Throw the beloved to the crocodiles

Those of you who are from India or Pakistan must have heard Baba Bulleh Shah's poem 'Piya Ghar Aaya'. Bulleh Shah wrote in Punjabi, so the lyrics have been difficult for me to follow, and I had always wondered about the meaning of the opening line:

Ghariyal deyo nikal ni

The only gharial I knew about is an endangered crocodile-like reptile. Maybe the return of the piya (beloved) was creating too many complications and the poet wanted to set the crocodiles loose on him. Or maybe there was some deep Sufi symbolism involved.

As it turns out, Bulla was not a sociopath and there is no mysticism involved. The ghariyal in this case actually means the village watchman who beats his gong to mark the passing of the hours. The poet wants him sacked so that her (the poem is written in a feminine voice) reunion with her lover is not cut short by the coming of the morning. As one translator renders it:

Sack the gongman
My love has come home today.

He strikes the gong time and again
And shortens my night of dance and song
If he were to listen to me,
He would throw away the gong
Sack the gongman

An idea right after my heart. Let us sack all watchmen, throw away all alarm clocks, shut down all NTP servers, and give ourselves over to love.

But how come reptiles and watchmen have similar sounding names? The reptile part is easy. Earthen pots are called 'ghara' in many of the languages of the subcontinent, and the male gharial has a snout which resembles such a pot. About the watchman I can only guess. Maybe gharas with holes were used in water clocks, giving the name ghari to clocks in general, in turn leading to the person whose duty it was to announce the time being called a ghariyal.

What do you think?

Rubaiya is back

Rubaiya Bintenahar is coming back to the RG Kar Medical College Hospital, Kolkata to continue her studies.

Rubaiya is a third-year medical student who had been branded a witch and confined to her house in her village for 23 days. She had received psychiatric treatment earlier and a worsening of her condition was taken as a sign of possession by her father who brought her back home to be treated by a witch-doctor. After the story was picked up by the media, social activists and the administration convinced her father to allow her to rejoin her studies.

What I found really touching is the image (reproduced here) that accompanied the newspaper report. The man walking behind her with the heavy bag is identified as her father. He looks so much like the stereotypical protective father of a Bengali girl, carrying the heavy bag to spare his daughter. In the university where I study, every year at admission time there are some fathers like this who insist on checking for themselves whether the dormitory beds are soft enough for their darlings. Looking at this photo I cannot bring myself to believe that Rubaiya's father meant her harm. Yet, he treated her so cruelly.

Reminds me of the famous quote by the physicist Steven Weinberg:

Good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things—that takes religion.

Except that this time it is garden-variety superstition rather than religion which is to blame.