I.
Earlier this October, on my way back from Italy and Greece, I found myself non-consensually subject to German hospitality. My transatlantic return had a tight layover in Frankfurt, and touching down twenty minutes late, the Lufthansa app ominously warned me that my flight might be ‘impacted’. Between the delay and the fact that I needed to get from the A to the Z Gates, ChatGPT gave me a grim 15% chance of making my connection. So on the crowded shuttle, I commiserated, strategized, and shared my phone’s hotspot with a Canadian youth pastor and recent father whose sister had also gotten married in Italy during the past month—making a beeline (schnell, schnell!) for security on arrival.
Charging at a quasi-gallop towards my gate, I attempted to enlist the help of several airport buggy driving professionals. My mother had to make the same hectic connection a week earlier and attributed her miraculous boarding to their kind assistance. Alas, I was not so fortunate, my humble entreaties met with ‘sorry bhājīs’ from each last buggywala, who then lackadaisically drove their empty vehicles the very same direction I was headed—your now rather sweaty correspondent galloping in a pasīnā-laden pique behind them. When I finally made it to the Z Gates, the placid agents reassuringly promised to hold the plane for me; I would just have to clear security first.
II.
This is perhaps the place where I had best say a few words about my general approach to flying as a turbaned Sikh American-born millennial. Growing up early enough to remember what flying was like before 9/11, I began traveling solo across America and beyond in the summer before starting high school, largely in connection with my studies in Gurbāṇī Kīrtan and Indian classical percussion. Soon realizing that I would just about always be selected not-so-randomly for extra screening, the civil libertarian in me—reared on Ben Franklin’s oft-quoted adage on liberty and security—impelled me to opt out of the invasive body scanners, thereby subjecting myself to the Transportation Security Agency (TSA)’s still more invasive full service, full body pat downs.
Across airports and times of day, I have become accustomed to widening my stance, with my arms out straight, forming the shape of a crucifix. ‘No, I do not have any sore or sensitive areas.’ ‘Yes, I understand that you will use the back of your hands and proceed until you meet resistance.’ ‘No, here in public view is just fine.’ These questions and responses have come to take on an almost liturgical character, although their familiarity does not quite bely the demeaning invasiveness of the experience. Even so, whatever glimmers of suspicion one might have imagined in the eyes of a minority of one’s fellow Americans following the attacks have over the years given way to almost unfailing glances of bemused commiseration, perhaps with the lady refastening her boots or again with the gentleman straightening his blazer.
Mercifully, when it comes to my dastār—or ‘headwear’ in TSA argot—I am able to pat it down myself when in the United States, doubtless thanks to the ongoing work of groups including the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund. And in opting out of the no less intrusive—if insidiously efficient—body scanners, I feel as if I am preserving a modicum of agency—naively musing to myself that if enough of my fellow citizens likewise spurned the security theater, the inevitable delays—and in turn, the power of the market—might force legislators to rethink their policy of hassling all Americans and expressly targeting the visibly faithful at airports. Indeed, when traveling with someone unaccustomed to my ways, I am wont to declaim this spiel loudly enough that another traveler or two in whose souls the embers of liberty burn low might be duly radicalized.
III.
Returning then to Z Gates security at Frankfurt Airport, I found an understated operation with three security agents and a small luggage scanner. After placing my carry-on, backpack, shoes, wallet, phone, watch, belt, and tweed jacket through the scanner, I was courteously offered a chair as the security professionals minutely inspected my sock-clad feet. When it came time to address the lion in the lounge, they simply passed a metal-detecting wand around my dastār in a fluid motion and soon had me on my way. Arriving breathlessly at my altogether empty gate—naturally the last and farthest of the Z Gates—I was informed by the woman behind the counter that it would be impossible for me to board. Incredulous, I quoted the senior gate agent’s promise that they would hold the plane for me. I could even see on the screen behind her that my plane back to the States was ironically delayed by twenty minutes. Clearly the Germans had internalized Mr. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and so realizing my words were to be of no avail here, I decided to cut my losses and finally allowed myself to make straight for the little boy’s room.
Considerably more at ease, I strolled leisurely back the way I had come, pausing to throw up my hands in defeat when the senior gate agent—notably a tall, balding German who spoke in flawless received pronunciation that would raise no eyebrows at Windsor Castle—shot me a quizzical look. Under the circumstances, I could not help but wickedly conclude my tale of thwarted fleetness with a jovial remark to the effect of, ‘I understood this to be a nation of engineers!’ He quickly grasped my implication, and with dignity, summoned a reluctant buggywala to come to my belated assistance. So with a ‘Danke, mein Herr,’ we were off, hurtling with now superfluous celerity towards the Lufthansa customer service center. Collecting a numbered ticket from the automated machine, I let my family know my return would be delayed, and then pulled out Lawrence of Arabia’s prose translation of the Odyssey, longing for Greek xenia and the mastic of Chios.
IV.
Not long afterwards, spotting my dastār, a pair of Panjabi women—each in a salvār–kamīz—sat down beside me. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, they explained that they were grandmothers-in-law, respectively a nānī and a dādī to a shared grandchild. Now duly helped and all set to return to America—five, maybe eight hours later on a (delayed) United flight, albeit with my ticket to Frankfurt’s QR code magically transmogrified into an airport meal voucher—I was approached by the nānī. She politely but insistently requested that I stay with them to serve as their interpreter when their number was called. I readily agreed, and not a moment later, she and the dādī began making inquiries into my marital status, continuing, ‘It is difficult to find nice, educated girls these days. We come from a good Jatt family. There are many educated girls in our village.’ Saved by the felicitously-named customer service agent calling their ticket number, I escorted them to the counter.
The grandmothers’ return to India tribulations eventually sorted out, the Lufthansa agents thanked me for my help—‘one cannot take it for granted, these days’—and I walked the nānī and dādī to their new gate. ‘Too bad they took away our paraunṭhe at security. Still, come visit us later, if you have time.’ After saying my goodbyes, I promptly transfigured my newly enchanted used boarding pass to Frankfurt into a cappuccino, a long, rectangular slice of pizza, and a large, whimsically rainbow cookie. Duly sated, if already missing Italy, I picked up a complimentary copy of The Financial Times and then proceeded to United’s customer service counter, in search of my new boarding pass. Joining the queue, I soon noted that the sole customer service professional was a fellow sardār in a crisp, black turban—and with a still crisper beard. He returned my ‘Fateh,’ ably linked my baggage to the new boarding pass, and admitted it might be a while until takeoff.
V.
I did not sleep the preceding night. Perhaps owing to the youthful bravura of a kīrtanīā-scholar not unaccustomed to multiple all-nighters a week over a decade and a half—impelled by the rigors of riyāz, my existentially-mandated extracurricular readings in my private library of 3,000 volumes, and a certain wild ambition not far from Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality (if only he could remain awake for just six days and seven nights!)—I thought I could skip getting a hotel room and spend the late evening and night en route to Frankfurt from Athens by Brunelleschi’s Duomo, under Firenze’s stars, before taking a very early morning train to Pisa—wherefrom I was to fly back to the States via Germany. Arriving late in the evening at Florence’s Santa Maria Novella station, I stowed my luggage nearby for six euros using an app, and found I had just enough time (and Italian) to secure a copy of Roberto Calasso’s wonderful Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia just as the Feltrinelli bookshop was closing.
There was nothing left to do but to indulge in an excellent pizza—con funghi, naturalmente—by the Duomo as my phone charged. While chewing, I reflected on my final days in Piraeus, where Plato’s Republic begins and my trip to Greece ended. On how much Greece and India have in common. Two ancient civilizations, bursting with sights, smells, human energy. Peoples and nation-states both striving to channel traditional ways of knowing how into globally relevant financial know-how. Halloumi as paneer. Tzatziki as raita. Pita as naan. Okay, not really, but vegetarians are no afterthought in either cuisine.
As I finished scribbling some notes—“There are ugly places where you are respected less for pausing to view the wares shopkeepers peddle. They disdain the curious, for they know it is garbage they sell…”—into my trusty legal junior legal pad with the solid, bejeweled Victorian propelling pencil I picked up on Oxford’s High Street after graduation, a couple from Montana (naturally also having a cheese-forward pizza) asked me to take their picture. My phone’s battery rejuvenated, I downed a double espresso and made my way towards the Uffizi, stopping only for a gelato (gianduia), precarious enough to give Pisa’s Leaning Tower a run for its money.
VI.
Armed with my gelato—if still encumbered by my judiciously-packed, if still very-much-tangible Osprey Daylite pack—I lingered by the Uffizi statues of Firenze’s greatest sons: Dante, Boccaccio, Da Vinci, Machiavelli. As on my prior visit, I paused longest before the statue of Francesco Petrarca (yānī, apaṇā Petrarch). I then proceeded across the moonlit Ponte Vecchio, admiring the reflections in black waters I had last taken in under skies as astonishingly blue as Giotto’s. Around midnight, it became clear to me that especially with my backpack, I did not wish to be wandering Florence’s streets alone that autumn night. Wending my way back to the hotel where I had stored my baggage some five hours earlier, I was sorry to learn that the charmingly-named Hotel Boccaccio did not have any spare rooms. What was worse, the shift of the helpful young man who managed the hotel’s front desk and who had accepted my luggage was ending imminently. While he said he would have no problem with my reading in the Hotel’s rather elegant lobby through the night, he seemed quite doubtful whether his colleague would be equally understanding. After all, the luggage storage is technically distinct from the Hotel.
When his large, bespectacled, and curiously formal—perhaps shy?—colleague entered, the two discussed my predicament in muted tones. Their speech was far beyond the pleasantries, vocabulary for ordering at restaurants, expression markings on musical scores, and Renaissance humanist concepts that largely comprise my little Italian. Standing by the counter throughout this exchange, I waved my thanks to the younger receptionist as he departed Hotel Boccaccio, presumably for the comfort of his own bed. The large man peered at me from behind his glasses and not unkindly asked me to explain my situation. After vainly helping me look for trains and buses to Pisa from his computer—there was no transportation available until early morning, save Ubers more than ten times the cost of a train ticket—he not unkindly said, ‘I suppose you had better take a seat.’
VII.
My legal pad—naturally (red) white (and blue), rather than those lurid yellow ones—records some of my thoughts from later that night in Hotel Boccaccio’s lobby. If I can honestly say that they were impressionistically pencilled in without an eye to future publication—apparent in the unselfconscious frankness such privacy invites—it is also undeniable that even in that liminal place between hyper-lucidity and delirium, I was cognizant that these sketched observations might serve as data for my literary exertions. There seems to be just enough continuity of sensibility between present me and the self who wrote these for me to ethically quote a few choice selections from that mostly white legal pad, circa three in the morning. To annotate, footnote*, or further contextualize these, while tempting, feels artlessly boorish.
“My accent is very much a source of wonder in the stolid clerk.”
“There is a particular kind of mind that does not allow talk to go to higher matters, always redirecting the flow of conversation to the visible and tangible. It is rather tiring.”
“The unceasing torrent of words halts only when it is time for me to turn the page. The industrious part of me is quickened by a certain vanity: when I fancy others regard me, I am especially wont to froth myself to genuine activity. Thus writing in public suits me, as I believe it suited Dumas before me.”
*And besides, it is a particularly textual form of hubris to believe that everything that needs saying must—or could—be written down in a single place. Leave some fun for the rhapsodes, kathākārs, and tomorrow’s scholars!
VIII.
Around four o’clock the stolid but not unkind clerk offered me a cappuccino. I gratefully accepted. Soon after, it was time for me to depart for the train station. We exchanged names and shook hands. ‘Piacere,’ I said, walking out of Hotel Boccaccio’s warm lobby, wheeling my baggage across the black, pre-dawn, pre-modern streets.
(A ‘grazie mille’ somehow felt too cheap.)
IX.
What I am basically trying to say by way of my Italian excursus is that I was pretty tired. So when I spotted a sign in the Frankfurt airport intimating that I could partake of a ‘Dusche’—a shower (mirabile dictu)—for the first time since being denied an easy nostos, I was glad that I was marooned specifically in Germany. Short of a proper night’s sleep, the prospect of a shower presented itself as the perfect restorative. Yes, the gracious Phaeacian lavations granted Odysseus—betokening divine favor in his eventual homecoming—naturally sprang to mind, but less poetic considerations soon claimed my attention. Alas, the Z Gates Dusche was unattended and desolate-looking, and so I would have to brave another two adventures through airport security—there and back again—to the B Gates to claim my panacean deliverance in soap and steam.
X.
The lengthy walk to the B Gates was fortunately against the flow of foot traffic. I passed a sizable party of uniformed East Asian students, as well as a group of air hostess professionals in vibrant saris. It was evident that I was moving away from the busiest part of the airport that evening, and upon entering the sleepy B Gates security, I found myself the lucky winner of a security lane all to myself, under the keen scrutiny of five of Frankfurt’s finest. As expected, the highly stylized, lithe bronze statuette of Aphrodite from the island of Hydra gracing my backpack was flagged for additional inspection.
I grinned, ‘We’re in this together, goddess.’
‘Is it a machete? Is it a knife? Is it a razor?’
As usual, I gestured wryly towards my uncompromising beard—that glorious, pogonotrophic witness to a lifetime’s celebration of sahaj. They unwrapped the statue as I looked on with amusement, recalling how the lady security professionals in Athens giggled at this case of mistaken identity.
When it inevitably came time to address my dastār, as usual, I requested to pat it down myself and then have my hands tested for explosives residue. Here a slight frown clouded the security professional’s visage. ‘It is impossible.’ I explained how this is literally what I have done on countless flights, including earlier in the day at the Z Gates. ‘Why the difference in protocol?’ When the officer nominally in charge hesitated, a younger, junior colleague who had been watching from the sidelines stepped in, clearly because of his greater facility in English. ‘You are not authorized personnel; you do not have the necessary training.’ I levelly inquired what specialized training could possibly make him more qualified to pat down my dastār than me. ‘I cannot explain; you must choose.’
I gestured around me to the still empty security line. ‘Is the concept of religious liberty alien to Germany?’ As the remaining officers crowded towards me, I refrained from making a quip about the death of Habermasian public reason, on the necessity of liberal democracies to offer principled justifications for their actions. Even so, something about ‘Weber’s bureaucratic rationality—vāh jī vāh,’ almost certainly escaped my lips. Then a little louder, to edify the onlooking security professionals, ‘In America, we have a First Amendment to protect the faithful from state tyranny.’ When the younger officer tried to protest, ‘This is an independent country with its own laws,’ I gently invoked the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—privately musing that whereas America is doing ‘entangling (NATO) alliances’—sorry, George!—and whereas the Southern states in America only a decade back (partially) regained their Constitutionally-enumerated right to determine their own election laws, then might it not be a several decades premature for the German state to self-police on matters of religious liberty, Mr. Merz?
XI.
‘Still, you must choose.’ Calmly lucid on the surface (but with my brain on hyperdrive, several not altogether mutually-exclusive plans coalescing frenetically within—admittedly including penning an essay not unlike this one), I inquired what would happen if I refused to permit the security personnel to paw my crown—appealing instead to the American Embassy (and potentially escalating the silly situation into a diplomatic incident, which might appear in tomorrow’s Financial Times)—Patrick McGoohan’s ‘I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered…’ coursing through my mind, something between mantra and jakārā. Taken aback, the security professional said that the two police officers standing not far away would escort me out of the airport, at which point I would be free to seek my embassy’s aid. Bypassing security and returning to the now familiar Z Gates was not a possibility. ‘So what do you decide?’
Particularly with the fearless Harmeet Kaur Dhillon—a cordial acquaintance from my Berkeley days—serving as U.S. assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, I frankly did not dislike my odds. Given the present administration’s iconoclasm and penchant for sticking it to Europe on meeting its NATO obligations, I could see a fraction of a chance that something genuinely positive for all travelers of faith might emerge from my further delaying my nostos. But was it really the thing to do, a fitting place to make my stand? Was my indignant righteousness born of haumai? Did it spring from a genuine desire to advance sarbat dā bhallā? Or was I vainly saving myself for a nobler, a more beautiful sacrifice—like the strict utilitarian foreswearing the opportunity to do a real good before him because it might not be the ‘greatest’ good ‘for the greatest number.’ More likely, was it not something in between? Alongside these light speed (and partially subliminal) considerations, it registered that I had been up far too long and that I needed to depart for my cousin-sister’s Ānand Kāraj in Ohio the following morning. So somehow—for the moment—I chose to yield to the machine, of course retaining my Vāhīgurū-given natural right to declaim throughout, ‘Schande!’
XII.
Once it was all over, I politely asked the younger polyglot security professional who carried out the beadbī/‘screening’ for his name and badge number. His superior promptly descended, whisked me to the side—though the screening line was still non-existent—and informed me that particular officers remain unidentified and unidentifiable to travelers in Germany. At my request, he retrieved a small card with the website for filing an official complaint. He said they were just doing their jobs; I requested he study Germany’s recent history.
XIII.
At fifteen euros and after that bracing experience, the shower was serviceable if anticlimactic, but still very much welcome. Carefully unfolding my dastār, I combed my kes and allowed the column of water—intermittently stopping every thirty seconds or so and requiring reactivation with the push of a button—to wash away the cares of a very long day.
Eyes closed, I instinctively murmured a couplet from Gurū Nanak’s Japu jī —‘Intellect crowded with those sins whose company it keeps/it is washed clean by the color of the Name’.
Refashioning those five and a half meters of fabric on my head—crowning declaration of sovereignty, preserved through the countless sacrifices of centuries—I braced myself for a final encounter with Frankfurt security, upon my return to the Z Gates to finally go home. As I left, I was surprised to find by the entrance a sizable but orderly queue. Presumably, the attendant had left while I was in the Dusche—perhaps for the Z Gates?—and the weary travelers (each doubtless with a journey at least rich as mine) had lined up, likewise hoping for warm water and a little solitude. Astonished, they watched me as I exited—clean and refreshed—their flagging hopes seemingly renewed.
XIV.
Briskly retracing my steps, but in the opposite direction, I soon found myself at the security checkpoint that one must pass through to reenter the Z Gates. Again, it was relatively empty, and prepared for the worst, I still put on a smile and offered the security professional a ‘Guten Abend’. He met it with warmth and promisingly, he seemed unsurprised and more than willing to accommodate my request to pat down my own dastār.
And then for the second time in my life, the explosives detector turned a livid red. I asked how often it returned false positives, and nearly apologetic, the security professional said that policy dictated that he now call over the police officers on duty. Because it becomes relevant to my analysis, I should note—though I aim to eschew racial explanatory variables for however long it is epistemically responsible—that in physiognomic terms, the officers who sauntered over were unmistakably Teutonic.
The security professional seemed to explain what happened to them—all in German—and smiling, they turned to me. ‘We understand that a turban requires a good deal of effort to retie, ja? So let us give this magical wand a little try, and if it does not beep when it passes over your turban, you are good to go.’ Beaming at my relieved ‘wunderbar’, they duly ran the wand over and around my dastār without further incident. Once they were satisfied, I joked that everything was fine when I entered the B Gates security. Indeed, the only place I had visited was the airport showers. ‘You need to do a better job cleaning your Duschen; they charged me fifteen euros!’ The two officers, the security professional, and I all burst into laughter—the hearty, deeply human kind that generally does not exist in the situations officialdom requires—and we parted amicably.
XV.
My justification for naming the racial extraction of the officers—and of the gentlemanly Z Gates security professional as well—is because this most recent experience of security at Frankfurt airport revealed the considerable discretion available to officials, and how significant a difference its prudential exercise can make to traveler experiences and human dignity alike. Since the activity in triaging airport threats self-evidently involves elements of racial and religious profiling, the reader will doubtless forgive me for noting that whereas the Z Gates team appeared quintessentially Teutonic, the senior security professional and polyglot desecrator in the B Gates appeared just as indubitably Middle Eastern.
I shall refrain from speculating on the relative success of German civic enculturation across native and immigrant populations or recklessly generalizing from the one time my great aunt’s guṭkā was violently seized, torn, and junked by airport security when she visited a Middle Eastern country. I shall also refrain from any further use of preterition in discussing the sensitive matters at hand, noting only that bureaucratic neutrality may sometimes mask ethno-religious animus, and that in trying to prove to a majority population that they belong, later arrivals in a political community may display rigorist tendencies, even when they are contrary to institutional aims. (Perhaps that’s what the post-liberals make of my Burkean defense of American constitutionalism.)
Analyses of this kind, especially when superficially plausible, cut deeply against the ethos of equal charity under which I aim to interpret all of the One’s children, myself not excepted. Laying aside, then, this uncongenial mode of sense-making, what I can definitively report of my own experiences is that when it came to security at Frankfurt airport, the vilest umbrages I underwent were uniformly at the hands of the security professionals whose skin tones and grandmothers’ cooking more closely resembled my own.
XVI.
My flight home was exceptionally comfortable. Perhaps judging my karmic ledger not too disgraceful on balance, the United divinities granted me a row of my own towards the aircraft’s back right corner. With the blessings of the air hostess professionals, I reclined, double-blanketed, across the seats (always ensuring that my fastened seatbelt was in plain view). And so I made it home with my amour-propre, baggage, and principles more or less unscathed—grateful for the opportunity to finally close my eyes, so as to better seek the immortality of Gilgamesh another day.
XVII.
That would have been the natural terminus for this narrative. But then again, without going full Tristram Shandy (or David Foster Wallace for that matter) later in October, I had a few experiences that curiously feel like a necessary continuation of this story. While visiting my recently married little sister and jījā jī in New York City, I joined my family for a fundraiser that offered a telling snapshot of the diasporic Sikh lifeworld in the final quarter of this young millennium’s first century’s first quarter.
The London-born Amandeep Singh—alias ‘Inkquisitive’—was marking fifteen years of his career as a visual artist with a charity auction to raise money for Panjab flood relief in partnership with Khalsa Aid, its founder and “CEO” Ravi Singh in attendance. As a condition of entry, the young, bangled lady managing the guest list insisted on stamping the back of every hand, including mine, as if we were patrons at some nightclub—heaven forfend—apologetically refusing even my polite request that the red stamp be placed discreetly on my palm.
Thankfully, we arrived in time to secure seats, because the back of the room was rather crowded by the time the opening act comprising kaharvā accompaniment on the tablā to upbeat desi and global hits by a popular entertainer sharing my name—and an instrument!—concluded. Throughout the event, I was able to reassert some experiential sovereignty by shielding my eyes from the glaring lights with dark glasses; had I brought my noise-cancelling JBL headphones, I would not have hesitated to turn the music down several decibels for myself—perhaps even to listen to Sir Roger’s delightful oration, ‘The Tyranny of Pop.’ And then, were the lighting less erratic—and were it not my father’s birthday—I might even have reached for my worn copy of Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture.
It was announced that the bar magnanimously also served “non-alcoholic options”. So standing in line for a ginger ale (it seemed clear that they would have club soda, not sparkling water), I was able to survey the audience—largely Panjabi yuppies in their twenties and thirties, with some distinguished elders in suits and ties seated behind us. The parents of some of the youngest attendees opted to leave before the headlining artist took to the stage. (Among these was a dear gurūbhāī from our late tablā maestro Ustād Zakir Hussain’s summer workshops. He serendipitously saw me as I stood in line, came over and introduced me to his son and daughter, and wished me a good evening.)
It was a shame things were permitted to run so late, because Amandeep Singh’s remarks overall came across as humble, heartfelt, and full of gratitude. As I remarked to my jījā jī after the event, Amandeep has become a pop Sobha Singh for our times, not only drawing on his work, but more fundamentally, achieving an instant visual recognizability within the community’s visual self-representation—even if one had not previously heard of the artist behind the images.
XVIII.
Tiār bar tiār, I seldom leave home without my dark teal Parker 51 fountain pen and a few sturdy, unruled index cards. As I waited for the event to proceed, I jotted down my observations, additionally taking down quotes whenever anything particularly juicy was uttered.
Reflecting on the musical offering in the opening act—and whatever was being piped through the sound system—I wrote of ‘DJs as agents of social control,’ modulating brute sonic force and viral vibes to “enforce a particular attentional regime.” What was being played struck me as primarily aimed at fostering “relatability and connection.” About feeling “less alone” in a giant city—drawing upon the ‘familiar and nostalgic.’ About generating “hype”—the curation purely algorithmic—with the “current as currency.”
I meditated on the complex concatenation of confluences, compromises, and crises culminating in the ephemeral sonic cocoon that enveloped me that evening. This may all sound zany, grandiloquent even, but consider for a moment that it was the revelatory songs of Bābā Nanak and his successors—the revelatory Word rendered audible in no less revelatory nāda—that transformed mortals into devate in just an instant. It was saṃgīta of the highest order, where every aesthetic choice must redound to the eternal glory of Akāl Purakhu, which made GurSikhs of our ancestors and over centuries constituted the most intimate substance of their GurSikhī.
It has never felt so disheartening to feel so vindicated, especially on what some took to be an unrelentingly tough review in these pages of Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh’s translations from Gurū Nanak for Harvard University Press. What I witnessed that evening was fully consistent with the subjectivity—indeed, the diasporic lifeworld—that perceives no treasonous slippage, no existential razing, between “tāla” and “beat,” “pakhāvaj” and “tambourine.”
XIX.
“Make some noise,” said the emcee. “This is the best crowd.” So duly stamped (sorry, Mr. McGoohan!), plied with drinks (some of them even non-alcoholic!), and subject all night long to the subwoofer’s pitiless oontz oontz oontz, the “crowd” made “some noise.”
Proclamations were read out. Prints were auctioned. Money was raised.
And yet, transposed into an awkward key, my experience of the evening somehow fell flat.
It was as if the savorless subsumption of what might have been sangat into a far coarser—an immeasurably less wondrous—cultural script somehow constricted the predominating quality of connection. Or perhaps I was merely jet-lagged.
XX.
This October, as I gathered in sangat for weddings and funerals alike, it struck me how, with their novel logistical exigencies and heightened emotions, both reveal what does (and does not) come naturally to us.
Entrusted with the responsibility of reading the four lāvān at my little sister’s Ānand Kāraj in Tuscany, the concept—and more crucially, the lived state—of sahaj has haunted me. When it came time to say a few words at the reception, I attempted to draw some parallels to the flow state of psychology, the wu wei of Taoism, and the sprezzatura of Castiglione. Mainly because the cake had yet to be served, I spared our guests a discussion of Aristotelian habituation.
Across these cases, a tricky question arises of how we might cultivate what is most fundamental in us so that it might emerge naturally. Again, this is not so distant from the problem that translation aims to solve: creating a bridge from apparent meaninglessness to recognition.
But sometimes less is more concerning the spiritual and aesthetic. With irony for armor, I hoped to preserve my freedom by translating for myself and resisting foreign translation. Yet this is not quite selfless surrender to innermost necessity; it falls short of sahaj. Perhaps then, the beginning of sahaj is realizing how all along, the One has been translating us all.
_____
Nihal Singh