Narsi Mehta

The heat lay thick over the lanes of Junagadh, and a young man walked home with his throat cracked dry from thirst. He had been out among the shrines since morning, lost in the way he always got lost, singing to himself, forgetting the hour. He came to his own threshold and called out to the one person who was supposed to keep that house running while his elder brother was away: his sister-in-law. "Bhabhi," he said, "give me some water." She turned on him with the particular cruelty reserved for a relative who has become an embarrassment. Look at you, she said, wandering about all day composing your bhajans, bringing no grain and no coin into this house, and now you want to be waited on besides. If you cannot even fetch your own water, what exactly is it that you do all day? The words were sharper than the thirst. Narsinh Mehta, a grown man by then, married, a father, stood on his own doorstep and felt something in him crack open, not with rage but with a terrible, clarifying grief. He turned around and walked out of Junagadh without another word, past the last houses, out toward the shore, until he came to a small, deserted temple of Shiva.

To understand why that single insult could send a grown householder into the wilderness, it helps to know what had already been asked of him. He had lost both his parents by the time he was five years old, and for three years after that he did not speak at all, not one word, to anyone. His people despaired of him. Then, the story goes, an old sadhu passing through had him repeat the name "Radhe Shyam," and the boy who had been silent for three years opened his mouth and said it. From that day the silence broke, though something in him remained apart, listening to a different register of the world than the one his relatives lived in. His much older brother, Bansidhar, raised him with real tenderness; it was under that same brother's roof, after their parents were gone, that Narsinh grew up, and it was in that household, once he had married a woman named Manekbai, that he continued to live, dependent, absent-minded, more interested in bhakti than business, an increasingly sore subject for a sister-in-law trying to run a practical home. The taunt about water was not new. It was simply the one that finally sent him out the door for good.

At the empty Shiva temple by the sea he did something that startled even the priests who eventually heard of it: he sat down before the lingam and refused to leave. No food, no water, seven days. He had already been refused water once that week and no longer seemed to want it from anyone but the god. Shiva, watching a soul that stubborn choose to starve at his own doorstep, is said to have remarked to himself that even an ordinary man will go to the door of someone barely able to help him and expect to be noticed there; how much more should Maheshwara himself take notice of a devotee starving on his very threshold. He appeared before Narsinh in his own form, first quietly restoring him with food and water, and then asked him to name a boon.

Narsinh's answer is the part of the story that people in Gujarat still repeat to each other: he said he did not know how to ask for things. Whatever was most precious to Shiva himself, whatever Shiva loved best in all the worlds, that was what he wanted, nothing else. It is a startling request to make of a god, because it forced Shiva to admit, half smiling, half afraid, that the dearest thing he possessed was something he hesitated even to name to his own beloved Parvati, the thing the Vedas themselves could only gesture at by saying neti neti, not this, not this. What he loved most was Krishna, and the vision of Krishna at play. So Shiva took Narsinh, in spirit if not in body, to the Vrindavan of eternity, into the circle of the raas leela, where the dance of the divine cowherd and his companions never ends and is never seen by mortal eyes. He gave Narsinh the form of a sakhi, a female companion of the gopis, and set a torch in his hand to light the dancing ground. Narsinh stood there in that borrowed, luminous body and watched Shyam turn and turn among his beloveds, the ground strewn with jewels, the air full of a fragrance and a music unlike anything in Gujarat, and he was so entirely emptied out into the sight of it that he did not notice the torch burning down into his own hand until the vision itself ended. When he came back to his ordinary body and his ordinary life, he was no longer the same man who had begged for water at his brother's door. He had been given what he asked for: to love Krishna the way the gopis loved him, without calculation, without shame, without limit. That sakhi-bhava, the stance of the beloved rather than the servant, would color everything he sang for the rest of his life.

He left his brother's house for good after that and set up a small household of his own in Junagadh with Manekbai, and in time two children were born to them, a son named Shamaldas and a daughter named Kunvarbai on whom, by every account, he doted. He had no head for property and no interest in acquiring any; what he had instead was a voice, and a growing circle of people who wanted to sit near him while he sang. Sadhus began arriving at his door and staying. Farmers, weavers, the poor, and people the town's more careful citizens preferred not to be seen with all found a welcome in his courtyard, because Narsinh had come back from that vision unable to see any of the old fences between people as more than a kind of forgetting. If someone loved Hari, that was the only credential he asked for. This made him a scandal among the orthodox Brahmins of his own community, who watched a man of their own background sing and dine and dance with people well outside their circle and treated it as a kind of disgrace being visited on all of them. They mocked him, excluded him, and periodically tried to have him disciplined or punished. Narsinh's response was never argument. He simply said that Giridhari, the mountain-lifting Lord, stood guard on every side of him, and that a man who lives inside that protection has nothing left to fear from anyone's opinion.

The most famous test of that indifference came in the form of a group of pilgrims setting out for Dwarka. Some of the very Brahmins who despised him directed the pilgrims to Narsinh's door as a private joke, knowing he had no money, and suggested he write them a hundi, a merchant's promissory note, so they could draw funds from an acquaintance of his once they reached the city. Narsinh, entirely undisturbed, sat down and wrote out a note for a substantial sum payable in Dwarka by one Shamalshah Sheth, a name that means, if you listen to it the way a devotee does, something very close to "the dark-hued lord," one of Krishna's own epithets. He sent the pilgrims off with his note and a prayer, and at home, with whatever small stores were left in the house, his wife cooked a meal and fed it to the sadhus who came by, down to the last of the flour. In Dwarka, meanwhile, the pilgrims searched the city and found that no merchant by that name existed anywhere, and they began to suspect they had been made fools of by a penniless singer. Then, just as the note was about to be dishonored and the pilgrims disgraced along with it, a merchant calling himself Shamalshah appeared, paid the note in full with interest, and vanished as suddenly as he had come. Narsinh's own composition on the episode, still sung today as "Hundi," is less a boast about the miracle than a prayer of astonished gratitude that the Lord would trouble himself to honor a poor man's rash promise.

A second and gentler episode grew out of his love for his daughter. When Kunvarbai was expecting her first child, tradition required her parents to send an elaborate set of gifts to her in-laws' house in the seventh month, a custom called mameru. Narsinh had nothing to send. He went anyway, empty-handed, and when his daughter's mother-in-law realized this she did not hide her disdain; she rattled off, more to humiliate him than to inform him, a long and deliberately extravagant list of gold, cloth, and vessels that a family of means would be expected to provide. Narsinh, instead of despairing, told his daughter calmly to have the list written down properly and to add anything else the family could think of, so that nothing would be forgotten later. The mother-in-law, certain she was mocking a beggar, obliged in full. Within a short while, a wealthy merchant arrived at the in-laws' house with porters carrying sack after sack of exactly what had been listed, presenting himself as sent on Narsinh's behalf, and departed before anyone could properly question who he was. The household that had sneered at Kunvarbai's father was left staring at more wealth than they had asked for, and the story has been sung in Gujarat ever since as "Kunvarbai nu Mameru," one more instance of Shyam quietly settling his devotee's debts.

The episode that finally broke the back of his enemies' campaign against him was more dangerous than either of these, because it touched his honor rather than his purse. Narsinh's easy affection for women among his following, the sakhis and companions who sang and wept with him in his sessions of devotion, was twisted by jealous tongues into an accusation of impropriety, and the matter was carried all the way to the ruler of the region, Ra Mandalik. The king, under pressure to act, devised a public test: he would have a garland placed around the neck of the temple image of Damodar and the doors sealed and guarded overnight; if by morning the garland was found instead around Narsinh's neck, his devotion would be proven beyond question, and if not, he would be punished as a fraud. Narsinh spent the night not in fear but in song, given only his small stringed instrument for company, pouring himself into kirtan as the hours passed. Toward dawn, according to every telling that has come down through the centuries, the temple doors that had been barred from outside swung open on their own, and the garland lifted from the deity's neck and settled itself, gently and unmistakably, around Narsinh's own. The king who had ordered the trial arrived to find not a fraud exposed but a miracle waiting for him, and whatever official shame had been intended for Narsinh turned instead into public vindication.

None of this spared him from ordinary grief. His son Shamaldas died while still young, and Manekbai, his wife, worn down by sorrow on top of the poverty and public hostility she had shared with him for so many years, did not long survive their son. It would be easy to imagine that a saint famous for miracles ought to have been spared such losses, or ought at least to have raged against them, but the songs Narsinh left behind from this period show no such rupture in his faith. He continued to compose, continued to sing before whoever gathered to hear him, continued to insist that the same Giridhari who wrote hundis and untangled dowry lists and unlocked temple doors in the dead of night was equally present in the plain, unmiraculous fact of loss. In his later years he seems to have moved from Junagadh to the coastal town of Mangrol, and it is there that tradition places his death, at a considerable old age for the period, sometime toward the end of the fifteenth century.

What survived him is one of the true foundations of Gujarati letters. He is remembered as the Adi Kavi, the first poet, of the Gujarati language, and centuries of oral transmission carried his padas, his prabhatiyas sung at dawn, his garbis and his narrative poems about his own life, down to people who had never seen a written page of them, long before the earliest surviving manuscripts were copied out. Among all of it, one composition eventually traveled far beyond Gujarat altogether: "Vaishnav jan to tene re kahiye, je peed paraai jaane re," call him alone a Vaishnava who feels the suffering of another as his own, who does good even to the one who has wronged him and never lets pride enter his mind. Four and a half centuries after Narsinh sang it, Mahatma Gandhi took that hymn as one of the two or three verses he wanted read at his own prayer meetings every single day, and through him the poor bhajan-singer of Junagadh, once refused a cup of water at his own front door, ended up teaching the whole of a nation what it might mean to recognize another person's pain as one's own. It is not a bad inheritance for a man whose only asking price, when a god once offered him anything at all, was simply: give me what you love best.