Bulla & Everyone Else

Everyone sings in India. Birj mentioned this in passing. I had forgotten it. This is the song, he said, that all the kids on the streets were singing when I was last there.

Friday morning, I put on Rabbi in the car. Bulla streams out as the sun glances off downtown San Francisco. I’m approaching the city, on the bay bridge. Rabbi’s sound, Bulleh Shah’s words, kids with nothing who keep singing the words of a Sufi poet from the mid-18th century.

Nor did I create the difference of faith
Nor did I create adam-eve
Nor did I name myself
Beginning or end I know just the self
Do not acknowledge duality
There’s none wiser than I
Who is this Bulla Shah
Bulla! I know not who I am

The song overwhelms me. If I know only myself, if at all, that means I don’t know a lot. If at all.

The kids sing Bulla on the streets of Mumbai. With not a thread of their own, not a home but a tarpaulin, not a bath but under a public tap, no school just the business of an outstretched hand. If they can sing, why can’t I?

———-
Postscripts:

The only other person that similarly frees my mind with an evocation of the human spirit’s possibilities while at the same time spinning a fine web of entrapment with his very present sense of our human cruelties is Rohinton Mistry in “A Fine Balance“.

Rabbi’s story from Tehelka; The video. The wallpaper. Thank you Gurtaj & Mila for the introduction.