Finding Lal Ded in the Noise

I am sitting cross-legged on my slightly bruised hardwood floor, actively trying not to think about when I will finally find the time to scrub it clean, while simultaneously attempting to achieve spiritual transcendence over the roar of the gardener unleashing an arsenal of violently loud power tools outside. I have deployed a desperate concoction of scented candles and room sprays, hoping the combined fumes will mask the lingering aroma of last night’s curry. We try to stage our own peace. I have personally spent a not-insignificant amount of money on this very specific delusion. It is exhausting.

More than six centuries ago in Kashmir, a woman named Lalleshwari, known to anyone who grew up drinking saffron-steeped kahwa simply as Lal Ded, had zero interest in curating her calm. She walked out of a miserable marriage, shed her clothes and wandered the valley reciting vaakhs. These were piercing verses that dismantled every polite rule of religion and society. I get a bit chilly if I forget my cardigan at the supermarket; she wore only the sky.

Lal Ded did not care for temples or the hollow comfort of performing your faith for the neighbours. Her philosophy was not something you had to dress up for. She sang:

Shiva is present in every being, she told us, so do not divide between Hindu and Muslim. You are your own refuge, your own master. The true place of worship lies entirely within you.

Think of the kangri, that woven wicker basket of hot embers we Kashmiris tuck inside our heavy woollen pherans to survive the biting winter. Lal Ded spoke of a different fire. She spoke of the latent, coiled energy of the kundalini.

I read these lines three times over before I understood she wasn’t being poetic. She did not see the temple outside, she said; she lit the flame within herself. The inner sky blazes with radiance. She was being literal. There was no metaphor here to admire from a safe distance. She did not need a physical fire pot to keep the frost at bay, nor did she need to visit a shrine to find warmth. She was her own hearth.

She did not write for the scholars. Call it Kashmiri Shaivism, call it sakshi-bhāva (the witness consciousness): she spoke to ordinary people hauling water and weaving carpets, not reading philosophy.

I read this and heard her say: the Guru’s word became the lamp within, lighting the cave of my heart and when I saw my own self shining, I found liberation in my own being. My grandmother never sat on a mountain. She beautifully tended her roses and cucumbers and made excellent roganjosh; but on occasions, she said something that I am still trying to process decades after she left this world. Lal Ded might have recognised her.

When I realised the essence of OM, she said, I found Shiva pervading all. Life and the divine are not separate things; they are the same thing, seen from different angles. The names we give them, the forms we pour them into, are passing waves on the same water. We spend so much time ignoring this, searching for liberation in the right diet, the right postcode. As if liberation were a neighbourhood you could move into. We build walls around our spiritual identities. Lal Ded is not interested in your walls. Sometimes the guru is whatever makes you feel faintly guilty when you are not paying attention to your own life.