Asked to Do Ardas, and Nobody Had Taught Them

It happens at gatherings. The paath finishes, and the Ardas comes next — then the Hukamnama, then the karah parshad.

And just before everybody rises, one of the elders turns to one of the children and asks them to do the Ardas.

You can watch the child go still. There is a particular stillness they go into when they are hoping the moment will pass over them and land on somebody else.

And it is a lot to hand a child, if you think about what is actually being asked. Everybody in the room will stand with them, hands folded — and for those few minutes the child is not reciting to the room. They are speaking for it.

Sometimes it passes. Sometimes there is a bit of encouragement from around the room, and the child stands up, folds their hands, and begins.

And then a thing happens that I think a lot of us have heard and not known what to make of. They know what comes next — that is not the problem. But sound after sound comes out uncertain, shaped almost right and then sliding off. Not forgetting. Something else.

It is usually the Roman

The child is reading Roman Punjabi — our words spelled out in English letters, an alphabet doing its best impression of sounds it was never built to make.

That explains the whole thing at once.

Roman cannot hold our sounds. Gurmukhi keeps ਤ and ਟ apart, and ਦ and ਡ apart — different letters, different words — and everyday Roman gives you “t” and “d” for both. The nasal sounds that bindi and tippi carry simply fall off the page. So a child reading closely, doing exactly what is written in front of them, still arrives at a different word than the one they meant to say.

They have not been careless. They have been following instructions written in an alphabet that cannot give the right instruction.

This is what makes it worse than merely imperfect. A child who cannot read Gurmukhi at all knows they cannot read it. A child reading Roman believes they are reading it right, and so does everyone listening, until the day somebody asks them to stand up.

A careful transliteration — the kind that marks the nasals and breaks the vowels properly — is better, and it has its place. But even the good version is scaffolding, and scaffolding that never comes down stops being scaffolding and starts being the building.

What is actually at stake

When this happened in our home, what I felt was not disappointment in my child. It was embarrassment at myself, for not having taught them something this basic before a room full of people had to discover it for me.

And underneath that were two questions I have not really put down since.

How does this child reach Guru Sahib when they are in sorrow?

Not sorrow in the abstract — the real kind, the kind that turns up at two in the morning, in a life I will not always be in the room for. Where do they stand, and what do they say?

And the harder one: how do they say thank you? When something good happens, when it works out, when they are full of it — how does that get where it is going?

Ardas is how a Sikh does both. It is the standing place. It is where you put down the thing you cannot carry and where you hand over the thing you are grateful for, and you do it in front of Guru Sahib in words the Guru Sahiban gave their weight to. A child who cannot do Ardas has not missed a skill. They are missing the address.

Gurmukhi was given to us on purpose

This can sound like a purist’s preference. It is not.

Start with where the script came from. Guru Angad Dev Ji refined and spread Gurmukhi and opened schools to teach it, so that ordinary people could read Gurbani for themselves instead of waiting for somebody learned to read it to them. The word Gurmukhi means from the Guru’s mouth.

Sit with that for a second, because it is the whole argument. We were given a script for the express purpose that a person could stand up and say the words themselves. That is exactly what we are asking a child to do when we ask them to do Ardas. Letting the script quietly go because another one is more convenient is setting down something that was placed in our hands on purpose — and it was placed there for precisely this moment.

The Ardas in Punjabi also carries history inside it. It names the Panj Piare, the Sahibzade, the Chaali Mukte, the Sikhs who held on through things most of us cannot make ourselves imagine. It carries the weight and the blessing of the Guru Sahiban. That is not ornament sitting on top of the meaning. A great deal of it is the meaning.

And there is the thread. A child standing to do Ardas is doing the same thing, in the same words, as Sikhs doing it that hour in Brampton and Birmingham and Ludhiana and Melbourne — gratitude, forgiveness, and the ordinary contents of a life, handed over. Not a tradition they have inherited from a distance. A room they have walked into, with everybody else already standing in it.

ਨਾਮੁ ਨ ਵਿਸਰਉ ਇਕੁ ਖਿਨੁ ਚਸਾ ਇਹੁ ਕੀਜੈ ਦਾਨਾ ॥੧॥ ਰਹਾਉ ॥

Please, grant me this one blessing, that I may never, even for an instant, forget Your Name. ||1||Pause||

— Guru Arjan Dev Ji, Ang 396

That line is itself an ardas. A request, placed where requests go. And what it asks for is not to forget.

They do not have to understand it first

Here is the part I would once have got wrong, so let me say it properly.

Children start by copying. They do not start by understanding, and waiting for understanding before letting them begin is how nothing ever begins.

That is not a compromise. It is the actual shape of the journey, and it was the shape of mine. First you copy sounds you do not yet understand. Then somewhere in the repetition they stop being foreign — they become the thing your mouth does, the thing the room does, the thing that means we are beginning or we are finished now. Only later do you sit down with them properly and find out what you have been saying all along. And it keeps going after that. What Ardas means to a person at twenty-five is not what it means to them at seventy.

So no, an eight-year-old will not understand it. That was never the entry requirement. The entry requirement is that the words are right, so that when the understanding does arrive, it has something true to arrive at.

Two things worth doing

Let them do it before they are ready. Nobody would choose that evening. Asked in advance whether a child should do Ardas cold, in front of a room, having never once done it, any of us would say absolutely not — let me prepare them first. And we would be wrong, because “let me prepare them first” has usually already had years to happen and has not. Somebody asking is worth more than our intentions. If your child is at a gathering and there is a chance for them to do it, let it happen. The struggling is not the failure. The struggling is what starts the thing.

Then get them off the Roman. I want to be honest about this one, because it is often given as advice you take once, and it is not.

It is real work. Roman is easy, and easy is not nothing — it is what let them approach Ardas in the first place, and no child gives it up because an adult explains the linguistics to them. It wants sitting together. It wants going slowly through the Gurmukhi, hearing a line and reading that same line, until the eye stops reaching for the crutch. It is weeks rather than an evening, and there is resistance in it.

But weeks does not mean hours. Ten minutes after dinner with three lines in front of you beats a two-hour weekend session everybody dreads and quietly starts avoiding.

That is the whole method: hear it and see it at the same time, in Gurmukhi, until the sound and the shape lock together. No transliteration can tell the mouth that.

I will not pretend it is a formula. Every child arrives at this in their own time, and rarely on the schedule a parent has in mind. Children are not outputs. But of the things within reach, this is the one I would not skip.

Where it tends to land

The thing that changes a child’s mind is almost never a lecture from a parent.

It is standing in front of people, hearing their own words come out not quite right, and not liking it. Children have a good ear for the gap between what they said and what it was supposed to sound like. Give them that moment and many of them will go looking for the Gurmukhi themselves — not because they were told to, but because they want the words to sound the way the words are supposed to sound.

Which leaves us the unglamorous middle part. Sitting next to them, week after week, while they let go of the easy thing.

Somebody asking a child to do Ardas can look, in the moment, like an exposure of everything we have not got round to. It is worth taking it the other way. It is the invitation arriving while there is still plenty of time to answer it.

We put the Ardas up line by line — Gurmukhi, a careful transliteration, and a simple English meaning under each line, with audio that lights up each word as it is recited. The transliteration switches off, which is the point: use it to get started, then turn it off and let the voice and the Gurmukhi carry them. It is free, like everything else here.

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Has your child ever been asked to do Ardas at a gathering? I’d like to hear how it went — whether they stood up, and what happened afterwards.

Maastarji.com makes free, English-first Punjabi and Sikhi learning resources for diaspora families.