Nobody told me what the word means.
I heard it in songs and assumed a ring,
a simple metal loop,
a love story with the usual arithmetic.
I nodded along.
***
But a chhalla and a jhalla are more than rhymes.
Jhalla is a madman.
At Harike Pattan,
where the Beas and the Satluj meet,
a boatman named Jhalla sent his son into the river.
The son never came back.
***
Chhalla beri boor e.
He is the blossom of the ber tree,
the flower that arrives before the fruit.
The fruit never came.
This is not a Shakespearean tragedy.
This is the cruelty of being.
This is what drowning looks like when the river is slow:
you don't notice how far from shore you've drifted until you can't see it anymore.
***
Panjaab’s grief was never allowed to be silent.
It was always performed, always shared, always witnessed.
But the witnessing changes nothing.
Panjaab sent its sons into the world.
And then Panjaab stood on the bank and waited.
The sons sent envelopes full of money
but kept the grief.
because the grief had no postal address.
***
The chhalla is given as a promise.
A circle with no end,
meant to mean forever.
Chhalla keeps returning to the loss.
He keeps circling the void of the thing he used to be.
The river didn't kill Chhalla. The river just revealed what was always true:
some men are blossoms that arrive before the fruit,
and the storm just has to show up before the fruit does.
- fatey joote
I have written a full essay on Chhalla and its influence of Panjaabi folk tradition, you can read it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/fateyjoote/p/chhalla?r=202jha&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer