The song that sang me: How ‘kahe ko byaahe bides’ found my soul

Not the brash, boastful kind that bruises the streets of Delhi, but the slower, secretive drizzle that lingers—like memory, like melancholy, like a voice that won’t be silenced. It was on such a night, when thunder murmured its monsoon prayers and the house breathed in half-sleep, that I first heard the song that would become my shadow.

Kahe ko byaahe bides, arre lakhiya baabul mohe?

Why have you married me off to a foreign land, O father with the eyes of light?

I must have been 10, perhaps 11—too young to name despair, old enough to recognise it. Umrao Jaan (1981) shimmered on our television screen: Muzaffar Ali’s Lucknow, filmed like a dream remembered by silk. Rekha’s eyes held galaxies of grief, Khayyam’s score dripped with the musk of longing and Jagjit Kaur’s voice—soft as monsoon mist—moved through the room like mercy.

The air smelled of sandalwood and sorrow. My mother’s bangles chimed faintly as she shifted in her chair. The ceiling fan sighed. Somewhere between the screen and my skin, something awakened—a recognition, a remembering, a thread of ache older than my own years.

Then came the verse that split me open: Bhaiya ko diyo baabul, mehala do mehala, Arre ham ko diyo pardes…(You gave my brother two palaces, O father— and to me, you gave exile).

Even as a child, I understood unfairness in its purest form. The brother inherits grandeur, the daughter inherits departure. The palace is privilege; the pardes is punishment. And yet, I—a boy already burdened by difference—felt the daughter’s displacement as my own.

I wasn’t being married off, but I, too, was being sent away—from the sanctuary of sameness, from the comfort of convention, from the quiet fiction of belonging. I was that bud plucked before bloom, that bird banished before flight. The song spoke for me before I knew I would need its
language.

Ham to baabul, tore bele ki kaliya, We are, father, the buds of your own vine— why pluck us before we flower? That lament became my lullaby. In the years when the world offered no mirror that reflected me whole, I sang it in whispers—an orphaned prayer to a parent I could not see. I wasn’t asking a father why he had sent his daughter away, I was asking the Creator why He had cast me into a life so alien to love.

People said I had chosen my path—as if queerness were a hobby, a fashion, a flamboyant decision. Would anyone choose a road lined with ridicule? A body made battleground by those who fear softness? Would anyone choose to live where love itself must hide?

No. The song knew better. It had known centuries of exile before I entered its echo.

Later, when I learned that this kajri—this monsoon melody—was written by Amir Khusrau, I felt destiny’s deliberate hand. Khusrau, the poet of paradox, the disciple who worshipped Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya with words that blurred between the divine and the desirous. His bides was not geography; it was godhood. His longing was not lust; it was love so large it refused to fit a single form.

How fitting that the same song that once mourned a daughter’s departure would, centuries later, cradle a gay man’s exile. Perhaps that is Khusrau’s quiet genius—he writes for the ones between worlds, the ones who love without permission, the ones whose language is longing itself.

Through Muzaffar Ali’s lens, that longing became visual prayer. His frames—amber and indigo, perfumed with nostalgia—transformed pain into poetry. The courtesan’s courtyard became a cathedral. The act of leaving became an art of surviving.

In that world, Rekha’s Umrao was not merely a woman wronged; she was the embodiment of exile made eloquent. Every tilt of her head, every tremor of her wrist, mirrored my own unspoken ache. I was a boy humming thumris in the dark, rehearsing how to exist in a world that had no name for me yet.

Mahalan tale se dola jo nikla, Are biran mein chhaaye pachhad…From beneath the mansions, the palanquin glided, and behind it, the barren earth rose in dust.

That dust was mine—the residue of secrecy, of shame, of self-survival. Every time I sang the line, I saw the swirl of my own dislocation: the dust of Delhi, the blur of New York, the hush of hotel rooms where desire met danger.

The brother had his do mahalan, his twin palaces—heteronormativity and home. I had my pardes—a passport stamped by solitude. But over time, I realised: exile too can be an education. The foreign can become familiar. The outcast can become oracle.

Because when everything familiar rejects you, you learn to belong to yourself.

And in that realisation, beauty begins to braid itself with bruises. The ache acquires aura. Even sorrow starts to shine. In that, Khusrau’s shadow guided me. His devotion to Nizamuddin Auliya was not submission—it was surrender. The kind that sanctifies. The kind that sees the divine not as distant, but as beloved. Through him, I learned that love—any love that expands rather than excludes—is holy.