In His Shelter

qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review

Saraṇa — Sanskrit śaraṇa — is a refuge: the roof you get under, the place you reach when something is after you. Śaraṇāgati, coming-into-refuge, is one of the great terms of the bhakti literature, and the Chalisa has already shown what it looks like. Vibhīṣaṇa walked out of his brother's city with nothing and was taken in. The word in this chaupai is the same word for what he did.

Lahai is plain and physical: to get, to come by. Sukha is ease rather than joy — the state of a body and a household not under strain, which is a much more ordinary thing to promise and a much harder one to arrange.

Two chaupais back the poem said what his grace does to impassable ground and kept a person out of the sentence altogether. This is the first line that puts one in: somebody is under the roof, and something is found there. Several more will follow.

The honest reading takes the verbs seriously and does not finish the sentence. What the couplet names is not an act performed and paid for; it is a location — being under someone's roof — and then a description of what is found there. That is what it says. A reader can hold it without being told what to conclude.

Printed texts divide on the second line. Some set rakṣaka and run the last two syllables together as ḍaranā, which turns the half-line into a question — you are the protector, so what is there to fear? The reading followed here has the Awadhi racchaka with ḍara nā as two words, a flat statement that there is no fear of anyone; racchaka is the regular Prakrit development of Sanskrit rakṣaka, and the Sanskritised spelling is a habit of printers rather than a different sense.