Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
The fourth watch is old age. Baynee paints the picture plainly: hair white as jasmine, voice faint and far away, eyes that water constantly, strength and intellect gone.
And yet — the desire hasn't left. That pull that drove through the whole life is still churning inside the withered body. The body is like a lotus that has dried up and wilted. But the wanting is still there.
And the Bani — the Lord's Word that could have nourished the soul, that was available the whole time — was never taken up. The word of the Immortal Lord was left untouched in a mortal life. Now the body is nearly done, and the soul never ate.
The image of desire (kaam) churning even in an aged body is not meant to be grotesque; it is meant to show how deep the conditioning of desire runs. The passions, left unaddressed, outlast the body's capacity to fulfill them — which is its own kind of suffering. This is not a moral condemnation of the elderly; it is an illustration of what happens when a human life goes spiritually uninvested. The body was a vessel; the Bani was the content it was built to carry; the Lord's immortal Word (akhar amol) was left untaken. The timing of the wilt and the persistence of desire together create one of Baynee's most powerful images.
Have you ever put off something important because you thought you'd get to it later? What if later doesn't come the way you expect?
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI