આ શેરી વળાવી

This is a song of invitation — an aavahan — from the founder of the Gujarati poetic tradition. Narsinh Mehta, revered as the Adi Kavi (the first poet), wrote in the ecstatic register of Krishna devotion roughly a century before Mira and the northern sant poets rose to fame. Here he speaks not in his own voice but through the viraha longing of a bride or gopi who has readied her whole household for a guest who has not yet arrived. The very first act — 'આ શેરી વળાવી', having swept the lane clean — is telling: hospitality does not begin at the door but out in the public street, and 'આંગણિયે પથરાવું ફૂલ' (I strew flowers across the courtyard) completes the preparation of the approach itself.

What follows is a beautifully patterned catalogue. Each couplet names one domain of welcome and then doubles the offering: lodging becomes rooms and then 'મેડીના મોલ' (upper-storey mansions); the morning twig becomes a pomegranate stick and then an 'કણેરી કાંબ' (oleander switch); a bath becomes water pots and then, tellingly, 'જમનાજીનાં નીર' — the waters of the Yamuna. That single escalation from ordinary well-water to the sacred river quietly unmasks the guest: only Krishna's home is the Yamuna, and only for him would a household offer its waters. The catalogue moves on through food ('લાપશી' and 'સાકરિયો કંસાર', sweet cracked-wheat dishes), games ('સોગઠી' and 'પાસાની જોડ', dice and pachisi), and rest ('ઢોલિયા' and 'હિંડોળા ખાટ', a cot and a swing-bed). Binding it all is the soft, coaxing imperative that lands at the end of every line — 'ઘરે આવો ને' — so that the poem becomes one continuous act of longing: everything a home can give is offered, and the only thing missing is the beloved's presence.

Read devotionally, the swept street and the flower-strewn courtyard are the readied heart of the bhakta, and every doubled offering is the soul's preparation to receive divine grace. The poem closes, as Narsinh's poems do, with his signature bhanita — 'આ મહેતા નરસૈંયાના સ્વામી શામળિયા' — naming himself and his lord Shamaliyo, the dark-hued Krishna, and folding an intimate household song into his lifelong devotion. As a fifteenth-century oral composition it has no fixed critical text, and its stanzas and spellings vary slightly across anthologies, yet the poem has lived unbroken as a beloved Gujarati bhajan, sung at devotional gatherings and in wedding-adjacent settings for the tenderness of its central image: a home adorned in full, waiting for the one who completes it.