When the Wind-God, Vayu, bearer of the perfume, God of all northwest India, blows through the Suleimans, he snakes his way through the Khyber Pass to Punjab. There he crosses the Indus and chases his shadow across the city in the bowl at the base of Margalla Hills. When angry he brings dust storms, hen sad he brings rains, watering the crackled lips of the land, setting Persian wheels creaking.
Blowing east, Vayu gnaws at the plateau of called Pothowar till it falls away beneath him to plains beyond Jhehlum. He blows dry past the Salt Range, over lush rolling hills where the silvery ribbons of the Jhehlum, the Chenab, the Ravi and its canals seeks the Indus. Then he climbs the watershed between Lahore and Amritsar. Stooping low for the blessing at the feet of the Himalayas, he whisks canals streaming from the Sutlej and the Beas, sweeps unobstructed across the river plains of the Ganga and rises to sear the heart of India. When he returns, circling over the Arabian Sea, hauling monsoon clouds into position, he sleeps a weary sleep on the breast of the Indus.
And he believes his gifts are all Punjabis need to make them happy.
Oh, foolish Vayu!
In the age since he first inhaled, before India was ever called India, Vayu has guided army after army through the mountain passes to Punjab. The English circulate a story that a race of tall, blond, blue eyed Aryans invaded first, from the Caucasus, Vayu ushering them forward, to lord it over darker people, drive them south, but Vayu, oblivious to bloodline, remembers only that he caught music from migrants over the passes, melded it into language. Then Vayu guided invaders whose traces still remain – Persians, Alexander the great astride his Bucephalus; Hun raiders and traders from Afghanistan, Mahmud of Ghazni, the idol-breaking raider from Turkestan; fugitives and refugees from the Mongols. Vayu’s winds stirred war cries from the horsemen of the first Mughal, Babar of Samarkand, then he brought news of successions of Mughal Emperors, father to son and father to son.
In the age since he first inhaled, before India was ever called India, Vayu invited animist gods to join him in the Aryan Hindu Pantheon, even as menials themselves falling to level of menials. It was Vayu who swept the ground before Mahavira Jain, heard the first lesson of non-violence. He listened in awe as Gautama Buddha taught Buddhism’s eight-fold path, saved Buddha’s ideas, puffing them out of reach of Hinduism, to sanctuary in the Himalayas and Tibet. Then when Islam first sank its roots in Punjab, Vayu shifted direction, bring the Propeht Muhammad’s revelation of Allah to sway the hearts of raja and menials alike, meddling languages again - Prakrit and Persian to Urdu.
Ages later, Vayu saw a boy, Nanak, refuse the ritual black thread of his Hindu ancestors, commune with MuslimSufis, then walk his own path. He saw Nanak leading the first Sikhs to a single faceless God, and gather into the Sikh quorum those who would seek the divine with him. Vayu’s wind felt Guru Nanak’s sprit enter nine more Guru’s lives, and later it was Vayu who rustled between the pages of the Guru Granth Sahib, when the rapturous poems of all ten Gurus become the Sikh quorum’s remaining guide.
It was Vayu who rode in the manes of horses when the Persians and Afghans sacked Lahore and snatched away its women; it was he who stirred the pennants of Sikh chiefs wresting control from Afghanistan, slaying in vengeance, bereaving more women. And when the English pressed northwest, it could have been Vayu who led their forces to slaughter in Afghanistan. Later, his breezes rode across Punjab at the shoulders of Sikh warriors of Maharaj Ranjit Singh, and when those warriors fell in battle against the British it was Vayu, as always, who brought word to their widows.
When Vayu skirts the doorway of the fairies at Pari Darvaza, small village of mud and brick scooped from the soil, he finds few Hindus there to call his name; those who did were driven south or converted, generations ago, from Hinduism to Islam. Instead, in Pari Darvaza, he finds Sikhs celebrating harvest festivals and anniversary days of their ten Guru’s lives, and Muslims who mark the passage of the day by muezzin’s call to prayer.