Grinning foolishly, we suddenly slammed into our bodies.  “Wah-wow!” one of us said, “This body feels gurooooovy!”  The elevator zipped down to the first floor and opened up.  Six happy looking bodies exited tripping over each other in excitement, and totally trippin’ out of our minds (whatever Pipa had given us was verrrrry  goooood stuff!)

Bursting-with-besan–auntie came up and hugged me, “Oh, my cutie-pie, I missed you in the morning, how brave you were with the Goons!”  She mauled me (actually my physical body) thoroughly before stopping and asking, “What’s that dust you have all over you, sweet boy?” (I guess the light powder appeared as dust to regular (boring muggles!) people who hadn’t been on the most excellent astral adventure). Some of the powder rubbed off on her. She began grinning foolishly; her eyes went all dreamy and she smacked her lips grunting, “mmmmmm – feel good!” Then she pushed me away saying, “Get away, little boy!” and walked off with a rather determined look on face saying, “Where is that hunk of my husband?”

We stared after her watching her waddle away. Odd - she hadn’t gained a single pound since we last saw her.  “We couldn’t have been gone for too  very long!“ one of the more smart-ass amongst us quipped.  

Then we heard the shabad from the keertan hall  which confirmed our suspicions:

nwnk gurU n cyqnI min AwpxY sucyq] Cuty iql bUAwV ijau suM\y AMdir Kyq] KyqY AMdir CuitAw khu nwnk sau nwh] PlIAih PulIAih bpuVy BI qn ivic suAwh]

naanak guroo n chaethanee man aapanai suchaeth|| shhuttae thil booaarr jio sunnjae andhar khaeth|| khaethai andhar shhuttiaa kahu naanak so naah|| faleeahi fuleeahi bapurrae bhee than vich suaah||

O Nanak, those egoists who do not keep the WaheGuru in their minds (as their one True Lord)  and (instead) have a hundred (false) masters, are like scattered sesame left abandoned in the field – they might appear to bear fruit and flower, but within are filled with ashes.

The Conspiracy theory kid exclaimed, “Dudes and Dudettes, no time  at all has passed while we were astral tripping in the elevator!” 

The keertan sounded so cool and magnetic that we rushed towards the keertan hall.  While running, the Conspiracy theory kid kept stuffing his pockets with the light loose powder, that fell away “Hey, you never know when this is going to come handy,” he said with a wink.

We entered the keertan hall with so much gusto that the raagi Singhs tightened their grips on their vajas and joris.  The main raagi Singh picked up a the 3-footi Sri Sahib from in front of goolak and put it across his lap, “If they want this vaja, they will have to pry it off from my cold, dead fingers!” he whispered to the joRi vala, who also pulled his hammer a little closer and whispered back, “They breaka my dhama, I taka their prana!”.

But we didn’t want their vajas or joRis – we wanted them to sing more gurbani.  And sing they did!  The light gold dust particles of powder abundantly floating around our bodies drifted away and alighted on the raagi Singhs. They suddenly burst into singing the next asa-dee-vaar pauree so enthusiastically that it sounded like a major smagam (but only about 10 or people sat in sangat). 

AwpIn@Y Awpu swijE AwpIn@Y ricE nwau] duXI kudriq swjIAY kir Awsxu ifTo cwau]

aa peenhai aap saajiou aapeenhai rachiou naao|| dhuyee kudharath saajeeai kar aasan dditho chaao||

WaheGuru created WaheGuru-self; then WaheGuru created Naam; then (through Naam) creation was fashioned. Seated within the creation, WaheGuru beholds it with delight.

dwqw krqw Awip qUM quis dyvih krih pswau] qUM jwxoeI sBsY dy lYsih ijMdu kvwau] kir Awsxu ifTo cwau]1]

dhaathaa karathaa aap thoon thus dhaevehi karehi pasaao|| thoon jaanoee sabhasai dhae laisehi jindh kavaao|| kar aasan dditho chaao||

WaheGuru, You Yourself are the Giver and the Creator; by Your Pleasure, You bestow Your Mercy. You are the Knower of all; You give life, and take it away again with Your Hukam. Seated within the creation, You behold it with delight.

Then the raagi Singh started the next salok,

hir pRym bwxI mnu mwirAw AxIAwly AxIAw rwm rwjy] ijsu lwgI pIr iprMm kI so jwxY jrIAw]

har praem baanee man maariaa aneeaalae aneeaa raam raajae|| jis laagee peer piranm kee so jaanai jareeaa||

The word of the Lord's Love is a pointed arrow, which has pierced my mind, O Lord King. Only those who feel the pain of this love, know how to endure it.

jIvn mukiq so AwKIAY mir jIvY mrIAw] jn nwnk siqguru myil hir jgu duqru qrIAw]

jeevan mukath so aakheeai mar jeevai mareeaa|| jan naanak sathigur mael har jag dhuthar thareeaa||

Those who die, and remain dead while yet alive, are said to be liberated while yet alive. O Lord, unite servant Nanak with the True Guru, that he may cross over the terrifying world-ocean.

The raagis sung this shabad at such a high sur, that the humans in the sangat could barely grasp it (the high-frequency-beings hanging out listening had a ball though). We listened to this shabad until we just couldn’t take it anymore – so much energy flowed through us that we couldn’t sit still. We all jumped up and began bouncing up and down energetically; some of us shouting along with the shabad, others crying and laughing and giggling,  some all at once. I, for one, thought I could never ever be sad again!  No matter what happened, I would keep this honey-like bliss inside me. Ooooh, it felt good and I wanted the whole world to know how good it felt!

Unfortunately, the naamis in the sangat didn’t think along the same lines. Before we knew it, my naam-filled Amrit Aunty Jee was leading our sister and kaRtall killa kid away; Yodha Singh had me and the conspiracy kid under his arms and Nihung Jee had vaja toR andn joRi PhaR under one.

We quickly exited the keertan hall. The naamis threw us (quite roughly, I might add) to the floor in one of the adjoining storage rooms atop the gurudwara bedding supplies.  “What do you think you are doing dancing and raving like FOOLS?!!” Yodha roared.

My naam-filled Amrit Aunty Jee turned to our sister, “You!  Tell me what’s going on? I am disappointed in your behavior today!”  We all lost a little of our high. My sister stammered, “Aunty Jee… we… we … went into the elevator…”

“You WHAT?” Yodha Singh interrupted, his eyes narrowing, “Where did you get this glittery sparkly powder from?... Did you meet Pipa?!”  He didn’t wait for our answer but turned to Nihung Jee and nodded; Nihung Jee disappeared and reappeared with a bucket full of water.  “All of you dip your feet into this water NOW!” Yodha Singh commanded. Turn by turn (still giggling like little kids - the six-something kind) we all did as ordered. (If he had told us to put our heads in there, we would have done that too – such was the Naam energy in his voice). Then to our utter amazement, the three naamis picked up the bucket, lifted it to their lips and began guzzling down the water!!!

Our giggles vanished from our faces in shock but immediately reappeared on the Naami’s faces!  “Thank you, Pipa!” Nihung Jee giggled facing upwards, with a huge silly giggly grin on his face.  Smiling so wide their teeth showed (although Yodha Singh was trying very hard to keep a stern face), the naamis took deep breaths murmuring things like “gurrrrrWAH!” “ggggRRRRRuu!”.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened. But for the sake of our readers let me explain: They had stolen Pipa’s  WONDERFUL stuff from us in broad daylight – well, in broad spectrum florescent rainbow  light. Although to be fair, Pipa did tell us to give it the naamis.  But let me just ask, what would have gone wrong with the Universe if we had been allowed to keep it for a few more hours (or days, or lifetimes, or eons, even???) Which Khand would have come to a screeching halt if that could have happened? Huh? I’m telling you (and not for the last time), this Universe is skewed against us kids. Just wait until one of us “kids” hack into the Universe’s software to make some long overdue changes. 

I went ranting on inside when Yodha Singh turned and told us, “C’mon,  don’t pout, you had your share!  Let me tell you a story … it’s about Pink Elephants!  Hee hee hee”. 

Aunty Jee and Nihung Jee fell on the floor laughing their bellies off “Pink Elephants, hee hee ho ho ho”.

We kids looked at each other sullenly, “What’s so darn funny?” 

My sister looked at me, “What’s wrong?! Why are you purple?”  Just then I remembered my PP situation; holding myself as discreetly as possible, I ran to the bathroom. Though it couldn’t be compared to Pipa’s stuff, relieving myself did feel verrry good.  I rushed back, not wanting to miss anything.  I opened the door and to my great shock everyone had frozen stock-still!  Aunty Jee and Nihung Jee lay on the floor (their mouths open) holding their bellies frozen in mid-belly laughter. Yodha Singh had stopped speaking in mid-sentence. I saw several translucent figures finishing up the last remaining drops of water in the bucket!! I pinched myself - this was too astralish!! Then the figures simply disintegrated and everything came back to normal (if you can call naamis rolling on the floor howling, hooting, gurgling, and giggling, while clutching their bellies  normal). Yodha finished his sentence saying, “… a story.  You have to understand…”

Naam-Steal

Drama historians generally attribute this “art” to the Jedi Nights staff who in one of the episodes decided to get some Naam from their characters. This sent shock waves throughout the art and Naam world. The Jedi Nights “artists” later apologized and retracted their work which they had submitted immediately after the Naam-Steal.  Part of it is attached:H

grrrrrrrrrWah! Grrrrrrrrrwah!

Wah! Wah! Wah! Wah!

Giggly, wiggly, jiggly, wah!

Rollicking frolicking Metabolickingwah!

Wah! Wah! Wah! Wah!

Subtitles by Muggles: A

grrrrrrrrrWAH! Grrrrrrrrrwah!
Wah! Wah! Wah! Wah!
Giggly, wiggily, jiggily, wah!

Rollicking frolicking metabolicking wah!

Wah! Wah! Wah! Wah!

 Yodha Singh then proceeded to tell us the following story (between bouts of belly-laughter):

“There was this instructor of a pink elephant diving school. She had an enormous dilemma. She needed to find a body of water BIG enough for all her 100 pink elephants students to dive in at once. 

The instructor apologized and moved on to a nearby lake.  This time 10 elephants dived. Everything seemed to go fine.  So then 50 jumped in...                                               

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH! SPLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! Mega Mega commotion!                                                       

Nihung Jee added, “Yeah, it was like whhhosshh heheheheheh!” (*WE* should be doing the  giggling of funny sound effects here, not some naami who doesn’t need any more of OUR naam! But then nobody said the Universe is fair! grumble grumble)                                        

A huge wave swelled up and washed out all over everywhere, frightening many animals.  The senior citizen's party on the lake shore got disrupted. The really crotchety ones already had their cell phones to their earpieces calling their lawyers to see how much they could sue this instructor for.

The instructor quickly moved on. They came to a vast Ocean. "Dive in, y'all!" the Instructor ordered. 100 pink elephants dived in trunks first..  Nothing happened! Not even a RiPpLe. The ocean took all of them in quite graciously.

So which one of you geniuses is going to tell me what this story means?” Yodha Singh asked. 

The Conspiracy kid raised his hand; my sister rolled her eyes; Aunty Jee tried to look serious; Nihung Jee coughed; Yodha Singh’s kundalini rose through the funny bone. 

The Conspiracy kid cleared his throat, “It is quite obvious actually; the instructor is the Guru; the elephants are Naam Kinkas (you know, drops) and we are the water.  The Guru gives Naam to us; if we can’t handle it, the Guru will not give us more until we can.  If we are a pond, with just a little ras we go nuts – we scream, dance, rave and tell everybody about it; on the other hand, if we are an Ocean – deep and gracious – we take the Naam in and the Guru keeps on giving more.”

The Naamis stared at him, then at each other; their giggles subsided a little now; “Ahem, yes, that is exactly right!” Yodha Singh exclaimed.  “So,” he continued, “we must not let our water overflow when we get any spiritual experiences.  In other words, we should keep our spiritual experiences to ourselves - if we want to have more of them.  No one, absolutely no one (except perhaps a close naami mentor, if we have one) should know we have had a mind-blowing experience.  Even a teardrop is prohibited. Has anybody noticed that if one is in naam ras and one wants to cry, as soon as tears escape the eye, the ras diminishes drastically? The reason is that as soon as the tear comes out, the ego too jumps out and wants others to see this.  "I just had an experience.  I am high.  I am a gursikh.  Respect me.  I am somebody," it says.  And once you do that, you and other people are deluded about your spiritual state and people start coming to you with their worldly problems.

So my dear ones, we have to jar the ajar – bear the unbearable. This is no easy task - in fact, it is so difficult that along with remembering the gursikhs who obeyed the guru’s hukam, we also remember the gursikhs who accomplished this jar-ing of the ajar.”

In between giggles, my Amrit Aunty Jee asked sweetly, “So kids, what did you see on your astral ride?”

We all clambered to tell all about all the wisdom we had gained so she would realize we could indeed *handle* that stuff from Pipa. After we were done, the naamis looked at each other and said, “I’m afraid you kids saw too much – you won’t be able to handle it; we have to completely erase your memory about the ride!” We all pleaded against this (especially the Conspiracy theory kid whose pockets were now bulging with the naam powder).

The naamis ignored us and raised their khandas of Naam. Just then there was an urgent knock on the door, “IS MY HUSBAND IN THERE??!!” screeched bursting-with-besan–auntie!

Nihung Jee called out, “NO, LADY! There’s just us kids in here <giggle> <giggle>” (very funny, suddenly everyone is a comedian now – I hope he still keeps his day job!). Just as the Naamis shouted, “Gurrr-WAH!!!” and started waving their khands of Naam towards us, the Conspiracy theory kid dived under the blankets…

<Meanwhile … on the dark side …>

If you will recall, dear patient readers, we left our villains with Godfather shouting at the Peer <s.c.u.m> in bollywood-speak, who in turn was shouting back in teen-speak, and Ridhi-Sidhi Frogirl <psycho music> whose head resembled a frog, clinging to Godfather demanding her magic wand, which was still stuck in the mouth of Bheta Boa, whose pain was being eased by Stella’s <shiver>’s spop-spsycho-therapy,  while she inspired him by spinning this tale:

Once 3 black widow spiders went to the beach where the glare of bright sunlight gave them all headaches (a cephalothorax-ache actually - we are committed to being an all-species-friendly series). The next day they met again over lunch. The first one reminisced, “My husband was a spodiatrist doctor; before I operated on him, he gave me a shot in my pedicel and now my cephalothorax-ache is gone and I feel really good. The second one said my husband was a chirospractor; before I boned him, he massaged my spinnerets and now my cephalothorax-ache is gone and I feel really good. The third one said, “My husband was a spsychiatrist; before I shrunk him, he spsycho-therapied me and now I feel really good about my cephalothorax-ache!”

Bheta Boa squeezed out a melancholy chuckle. Sadly Stella’s <shiver>’s stories really didn’t help much. He still felt a massive pang in his left fang. Not only that, he was famished too. For his latest meal, two memorable mouthwatering rats, had taken the opportunity to get the heck back out of his open mouth. Greedily eyeing Stella’s <shiver>’s plump posterior imagining sizzling spider steaks, he sighed heavily. You just can’t expect to  replace two healthy rats (with whom you have already been intimate) with fantasies of a tasty  hot-looking spider no matter how venomous; so instead he swallowed his own misery and waited for his father, Peer <s.c.u.m>,  to come back to feed him with something nice, like a skunk salad.

That reminds me, why is Peer <s.c.u.m> teen-speaking? Is it to reach out to the disfranchised youth? Is it to sound hip? No and no. Actually, it all started with a programmer named Murti.  and creations.khand who had been experimenting with outsourcing software.  Peer <s.c.u.m> had been among the first batch of humans to be created through this partnership.

Murti while having an unusually bad day had been given the task to code the Peer <s.c.u.m>. You see, all the cool design work had already been done. Incredibly bored with grunt work, Murti and his fellow chaps at veryCheapSoftware.khand had placed bets on putting a bug in the software without  it being caught by QA.khand.

So Murti, (whose girlfriend had left him for a Bollywood type Son of a Goonda and whose mother had put too much chili in his masala dosa) programmed Peer <s.c.u.m> to teen-speak as soon as he heard someone say, “Kuttey kaminey! Mein tera khoon peejoonga!” to him. During lunch over idli at ShamberKhand, He snickered to his fellow code-monkies “The QA boys are never going to catch that!”

Wrong! The QA boys were good! They did catch the bug but not until the shipment was almost out of the door. They determined (after much teeth gnashing, firing and hiring) to” let this one through”; mainly because a LOT of 9-month pregnant mamas were expecting and you don’t wanna mess with them big mamas! Anyways, they did jack-up the version of the Peer <s.c.u.m>’s MS-Nasty to the highest setting available; hoping thereby to make it virtually impossible for anyone to be considered by the Peer as being nasty to him (as luck would have it however- they didn’t bother to go into the future to check up on the mother of all nasties, Godfather).

So, that’s the story behind Peer <s.c.u.m> uttering teen-speak. (I hope I haven’t kept you waiting too long for this dark truth.)

What?... well, yeees, it is possible that there are other bugs in a few other folks too – perhaps in even you; but I would urge you to NOT report any suspected bugs!! One thing the Khands haven’t figured out yet is how to go about doing effective recalls. The last one they did ended up a complete disaster!

It happened during the dinosaur’s era. The dinos actually were never intended to get THAT big – some joker had programmed them to continue growing and then had forgotten to design a predator for them (“a minor design flaw” according to the project books). So this same guy (yeah, the joker) instead of simply fixing his mistake, brought in the best PR people to campaign saying that the blueprint of the dinos had been misread! (The gall of this guy!) So it was decided (after much teeth gnashing, firing and hiring) that dinos needed to be recalled in order to have an extra rudimentary brain installed (in their butt, so it could handle their lower body functions).

After running the recall through millions of simulations, the joker guy insisted that it would take a maximum of 2 days – well, we all know what happened then! ( For Readers # 1’s benefit-  those days turned out to be ONG days measured in ONG time and currently we are still in the very L-ONG ONG day ONE)

To be continued…

Obituary

It is with regret that Jedi Nights Series announces the death of one of our secondary characters, Mr. Hunk. The cause of death is still to be determined but early diagnosis suggests shock from sudden and ferocious impact of a small asteroid. He is survived by wife bursting-with-besan–auntie and son milkcake.

To be continued…