Lalla-Naked-Song

with it that the bare form of "Lalla," whom she often addresses,
seemed clothing enough. Her awareness observes the body, but is
not identified with it.
We know very little about her, other than what comes through
the poetry. There are no official references until four hundred years
after her death, and no contemporary manuscripts. The legends
of her life and the poems were preserved in the oral tradition.
Lalla means "darling," and she is certainly beloved in Kashmir. It
is said that only two words mean anything in Kashmiri, Allah and
Lalla, the rest being just language. Hundreds of lines from the
Lalla- Vakyana are still actively a part of Kashmiri conversation.
Her diction is colloquial, tuned not to philosophy and organized
religion, but to the common people. The "text" has come down
with many variations, some of it in an old Kashmiri dialect, side
by side with Sanskrit transcriptions. Between one hundred and
two hundred songs, poems, and sayings seem to have survived.
Lalla-Vakyana means Lalla's Word.
She is also known as Lal Ded, Lai Didi, and Mai Lai Diddi,
all of which mean Granny Lal, Grandmother Lalla. And in Sanskrit
she is called Lalleshwari, Lalla the great yogini, prophetess
and practicioner of yoga. The poems reveal this double nature:
one eye a warm, grandmotherly glance. The other a more severe,
truth-telling vision into the Void. Her metaphors of oneness are
not majestic light-upon-light images. The shapes of melting ice
interest her. And she also notices how ashes merge with clay to
become soil. "Study the ground, Lalla," she reminds herself.
Born in Kashmir, probably in a village near Srinagar, maybe
in 1320, she died near there in 1391. All these facts are speculative.
There are stories of her being mistreated as a young wife living
with in-laws. Her mother-in-law would put a stone on her plate
and cover it thinly with rice, so that it would look like Lalla was
getting more food than she actually was. Lalla never complained.
And she loved to spend time meditating at the holy shrines. Sent to
fetch water, she would stop there. One day her husband, thinking
to punish her for dawdling on the way home, struck the jar she was
carrying. It broke, but the water remained in place as a jar-shaped
column on Lalla's head. That water became the sacred "Lalla's
Lake" in Kashmir.
Tradition has it that Lalla left home, and the marriage, at
twenty-four to become a student of the Hindu teacher, Sed Bayu.
It was then also that she began to ignore conventional standards
of dress and to wander in a state of ecstatic clarity. One morning
as children were making fun of her nakedness, a cloth merchant
scolded their disrespect. Lalla asked him for two strands of cloth