śrī bholenātha jī kī āratī

The Hindi aarti to Shiva as Bholenath — the simple-hearted one, the name that carries most affection of any he has — and the vocabulary of the whole piece follows from it. Bholenath, destroyer of the sorrow of devotees, breaker of becoming, maker of good and of happiness; kind to the poor, compassionate, enemy of time, the unseen and stainless Shiva, the yogi. The pairing in that second line is the aarti's whole method: an epithet a child could understand set beside one out of the Upanishads, in the same breath and the same metre. Sung standing at the end of worship with the lamp circling, and the reason it stays in the memory is that it never stays long in either register.