This one you must listen to carefully, because it is the sakhi that explains all the others.
Half a hundred years had gone by. Somewhere in the hills near Sadhaura there was a very old holy man called Budhan Shah, and he was waiting for somebody.
He had been waiting a long time.
When he was young and miserable and getting nowhere, Guru Nanak Dev Ji had come and given him the Lord's name, and pulled him out of his fasting and his hard rules, and taught him to remember the Lord instead. And he had promised him something. I will come and drink your milk, he said, when I come the sixth time.
And he did. Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji came, and drank the milk. And the old man, who was not so old then, said: come and drink it again. Please. Once more.
Which is why, one quiet morning at Anandpur, sitting alone by the river Satluj with his eyes closed, Guru Gobind Singh Ji remembered a promise he had made a very long time ago, and got up to go and keep it.
Bhai Sahib says it plainly here, so I will say it to you the same way. The soul was the same in all ten bodies. The beads in the hand, the sword at the waist, and now the plume in the turban, but the same one inside.
Meanwhile, up in the hills, the old man opened his eyes from his prayers and looked at the sky, and something was happening to him. He could not keep still.
O Guru Nanak Dev Ji, he said out loud. You gave me the Name. Now give me your face. Come through my eyes and sit down in my heart.
O Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji, he said, you came once with your sword. Come to me now as the one with the plume.
I am too old to be clever, he said. Keep your heaven. I want your feet where these bony hands can hold them.
He had been an old banyan tree for so long, and so many rivers had run past, and so many springs had come and gone.
Then, all at once, there was a light he could not look at.
And he heard something he had not heard since he was a young man. Somewhere very close, Bhai Mardana Ji was playing the rebab and singing, the way he used to when Guru Nanak Dev Ji walked the world.
The old man's heart went out of him. The tears came down like the Satluj in flood, and he fell forward at the feet that had come, and after that he did not know where he was, nor how long he lay there, because time had stopped counting.
Then a voice at his ear said two words.
My milk.
He came to himself and lifted his head.
And this is the thing I want you to hold on to. He had laid his head down in the lap of Guru Nanak Dev Ji. When he lifted it up, he was lifting it out of the lap of the one with the plume.
He looked, and the face was so beautiful that his eyes filled and shut again, and his head went back down into that lap, and Guru Ji held him there with both hands.
The one who had come was asking him for milk, and he could not hear a word of it.
After a while the voice came again. I am hungry.
Then again: my milk.
That woke him. He sat up sharply.
And it happened the other way round this time. He had put his head down in the lap of the one with the plume, and when he raised it, he was raising it from the lap of Guru Nanak Dev Ji.
That is when the old man understood, and stopped being confused for good.
The beloved is the same. Only the bodies are different.
He tried to get up and go and fetch the milk. His feet would not take him. He got as far as looking back, and the plume caught the light, and down he went into that lap again.
My milk, said Guru Ji, patiently, a fourth time.
He was like a bee that has got into a flower and will not come out, and honestly, who could blame him. He had waited three lifetimes for this.