Tonight's sakhi does not begin on the earth. It begins in a town you have never seen.
The town is called Begum Pura. The houses there never crack and never grow old. Nobody is sad. Nobody steals, so nobody needs a lock, and there is no watchman at any gate, because there is nothing to be afraid of. The houses are not built of brick and stone but out of something finer than a thought, and if you would like yours to be different, it simply becomes what you wanted.
The people there shine, and their clothes are not cloth at all. They are made of love and of light, in colours nobody here has ever seen.
And listen to this. In that town, if you reach up and pick a flower, the flower is in your hand, and the flower is still on the branch. Because in that town nothing dies.
In the middle of Begum Pura stands a palace of pearls, and the light inside is so strong that it comes out through the walls as though they were glass. That light goes out to the sun and the moon and every star and gives them their power. Everything, anywhere, is kept going by that one place. It is the Lord's Palace.
One who came to see it found the doors shut. Then a shining soul came and stood at the door with folded hands and sang a question. O Lord, which is the place where you are remembered always, without stopping? I have come looking for it.
The door opened, and he was so kind that he took the stranger's finger in his hand and brought him in too.
Inside, the roof was thick with stars and the floor shone like moonlight on water. Around a great throne sat souls the way the ring of light sits around the moon, and you never had to ask them what they were thinking, because whatever was in their hearts was already on their faces.
On the throne sat the Lord, who has no shape and no face at all. This is what the old word nirgun means, God with no shape, nobody's eyes can hold him. And yet, looking carefully, you saw he was in the mountains and the forests too, here and there and everywhere at once.
In front of the throne sat one more, and between that one and the throne ran a cord of light, joining them.
The Lord spoke with great gladness. Nine times you have gone down, he said, and nine times you carried the hardship on your own back, and you took away the suffering of the people. You never forgot me, and you never once thought yourself somebody important. That makes me glad.
Nine times. You know already who was sitting there. The first time down, they had called him Guru Nanak Dev Ji, and he had gone on walking the earth in one body after another for more than two hundred years, planting a garden of people who remembered the Lord.
Then the Lord said the words the whole shining company stood up to hear.
You are my son. I am sending you to the earth. Go and put people on the true path, and turn them away from the wrong ones.
One of them was puzzled, and asked it out loud, the way you would have. But the ninth one is sitting right here in front of us. What does a tenth mean?
It means, he was told, that the same one is going down again. The Lord has asked for a tenth body, and the work will go on in it. The garden that the nine planted will be kept safe.
And then the two of them, the Lord on the throne and the one in front, came so close together that if you had looked with all your might you could not have found two figures there any more.
There was only one.
That is the other half of it, and you must hold both halves at the same time. He is the son, sent by his father. And he is that shapeless God himself, come out where people could see him and love him, which is what the old word sargun means.
So it was settled, long before any December in Patna, that the light was coming down for the tenth time, and this time we would call him Guru Gobind Singh Ji.