Bhai Nand Lal Ji listened to his wife recite every morning, and the more he listened, the more he wanted to see where those words had come from.
Life went on around him. He became famous in Multan for his Persian. The Chief of Multan heard of him and made him his reader. Later he gave up that post, but he stayed in the city. When he was forty a son was born to him, and after that another child.
And in the middle of all that, one thought kept coming back and would not leave.
How long am I going to stay wrapped up in a wife and children, he thought. I know where the road is. And the Lord's own one is walking about on this earth right now, in my lifetime, and I have not gone to look at him.
That thought got into him and stayed.
So he asked his wife's leave and went. He settled her and the children at her parents' house, and set off.
He went slowly. Lahore first, where he sat in the gatherings and listened to kirtan. Then Amritsar, where he saw the Golden Gurdwara and could hardly contain himself.
Then, at last, Anandpur.
And having come all that way, he did a very strange thing.
He rented a house, and stayed in it.
He had met a great many holy men in his life, and none of them had turned out to be the one. And he had decided something on the road, and he stuck to it now that he had arrived.
I will not go and present myself, he thought. I will sit here and wait, and see whether he sends for me. If he calls me without being told I am here, then I will know.
So there he sat.
And his mind split into two minds, and they went to war.
His outer mind was very pleased with itself and its clever test. His inner mind, the one that had brought him a thousand miles, was in agony. It jumped about. It ached. It waited every day for a message.
The days went by, and no message came.
He stopped eating properly. He went thin, and then thinner. His face went pale and fell in. He had a servant living with him, a young man who watched all this happening to his master and could not understand any of it.
Then one day the message came.
Guru Ji had asked for him. By name.
Bhai Sahib says he looked completely crazy when he heard it. Something went through him like a bell being struck, and it rang and rang and would not stop ringing.
And then he went, and he saw him.
That poet's mind, which had been in pain for months, which had been polished so fine by all that waiting that it was ready to be poured into the Lord like water into water, got what it came for.
He walked home afterwards, and his servant took one look at him and nearly shouted, because there was light in that pale drooping face.
Later the servant asked what had happened, and got an answer.
Child, said Bhai Nand Lal Ji. I carried that pull in my heart for years. I came here in a fever to see him. And then, having come, I stood outside and blocked myself, and that is why my body wasted away. The pull was deep inside all along.
The servant said something rather wise back.
It is the Lord's kindness that you have got it, he said. This is the real wealth. It does not go anywhere. It stays with you.
And as for me, he said, I am not in a hurry. Whenever I get it, that will be all right. For now I am happy just to be near it.
Bhai Nand Lal Ji stayed on at Anandpur after that, and he was a happy man.
Kirtan in the early morning. The gathering in the evening. And in between, seeing Guru Ji, which he had waited half his life for.
Think of the shape of that life. A boy studying in Ghazni. Both parents gone. A stranger in a country that was not his. Then work, and marriage, and comfort, and giving all of it up.
And at the end of it, a house at Anandpur, and the one he had been looking for since he was a child who would not wear a necklace.