In those days a great many ordinary people were pushed into changing their religion, out of fear or out of hunger. Whole trades went over together, whole villages: the boatmen, the oil-pressers, the weavers, the people who kept cattle.
In a village near Hoshiarpur there was a farming family, and one by one every relative and every friend they had went over.
Then there was only the two of them left. A husband and a wife, standing alone in a place where everybody they had ever known now belonged to something else.
And in the end, with heavy hearts, they said the words and became Muslims too.
They were given work as gardeners in Delhi, in the house of a man called Dr. Abutrab.
He was a learned, easy-going man who did not take religion very seriously and liked a comfortable life. He had a great garden by the fort. He had got all of it by telling Aurangzeb the secrets of his own people, and had been well paid for it.
The two gardeners knew their work. That garden went green and thick under their hands, and it flowered, and Dr. Abutrab was delighted with them. He was generous. He was fond of their children and gave them presents and made a fuss of them.
And the two of them counted every one of those kindnesses as another bar on the cage.
Bhai Sahib says it exactly like that. A bird in a golden cage.
They had a good house and a good master and enough to eat, and they would not touch food that a Muslim had touched, and the thing they had said with their mouths that day sat in them like a thorn that never came out.
Then Aurangzeb sent for Dr. Abutrab, because he needed him.
News kept coming to the emperor from up north. Something is growing at Anandpur, his people told him. A power. The seed of a kingdom. There is a sheath being made up there, and the sword that comes out of it will have two edges: one to cut down cruelty and one to give people the love of the Lord.
Aurangzeb was not going to sit quietly after hearing that.
First he set the hill kings on Anandpur, and then heard that the hill kings had already been beaten.
So he decided to send somebody up there secretly, to watch and to report. And the man he picked was Dr. Abutrab, who had proved once already that he would sell anything.
Dr. Abutrab had a Sindhi outfit made so he would not be recognised, and got ready to go quietly with one cook and one servant.
And he needed somebody sent on ahead to take houses for them, and he knew exactly who to use. The gardeners. They were faithful, they were from that part of the country, and nobody would look twice at them.
So the family, whose name was Gulaba, went up to Anandpur ahead of the spy, and rented one house to live in themselves, and passed as traders, and rented a second house for their master.
And then something happened to them that nobody had planned.
The fear went.
All their years in Delhi there had been the call to prayer five times a day over the rooftops, and arguments about the law, and the standing rule that a person who did not believe could be killed for it. It had been pressing on them the whole time like a hand on the back of the neck.
Up there, it simply stopped.
There were hills instead. Valleys, and green everywhere, and a great quiet, and a mind that had been in pieces for years began to gather itself back together.
The two of them stood in that place and Bhai Sahib says their hearts opened like a rose.
And slowly, living there among the people, they began to see what sort of person the one with the plume was.