Guru Gobind Singh Ji's court was full of clever people. Poets, scholars, translators. Fifty-two of them are remembered by name.
Some of them put the Lord's name into their hearts and stayed. Some were sent out to teach and to serve people. Some simply lived quietly and happily with the Name and asked for nothing more.
One of them was Bhai Jai Singh Ji.
He came to Guru Ji the way poets come, wanting to show what he could do. And then he saw Guru Ji, and forgot all about showing anybody anything.
Guru Ji gave him the Lord's name. And that was the end of Bhai Jai Singh Ji as a man who wanted to be admired. He fell in love, and stayed in love, and spent most of his days sitting quietly with the Name going round inside him.
Which is how the trouble started, because other people noticed.
One day a Sikh came to Guru Ji with a complaint that sounded very reasonable.
Bhai Jai Singh Ji spends nearly all his time sitting in meditation, he said. Please order him to come out and take his turn in the fighting like the rest of us.
And Guru Ji said: his soul has to grow in the love of the Lord.
That was all. No scolding of the man who asked. Just: that is not what this one is for.
But the next day Guru Ji called Bhai Jai Singh Ji in and gave him an order of his own.
Go home, he said. Go back to your own town. Live with your family. And do your remembering there.
Now think about what that order was.
He was not being punished. He was not in disgrace. He was being sent away from the one person he could not bear to be away from, and told to go and be happy about it somewhere else.
Bhai Sahib says it plainly: it was a hard command, and it was a command of separation.
And Bhai Jai Singh Ji obeyed it. He went home.
He stayed there two or three years. What those years were like, says Bhai Sahib, only he knew, and Guru Ji knew.
He wrote a great deal of poetry in that time, and almost all of it is lost now. Two pieces survived, and they are not about anything except missing somebody.
O true Guru Ji, one of them says. Why do you not call me? I am crying like a bird that has got separated from its flock.
If I am a sinner, well, you are the one who washes sins away. So listen to me crying.
Please. Let me see your face.
And the other one goes:
O Magnificent, I cannot live without seeing you. Who else is there to tell about this thorn stuck in me, and this ache of being apart? Day and night I remember you and I cannot sit still.
Listen to Jai Singh Ji's prayer.
I am sailing on the river of your love.
That is a grown man, a famous poet, sitting at home in his own house with his family around him, writing that.
And then one day the message came from Anandpur.
Guru Ji had called him back.
He got what he had been asking for in every line he had written, and he saw that face again, and Bhai Sahib does not tell us what he said when he got there, which is probably right.
Some things a person should be allowed to have to himself.