In a little town called Talwandi there was a well that turned all day long. It lifted the water up in small pots, and poured it into a channel, and the channel carried it out to the fields, where the seeds lay sleeping under the ground. The well made a sound while it turned. Zoon, zoon, zoon.
Most people heard a well. But if you listened in a certain way, you could hear it singing something else. You, it sang. You, you, you.
One night in that town, something happened.
The moon had gone thin, thin as a bow, and it waited low in the east for the sun to come. The stars turned quietly above it. The sky was dark and clear, like a blue stone washed clean. A soft breeze got up, carrying the smell of flowers, the way the air stirs when somebody very dear is about to arrive. The trees held their leaves up like baskets of blossom. The grass lay down like a green carpet.
Then the sun came over the edge of the world.
It was a round disc of light, and the light was not sharp. It was gentle. It was the kind of light you can look straight at without blinking, that pours into your eyes and leaves you feeling washed and new. It spread over the fields and the flat rooftops, and all the shadows lay down on the ground.
And in a house in Talwandi, a baby had been born.
The nurse who was there could never quite explain it afterwards. She said it had seemed as if gladness filled the whole sky and the whole earth at once. She said it felt as though people nobody could see were standing up above, letting flowers fall, and stars. She said she heard singing, far off, the sort of song people sing to welcome someone home.
And she said this, which was the strangest thing of all.
The baby was born smiling.
Babies cry when they come into the world. Everybody knows that. But this one arrived the way an honoured guest arrives, quietly and gladly, and he smiled. And the name he was given that night is the name the whole world says now. Guru Nanak Dev Ji.
Hardyal Ji, the priest of the town, was sent for that very night, because writing down the hour of a child's birth was his work. He came, and he looked at the baby, and he had seen a great many children born in Talwandi and in the towns around it, and he had never seen anything like this. He did not say much. He went home. He could not stop thinking about it.
The years went by, and Guru Nanak Dev Ji grew, and here is what everybody in Talwandi noticed first. He gave things away.
If somebody hungry came to the door, Guru Nanak Dev Ji found them food. If somebody was cold, he found a blanket. Once he gave away the pots from the kitchen. Once he gave away good clothes that had cost his father money. His mother, Mata Tripta Ji, would quietly close the gaps so that nobody noticed. His father, Mehta Kalu Ji, noticed in the end.
He never fought with the other children. Not once. When he climbed a tree and shook the fruit down, he handed it round and ate none of it himself. Wherever he went, the other children went too.
And sometimes, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, he would sit down under a tree with his eyes closed and stay there an hour, or two hours, perfectly still, with a small smile on his face. The face of somebody listening to a voice he loves.
Hardyal Ji watched him grow. He used to tell his friends: I go and see that child, and I come away cool and quiet inside. I have never once seen him cry. Even in the cradle he looked like somebody who had come a very long way.
Out past the houses, all the while, the well went on turning. Zoon, zoon, zoon.
And in the early mornings now, from the edge of the trees, the townspeople could hear a small voice singing, and the words it sang were these. O Lord, you are great.
Goodnight, little one. The light that came up over Talwandi that morning has never gone out.