There is a place called Kurukshetra, and one year an enormous fair was held there, because the sun was going to go dark.
You may have seen it happen. The moon slides in front of the sun, and the middle of the day turns the colour of evening, and the birds go quiet and think it is time for bed. It is called an eclipse.
In those days people were frightened of eclipses. They thought a demon was swallowing the sun. So when the shadow began, everybody in that huge crowd rushed to the water to bathe, and gave money away as fast as they could, hoping to keep the demon off.
Guru Nanak Dev Ji was sitting a little apart from all this, quite still, and Bhai Mardana Ji was playing his rabab and singing.
While the fair was churning, two travellers came riding in.
They were a young king and his mother. The king had lost his kingdom. Men with armies had come and taken it and pushed him out, and now he was riding through the country with nothing much left, and his mother rode beside him in her covered chair.
He had been hunting on the way. He did not even know it was the day of the eclipse.
But when he saw the face of the man sitting under the tree, he got straight down off his horse and went to him, and his mother came down too, and they bowed. Whatever they had lost, they knew when they had found something.
Then the young king told Guru Ji the whole story, and asked him to bless him so that he might get his kingdom back.
And Guru Ji told him something worth more than a kingdom.
A crown is a misery, he said, if you think it is there to make you comfortable. But if a king looks after his people the way you would look after your own children, and keeps the Lord in his mind while he does it, then the hard parts do not feel hard, because he is carrying them for somebody else. Remember the Lord, and set your heart on serving your people, and you will have your kingdom back.
Meanwhile the king's cooks had lit a fire and begun making food, for the travellers and for whoever else was hungry.
And the crowd saw the smoke.
They came running with sticks in their hands. Cooking, they shouted. Cooking, today, during the eclipse. Who are you. What sort of people are you.
They were very angry, and there were a great many of them, and the smoke went up in the middle of them all.
Guru Nanak Dev Ji did not stand up and he did not raise his voice.
The food is being cooked, he said, because people are hungry.
That did not calm them at all. Some of them came forward looking as though they might do him harm.
And he looked at them and asked one quiet question.
Come, he said. You are welcome to hurt me if you wish. But tell me first. If it is a wicked thing today to take the life of an animal, how has it become a holy thing to take the life of a man.
The sticks came down.
Nobody had an answer, and standing there in the strange grey light of the darkened sun, a good many of them heard what they had just been about to do.
Then Guru Ji talked to them, for a long time, about the sun.
It is very far away, he said. The moon passes between us and it, and its shadow falls on us, and that is all that is happening. There are no demons in the sky. The demons you should worry about are the ones you have brought here with you. Greed. Anger. Wanting what belongs to somebody else. You have washed your body in the river, but not one of those has been washed off.
And slowly, out of that crowd that had come with sticks, people sat down.
The shadow slid off the sun. The light came back, the way it always does, and the birds started up again, and it was the middle of the afternoon at Kurukshetra, and the food was ready, and everybody who was hungry ate.
Goodnight. The sky was never in any danger.