The rains were coming, and Bhai Mardana Ji had had enough of walking.
Look at those clouds, he said. Nobody travels in weather like this. You may be able to walk for a hundred years, but I get tired. For my sake, let us stop somewhere.
Guru Nanak Dev Ji smiled, because he knew what his friend was doing. Whenever the journey got hard, Bhai Mardana Ji discovered he was hungry, or tired, and somehow they would rest.
Very well, said Guru Ji. The next village we come to, we will stay.
The next village had a garden on its edge with a little hut in it, and they stopped there.
In that village lived a man called Jeevan, who liked holy people and liked to look after them. He heard that somebody had come to the garden who sang so beautifully a river would stop to listen, and he went out to see.
He sat down and closed his eyes, and when he opened them a great deal of time had gone by and he had not noticed a minute of it.
After that he came every day, and brought food. If ever a day came when he could not go, he would not eat at all.
On the way out of the village stood a grocer's shop, and the grocer watched Jeevan go past every day and got curious.
Where do you go, he called out. You never used to come down this road.
There is a holy man in the garden, said Jeevan. Come with me.
So the grocer came.
Now the road out of the village split in two. One way went to the garden. The other went towards a house where the grocer had no business going at all.
And at the fork, that first evening, something down the other road caught him, and though he walked on with Jeevan, he was not really listening to anything afterwards.
And that was how it started. Every evening they walked out of the village together, and at the fork Jeevan turned toward the garden and the grocer turned the other way.
Jeevan begged him to stop. The grocer did not stop.
One evening the grocer said: let us settle this. See that fig tree. You go your way and I will go mine, and whoever gets back first waits there. Then we shall see who has gained and who has lost.
Agreed, said Jeevan.
The grocer went off down his road and found the house shut and nobody home. He came back to the fig tree early and sat down, bored, and began poking at the earth with his fingers, the way you do.
And he turned up a gold coin.
He had his knife out in a moment, digging, certain there was more. And there was. The knife hit the side of a buried pot, and he hauled it out and pulled off the lid.
The pot was full of coal. Lumps of black coal, all the way down to the bottom.
Just then Jeevan came limping up the road with one shoe trodden down at the heel. A thorn had gone into his foot as he left the hut, and a piece of it was still in there.
The grocer laughed. Look at us, he said. I go and do exactly what you tell me not to do, and I find gold. You sit with your holy man and get a thorn through your foot. Explain that.
Jeevan could not. So they went back to the garden and put the question to Guru Ji.
It would be better to forget the whole thing, said Guru Ji.
Please, said the grocer. Tell us.
So Guru Ji put his hand on the grocer's head, and told him.
That pot was full of gold, he said. Every lump of coal in it was a gold coin once. You gave one coin to a holy man long ago, and it grew into a hundred. And then, evening after evening, you burnt them. One is left, and that one is only there to bring you here and show you what became of the rest.
Then he turned to Jeevan.
And you, he said, were owed something far worse than a thorn. It has been coming down and down, all these evenings in the garden, until there was nothing left of it but a prick in the foot.
Goodnight. Whatever you do this evening is going into the pot.