Every morning, before the sun was properly up, a man called Jhanda Ji sat down in his house near the sea and worked at his breathing.
That was his practice. Breathe in, long and slow. Hold it. Let it out, slower still. Somebody had told him, years ago, that this was how you quieten a mind, and he had been doing it ever since.
And it did quieten his mind, for a little while.
Then he would sigh, and open his eyes, and look about the room, and rub his forehead, and start again.
He wanted to find God. That was the whole of it. He had wanted it for years.
His friend Inder Sain came round that morning, a young man in fine clothes, and asked how things were going.
Well enough, said Jhanda Ji. The world is happy. We are still trying. And I have a longing, and I hope the longing lasts. If I never manage to find Him, at least let me go on wanting to.
Why does that matter so much, said his friend.
Because as long as you are still longing, said Jhanda Ji, you are still trying. When the longing goes, the trying goes, and then a person's mind just wanders off after whatever it fancies, like everybody else's.
Then he said the sad part.
I have met a great many holy men, he said, and I will be honest with you. Some of them keep followers for what they can get out of them. Some of them promise people that if they do this or that, they will get rich. Following people like that does not clean your mind. It makes it dirtier, because now you are being greedy in a holy voice.
I have never yet met one who wanted nothing at all.
And then there was a knock at the door.
Jhanda Ji opened it and found a man standing there with an instrument on his back.
They talked. And when Jhanda Ji asked who had sent him, Bhai Mardana Ji told him the name.
Guru Nanak Dev Ji, he said.
And Jhanda Ji stood in his own doorway and said: my stars must be shining. I have been waiting and waiting for somebody like that, and now he has found me, and sent you to my door.
So Guru Ji came to that house.
And Jhanda Ji, who had held his breath every morning for years, sat down and asked all the questions he had been storing up.
Guru Ji did not give him a hard answer. He gave him a very easy one, and it was this.
Say the Name.
Say it out loud, with your tongue, over and over. If you say a thing once, it does not stay. Say it again and again, and it goes down out of the front of your mind into the deeper part, where things live without your having to hold on to them, and there it settles, and there it stays.
Jhanda Ji held his breath again, but this time only because he was listening so hard.
And when Guru Ji stopped, he let it out and said: I understand. But may I ask something else.
Ask.
When I am working, said Jhanda Ji, will the work not push it out again.
No, said Guru Ji. Your work is done by the front of your mind. The Name is settled in the deeper part. The front of your mind can be busy all day counting or hammering or arguing, and the Name goes on quietly underneath the whole time. That is why people who have it are always saying it, morning and night, without effort.
And whatever dust the day puts on you, he said, the saying of it washes off again.
Jhanda Ji thought about all the years.
He had done breathing. He had held it and let it go. He had sat and sat.
And here was a man telling him that the way in was to say one thing, over and over, like a child learning a song, until it went down and lived in him.
Goodnight. It was never a difficult thing. It was only a small thing, repeated.