In the city of Agra there lived a lady called Jassi, and every single day of her life she sat down in her clean courtyard in front of three small brass figures on a tray.
She had been doing it since she was a girl. A holy man had shown her how, and she had done exactly as he said ever since. She was past forty now. She had kept every fast and gone to every holy place and lived a good, careful, blameless life.
And every day she asked the same thing.
Open your eyes, she would say. Just once. Look at me.
They never did.
Some days she fetched her sitar and sat down in front of them and played, and sang, and the singing was so full of longing it would have moved anybody who heard it. Then the music stopped, and the courtyard was quiet, and there were three small brass figures on a tray.
Once she was so sure she had seen one of them move that she opened her eyes properly. They were exactly as they had always been.
Now, Jassi had a maid called Dhabli, who had come from far away as a poor girl and worked in many houses before this one, and stayed in this one because she was loved here. Dhabli was not educated and not particularly polite.
She came into the courtyard that day and found her mistress crying again.
Oh, said Dhabli. Crying again. You will ruin your eyes.
Can that tray see you crying. Can it hear you. I heard in a learned man's house that the figures are only there to help you settle your mind. You have been sitting in front of them for years. Have they ever once spoken.
They will never speak.
And Jassi did not get angry, which tells you something about Jassi. She sat and thought about it.
You have no faith, Dhabli, she said at last. When my worship is strong enough, they will speak.
Very well, said Dhabli. Then take care of your eyes, so that there is something left to see with when the day comes.
Time went on, and Jassi kept sitting in front of the tray.
And then a grocer of the neighbourhood, a quiet honest man everybody trusted, came to her with news.
There is somebody outside the city, he said, under the margosa tree. He is not of any faith I can name, and he speaks badly of nobody's. He takes what is good in every road and leaves the rest. I think he has come from heaven.
Take me, said Jassi.
So she went, in the evening, with the grocer and with Dhabli, who put on her best clothes from Bikaner for the occasion.
Under the tree a man was sitting with his eyes closed, and somebody beside him was singing, and people were sitting around them, city people and holy men and two or three Muslim teachers as well.
Jassi looked once and could not look anywhere else.
She had never in her life felt anything pull at her like that. It seemed to catch her somewhere above her eyes and draw her inward, and her eyes closed of their own accord.
The song ended. And then Guru Nanak Dev Ji himself began to sing, and what he sang was this.
O loving lady, what are you so proud of. The Lord is inside you, and you are looking outside.
She understood every word.
And when the song was over she got up and went and put her head at his feet.
Guru Ji put his hand on her head.
Come, he said. Clever, and knowing nothing.
If the figure had come alive because you asked it to, he said, then you could be proud. All your life you have been longing. What have you been proud of.
And then he told her the thing she had never let herself think.
A body dies, he said. And when it has died, somebody carves an image that looks like it, and the image does not listen and does not speak. Even supposing it stood up and walked, it would only die too. Whatever is born dies.
The Lord does not die. So the Lord has no shape.
And He is not far off. He is nearer to you than anything is. He is inside you.
You were searching outside.
Goodnight. Forty years of asking, and it was Dhabli who was right all along.