Two miles from Sultanpur there was a town called Malsihan, and the head man of that town was named Bhagirath Ji.
Every day, for years, he had sat in front of a stone figure.
A travelling holy man had told him long ago that this was the way. Sit here, concentrate, do not let your mind wander, and in time you will get what you want. So he had sat. He was good at it by now. He could hold his mind still for hours.
And it had not worked.
That was the trouble. He did everything he had been told, and got nothing at the end of it. Some days he felt a strange heaviness. Some days he felt nothing at all, which was worse. Whatever it was he had been looking for, sitting in that room had not brought it any closer.
So whenever a holy man came through Malsihan, Bhagirath Ji would find him and ask. And he kept sitting in front of the stone figure anyway, because he did not know what else to do, and he kept asking it for peace, and no peace came.
That is a hard sort of unhappiness. It is not the unhappiness of a person doing wrong. It is the unhappiness of a person doing everything right and getting nowhere.
Then one day Guru Nanak Dev Ji came through the town.
Bhagirath Ji met him, and something in him settled at once, the way a stone settles in still water. He went down at his feet. And when Guru Ji stayed the night, Bhagirath Ji stayed too, in the same house, because he could not bear to go home.
Guru Ji got up while it was still dark, as he always did.
Bhagirath Ji fetched fresh water for him. Guru Ji bathed, and sat down, and closed his eyes, and was gone into the Lord's love the way he always went, easily, like somebody stepping into his own house.
And Bhagirath Ji, waiting there in the half-dark, noticed a woman on her knees, scrubbing the floor.
She was doing it carefully, the way you clean a place you love.
Who are you, he asked her.
I am a goddess, she said.
Bhagirath Ji stared at her. People bow down to you, he said. People sit in front of your image for years. What are you doing on this floor with a cloth in your hand.
And she said: he is the Lord's own. I get my strength by serving him.
Bhagirath Ji did not go back to that room in Malsihan.
He came to Sultanpur instead and stayed there, and became a disciple, and Guru Ji gave him the Lord's Name.
And here is what his days looked like after that, which is the part worth remembering, because it is not grand at all.
Before dawn he carried Guru Ji's clothes down to the water. While Guru Ji bathed, he sat a little way off and said the Name to himself. Then he came back up with him, and for the rest of the day he looked after whoever turned up: fetching, carrying, making room, finding food for people.
That was it. That was the whole practice.
And Bhagirath Ji, who had sat still for years and got nothing, found that he was happy.
Not because anything remarkable happened to him. Because the wanting had gone quiet. The endless pull toward the next thing and the next thing, which had been making all the noise in him, simply stopped making it.
Meanwhile Guru Ji went on running the government grain store, weighing out flour for the palace and for the soldiers, all day, every day, and when somebody came who had no money, the grain went out anyway and Guru Ji paid for it himself, out of his own account.
He was busy from morning to night. He gave things away the whole time.
Goodnight. Bhagirath Ji spent years sitting perfectly still in front of the wrong thing, and then found what he wanted while carrying somebody's clothes down to a river.