After all the travelling, Guru Nanak Dev Ji came back to Talwandi and stayed in his parents' house.
He came back in the plain clothes he had worn on the roads. He did not change them.
And his mother and father, Mata Tripta Ji and Mehta Kalu Ji, were old now, and they still wanted exactly the same thing they had wanted when he was a boy.
Take off those clothes. Wear ordinary ones. Bring your wife and children here. Look after us. Stop going away.
Now, Mehta Kalu Ji had promised his wife that he would not raise it again, because every time he raised it his son went away.
One day he sat down beside him anyway.
Dear child, he said. You are not young. You have been all over this country and beyond it. We are old. Stop travelling. Stay here now. Do whatever you like. Only stay.
And do not go out of our sight again. Your mother is sad all the time.
And his son listened to all of it, and smiled, and said: father, everything you say is right. But this is the Lord's command. He sent me. I am not a wandering man and I am not a settled man. I do what He tells me and I go where He sends me.
By now Mata Tripta Ji had come and sat down too.
And Mehta Kalu Ji said the thing that had been in him for forty years.
In this world, he said, a mother and a father come first. Who is this Lord, that you serve Him and not us.
And something in his son's face changed.
He looked at his father, and then his eyes closed, and a brightness came over his face like a lamp being lit in a dark room, and the two old people sat there staring at him.
And after a while a voice came out of that stillness saying: O great Lord. O great Lord.
Nobody in the courtyard moved. And Mehta Kalu Ji, whose mind had never sat still in his life, felt it go quiet, and found that he had begun to say it too. O great Lord. O great Lord.
More people came in from outside. Whoever came went quiet, and joined in.
And then his son opened his eyes and looked at his father and said: I am the Lord's servant. I put myself at His feet and my pride ran off. I went down into His love and He made me His own. He is the one who keeps me now.
And that was the morning it happened.
Mehta Kalu Ji looked at his son, and for the first time in his whole life he saw him.
Something came apart in him. All those years of thinking, he must earn, he must provide, he must look after us in our old age, simply fell away, and he was not looking at his son any more. He was looking at somebody who had come from a very long way off.
You know what he did then. This old man, who had once been so angry about twenty coins.
He said: I thought you were my son. You are the Lord's own. Bless me.
I did not know what I was, he said. I have been frightened all my life. My mind was never quiet for a single moment. It was all worry and wanting.
And his son said, gently: there is one Lord, and He is everywhere.
But father, we cannot see Him, said Mehta Kalu Ji.
There is water under this ground, said Guru Ji, and you cannot see that either. Dig a well and there it is. It was always there. And somebody who loves and remembers Him does not have to dig at all. For them it runs at the surface, like a river.
How, said his father, does a sleeping mind wake up.
Say His Name, said Guru Ji. Sitting, standing, walking, lying down, in the middle of your work. Never let go of it.
And Mehta Kalu Ji sat in his own courtyard and began.
Goodnight. It took him a whole lifetime, and he got there.