There was a man in that town who used to go through the streets before dawn, singing.
He had not always been like that. He had been a proud, hard sort of holy man with a following and a great deal of certainty, and he had once nearly talked Ajita Randhawa into leaving his own family to go and do the same.
Then he had met Guru Nanak Dev Ji, and he was a different man now.
He ate two pieces of bread at midday and nobody knew how he spent the rest of it, and every morning before light he walked the streets singing, so that people would wake up.
He never told anybody to leave home any more.
Live in your family, he said, like a lotus lives in water.
The golden hours, she told her husband, is what the new one calls this time before dawn. Do not sleep through it. Get up and say the Name, or sing.
He says women should do it too. Get up, sing for an hour, then go about the day. Our Brahmins say a woman's religion is looking after her husband, and only a man who leaves home can be holy. He says that is nonsense. It is the same for everybody, man or woman, in a house or out of it. Love the Lord and remember Him.
And that morning, before the sun was properly up, somebody knocked at their door.
It was Moola Shah, who was the richest man in the town and the collector of revenue, and he had a problem.
He was Guru Nanak Dev Ji's father-in-law.
He has come, said Moola Shah. Our son-in-law, the one who goes about as a holy man. He is staying in your big garden.
I want to talk to him, and I did not want to go alone. Come with me.
Ajita went gladly, because he had been wanting to see this man for years.
And when he got there and looked at him, everything Ajita had heard turned out to be true, and he went down at his feet and stayed there, and afterwards he could not have told you how long it had been.
From that day Ajita served.
The sangat gathered in his garden every morning and there was singing, and food was cooked and given out to everybody who came, and Ajita spent most of his life in that garden fetching and carrying and feeding people.
And then one day it turned nasty.
Moola Shah came back, and his wife with him, and they stood in Ajita's garden speaking to Guru Ji in a hard, angry way, in front of everybody.
Somebody ran to fetch Ajita, and he came at once.
Why are you arguing, he said to Moola Shah. You have not understood who is sitting in front of you.
The whole world is being given something here and you stand there complaining. Recognise him. Love him. Or go home and sit down. Your arguing does nothing to him and nothing to us.
And Moola Shah said the true thing underneath, which was not about religion at all.
I am ashamed in front of my relatives, he said. And my daughter and her children live in my house and it costs me money.
And Ajita said, straight away: then let me pay.
If you will not send her back to her husband's family, I will keep them. She is my sister and you are my brother. Do not think about the money for one moment more.
It was not enough. Moola Shah said the relatives would still talk. His wife shouted. And then Bibi Sulakhni Ji herself began to speak, and Ajita said, gently: your parents have said plenty. You do not need to.
But she did.
Where am I to go, she said. I am a burden in my own father's house and I am told so every day.
And Guru Ji said to her: if you can do without a comfortable house. If you can be glad serving other people, and put up with going short. Then come. There is food here, and the Lord feeds everybody who sits down.
Bring the boys.
And she went straight home and came back with her two sons and started work in the kitchen that same day.
Goodnight. Ajita spoke up in a family argument in his own garden and offered his own money, and that is the sort of thing people are remembered for.