Once a year there was a great fair at Achal, and the yogis came to it.
They were famous men. People came from all over to bow to them and to leave money, and every year they went home with a great deal of it.
But if you had asked those people why they came, not one of them would have said it was because they loved the yogis.
They came because they were frightened of them.
Everybody knew the yogis had powers. Everybody had heard that if you displeased one he could curse you, and your house would come to nothing and your family with it. So people came, and bowed, and paid, and went home, and none of it had anything to do with love.
He sat down on a bit of raised ground on the east side.
And by the second day of the fair, there was a very large crowd around Guru Ji, and where the yogis sat it had gone quiet.
Because he was telling people something they had never been told at that fair.
Say the Lord's Name, and love Him while you say it. Do your work, all day, and remember Him while you do it.
Do not be frightened of anybody, he said. And do not frighten anybody either.
Be kind. Everybody is having a hard time of it somewhere. Everybody makes a mess of things. Forgive people, and never curse anybody, not once.
You can imagine how that went down with the yogis.
Some of them were decent men. One named Mangal Nath tried to talk the rest round. He is not one of your frightened villagers, he told them. He will not bow to you. Leave him alone.
Nobody listened.
So they decided to make him look foolish.
Nearby, some performers were acting out a play, and everybody was watching, and there was a tray in the middle where people dropped their coins.
The yogis made the tray disappear.
The performers stopped in the middle of the play and started hunting about for their money, and the crowd got restless, and then the yogis called out, nice and loud, so that everyone could hear:
If this Guru Nanak Dev Ji has such powers, let him find the tray.
And Guru Ji went and took it out from where they had hidden it, and gave it back.
That made things worse.
So they came in a body and sat down opposite him and began asking questions, meaning to make a fool of him in front of the crowd.
You have left your family and your house, they said. So why do you tell everybody else to stay in theirs.
And Guru Ji said: you were born in a family. You grew up in one. Then you left. And now you walk back to those same families to ask them for bread.
And when they do not give it, you frighten them into it.
If nobody ploughed a field, he said, and nobody ground the wheat, where would your flour come from. You live off the very people you call low.
The yogis had no answer to that. So they stopped arguing and did the other thing.
They started making things appear.
Tigers. Snakes. Balls of fire, rolling through the fairground.
Guru Ji was not troubled in the slightest. But the crowd began to panic, and there were a great many of them, and children among them.
So he said, in a voice that carried right across the ground:
Children of the Lord. Do not be afraid. Sit still.
There is nothing there. It is all a trick.
And then he turned to the young man beside him.
Ajita, he said. Get up. Walk right round all these people and draw a line on the ground. Say the Lord's Name while you draw it.
No tiger will cross that line. No snake and no fire.
So Ajita got up, saying the Name out loud, and walked all the way round that crowd with his finger, and drew the line.
And inside it nobody was frightened any more.
The tigers went on prowling and the fire went on rolling and the snakes went on coming, and the whole crowd sat inside a line scratched in the dust and watched them, quite calmly, the way you watch weather through a window.
Goodnight. They had been paying those men for years to keep the tigers away. It turned out the tigers had never been there.