The sangat at Kartarpur had begun to notice Bhai Lehna Ji.
Not because he stood out. Because he did not. He had been living among them for a long time now, doing the plainest work, and they had all rather taken him for one of themselves, another ordinary person in an ordinary place.
Then slowly they started to see it.
Whatever Guru Ji asked, he did. Not eventually, not after thinking about it, and never with the look on his face of somebody being asked to do something beneath him. Anything at all, straight away, gladly.
He has no pride left in him, they said to each other. None. Not a scrap.
And people began to say a thing that iron does when it has been kept against a magnet long enough. It stops being ordinary iron. It becomes a magnet too.
He was one of us, they said, and now look at him.
And they began to hope, quietly, that when the day came, it would be him.
Not everybody hoped it. Guru Ji's wife heard the talk, and it did not please her, and she came and said so plainly. Our sons are good men, she said. The elder is a holy man himself. The younger one is turned that way too. Give it to one of them. This is a kingdom of earth and heaven both. It should stay in the family. That is how the world does it.
Guru Ji listened to her, and said nothing at all.
Because it was not going to be decided the way the world decides things.
What was being handed on was not a house or a title or a name. There was nothing to inherit. There was only a light, and light does not care whose son you are. It goes wherever there is something clear enough to hold it.
And in Bhai Lehna Ji there was no longer anything in the way.
The pride that had been left in him, just enough to make him a disciple and keep him a step behind, had worn away to nothing at all through all those years of carrying and fetching and washing and weeding. And when the last of it went, what stood there was not a copy of Guru Nanak Dev Ji. It was the same thing over again. The same Lord seated in the same place in the heart.
So the day came.
And Guru Nanak Dev Ji told Bhai Lehna Ji to sit down on his own seat.
Bhai Lehna Ji sat.
And then Guru Nanak Dev Ji walked round him in a circle, the way you do before somebody you honour. And he set down five small coins in front of him, and a coconut.
And then Guru Nanak Dev Ji bowed his head to the ground in front of his own disciple.
Everybody in that place saw it.
Then he stood up and put his hand over Bhai Lehna Ji's mouth and said: no more words now. Whatever you say from this moment will come true.
The Guruship is yours now, he said, and the whole world is your disciple.
Your name is Angad now. Go and give the Lord's Name to everybody.
And that is how Bhai Lehna Ji of Khadur, who had come walking to Kartarpur with a sack of salt on his head, became Guru Angad Dev Ji.
And he was told to sign his own writings with the name Guru Nanak Dev Ji as well. Because this was not a new person taking over. It was the same light, in a second lamp.
Goodnight. One flame lit another, and there was not less light in the room afterwards. There was more.