There was a singer in Talwandi, and he had the saddest name you ever heard.
When he was a baby, his mother had lost other children, and she was so frightened of losing this one that she gave him a name to trick death away. She called him by a word that meant a child who was going to die. She thought that if she said it out loud often enough, death would hear it, and shrug, and pass by their door.
Then he met Guru Nanak Dev Ji, and the two of them became friends the way people do when they have found the one other person who hears the same music. The singer had a rabab, a stringed instrument you play with your fingers, and he could hold any tune after hearing it once. Guru Nanak Dev Ji would sing, and he would catch the song and give it back, and they would sit out in the fields before sunrise until the trees and the grass seemed to be singing too.
And Guru Nanak Dev Ji gave his friend a new name.
He called him Mardana Ji.
And if you listen to that name in Punjabi, you can hear what he had done. His mother's name for him had death sitting inside it. Guru Ji took the death out. Mardana Ji means the one who does not die.
And Guru Ji said to his mother: this son of yours that you have called Destined to Die. He will live.
He will not live by anything you or I have done, he said. He will live because of the Lord's praises that people will hear from him.
So that was the end of the sad name, and Bhai Mardana Ji went about Talwandi with the new one instead, and he was hardly ever anywhere but at his friend's side.
Meanwhile, Rai Bular Ji had been worrying.
He could see that things were hard in the Bedi house: a father who wanted a son with a trade, a son who wanted the open sky, and the two of them wearing each other down, none of it unkindly meant.
So he sent for Jai Ram Ji, who was married to Bebe Nanaki Ji and lived in a town called Sultanpur.
I cannot bear this, said Rai Bular Ji. He is the Lord's beloved and he is being made miserable in my own town. Take him to Sultanpur. Let him be somewhere he can breathe.
Jai Ram Ji went home and found a post open in Sultanpur: manager of the government grain store. He wrote to Talwandi. And Guru Nanak Dev Ji said goodbye to everyone he loved, and went.
Before he left, Rai Bular Ji gave a feast for him, and there was singing, and at the end of it Rai Bular Ji asked: what can I do for you.
And he smiled and said: I will tell you one thing. When your own strength runs out, put your hands together and lay yourself at the Lord's feet.
Now, in Sultanpur, here is how he kept that store.
He kept good grain, and no bad grain. When he weighed something out for you, he weighed it true. Not a grain less than you had paid for. He never once tipped the scale his own way, and he spoke kindly to every person who came to the door, whoever they were.
But the store was only half his day.
He got up while it was still dark and walked out to the stream at the edge of the town, and bathed, and sat down on the bank with his eyes closed and stayed there until the sun came up. Then he came home, ate, changed his clothes, and went to work. In the evening he came back and sat quiet, and people started coming to sit with him.
And in the middle of the working day, in between the weighing and the writing, he would say the Lord's name to himself, over and over, so that the two things ran along together, the work and the remembering, like two wheels of one cart.
And one day, walking up the road from Talwandi with a rabab on his back, came the friend with the new name.
Goodnight. There is nothing in the world too ordinary to be done beautifully, not even weighing out a bag of grain.