“When the battle between Sri Chand and Lakhmi Das was publicly over, it moved into Baba’s home. The family, including Nanaki, Jairam, and myself, moved into the haveli.63 Bebe Nanaki tended to Sri Chand, and Mata Sulakhni to Lakhmi Das, wiping their cuts and bruises and applying balm. Lakhmi Das looked very weary and depressed. All the things that had been simmering and bubbling inside everyone burst out in a war of words. It was quite a family drama with everyone participating, except me, the quiet witness, the shadow,” Buddha narrates. He knows how hungry Mardana is for news of Baba, so he enacts the different characters to bring the scene alive for him.
“It’s all your fault!” Mata Sulakhni shouted, turning to Baba, shaking her finger at him, and addressing him with the not very respectful ‘toon.’64 “You take no responsibility for your part in how things have turned out with your sons! You have been an absent father their whole life! Even now you care more for your congregation, your disciples and servants, like that Lehna, who you love more than your sons!”
“Lehna does important work. I can depend on him,” Baba said, as if to play down his love for him so as not to inflame the situation further. Buddha’s voice as he relates Baba’s words is calm, quiet, even.
“ ‘Baba has always avoided kalesh,’65 Mardana adds, licking the ghee from his fingers.
“And here he was, in the thick of it.” Mata Sulakhni lost all control. “Why don’t you have your sons do your important work like scribbling your immortal words into books? Why don’t you have them make your books and your quills and invent your alphabets?” Mata shouted.
“Because they are lazy and don’t want to do it,” Baba said, simply, honestly.
“I’m not lazy,” Sri Chand said. “Just because I don’t do things you think I should do doesn’t make me lazy. I mediate for hours on end. I’m very diligent about my austerities.”
“You also have a life to live,” Baba said. “Plough the fields, plant, nurture, and harvest the grains you eat.”
“Life as you see it, Father. My definition of life is different from yours.”
“We disobey you because you’re deranged!” Lakhmi Das burst out.
A tense silence was broken by Mata Sulakhni. “You expect them to be polite when you call them lazy for not obeying your orders? Build a wall in the middle of the night! Wash your clothes, also in the middle of the night! Why should they listen to you, who have given them lectures and orders instead of love?”
Mata Sulakhni was gesticulating expressively, like this, her hands and her whole body participating in the argument. Baba remained quiet and introspective as if Lakhmi Das’s words had passed through him as if through air.
“I admit I’m lazy,” Lakhmi Das said, groaning as Mata Sulakhni put some ointment on his cuts. “I don’t get up early in the morning and take a cold bath. I don’t want to. I do the things I enjoy. I am what God made me.”
“And yet he would like to succeed you as guru!” scoffed Sri Chand. “He thinks guruship is all about getting donations and living like a prince with his horses, dogs, and hunting parties! He has no discipline, and now he’s admitted it! He doesn’t deserve to be a guru.”
“Neither do you,” Baba Nanak said, quietly.
Sri Chand looked angrily at his father.
“I’ve told you to marry,” Mata Sulakhni said, turning to Sri Chand. “How many times I have made matches for you, they come for the engagement bearing gifts and sweets, and you don’t show up!”
“I’m not interested in marriage,” Sri Chand replied.
“If you don’t marry, how will I have grandchildren?” Mata shouted.
“You already have one,” Lakhmi reminded her.
“But he is sickly and weak. What if something happens to him?”
“He’s not sickly and weak!” Lakhmi Chand said angrily, reaching for Dharam Chand, who was terrified by all the shouting, and hugging him.
“Even if you were interested in marriage, who will marry you?” Mata Sulakhni said to Sri Chand. “Look at your appearance! You look like a ghost in midday, followed by your drug-smoking beggars! But I say, marry, marry whoever will have you! You can marry and then abandon her like your father abandoned me. Without marriage, he will not make you the guru.”
“Give it up, Mother,” Lakhmi Das scolded her. “Sri Chand is a killjoy. I just want to live my life the best I know how. I want to make up for the life that nobody in my family has lived. Not you, Father, not Sri Chand, who has followed in your footsteps, not …”
“Followed in my footsteps?” Baba asked, perplexed.
“It may not seem like it, but he has. He adored you, Father.”
“He’s very right,” Mardana interrupts Buddha excitedly, seeing the connections. “Sri Chand hung on his every word. He was only about five or six years old when Nanak and I left home for our journeys. Having no idea about who his father was, he idolized what he imagined his father to be. Before we went on our journeys, Baba did do some austerities and was very theatrical in the way he dressed. He drew everyone’s attention, that was for sure! Everybody called Baba’s journeys udaasis—hence the name of Sri Chand’s sect. He knew that Baba believed that everyone and everything, including animals, insects, stones in the universe, are particles and cells in Nirankar’s66 Great body, and that is why Sri Chand’s followers are from all races, castes, and classes; that’s why he’s a vegetarian. He knew detachment was at the core of Baba’s belief—why else would he leave home and family to wander the world? And that is why Sri Chand and his followers are celibate wanderers.”
“Exactly!” cries Buddha, enlightened by Mardana’s insights. “Lakhmi Das is very perceptive about all of this, as you will see as I continue the story.”
“Sri Chand has followed in your footsteps,” Lakhmi Das continued. “When we were growing up he believed all the rumors about you, that you were a sanyasi, that you didn’t comb your hair, smeared ashes on your naked body, didn’t eat meat like other wandering sanyasis, and he started to become the you he thought you were. But when he found out you weren’t what he thought you were, it was too late. He was already set in his ways. I was there when some traveling Brahmins told us the story of the deer you ate at Kurukshetra, Father; how a disciple had gone hunting and brought you a dead deer slung on his shoulder and you had skinned, roasted, and eaten it! Sri Chand was so distraught he didn’t eat for days! But I spoke to one of the Brahmins who had been converted by your arguments, and he sang for me the song you had composed. I don’t remember it now, but I memorized it then and recited it to myself frequently. Something about how death is part of life, life feeds on death, and everything, including us, is a sacrifice to the Greater Life. It had something to do with how we are vessels of flesh, conceived and living with and in flesh. But Sri Chand’s idol had fallen from the sky where he had placed it, and shattered all around him. He felt you had betrayed him, and for days he kept punching trees and walls. I told him to go hunt something and he would feel better, but he punched me so badly my jaw was swollen and I couldn’t eat for days. But I was determined when you returned home to hunt and cook deer and other delicacies for you, Father.”
“Sri Chand looked at his younger brother,” Buddha continues his re-creation of the event, “and for the first time I saw some respect in his eyes for him; as if his words had illumined him in some way. I think he saw his brother not as the brute he thought he was but a thinking animal.”
“Other than hunting, I didn’t and don’t have any joy,” Lakhmi Das continued. “And nothing’s going to stop me from doing it. I wish I could get away from this endless family fight and hunt something juicy cooked in its own blood and feed it to this saintly brother of mine.”
Sri Chand broke free from Bebe Nanaki and looked like he was going to start the battle all over again, but Bebe Nanaki sat him down and patted his hair and whispered, “Listen, just listen.”
“How can I listen when innocent, baizubaan67 animals, mothers together with their young ones, are slaughtered mercilessly by this heartless and soulless creature with far less sense than animals? Everyone has noticed how there are fewer peacocks and deer since he has been killing them. He is an angry man. He drinks, smokes opium, and takes pleasure in killing,” Sri Chand shouted.
“I’m a sow’s ear and you can’t make a silk purse out of me,” Lakhmi Das said. “I’ve been hunting since I was ten years old. I saw Mother suffering from your absence, Father, and I couldn’t bear it. You have no idea how she suffered while you were away on your journeys to find your Akaal Purukh! She’s right. You abandoned her!”
Mata Sulakhni broke down and sobbed and Bebe Nanaki put her arms around her.
“I want to live, for both of you,” Lakhmi Das continued. “But I don’t know what it means to live. You say it means loving the Beloved, Father, but I don’t know anything about that. I’m tired in my bones. Sometimes life isn’t enough.”
“What did he mean by that?” Mardana interrupts Buddha.
“He struck me as being very sad and very tired. His words triggered something deep and painful in Mata Sulakhni, who revisited old wounds in between sobs. I was amazed at how the past is so deeply hidden yet so alive in us. What a thin membrane separates the past from the present—you only have to scratch the present, and the past becomes present in all its reality, in all its infinite layers existing simultaneously in some spaceless space in our hearts and minds. Mata Sulakhni lives in the present only insofar as it echoes the past. As her stories wove between the layers of time, not sequentially, but all connected to her perceived ‘rejection’ by Baba, I was struck by how and why humans persist in living inside their painful memories, re-creating them over and over. There is something in us that sticks to pain like glue. She sat on her peedee, her gray hair covered by a shawl, one hand by her ear, the other gesticulating as she spoke about the past as if it were present.”
“I should have seen the signs,” she said. “When my father sent you my horoscope before our marriage was finalized, you sent it back, saying ‘I don’t believe in astrology, I’m not superstitious.’ ”
“I wasn’t rejecting you. I was ready to marry you anytime, whether our horoscopes matched or not,” Baba said, gently.
“You called my father superstitious! Father had second thoughts about you. Then we heard your parents were thinking of marrying you to someone else. How shameful it was for me, all our neighbors whispering ‘Mul Chand’s daughter has been abandoned by the Bedi boy.’ My mother was livid and hated you, and my father was angry beyond words. What a shame your marrying someone else would have been for me if you had backed out! Nobody else would have married me.”
“But I did marry you,” Baba said.
“Yes, and how brief was my joy!”
“All joys are brief, Mother,” Lakhmi Das said.
“What a lovely phulkari68 my mother and I made for my wedding. We wove the cloth, sewed it together, and then embroidered it. The whole village came to embroider it, and I was so happy! With every stitch I prayed I would have a good life. But what did you do during our ceremony? What did you do? The whole village was watching! We had gone around the fire only four times, instead of seven,69 and the priest was invoking the sun and the moon, when you pulled me away unexpectedly and I stumbled and fell. Everyone attending the ceremony was stunned. You had broken our wedding! The shame of it! Before all the people! Because of this our marriage was only half a marriage. It wasn’t long after that you left on your ‘important’ journeys that have made you so famous.”
“After thirteen years,” Baba corrected her. But Mata Sulakhni wasn’t listening. Time had collapsed in her mind, the interim between tragedies smudged on the tablet of her heart with dark, indelible ink.
“You didn’t think when you left, what will happen to her? What will happen to the children? Will they live on the streets? Will they even have enough to eat?”
“I knew you would be well taken care of by my family.”
“Your family! What do you know about how they treated me? If my mother hadn’t rescued me I would have been begging on the streets! Your father was so upset with you for not living the life he wanted for you that he took it out on the children and me! Your mother treated me like I was her slave! She made me do all the work while she herself sat on the peedee in white clothes, looking like a lady!”
“That’s not true!” Nanaki interjected.
“What do you know? You were the beloved daughter, not the daughter-in-law! Things got so bad for me that I finally had to return to my parents’ house after they had snatched away my oldest son for their barren daughter who had no children!”
“It was you who didn’t want to take care of two children! I helped you out and helped myself, too. I was so happy to have him,” Nanaki said.
“She’s right,” Sri Chand said to his biological mother. “I remember it because the memory is written with a knife in the flesh of my heart. I remember the moment you made the choice, Mother, your gaze going from one to the other as we stood before you, fixing itself on Lakhmi with teary-eyed love, picking him up and holding him close to you. You cast me away.”
“Blame him,” Mata Sulakhni said, pointing her finger at Guru Nanak, and then at Nanaki. “And blame her for bringing you up so badly and for making you who you are.”
“I loved him. I am not responsible for his destiny. And I am hurt about the things you say about my mother. If she was what you make her out to be, why would Vir jee address so many shabads to her? She was a saint!” Nanaki said.
“A saint! A saint!” Mata screamed. “I am surrounded by saints! I hate saints! I’m sick of being around saints!”
Mardana has a good laugh, and Buddha joins him.
“Mata just went on and on about how sick she was of saints,” Buddha resumes. “ ‘Everyone is a saint except me because I have feelings! How do you think I felt, not seeing your face for twelve whole years? I thought you were dead! Sometimes I heard reports from wanderers and fakirs like you that they had seen you dressed in strange costumes. I was visiting your parents in Talwandi. I was bent over the chulla to make sure the milk didn’t boil over when I was startled at the sight of Mardana. I forgot all about the milk and it boiled over and your mother yelled at me. You weren’t with Mardana. My heart stopped beating. I thought he had come to tell us robbers had killed you. I asked him and he didn’t say anything because, I later found out, you had told him not to mention you. Mardana said he had come to visit his wife. Your servant had more sense than you!’ ”
“ ‘Mardana is not my servant but my beloved companion,’ Baba said.”
“He said that?” Mardana says, sitting up straight and then slumping over and sobbing. Buddha pauses to let Mardana have his cry. Mardana wipes his tears with the edge of his shawl and says, “Go on.”
“Yes, abandon your wife and have a beloved companion,” Mata Sulakhni mimicked, not very kindly. “Who was my companion? I was alone, completely alone!” Baba moved toward her, but before he could put his arm around her, Lakhmi Chand put his arm around both her shoulders and pulled her to him, as if to say, “Leave her alone!”
“You had come back from one of your journeys because Mardana had said he would die if he didn’t see his wife, parents, and children again,” Mata Sulakhni continued with her memories.
“Yes, yes, I did say that!” Mardana says, looking at Fatima.
“I was missing you so very much! I said to Baba, ‘Here, play your own rabab, I am going home!’ So Baba consented to returning to Talwandi on the condition that I not tell anyone that he had accompanied me back. He camped in the forest, and I was not to mention him if anyone asked. Oh, what a story that was. Let me tell it!”
“But why didn’t Baba want to meet his family?” Aziza asks.
“Yes, I want to know that, too,” Fatima says.
“I don’t really know,” Mardana admits. “I rarely questioned him.”
“I know the answer to that,” Buddha says, “and I will tell it after Mardana jee tells his version.”
63. From Persian: enclosed space.
64. There are many words for the second person singular pronoun, and toon is the least respectful and also the most intimate, depending upon context and intonation.
65. Emotional turmoil, especially in the context of family.
66. The Formless One.
67. Literally, without tongues, but here meant as “speechless,” or unable to speak in our tongue.
68. Wedding shawl.
69. It is customary in a Hindu marriage ceremony for the couple to do seven perambulations around fire.