Kabīr

There is a lake a little way out of Banaras, on the south-west side, where the road leaves the houses and goes off among the fields. It is called Lahartārā. It runs a little more than a mile end to end and about an eighth of a mile across, and in the cold months it goes russet with weed, so that the water birds come down on it and walk about on the surface as though it were ground. Rushes stand up here and there along the margin. Anyone on the road at that hour hears the birds before he sees the water.

In the year 1398, on a Monday, on the full moon of Jeṭh, a weaver was walking that road. The month of Jeṭh is the worst of the year on that plain. The heat comes up out of the brick and the dust all day and the night hands it back again, and people who have to travel go early. His name was Alī, and because he lived beside the water everyone called him Nīrū, from nīr, which is water. He was bringing his wife home from her parents' house.

He saw something at the edge of the lake among the leaves, and went down to it. It was a child, a few days old, lying on a water lily that had opened under him. There was no one else on the road and no one in the fields.

Nīrū knew at once what he was looking at. A child left at the edge of a lake outside a city has been left there by a woman who cannot keep him and cannot say why. He went back up the bank and told his wife.

Her name was Nīmā. They had no son of their own and it was in their power to take this one, and she said no. She said what any woman would have said. She said the whole quarter would talk, that the talk would not stop at the two of them but would go round every weaver's house in Banaras, that a tribe's good name is a thing nobody can mend once it is broken, and that they would be carrying this for the rest of their lives.

Then she went down the bank and looked at him.

He was fair to look at. He was not screaming, which is what a hungry abandoned infant does. He was lying there bright and cheerful, as though he had been put down by someone who meant to come back. Whatever Nīmā had been going to say next, she did not say it. They picked him up and carried him home.

On the margin of that lake there is now a small temple. The monks who keep it are proud of their Sanskrit and will tell a visitor a good deal. Close by is Nīrū's grave.

Of how the child came to be lying there, this is what has been handed down.

There was a brahmin in Banaras who attended on Rāmānand. He was one of those men who arrange their whole day around a teacher: he was at the ghāṭ when Rāmānand came down, he was there when Rāmānand went up, he carried things, he waited. At home he had a daughter. She was a widow, and she had been widowed before the marriage was consummated, so that she was a widow and a virgin together, and the rest of her life was already decided. She would eat once. She would wear white. She would not marry. She was perhaps twelve.

She wanted to see the man her father spent his life on. He took her.

She was allowed to come forward and put her forehead to Rāmānand's feet, which is what any woman of that household would do. He did not know who she was. He said what he would say to any young woman who came and bowed: that she would be blessed with a son.

Her father told him what she was.

Rāmānand did not take it back. He said that what he had spoken could not be called back in, and that she would have a son. He said that no one would see any sign of it in her while she carried him, and that no stigma would come near her name. Then he said the rest of it, which was that her son would reform religion and save the world.

So the child was born, and nobody in that house had a single thing to do with him. She carried him out to Lahartārā in the dark and left him at the edge of the water and went back to the life that had been fixed for her. She had no choice that anyone has ever been able to name. It is not recorded what she did afterwards, or how long she lived, or whether she ever knew what became of him.

The man who found him was a Muslim.

That is the beginning, and everything in this book comes out of it. A brahmin household in the holiest city in the world produced a son it could not acknowledge and put him out by a lake at night. A weaver of the other religion picked him up and took him home and fed him. The boy grew up in the weaver's house, in the weaver's trade, with the weaver's name on him, saying the Hindu name of God, and spent his whole life telling both houses exactly what he thought of them.

He said it himself, later, when people threw his birth at him, and he said it without a word of apology:

I have just come from God.

The world has been led astray by what it wants,

and it has not found the secret of how I was born.

I was not born.

I did not lie in any womb.

I appeared, a child, as I am.

A weaver found me by his hut, in a lake, at Banaras.

I was not in heaven, or on earth, or in any country.

I have no bones, no blood, no skin.

The word spoke, and here I am.

I am past all bodies and I do not end,

and men call me Kabīr, who does not die.

Take the boast out of that and there is still something left in it, which is that he refused the question. He would not stand and be asked whose son he was. He never answered it once in a hundred and nineteen years.

When a child comes into a Muslim household he has to be named, so a qāzī was called to the weaver's house.

The way it was done was this. The Quran was opened and a lot was cast, and whatever word came up first was the child's name. The word that came up was kabīr. In Arabic it means great. It is one of the names of God.

They gave it to him and he kept it, and there is a joke in it that he certainly knew, because the name is not a name a weaver's family would have chosen on their own. It sat on him for the rest of his life like a coat several sizes too large, and he wore it the way he wore everything else, without explaining.

The house he grew up in was a weaver's house, which means it was one room and a loom. In Banaras a julāhā worked a pit loom: a trench dug in the earth floor of the room deep enough to take a man's legs to the knee, the treadles set down in the trench, the warp running out through the doorway or the wall into the street, where it was stretched and sized and dried. A weaver spends his working life sitting in a hole in his own floor with his legs down in the dark and his hands up in the light. The whole family is in it. Somebody has to wind the bobbins. Somebody has to size the thread. Somebody has to take the finished cloth to the market and stand there with it and take what is offered.

The weavers of Banaras were Muslims, most of them recently so, converts out of the same Hindu castes as everybody else on that street, and they were poor. They lived at the edge of the city that the rest of the city called the centre of the world. Every day of their lives the priests of Śiv went past them down to the river, and every day of their lives they were what the priests of Śiv went past.

Nīrū and Nīmā fed him and raised him and taught him to weave, and they never once got the better of him.

It became clear early that the Muslim household had not taken in a Muslim child. He played in the street with the other children and what came out of his mouth was Rām. Hari. The Hindu names. Nobody had set out to teach him. There was a holy man in the city called Gosāī Aṣṭānand, one of Rāmānand's people, who is said to have been at the lake on the night the child was put there, and to have kept an eye on him afterwards and put things in his way as chances came; and beyond that there was simply Banaras, which gets into everyone, and which had got into the Muslims of Banaras long before Kabīr was born.

The other children told him he was a kāfir, an unbeliever, because they had heard it at home.

He gave them a list. An unbeliever, he said, is a man who hits somebody for no reason. A man who puts on religious clothes to fool people. A man who drinks. A man who steals. A man who kills himself. A man who smokes. A man who robs on the road. A man who takes life.

Eight things. Not one of them is a matter of which religion you belong to. He was a child and he had already worked out the move he would make for the rest of his life, which was to take a word that had been thrown at him and hand it back with the meaning changed, so that the person who threw it had to catch it.

They went on calling him a kāfir anyway. People do.

Banaras sits on the outside of a bend in the Ganges, on the left bank, which is the high bank, so that the city stands up over the water and the far shore is a flat waste of sand with nothing on it. The sun comes up out of that sand. Every morning of the world, the people of Banaras go down their own steps towards the sunrise and stand in the river up to the waist with the light coming straight at them across the water.

This is the oldest arrangement in India and it is why the city thinks what it thinks about itself. It holds three things. It holds that the city is not in the world at all, but resting on the point of Śiv's trident, so that when everything else is dissolved Banaras will be left standing. It holds that the Ganges, which runs south-east for the whole of its length, turns and runs north here out of respect. And it holds that whoever dies inside a certain boundary drawn around the city is released, whatever he has done and whoever he was, because Śiv comes and says a word in his ear at the last moment. Old people from four hundred miles away came there to wait. Some of them waited years.

A city that believes this about itself develops a particular kind of pride, and a particular kind of trade. The stairs down to the water were owned. The positions on the stairs were owned. A man sat under a great palm-leaf umbrella at the top of a flight of steps and that was his living and his father's living before him: he minded your clothes, he found you a priest, he told you which words to say and how many times, he took his share. Priests kept genealogies of the families who came, so that a man arriving from the Dakhan could be told what his great-grandfather had given. There were people who sold flowers, people who sold milk for pouring, people who sold the little earth lamps, people who carried the dead down through the lanes at a trot calling out as they came, and people whose whole inherited work was the fire, the wood, the arranging of the body, the breaking of the skull. All of it was hereditary. None of it could be entered from outside.

The lanes behind the river are so narrow that two men with loads cannot pass, and they do not run straight for more than a few paces. Bulls stand in them and have to be gone around. Above are the houses, five and six storeys, leaning in until the sky is a strip. In the mornings the whole place smells of wet stone, river mud, cow, marigold, sandalwood, wood smoke and the particular sweetish smell from the burning ground, which does not stop, because the burning ground never stops.

And in the middle of all this, and slightly to the side of it, there were the weavers.

Banaras cloth was famous then as it is famous now. Silk went out of that city to every court in the north. But the men who made it were julāhās, and a julāhā was nobody. Most of them were Muslims, and most of them were Muslims of the most recent sort, whose grandfathers had been Hindus of a low caste and had changed, one street at a time, one family at a time, for reasons nobody wrote down. Conversion had not made them rich and it had not made them respectable. It had moved them sideways. They were now outside the caste order rather than at the bottom of it, which in a city like Banaras was a distinction without much comfort. The word julāhā was a term of contempt in the mouths of the people who wore the cloth.

So the boy grew up in a house at the edge of the holiest city on earth, and every day of his life the traffic of that holiness went past his door and had nothing to do with him. The pandits went down to the water. The pilgrims came up from the water. The corpses went by. The bells started before it was light. And in the doorway of a mud house a Muslim weaver's adopted son sat with a length of warp running out past his feet into the street, watching the whole thing, saying Rām.

He never left it, either. He had the run of the north and he stayed in Banaras for a hundred and eighteen years. Whatever he thought of the city, and he said some hard things about it, he did not go. He knew exactly how the money moved on those steps and exactly what the priests were worth and exactly what it cost a poor man to be told he was impure, and he knew it because he watched it every morning from the same doorway for a lifetime.

That is the difference between him and a man who arrives with an argument. He was not arguing from outside. He was describing the street.

A boy in a weaver's house does not decide to become a weaver. He is in the room where the work is, and the work has jobs in it small enough for him, so he does them, and by the time anyone asks him what he wants to be he has been doing it for nine years.

The loom in that room was a pit loom. A trench was dug in the earth floor, deep enough that a seated man's legs went down into it to the knee, and the treadles hung in the trench where his feet could reach them. He sat on the edge with a plank under him. The warp, which is the long threads, the ones that run the whole length of the cloth, came in through the doorway from the street, because there was nowhere inside long enough to hold it, and it had been made ready out there, which is a business of its own and will keep.

The threads came in through the heddles, which lift alternate threads when the treadle is pressed, opening a gap. The shuttle goes through the gap. The comb beats the new thread home against the cloth. Then the other treadle, the other set of threads lifts, the gap opens the other way, the shuttle comes back. That is all weaving is. A gap opens, something passes through it, the gap closes the other way. Several thousand times for a length of cloth.

The noise is the thing people forget. A pit loom is loud, and it is loud in a regular way: the double knock of the comb, the slap of the treadle, the hiss of the shuttle. The men in a weaving street do not talk over it, they talk through it, in the gaps, and they sing, because singing goes with it and thinking does not. This is why so many of the singing saints of the north were artisans with their hands busy and their mouths free. A potter at his wheel, a tanner at his tub, a weaver in his pit: the work takes the body and leaves the head alone for ten hours, and something has to be done with the head.

Kabīr had a loom under him from childhood to old age and everything he ever said came out of it. He did not use weaving as an illustration, the way a preacher reaches for something homely. He genuinely could not see the world in any other terms. When he wanted to say what God does, he said God is a weaver and the world is a piece of cloth on the loom. He meant it exactly. In one of his songs God says he stretched the warp of the whole world out to this length, and made the earth and the sky his workshop, and set the sun and the moon going, one up and one down, the way a weaver's two treadles go. Kabīr's comment at the end of it is that he likes the look of that weaver. He will sing the whole of that song one day to a man who asks him, in front of an audience, what a weaver is.

When he wanted to say what a life is, he said it was a length of cloth, and that a man is given it clean and hands it back at the end in whatever state he has kept it. When he wanted to say what happens at death, he said the body is a garment that gets torn and thrown on the heap, and the thread does not care. When he wanted to insult a brahmin, which was often, the insult came off the loom too: you have one thread round your neck and you think it makes you holy, I have a houseful of thread and I make cloth people can wear.

And when he wanted to say something about God that could not be said, he described the making of a cloth so fine that no one could see how it was done, and left it there:

Fine, fine, he has woven this sheet.

What was the warp, what was the weft,

what thread did he use to weave this sheet?

In and out through the breath he ran it,

eight lotuses and ten wheels on the frame,

five elements, three qualities,

and he sat down and took ten months over the border.

Gods wore it, men wore it, holy men wore it,

and they wore it filthy, every one of them.

Kabīr wore it too. He took care of it.

He is handing it back exactly as he got it.

There is no religion in that sentence and there is nothing else in it either. It is a weaver's remark about a piece of cloth.

One day he put on a forehead mark and a sacred thread.

It is worth being exact about what this was. The sacred thread is three strands of cotton, worn over the left shoulder and under the right arm. It is given to a boy at a ceremony, and after it he is called twice-born, which means the ceremony counts as a second birth. Brahmins wear it. Two other classes of Hindus are entitled to it. Everybody else on earth, which is most people, is not, and that includes every Śūdra, every untouchable, every woman and every Muslim. It is not an ornament. It is a licence. It says that the person wearing it may study the Veda and perform sacrifice, and that the people not wearing it may not, and may not hear it, and in the older books may be punished for hearing it.

Kabīr was a Muslim weaver, an unacknowledged child, adopted, with no lineage at all. He put the thread on. In Banaras. In the street.

A brahmin called Mukand came and told him to take it off. The argument he made was the obvious one and he must have thought it unanswerable: you were brought up a Muhammadan, you follow your foster-father's trade, you have no business with our religion, and you are not entitled to wear its marks.

Kabīr sang at him.

I have thread all over my house. I weave all day.

You have one on your neck.

You read the Vedas and say the Gāyatrī.

I have him in my chest.

He is on my tongue, he is in my eyes, he is in my heart.

When they examine you at death's door, mad Mukand, what will you say?

I am the cow, and you are the herdsman,

lord of the earth, guardian of every creature that is born.

You never took me across the river to the good grass.

What kind of master have I got?

You are a brahmin. I am a weaver of Banaras.

Try to follow me.

You beg from lords and kings. I keep my mind on God.

Which of us is doing better?

Every line of that is a trap. The name Mukand is one of the names of God, so when he calls the man lord of the earth and guardian of every creature he is handing him the title and then asking, quite reasonably, why the pasture is so poor. He turns himself into a cow, which is the one creature in that city that cannot be argued with, and makes the brahmin its careless owner. He puts the word thread through three different meanings in two lines. And then he drops all of it and says the thing he is really saying, flat, with no poetry on it at all: you are a brahmin, I am a weaver, and I am the one who has got somewhere.

He did not argue that a weaver deserved the thread. That would have accepted the premise. He argued that the thread was a piece of string and that the man wearing it had spent his life begging at rich men's doors, and that the whole arrangement was a fraud that had fooled everybody including the people running it.

Nobody made him take it off. There is no record of what Mukand said.

Later he got shorter about it. There is a couplet of his that goes round north India to this day in various forms, and it says: if being born a brahmin makes you superior, why did you not come out some other way. It is not subtle. It was not meant to be.

Nīrū and Nīmā had been patient for a long time. They had taken in a child nobody wanted, they had fed him through whatever years those were, they had put a trade in his hands, and they had watched him grow up saying the wrong name in the street where everybody could hear. Patience runs out. At some point they decided that the thing to do was to have him circumcised.

This was not cruelty and it should not be read as cruelty. It was the ordinary correction of a household that had a problem. Circumcision is what makes a Muslim boy formally a Muslim among his people. It is done young. It had been left too long in his case, probably because of the irregularity of his coming to them, and now the irregularity had grown into a young man who wore a forehead mark and sat about with Hindu holy men. They were not trying to break him. They were trying to settle the question, once, with a knife, the way their neighbours had settled it.

He answered with a song, and the song is one of the hardest things he ever made, because it is aimed at the qāzī and not at his parents, and because it does not argue about circumcision at all. It goes underneath and pulls the floor out.

Where did the Hindus come from? Where did the Muslims come from?

Who started them off down their two roads?

Think about it. Have a look in your own chest before you answer.

Then tell me who is going to heaven and who is going to hell.

Qāzī, what is it you are explaining to us?

Readers like you, students like you, they have all come to nothing.

Not one of you has found anything out.

You cut it off for a woman's sake.

I am never going to believe in it, brother.

If God had wanted me to be a Muslim

I would have come out of the womb with the job already done.

And if cutting a man makes him a Muslim,

what are you going to do about a woman?

You cannot put away your wife. She is half your body.

So you are a Hindu after all.

Put the books down, you fool, and think about God.

What you are doing to people is cruelty.

Kabīr has got hold of God and is holding on.

The Muslims have failed completely.

Look at what he does there. He starts with the largest question available, which is where the two religions came from in the first place, and he asks it in a tone of genuine curiosity, as though it had simply never occurred to anyone. He does not ask which religion is true. He asks who set them going, which is not the same question and is much worse for everybody.

Then he goes for the qāzī with the one argument that cannot be met, which is the argument from the woman. A Muslim woman is a Muslim. She is not circumcised. So circumcision cannot be the thing that makes a Muslim. And if you say it applies only to men, then your wife, who is half of your body, is standing outside the requirement, which means half of you is standing outside it. He is not being clever. He is doing what he did all his life, which is taking a rule seriously enough to follow it to the place where it falls over.

And he does the identical thing to the Hindus elsewhere, with the identical tone. He asks the pandit who is so careful about the pot he drinks from what he proposes to do about the fact that he was carried for nine months inside a body and came out the usual way. He asks the man who bathes five times a day whether the frogs, who never get out of the water at all, are further on than he is. He asks the man with the rosary how much God has been impressed by the counting.

The people who came after him have spent five hundred years trying to file him down into a man who said that Hindus and Muslims are really the same underneath. He did not say that. He said that the Hindus were wrong and the Muslims were wrong and that he could not see much to choose between them, which is a different and far less comfortable remark. He was not building a bridge between two houses. He was standing in the street between them explaining, at length, to anyone who would listen, that both of them had been built on nothing.

They did not circumcise him. Nothing in the accounts says how that ended, only that he was not circumcised and that his mother went on complaining.

Whatever else he became, he was a householder. He married. He had a son called Kamāl, and something odd is remembered about that boy which will keep until later. He fed a family off a loom, and he fed them badly, and the reason he fed them badly is the substance of this chapter.

The trouble was the holy men.

In Banaras among the better-off Hindu families there is a practice with cooking vessels. Sun-dried earthenware is used and thrown away and replaced every single day, because a night is held to make the pot impure. It is an expensive habit and a fastidious one. Kabīr, who thought ritual purity was a joke, adopted it, and he adopted it for a reason that tells you everything about him: he wanted holy men to be able to eat in his house. A wandering Hindu ascetic of any strictness could not eat food cooked in a Muslim weaver's kitchen in a pot that had been standing overnight. So the weaver bought new pots every morning, and smeared the cooking square fresh, and kept a Muslim house that a brahmin could eat in, so that he could go on having the arguments he wanted to have.

He paid for the pots out of the weaving. So did everybody else in that house.

Somebody in that household finally said what she thought, and what she said was preserved, and he preserved it, which is the extraordinary part. He set his mother's complaint down as the first half of a song and put his answer in the second half, and the first half is not softened at all:

Up at dawn again, buying new pots again.

Your whole life has gone in plastering the kitchen floor.

You do not go near the loom.

You are too busy saying God, God, God.

Who in this family ever said the name of Rām?

Since that useless boy of ours picked up a rosary

there has not been a moment's peace in this house.

Listen, sister-in-law. Listen, you too.

Something has happened that I cannot account for.

This boy has finished our weaving business.

Why is he not dead?

That last line is a real line and it was said by a real woman about a real son, and he wrote it down.

It is not a curse. It is the thing exhausted women say, and everyone in that street would have recognised it, and that is exactly why it is so bad to see in writing. She is calling in the other women of the household to witness. She is using a word that means a man with no sons, a man with nobody to work for, which she is throwing at a son who does have a son and simply will not work. The business is going. The thread in the street is going grey in the sun because nobody has come out to take it in. And the boy is sitting there with his beads saying Rām, Rām, and every morning he is out buying pots.

His answer does not apologise and does not explain. He says: the guru gave me his name, and that is the whole of my happiness. And then he reaches for the story of Prahlād, who is the child in the old books whose father was a king and an enemy of God, and who would not stop saying the name, and whose father tried to kill him for it, and who was saved when God came out of a pillar in the shape of a lion and tore the father open. Prahlād, Kabīr says, walked away from the gods of his own house and the ancestors of his own house and took his teacher's word instead.

That is the answer he gave his mother. He told her the story of a boy whose family tried to kill him for saying the name of God, and let her work out the rest.

There is no evidence that he was kind about it and no evidence that he was cruel. What is left is the fact that he kept both halves of the song. He could have written his own half only. He could have made himself the patient son of an unreasonable woman. Instead he gave her the opening verse, in her own voice, with the kitchen and the pots and the ruined business and the sister-in-law called in as a witness, and he let her say the unforgivable thing about her son, and he put his name to the whole of it.

He does this again and again. He gives the other side its best line. The brahmin, the qāzī, the yogi, his mother, the man in the market beating down the price of his cloth: they all get to speak, and they are never made stupid. He is not generous. He simply does not need them to be stupid, because he thinks they are wrong, and wrong is more interesting.

And the practical result of all this, which ought to be said plainly, is that the family was poor and got poorer, and that the people who paid for Kabīr's sanctity were the people who lived with him. He knew it. It is in the song.

It should be said carefully what kind of Muslims the weavers of Banaras were, because a great deal has been claimed about Kabīr on the strength of the word, and most of it is claimed by people who want him for one side or the other.

They were converts, or the grandchildren of converts. Whole artisan castes in the eastern plain had come over in the previous two or three hundred years, street by street and trade by trade, and what they had brought with them was everything except the name of their old religion. They kept the trade. They kept the marriage circle, marrying within the weavers as they always had. They kept a good deal of the calendar, and the songs at weddings, and the local shrines, and the words people use when they are frightened. What they had acquired was a new name for God, a book they could not read, a mosque at the end of the street, a qāzī who settled disputes and named children, and the five prayers, which busy men kept as well as busy men anywhere keep them.

They were not Persians. They were not Turks. They had no connection whatever with the soldiers and administrators who ran the country from Delhi and who regarded them, when they thought about them at all, as exactly what the brahmins regarded them as: low people who made things with their hands. Conversion had bought them nothing at all except the ability to say, when a pandit told them they were impure, that they no longer cared. Which is not nothing. But it is not much.

So the religion in the house Kabīr grew up in was thin, practical and unexamined, the way most people's religion is in most places, and the same could be said of the religion in the houses on either side of the street. The difference between a weaver's Islam and a potter's Hinduism, from inside that lane, was a matter of which festival you cooked for and which man you sent for when somebody died. It was not a difference of ideas, because neither household had been given any ideas.

Kabīr grew up close enough to see this and he never forgot it. The mosque at the end of the street was made of stone and mortar the way the temple was made of stone and mortar. The qāzī read out of a book he had learned by heart in a language nobody in the congregation spoke, exactly as the pandit did. The call went up from the minaret five times a day, and Kabīr, who had a genius for the insolent question, asked the one nobody asks:

They piled up stone and rubble and built themselves a mosque.

The mullā climbs to the top of it and shouts.

What is the matter? Has God gone deaf?

And about the other side, with the same voice:

If God is found in a stone, I will worship a mountain, which is bigger.

Better than either is the hand-mill in my house,

which grinds the flour that keeps the world alive.

Notice that both remarks are made by the same man on the same afternoon and that neither is an argument for the opposite side. He is not telling the mullā to become a Hindu or the pandit to become a Muslim. He is telling both of them that they have built a large apparatus and put it between themselves and the only thing that matters, and that he can see straight through it from where he is sitting, which is on a plank over a hole in the floor with a shuttle in his hand.

The Muslims of the street thought he was an apostate. The Hindus of the city thought he was an unbeliever. Both were correct, and neither could get rid of him, because he would not stand still long enough to be classified. He was the only person in Banaras with nothing to lose in either direction, and he used it.

Banaras is a place people arrive at, and in the fifteenth century the religious traffic through it was extraordinary, and a boy who sat in a doorway all day saw all of it go past.

There were the pandits, who lived there, and who were the establishment: the men who owned the steps and the ceremonies and the right to recite. There were the priests of the burning grounds, a hereditary people whom nobody else would touch and everybody had to pay. There were pilgrims from every direction, some of them rich enough to be carried, most of them walking, many of them old.

Then there were the wanderers, and they were an education in themselves.

Śaiva ascetics came down from the hills with ash on them and their hair in ropes to the waist, and some of them carried a skull to eat out of. Vaiṣṇava renunciants came up from the south with vertical marks on their foreheads and opinions about the ones with horizontal marks. There were the Nāth jogis, who were everywhere in the north then and are the most important of all for understanding Kabīr: men who had split the cartilage of their ears to take a great ring in each, who worked on their own bodies with breath and posture, who talked about the knot at the base of the spine and the moon in the skull. And who talked about sahaj, which is the state that is simply natural, the one a man falls into when everything forced has stopped. The jogis had a whole language and Kabīr took a great deal of it. He took the vocabulary and used it against them, which is his usual arrangement with anything he borrows.

There were Muslim mendicants on the same roads, because the roads were the same: faqīrs with patched coats, and Sufis with a lineage from a shaikh and a silsila running back through Baghdad, who sang, and who said things about annihilation in God that sounded, to anyone listening carefully in the lane, remarkably like what the ash-covered man had said last week in different words. Many of these people were poor. Many of them were frauds. A few were the real thing, and the difference was not visible from the doorway.

And there was Gosāī Aṣṭānand, who has already been mentioned, and who was at Lahartārā on the night the child was put down at the water's edge. What is said about him afterwards is modest and believable: that he kept track of the boy, and that as chances came he put things in his way. Not a teacher exactly. A man who knew where a child had come from and did not forget it, and who saw to it that certain words reached certain ears at the right age.

So the boy's education was the street, and the street was better than a school. He got the Hindu material from Hindus and the Muslim material from Muslims and the jogis' material from jogis, all of it by ear, none of it in order, none of it with anyone standing over him to say which parts he was allowed to question. He heard the best of each and he also heard the sales patter of each, which is what a man in a doorway hears that a man in a monastery does not. He watched them all eat. He watched them all ask for money.

By the time he was grown he knew more religions than anyone he would ever argue with, and he believed none of them, and he had an appetite that none of them had satisfied.

The word on his tongue from childhood was Rām, and everything depends on what he meant by it, so it will not do to hurry past it.

Rām, to the people around him, was a prince of Ajodhyā: the hero of the great story, son of Daśarath, husband of Sītā, the one who went to the forest for fourteen years and crossed to Laṅkā and came back and reigned. He has a face. He has a bow. He has a brother and a monkey general and a wife he sent away. Men have loved him for three thousand years and made him the shape of everything good. That story is the one the north has wept over for longer than anybody can reckon.

That is not what Kabīr meant, and he said so, repeatedly, in language nobody could mistake. The Rām he was saying was not Daśarath's son. He said it in those words. He was not talking about a person who was born and had a family and reigned in a city.

What he was saying was a name with nothing behind it.

This is the thing about him that is hardest for people to hold on to, then and now, because a name with nothing behind it sounds like a name with nothing in it. He meant the opposite. He meant that whatever it is that actually is cannot be got at through any shape at all: not an image, not a story, not an incarnation, not a body, not a face, not a form you could describe to somebody who had not seen it. Nirguṇa is the word, and it means without qualities, without attributes, nothing you can say about it is the thing itself. Set against it is saguṇa, with qualities: God with a face, God with a story, God you can love the way you love a person, which is what most of the singing saints of India were doing and what a great many of them did magnificently.

Kabīr was on the other side, and he was rude about it.

But he did not stop saying Rām, which is the point that gets missed. A man who believes that nothing can be said might reasonably say nothing. He said one syllable, constantly, for a hundred and nineteen years. He called it the nām, the name, and he treated it as the one thing that had been handed to human beings that actually works: not a description of God, which is impossible, but something more like a handle. He said the whole world was drowning for the lack of it. He said it was worth more than every pilgrimage on the map. He said that when it goes on by itself without your doing it, that is what people are straining after with all their postures and their breathing, and that it comes in sahaj, easily, naturally, of itself, and cannot be forced any more than sleep can be forced.

And alongside the nām he put the śabda, the word: the sound that comes from the other side, the thing that is heard rather than said. He used the two together all his life. Everything he ever taught fits in one sentence: there is a name, it is being said whether you say it or not, learn to hear it.

Understand this and the rest of his life is legible. He is not attacking images because he dislikes art, and he is not attacking the Quran because he prefers the Veda. He is attacking every single thing that stands between a man and a name that costs nothing and that no priest of any religion can charge him for. He is not a reformer of religion. He is a man trying to put a large and profitable industry out of business.

Every day, several times a day, a party came down the lane past the weavers carrying a body on a ladder of bamboo, at a jog, calling out as they came so that people would stand aside.

They were going to the water. At the bottom of the steps the body was dipped in the river, and then it was taken to the stacked wood and burned, and the whole transaction was watched over by men of a caste that everyone else regarded as untouchable and that everyone else had to pay, and the fire came from a hearth that is said never to have been allowed to go out. A householder with money bought good wood. A poor man bought what he could and the burning was not always complete. Some of what went into the river afterwards had been a person that morning.

This went on all day, and all night, and it has gone on all day and all night for as long as anybody can say.

The reason it went on was the promise. Banaras held, and holds, that whoever dies within a certain boundary drawn around the city is released from being born again, whoever he was and whatever he did, because at the moment of death Śiv himself bends down and says a word into the dying man's ear. Nothing is required. No merit, no caste, no fitness. The only requirement is the geography.

It is the most generous promise any city ever made, and it built an industry. Old men and women came from unimaginable distances and took a room and waited, sometimes for years, being fed by their families or by charity, so as to die on the right side of a line. There were houses whose whole business was this. There were priests whose whole business was this. Money moved, constantly, on the strength of a boundary.

Kabīr lived next to it his entire life and thought it was nonsense.

Not the dying. He had nothing to say against dying, and he said a great deal about it, most of it to the effect that people should think about it more often than they do. What he would not have was the line on the map. He could not see how a place could do for a man what the man had not done for himself, and he said that a place could not, and that if you had it in you then anywhere would do, and if you did not then the holiest ground on earth would not save you.

He said it for fifty years and nobody believed him, and it must have been an irritating thing to go on saying in a city that made its living the other way. So at the very end of his life, when he was an old man and had nothing further to gain, he did something about it. He got up and left Banaras and went to the one town in the north where dying was held to be worthless, and he died there on purpose.

That is the end of this story and it comes on the fourth day. It is mentioned here only so that the reader knows, from the beginning, that the boy sitting in the doorway watching the bodies go past was already turning something over, and that he was still turning it over a century later, and that he settled it in the end with his own body, which was the only argument left that nobody could talk their way out of.

He never wrote anything. There is no reason to think he could write, and a good deal of reason to think he could not, since he says so himself in a couplet that people still repeat: he never touched ink or paper with his hand.

What he made was made out loud, in the street, in the working language of the eastern plain, and other people carried it away in their heads. Some of it was written down by his own disciples within a generation or two. Some of it was collected about a hundred years later at the other end of north India, in the Panjab, by men compiling a scripture, who went to the trouble of gathering about five hundred of his compositions because they thought he belonged in it. Some of it was never written down at all and simply went on being sung, and is still being sung, by people who could not tell you where it came from.

He worked in three shapes, and the shapes matter, because he used them for different jobs.

The sākhī is a couplet. Two lines. The word means a witness, something seen with your own eyes and testified to. A sākhī is a nail: it is meant to go in once and stay. You hear it, and it sits in your head for thirty years, and it is waiting there the morning something happens to you that it fits. This is the form in which most of him survives in ordinary memory, because a couplet is portable and a man carrying a load can say one to himself.

The pad is a song, four or six or eight verses with a refrain, made to be sung with a drum and a one-stringed instrument, made for a gathering. This is the form of most of what the compilers in the Panjab took. A pad has room to develop an argument and turn it at the end.

The ramainī is longer and stranger, rhymed, closed with a sākhī, and it is where he says the things that cannot be said in order. The ramainīs are where the world goes upside down.

His language is not the language of the schools. It is the Hindi of the eastern plain around Banaras and Mirzāpur, with Gorakhpur forms in the late work, salted with the words of every kind of religious specialist he ever heard, Sanskrit and Persian and Arabic and the private vocabulary of the yogis, all of it used by a man who had learned it by ear and was not respectful with any of it. He is impossible to translate without loss because a great deal of the force is in the plainness. He says short, hard, ordinary words about enormous things and the collision is the whole effect.

And he signs. Almost everything ends with his own name in it: Kabīr says, or says Kabīr. It is not vanity, or not only vanity. It is a way of standing behind the sentence. When a man sings in the street that the pandits and the mullās are both frauds, there is a use in saying who is speaking.

There were two books in his world and he had read neither of them, and he attacked both with a freedom that only an illiterate man could have managed.

The Veda was not a book in any case, not in the sense of an object on a shelf. It was sound, held in the memory of a caste, transmitted mouth to ear with ferocious accuracy over an unimaginable stretch of time, and hedged with rules about who might hear it. The sacred thread was the licence to hear it. Kabīr had never heard it, was forbidden to hear it, and told anyone who would listen that there was nothing in it worth hearing, which is an impressive position to hold and he held it cheerfully for a lifetime.

The Quran he had heard, because it is recited aloud at every prayer and every funeral, and he had heard it all his life without understanding a word, along with everyone else in the street. The qāzī understood it. The qāzī had also, in Kabīr's view, understood nothing.

What he said about both was the same thing, and he said it in the plainest sentence he ever made:

People have read books till they died and not one of them came out a scholar.

Two and a half letters spell love.

Read those and you are a scholar.

The arithmetic is a joke in the original: the word for love is written with two full letters and a half one, so it is the shortest word in the world and the only one worth learning. But underneath the joke there is a claim of real violence, which is that the entire apparatus of sacred text in both religions, the memorising and the reciting and the commenting and the licensing of who may hear it, produces nothing, and that what it is supposed to produce can be had by anybody, including the illiterate, including a woman, including a weaver, including a Muslim, for nothing, without permission.

That is why they came for him eventually. Not for saying God was one. Plenty of people said God was one. For saying that the men in the middle were not needed, in a city where the men in the middle were the economy.

He went further, and this is the line that should stay with the reader through the next six days, because everything he did afterwards is inside it. He said that what he knew, he had seen. He was not repeating. He used the word sākhī for his couplets, which means testimony, the word for what a witness gives in court, and he meant it exactly:

What I have seen, I am saying.

You are saying what is written down.

Neither of us can help the other.

By the time he was a young man his reputation had grown past the weaving street, and what it had grown on was arguing.

He beat people. That is the plain fact and it is recorded as a plain fact: he was quicker than the learned men of his time, Hindu and Muslim both, and he beat them in public, in front of audiences who enjoyed it enormously, because he was a weaver and they were not. Nothing in India travels faster than the news that somebody has made a fool of a pandit.

His method was always the same and it repays learning, because he uses it for the next hundred years. He never disputes the scripture. He has not read the scripture, and everybody knows he has not read it, and he never once pretends otherwise. What he does instead is take whatever the man in front of him has just claimed and apply it somewhere the man has not thought about.

You are pure because you bathe. The frogs never get out of the water. Where have they got to?

You are a brahmin because you were born one. Everyone in this street was born. Were you born some other way?

You keep the fast. So does a poor man who has no food. Is he getting the same credit?

Your stone is God. Then a mountain is more God than your stone, and the grinding stone in my house is better than both, because at least it makes flour and the world gets fed.

You shout the call to prayer from the top of the mosque you built out of stone and mortar. Has he gone deaf?

You have turned that rosary over for years now. Has anything in you turned over?

Every one of these is the same move. He accepts the premise for the length of a breath and then walks it out of the building. He does not say your god is false. He says: look where your own rule goes if you actually follow it. And because he is not arguing from a rival scripture, there is nothing for the other man to push against. A pandit can refute another pandit. What is he supposed to do with a weaver who agrees with him and then points at a frog?

The other thing he does, which is harder to defend against, is that he is funny. He gets the audience laughing and the laugh does the work that the argument could not. A man who has been laughed at in the lane outside his own house does not come back the next week with a better syllogism. He comes back with something else, and in Kabīr's case they came back with several things, and one of them was an emperor.

What he wanted from all this, he said, was simple, and he said it so often that it is easy to stop hearing. He wanted people to stop doing things that did not work. Jog, the yogi's discipline. Alms. Fasting. The feeding of brahmins, which was the main religious economy of the city he lived in. He did not say these were wicked. He said they were nothing, they were zeroes, and that a row of zeroes is worth nothing at all until you put a numeral in front of it, and the numeral is the name of God and the love of God, and without it you may line up your zeroes for a lifetime and go out with exactly what you came in with.

There was, in the end, one thing that could be said about Kabīr that he could not answer, and the learned men of Banaras found it.

They had tried everything else. They had tried his birth, and he had turned it into a boast. They had tried his caste, and he had turned it into a hymn about God the weaver. They had tried his religion, and he had asked them where religions come from. They had tried argument, and had been beaten in the street in front of their neighbours. What was left?

What was left was that he had no teacher.

In that world a man's authority is not his own. It comes down a line. You are somebody's disciple, and he was somebody's disciple, and the line goes back until it reaches a name that everybody accepts, and that is where your right to speak comes from. A man without such a line is a nigurā: one with no guru. The word is not neutral and it is not merely descriptive. In the mouths of ordinary people it carries everything unpleasant that can be said about a man, because the assumption is that if nobody ever took him as a disciple there was a reason. It is a word for a man with no father, in a country where that is the worst thing there is.

So they agreed among themselves that this was what they would call him. Not wrong. Not a heretic. Nothing that would require them to argue with him again. Simply: a man with no teacher, and therefore an unbeliever, and therefore not somebody anyone need listen to.

It was a good plan. It was the best plan they ever had against him, because it was true. He had picked his religion up off the street. He had a Muslim foster-father, a dead Hindu lineage that would not own him, an old holy man who had watched him from a distance and put things in his way, and his own enormously fast mind. He had no initiation. He had no line. He had nothing behind him at all.

Kabīr heard what they were saying. He also heard the name they said it against, because everybody in Banaras knew who the great teacher in that city was, and where he lived, and what hour he came down to the river.

Then he went and got himself a guru. The way he did it is the next day's reading, and it is not what anybody expects.

---

A man with no teacher.

It was the only thing they ever said about him that stuck, and it stuck because it was true. He could not say whose disciple he was. In that country a man who cannot say whose disciple he is has no standing to open his mouth about God, and no amount of being right will get him any. Authority is not something a man has. It is something handed to him by somebody who was handed it, and so on backwards until the line reaches a name that everybody accepts.

So he went out and got himself a line, and how he did it is the reading for today. But before a weaver lies down on a wet stone step in the dark, the reader needs to know who was going to come down those steps in the morning, and where that man had come from, and why he of all the brahmins in Banaras was in a position to do the one thing that none of the others would have done.

The line runs south, and it runs back four hundred years.

In the year 1017, in a place called Bhūtnagarī, which people also call Perumbhūdūr, a short way north-east of Kāñcīpuram, a child was born who was called Rāmānuj. He is the largest name in the devotional history of the south. What he left behind him was not a book, though he wrote, and not a saying, though he is quoted. What he left behind him was an order: a way of worshipping God, with a daily shape to it, a rule of life, temples, an initiation, and men appointed to carry the whole arrangement forward after he was gone. He went up into the Karnataka country and set up an image of Viṣṇu in a hill town called Melkote.

His order worshipped Lakṣmī and Nārāyaṇ. That is God and his consort: the great lord of the world, and beside him the one who intercedes. A man who took initiation into that order took it into a household of two.

And it had rules, because an order is rules. This is not a criticism of it. An order without rules lasts a generation and then goes to pieces, and Rāmānuj's has lasted nine hundred years, which is the answer to anyone who thinks rules are the enemy of devotion. The rules covered the initiation, the marks a man wore, the words he said, what he ate and who he ate it with, and above all the kitchen.

The kitchen is where these things always come to a point, because the kitchen is where purity is either kept or lost. Food is the most dangerous substance in the Hindu world. It takes the condition of whoever touches it, whoever cooks it, whoever looks at it, and it carries that condition into the body of whoever eats it, where it becomes him. A man can be careful all day and undo it in one mouthful. So the rules round food in a strict Vaiṣṇava house were extremely fine, and one of them, the one this whole book turns on, concerned the food that was cooked for God.

The image is fed. That is not a metaphor and it is not thought of as one. The god in the shrine is woken, washed, dressed, fed, entertained and put to bed, every day, by men whose entire working life this is. The food offered to him is cooked by a man consecrated to cook it, and it is carried to the shrine and set down in front of him, and while he is eating a screen is drawn across so that nobody sees. Afterwards it comes back out and is shared, and it is now the best thing in the world, because God has had it first.

And the rule was this. If anyone but the cook sets eyes on that food between the kitchen and the screen, it is finished. It does not go to the god. It does not come back out and get shared. It is thrown away and the whole thing is done again.

Nine hundred years of this, in temple after temple, carefully, with nobody thinking it strange. Hold on to it. It is the thing that a certain brahmin, four generations of teachers later, was going to look at and fail to understand.

Because the thing about a line is that it has to pass through people, and people are not identical. Rāmānuj taught a man, and that man taught a man, and that man taught a man, and the fourth of them was a brahmin born at Prayāg, where the Ganges meets the Yamunā, far to the north of the image Rāmānuj had put there, and his name was Rāmānand.

He was of a Kānyakubja family of the upper country, and nothing about this man's early life is recorded except one thing, and the one thing is the strangest event in his life.

He was young, and he was observant. He kept the smṛtis, which means the whole body of rule about what a brahmin does in the morning and what he does at noon and what he touches and what he avoids, and he kept them the way a serious young man keeps them, which is exactly. He had a teacher already, a hermit, and he was that teacher's man.

One morning he was in a garden picking flowers.

This is the most ordinary work there is in that life. Somebody has to gather the flowers for the worship, and it is done early, while there is still dew on them, and it is done by hand, and the flowers are carried in a fold of cloth so that they are not bruised. A young brahmin bending over a bush at first light with wet hands is the least remarkable sight in the south of India.

Somebody had put the flowers there to be picked, and somebody would take them from him at the door, and the image would have them on it before the sun was properly up, and the next morning it would all be done again. That is the shape of a life in an order. It is not dramatic and it is not meant to be. It is the same thing every day done a little better each time, and a man can live it out from twelve years old to eighty and be no worse a man for it than anybody who ever wrote a book.

There was another man in the garden. His name was Rāghavānand, and he was a Swāmī, and he was of Rāmānuj's following. Rāmānand had not asked him anything. He had not had time to greet him.

Rāghavānand told him he had come to the end of his life, and that what he should do now was seek God's protection, because his last hour was on him.

Rāmānand went and told his teacher.

What follows is the part that people either take or do not take, and this book is not going to argue about it either way. The two of them, the young man and the old hermit, went to Rāghavānand and asked him to intervene. He was a man of jog. He knew the body from the inside, the way those men do: the nine gates of it, which are the openings anybody can count, and the tenth, which is not an opening at all and is at the top of the skull, and which is the one the breath goes out by when a man goes out on purpose.

At the critical moment Rāghavānand took Rāmānand's life breath and held it in the tenth gate.

The hour came. The hour passed. Nothing happened.

And on the other side of that hour the young man had a long life in front of him, which was not his and had not been coming to him, and which he had been given by a stranger in a garden who had spoken to him before he could get a word out.

He never went back to the hermit. He took Rāghavānand as his teacher and went into the order of Rāmānuj, fourth in the line from the man himself, and in due course he was given his own standing in it and men of his own to instruct.

It would be easy to make too much of the garden. It would be easy to say that a man who has been given his life back does not afterwards behave like other men, and that everything he did later comes out of that morning. The sources do not say it. What can be said is smaller and harder, and it is this: the one thing the record preserves about Rāmānand before he became anybody at all is that the ordinary working of things was set aside for him once, quietly, by a man with no reason to bother, and that he knew it had been.

He was going to be asked, later, whether a rule was a rule. He had seen a rule that is harder than any of theirs go round a man like water round a stone.

At some point he went north, and he went the way such men go north, which is on foot, with a water pot, by way of the places that have to be seen.

He went up to Badrikāśram, which is as far up into the mountains as a man can walk and still be walking to somewhere. The road goes out of the plain and into the hills and then into the high country where the villages are three days apart and the air thins and the pilgrims who are too old for it die on the path every season, and at the end of it there is a shrine under snow peaks in a place where nothing grows. Men go there once and talk about it for the rest of their lives. He went there, and to other places, and then he came down into the plain again and stopped at Banaras, and did not leave.

It is fair to ask why a man of an order rooted in the far south, whose teachers looked to temples a thousand miles away, came back down from the mountains and stayed in Banaras. Men of that order came north and went home again. The order was in the south, the order's great temples were in the south, and everything it held sacred lay behind him. He stopped in a city where he was nobody's kinsman, and he stayed there until he died, and every single person in this book is a consequence of that decision.

He lived at a ghāṭ called Pañcgaṅgā. The name means five rivers.

It is a long way up the river front from the burning grounds, past the great flights where the money is. The steps at Pañcgaṅgā go down steeply and there is a deep angle of stone at the bottom where the water stands, and above them the houses rise straight out of the stairs with no street between, so that a man standing in the river and looking up sees wall and window and wall going up into the light. In the evening the whole front of it is in shadow and the far bank is white with sun. The stone of those steps holds the night cold a long time after daybreak, because the sun comes up low and weak over the sand across the river and the water keeps them wet.

That is where he lived, and that is where he went down to bathe.

He went down every morning. The whole of this day turns on the regularity of it. A man who does a thing at the same hour by the same route for thirty years has made himself predictable, and being predictable is not a fault in a holy man, it is nearly the definition of one. It also means that anybody in Banaras who cared to could find out what time he came down and where he put his feet when he did.

An establishment grew up round him, as one does round any man that people come to. There would have been a building, and a kitchen in it, and disciples living in it under a rule, and the ordinary traffic of such a place: people arriving with questions, people arriving with nothing, food being cooked at fixed hours for a fixed number, somebody keeping the accounts, somebody sweeping. This is what a great teacher's house actually looks like from the outside. It looks like a household with too many people in it.

A hundred years after he died, a man sat down in the north of India to write the lives of the devotees of God, and when he came to Rāmānand he could say that the sandals were still kept at Pañcgaṅgā. Somebody had put them somewhere safe on the day he stopped needing them, and somebody had gone on keeping them, and after four generations of somebodies they were still there, and a stranger writing a book a hundred years later knew it and thought it worth putting down.

That is nearly all that is left of him as an object in the world. A pair of sandals on a shelf above a flight of steps.

Everything else he left is people.

The trouble, when it came, came over the food behind the screen.

The rule has already been given and it should be given again, because the whole of the rest of this book is downstream of one man's opinion about it. Food prepared for the image is prepared by the appointed cook. It is carried in and set down and the screen is drawn. If any eye but the cook's has fallen on it on the way, it is spoiled, and it is thrown out, and it is made again from the start.

Rāmānand did not think this was so.

He did not think it quietly, either. He said it. That is what the record carries: that he did not take this view, and that he said he did not. Which means there was a room, and there were men in it, and one of them was the senior man present, and he sat there and told them that whatever it was that happened when a man worshipped God, it was not the sort of thing that could be destroyed by somebody glancing at a tray of rice.

It is not recorded who else was in the room or what anybody answered. It is recorded that he said it, which in that setting is the entire event. A rule of that kind is not argued about. It is kept, by everybody, without discussion, and the only way to raise the question at all is to be the man who declines to keep it, in front of witnesses, and takes what follows.

You can hear the argument on the other side without any effort, because it is a good one. The rule is not about the rice. The rule is about attention. A man who will be careless with the food will be careless with the hour, and careless with the words, and in a generation the whole discipline is a memory and the temple is a place where people come to be seen. Rules like that are the fence round a field, and everybody who has ever taken down a fence has been told, correctly, that the fence was doing something.

And Rāmānand's answer, which is the answer he spent the rest of his life on, was that the field is not in that place. The rice does not carry the thing. The eye of a passing water carrier does not take the thing away. What a man is doing when he loves God is going on inside him, in a place no cook and no screen has any reach into, and to hold otherwise is to make God smaller than a kitchen.

He was not making a general attack on purity. That is worth being exact about, because it is what he will be accused of and it is not quite what happened. He was asking one question, and the question was: what has the cooking got to do with it. He never got an answer he could use. He was a man four steps down the line from Rāmānuj, in good standing, with his own disciples, and he could not see it, and he would not say he saw it.

So the order expelled him.

There is no drama recorded round the expulsion and there is no need to supply any. An order is entitled to say who is in it. A man who will not keep the rule about the food is a man who cannot be fed with the others or eat what they eat or be trusted with the shrine, and the practical effect of that is that he is already outside, and the formal act only writes it down. They put him out.

He had been given his life once by Rāghavānand and now he had lost his place, and he went to Rāghavānand about that too.

And Rāghavānand, who had heard the whole thing, and who was of Rāmānuj's following himself and had everything to lose by it, told him to go and start one of his own.

That is the second time that man appears in this story and the second time he does something nobody required of him. He does not appear again. Whatever he understood about his disciple that morning in the garden, he evidently went on understanding it, and the only thing history has kept of Rāghavānand is that twice, at the two moments when Rāmānand's life was about to close, he reached out and held it open.

So he started one of his own, and what he did with it is the reason this book exists.

He took down Lakṣmī and Nārāyaṇ and put up Sītā and Rām.

That is the first move and it looks like a small one, and it is not. Nārāyaṇ is God in his own place, the lord in the heaven of lords, formal and immense and approached through his consort because nobody approaches him directly. Rām is a man who was banished from a kingdom, walked into a forest with his wife and his brother, lost her, and got her back, and every village in the north knows the story and half the women in it have wept over the same passages their grandmothers wept over. To put Sītā and Rām at the centre of an order is to move the whole of it out of the temple courtyard and into the street where the story is sung. The name changes too, and the name is what people actually have. You cannot say Nārāyaṇ under your breath all day while you work. You can say Rām.

Then he relaxed the kitchen.

Then he did the thing that got him remembered, which is that he let anyone of any caste eat and drink together in his house.

Read that again slowly, because five hundred years of everybody agreeing that this was admirable has worn the edge off it. In Banaras, in the fifteenth century, in the house of a brahmin of an ancient southern order, a man of any caste could come in and sit down and eat off the same floor as a brahmin and drink water somebody else had touched. Not be fed at the door. Not be fed afterwards, separately, from other vessels. Eat together. There was no larger piece of machinery in that society than the one he had just switched off. Caste is not an attitude, it is a set of rules about food, water, marriage and touch, and if the rules about food and water go then the thing is broken in the place where it actually lives.

He did not do it as a gesture and he did not do it by simply ignoring the books. He argued it. He went to the śāstras and made the case out of them: that a man who has taken God's protection is not held by caste observance any longer, that it has no further work to do in him, and that to go on insisting on it in such a man is to misunderstand what has happened to him. He said that knowledge of God, gyān, cuts a man loose from every social bond there is.

He threw the door wide open and left it open.

He became the first Bairāgī, which is the name his order still carries. And then the door began to be used, and who came through it is the extraordinary part, and it repays reading the list slowly.

Anantānand. Sukhānand. Bhāvānand. And Sureśvarānand. Those four are brahmins by their names and by their training, and they are the part of the list that surprises nobody.

Then Pīpā, who was the king of a fortified state called Gagaraungarh, and who would one day take off everything he had and walk out of it.

Then Sain, a barber.

Then Dhannā, a Jāṭ, a farmer, a man who worked land with his own hands.

Then Ravidās, a Chamār of Banaras, a worker in hides, a man whose trade included carrying dead cattle out of the lanes, and whose touch was held to make water unfit to drink.

Then Kabīr, a Muslim weaver.

A king, a barber, a farmer, a tanner and a weaver, with four brahmins, in one house, in that city, eating off the same floor.

Every one of those men has come down to us with his trade attached to his name, which is itself the point. Nobody remembers what Anantānand did for a living. Everybody remembers that Sain shaved men and Dhannā ploughed and Ravidās cut leather, because in each case the trade was supposed to be the answer to the question of whether the man could be a saint, and in each case it was not.

He opened a door in a wall. The rest of this book is about the people who walked through it.

Now come back to the weaving street, where a young man has been told by the learned men of Banaras that he is nigurā, and has gone home, and is sitting in the pit with his legs in the dark and his hands in the light, and is thinking.

It was not a problem he could argue his way out of, and he knew it. He could beat a pandit on the street in front of the pandit's own neighbours, and he had, and it had got him nowhere, because the thing they were saying about him was not an argument. It was a fact about his position, and the only cure for it was to change the position. He needed a man to put a hand on his head.

There was exactly one man in Banaras whose hand would settle it, and everybody knew who he was.

And the distance between a weaver's doorway and the house above the steps at Pañcgaṅgā was not a distance you could walk. It was not a matter of nerve. Kabīr had nerve to spare and had never been short of it in his life. It was that there was no procedure. A man presents himself to a teacher and is looked over, and what is looked at first is what he is, and what Kabīr was could be established from across a courtyard by anybody, from his name, his street, his clothes and the loom callus on his hands. He was a Turk, as the word went in that city, which did not mean he came from anywhere but meant that he was on the other side of the only line that mattered. The initiation he wanted was a thing done mouth to ear. The teacher bends down to the disciple and says a word into his ear and nobody else hears it. It is the most intimate transaction in that whole religion. You do not do it across a line like that.

And there is a second thing, which Kabīr would have known better than anyone, which is that Rāmānand had already paid once for being soft about who ate in his house. A man who has been expelled from his order for relaxing the kitchen rules is not, on the face of it, going to go looking for further trouble.

Then a voice told him what to do.

No source says whose voice it was and this book is not going to improve on them. Something spoke to him. What it said was: put on the forehead mark of Rāmānand's people, and put a tulsī rosary round your neck, and go and be his disciple.

Kabīr said no.

He said the obvious thing, and it is preserved, and it is the only recorded occasion in his entire life on which he expected to lose. He said that Rāmānand would take him for a Turk and would not so much as look at his face.

Not would refuse him. Not would argue with him. Would not look at him. That is a man who has spent his whole life being looked past, and who knows precisely how it is done, and who has no intention of standing in a courtyard and having it done to him by the one person in the world he actually wants something from.

So the voice gave him a method.

And here is where this story stops behaving like anything else in the lives of the saints, and why, five hundred years later, people writing books about Kabīr have quietly turned the page. What he was given was not a discipline. It was not a prayer, not a fast, not a vow, not a teaching, not an instruction to purify himself and wait. It was a piece of practical trickery of the sort one street boy gives another.

It was this. Rāmānand goes down to the Ganges to bathe.

Go and lie down in his way.

That is all of it. Two sentences of advice, and both of them are about logistics. It contains no religion whatever. It is the kind of thing you work out by watching a man's habits for a week: he comes this way, at this hour, along this line, and he is not looking where he puts his feet because his mind is elsewhere, and if you were lying on the ground at that spot at that moment he would have to deal with you.

Kabīr took it exactly as it was given.

He did not make it noble. He did not go and fast first, or petition, or send a message ahead, or find somebody respectable to introduce him. He had been told where a man would be walking and when, and he went and lay down there. It is the same mind that took the word kāfir out of a child's mouth and handed it back with a list attached. Find the one place where the other man's own habits leave a gap, and be standing in it.

The rest of the night is the next chapter.

He went down in the last watch of the night.

The last watch is the three hours before dawn. The lanes are as empty then as they ever get in Banaras, which is not entirely empty: there is a dog somewhere, and somebody coughing in an upper room, and the men who carry milk are already out. The air off the river is cold in the months it is cold and clammy in the months it is not, and it comes up the alleys with the smell of the water in it. Nothing is open. The bells have not started.

He got to Pañcgaṅgā early enough to look the place over, which he did.

That is the whole of his character in one action. He walked down the flight in the dark and worked out the line. Where does a man come out of that house. Which way does he cross the stone. There is a flight of steps and there is one line down it that people take and another that they do not, the way there is a worn path across any yard, and it can be read by anyone who bothers to look. He looked. He chose his place.

Then he lay down on it.

The stone of a river ghāṭ in the small hours is very cold and it is wet, because the river has been on it and the dew is on it and the sun has not been on it for ten hours. It is not smooth. There is silt in the angles and there is weed where the water reaches. He lay on his back on a step at Pañcgaṅgā with his shoulder blades on wet stone and the river making the noise a river makes against stone below him, and he waited, and there was nothing to do while he waited except be cold.

He had no idea what was going to happen. There was no plan past this point. He had been told to lie in the road and he was lying in the road, and above him was the house of a man who had every reason in the world to have him moved on.

The sky over the far bank would have gone from black to the colour of ash. That is the hour.

Rāmānand came down.

He was an old man by now and he was going to the water as he had gone to the water every morning for years, and his mind was where it always was at that hour, which was on Sītā and Rām. That is what the record says, and the distinction in it matters: he was not distracted, he was occupied. He was doing the one thing he had spent his life learning to do without interruption. He came down the steps in the half dark saying the name.

His right foot came down on a man's chest.

What came out of him was Rām. Rām.

And he snatched the foot back.

Anybody would. It is what a man says when the ground turns out to have a body on it, and it is what that particular man would say because it was already in his mouth, and it is also the thing a brahmin says when he has just put his foot on a human being, which is the worst thing a foot can do. He pulled it back as fast as a man pulls his hand off a hot pan.

Down on the stone, Kabīr had what he came for.

He got up. Neither of them is recorded as saying one further word. Whatever Rāmānand did next, he did it and went on down to the river, because that was what he had come out to do, and he had stepped on a man in the dark, which happens.

Kabīr walked home saying it.

Rām. Rām. Up the steps and into the lanes with the milk carriers and the dogs and the first light coming over the roofs behind him, a weaver going home along the river front repeating two syllables he had just been given by the greatest teacher in Banaras, out of that teacher's own mouth, with the touch of that teacher's own foot on his body as the seal of it.

He had gone down to the water without a guru and he came up from the water with one.

Then he put it on, all of it, and did not hide any of it.

The mark first. Rāmānand's people wear the upright mark: two lines drawn up the forehead from the bridge of the nose towards the hairline, with the space between them, and it is put on fresh every morning with clay and water by a man who has just bathed. It is not decoration and nobody on that street would have read it as decoration. It is a statement of what house you belong to. It is worn in public precisely so that it can be read in public.

Then the tulsī round his neck, the rosary of beads cut from the wood of the basil that grows in the courtyard of every Vaiṣṇava house in India, which is worn so that it shows, at the throat, above the collarbone, where nobody can miss it.

And then the name, out loud, continuously, all day.

The reader has already seen what happened the last time this young man took up a rosary, because his mother said what she thought about it and he wrote it down. The pots. The plastered cooking square. The loom standing there with the work not done and the warp going grey in the sun. That was a household grievance about a son who would not work.

This was different and she knew it at once.

This was her son walking out of a Muslim weaver's house into a Muslim weaving street with a Hindu sect's marks on his forehead and a Hindu sect's beads on his neck, saying a Hindu name, under the eyes of every family her family had to live among and marry among for the rest of their lives. A woman in that street did not have a great many things. She had her name, her people's good opinion, and her daughters' prospects. He had just put all three of them in the road.

She let go.

There is no record of the words and there is no need for any. Anybody who has ever lived in a street of small houses knows exactly what it sounded like and how long it went on and how many doorways filled up while it did.

The record is careful about how far the noise carried, and it is the one detail in the whole story that tells you what the volume was. It went up the river front and reached Rāmānand's establishment. A woman shouting in a weaver's doorway in the lanes behind Pañcgaṅgā was heard in the house at the top of the steps, or was repeated until it got there, which comes to the same thing and may be worse. It travelled. Somebody in that establishment came and reported to somebody else that there was an uproar in the weavers' quarter about a boy going round in their marks.

And in the middle of it somebody asked him the question.

Who gave you all this.

It is the right question and it is the only question, and it was asked, we may be sure, in the tone in which you ask a child where he got the money. Who gave you the mark. Who put the beads on you. Who taught you the name. These are not things a man picks up in the market. Somebody has to hand them over, and whoever handed them over to a Muslim weaver has some explaining to do.

Kabīr told them.

Rāmānand.

He said it flatly and he went on saying it, and he was not lying and he was not being clever. He had it from Rāmānand. He had it out of the man's own mouth, at Pañcgaṅgā, before dawn, with the man's foot on his chest. Every single element of it was true and there was not one person in Banaras who would believe a word of it.

Which is how the weaver got his hearing. He could never have got in through the front of that house by asking. He got in because a respectable establishment had a problem: there was a Muslim in the lanes going round in their marks claiming their teacher, and it had to be stopped, and in order to stop it somebody had to send for him.

They sent for him.

Rāmānand ordered him brought, and the thing that had to be settled was put very plainly. When had he ever made such a man a disciple.

The weaver was brought up the steps he had lain on and into the house at the top of them. He would have been looked at on the way in by everybody in that courtyard, and he would have known exactly what the looking was.

They hung a cloth.

It was put up between the two of them across the room, so that the old man could question the young one without the two of them being in each other's presence, and the young one answered a sheet.

Nobody in that room needed it explained and nobody explained it. It had been brought out, and hung, and no doubt hung neatly, by somebody whose job it was, in the way such a thing is done in a house where it has been done before. This was not anger and it was not even discourtesy by the standards of the house. It was housekeeping.

From his own side of it, Rāmānand asked, and Kabīr answered, and what he gave him was the whole of it from the beginning, in order, leaving nothing out. The voice. His own objection, which he did not soften: he had said this man would take him for a Turk and would not look at his face. The instruction. The hour. The steps. Where he had lain and why he had lain there.

Then he made his argument, and it was an argument out of the books, which is the last place anyone expected a weaver to go.

He said that every book there is names Rām as the great mantra. Every one. Go and look. The Vedas say it, the Purāṇas say it, the men on this side of the cloth have been saying it all their lives and have written it down in every form of words they have. There is no dispute anywhere about what the great mantra is. It is that name.

And then he put the thing down on the floor between them.

At that hour before dawn, he said, on that step of the Ganges, you spoke the name of Rām with the touch of your own foot on my chest.

There was nobody else there. The lanes were empty and the river front was empty and the sky had not come up. There was you, and there was me, and there was that step.

I am the only man alive who heard it.

And past that great mantra, which you have just admitted is the great mantra, and which I have from your own mouth, at that hour, in that place, with nobody in the world between us: what is left for you to teach me?

There is no answer to it. There is no answer to it from inside the books and there is no answer to it from outside the books. He had not asked to be let in. He had not petitioned, or pleaded his case, or asked for an exception to be made for him on the grounds that he was sincere. He had come in through the one gap in the whole edifice that nobody had thought to close, which was that a man saying the name of God out loud in the dark does not get to choose who hears him, and having come through it he was standing on the inside, arguing from the rule, and the rule was on his side.

And behind the cloth an old man began to be delighted.

That is the word the account uses, and it should be taken as it stands. He was not cornered and he was not persuaded against his will and he did not give in. He was delighted. It is the pleasure of a man who has spent fifty years arguing with people who were not listening, hearing a case put from an unexpected direction and put well.

He said the conviction was sound. He said: keep that name in your heart. Serve God and serve God's people.

Then he put up his hand and pulled the cloth down.

And came round and took hold of him.

That is the story, and it has been carried for four hundred years, and a great many of the books that tell Kabīr's life do not tell it.

The account that carries most of the facts in this book, written out in English at the beginning of the last century by a man who went to Banaras himself and walked round the lake at Lahartārā in December and counted the steps, knew this episode perfectly well. He says so. He says that the great old book of the lives of the devotees contains a story describing how Kabīr came to be Rāmānand's disciple, and that he is not going to print it, because it is derogatory to both saints.

Then he goes on to the next thing.

Sit with that for a moment, because it is not stupidity and it is not dishonesty. The man was careful and he was fond of his subject, and he had every intention of doing right by both of them. He read this story and what he saw in it was two good men coming off badly.

You can see his difficulty without any effort at all.

Rāmānand comes out of it worst of anybody. He is the greatest teacher in the holy city, he is four generations down from Rāmānuj, he has an establishment and disciples and a rule of life, and in this story he acquires the most famous disciple in the history of northern India by treading on him in the dark. He does not discern anything. He does not look into the young man's face and see what he is. He is not even told what is happening until weeks later when the noise reaches his kitchen. He is walking along thinking about God, and he steps on somebody, and he says the word a man says, and that word turns out to have been an initiation. He is not the agent of it. He is the instrument, and he is an unwitting one, and the only person in the story who knows what is going on is the boy lying on the ground.

Now look at what Kabīr does. He is told to lie in the road. He lies in the road. He is not praying while he lies there and he is not being purified while he lies there. He is waiting for an old man to trip over him, because he has worked out that this is the one way into a house that will not open its door to him. And when he is brought up to answer for it, he wins, not by holiness, but by being a better lawyer than the men on the other side of the sheet.

A guru who was tricked. A disciple who tricked him. A Muslim weaver flat on his back on a wet step at four in the morning with his eye on the stairs.

Set that beside the ordinary shape of these stories, where the teacher sees at once, and the disciple waits at the gate for twelve years in the rain, and the recognition when it comes is mutual and full of dignity, and you can understand a man deciding that the ordinary shape is more fitting and turning the page.

Whether it is derogatory is for the reader to decide, and the reader now has it in front of him, which is the only honest arrangement.

This book will say only this. Everything true about Kabīr is in that story. He would not ask, because asking meant standing there while they looked past him. He would not lie, and he never once lied about how he got it: he told them the whole thing, foot and all, in front of the household. He took what he wanted from a man who did not know he was giving it, and he was right that it had been given, because the name is not the property of the man saying it. And the old brahmin, who in the polite version would have been diminished, is in this version the only man in Banaras who could hear an argument like that from a weaver and be pleased by it instead of having him thrown into the street.

Neither of them comes out small. They come out looking like themselves.

He had the name now. What he did with it took the rest of his life, and it is not what the man who gave it to him would have expected.

Rāmānand came down those steps saying Sītā-Rām. That is a particular Rām and everybody on the river front knew which one. He is the prince of Ajodhyā, son of king Daśarath, husband of the woman whose name goes in front of his own, the one who lost her and crossed the water to get her back. He has a face. He has a bow. He has a mother who was wronged and a brother who would not stay behind. A man who says Sītā-Rām is holding a person in mind, and the whole of the devotion of the north runs on exactly that and has produced some of the most beautiful things human beings have made.

Kabīr took those two syllables off the step and emptied them.

He said it outright, and he said it in words nobody could get round. The Rām he was saying was not the son of Daśarath. Not a version of him. Not him understood rightly. Not him, at all. The name, he said, was not the name of somebody.

This is the hardest thing in Kabīr and it is where people have always gone wrong with him, because a name with nobody behind it sounds like an admission that there is nobody there. He meant the reverse, and he was savage about the misunderstanding. What he would not allow was that the thing could be got at through any shape whatever. Not an image, which is stone. Not a story, which is words. Not a body, not a birth, not a family, not a face, not a description anybody could give to a man who had not seen it. Nirguṇa, without qualities: the moment you have said anything about it you have said something else. Against that stands saguṇa, God with attributes, God with a history, God you can love the way you love a man, which is where nearly everyone else in this story stood and where the greatest of them stood without apology.

He went further than doubting the images. He went behind the world to find the place where there had not yet been anything to make an image of, and he sang from there:

There were no eighty thousand prophets.

There were no holy men, not one of the eighty-eight thousand.

There was no moon and no sun and there were no stars.

There was no Fish and no Tortoise.

There was no Veda and no Book and no law.

There was nothing anybody had done wrong and nothing anybody had done right.

There was no call to prayer and there was no creed.

There was no Rām and there was no Khudā.

The last line costs him something. He has swept the whole floor clean, the Hindu furniture and the Muslim furniture together, and he has finished by removing both of the names, including his own. The name he said all day for a hundred and nineteen years, he puts in the list of things that were not there.

Which is precisely the distinction he wanted. The name is not the thing. The name is what has been left for us to work with on this side, and the thing was there before the name and will be there after it, and a man who confuses the two has made himself an idol out of a syllable, which is no better than making one out of a stone and is a good deal harder to notice.

And from that position, both religions look identical, and he said so with enormous satisfaction:

The Hindu says Rām belongs to him.

The Turk says Rahmān belongs to him.

The two of them have spent their whole lives fighting about it.

Neither of them has understood a word.

That is not a call for the two to be friends and it has been read as one for centuries. He is not saying both names reach the same God, which would be a generous and comfortable thing to say and would have got him a much easier life. He is saying that both men are talking about a possession. Mine. My Rām, my Rahmān. The argument is not about God at all, it is about ownership, and they will never settle it because there is nothing there to own.

So the weaver walked home from Pañcgaṅgā in the dawn saying the name of a man he did not believe in, and went on saying it for a century, and meant by it something his own guru had never put into it. He had taken the coin and spent it on something else. Which may be the most Kabīr thing in this entire book.

So what is a man doing when he says it, if there is nobody at the other end of it with a face?

He was asked this, in one form or another, for the rest of his life, and his answers are the most practical thing in him. He never once described God. He described what happens.

Start with the nām, the name. He treated it as a tool that works, in the way a shuttle works, and he was contemptuous of anyone who wanted to be told why before using it. It costs nothing. It requires no permission, no vessel, no priest, no fitness, no caste, no hour, no place, no language you have to be taught. It can be done by a woman with her hands in the washing and by a man with his legs down a hole in the floor and by somebody who cannot read, which is most people, which was the whole of his point. He said the world was going down for the want of it while the people who could have handed it over were busy selling other things.

But he distinguished, and the distinction is the part Day One did not reach.

Saying the name is work. You do it, and you get tired, and you forget, and you start again. That is the beginning and he never despised it. What he was after is the place where it stops being something you do. There is a state in which it goes on by itself, all day and through sleep, with nobody driving it, the way the pulse goes on, and at that point the man is not repeating a name any more. He is listening to one.

That is where the śabda comes in, the word, and it is not the same as the name and he did not use the two loosely. The name is what goes out of you. The word is what comes in. It is not language. It is not a sentence God speaks in Hindi. It is the sound from the other side, the thing that was going before you started, and the entire discipline is not to make it but to get quiet enough to catch it. He used the plain verb every time. Not receive it, not conceive it, not attain it. Hear it.

And when it arrives it arrives in sahaj.

The jogis had already had that word for a long time and Kabīr took it off them with no thanks. It means the state that is simply natural, the one that needs no apparatus: not achieved, not held up by effort, not lost when you stop trying, because you were not trying. They meant it as the far end of a very long technical road, past the postures and the breath and the knots along the spine. He meant it as the thing itself and said the road was unnecessary. You do not get to sahaj by force. Nothing forced is sahaj, by definition, and a man straining to be natural is the funniest sight in religion. He said it came the way sleep comes, which nobody has ever achieved by wrestling.

And because it cannot be arrived at along a road, it cannot be described as a destination either, which is why the language goes strange whenever he comes near it. He will talk about a tree that stands up without roots and bears fruit without ever having flowered, and tomorrow's reading is full of that kind of speech.

Nobody can draw a thing like that and he did not want it drawn. Every image in it has been taken away from itself. What is left when you have subtracted all of it is the one thing he is pointing at, and the only honest way to point at it is to say something that cannot be true.

Then, usually, he would stop being subtle and sign his name to something flat and hard, which is what he did whenever the talk had gone up too high for the street. Two and a half letters spell love. Read those and you have read enough. He had a weaver's sense of when a piece was finished.

There is one more thing in his teaching, and it is the strangest, and it comes straight out of that morning on the steps.

He made a claim for the guru that is larger than anything else he ever said about anybody. Larger than what he said about the books, larger than what he said about the temples, and it sits very oddly in the mouth of a man who spent his life telling people that nothing stands between them and God.

The word he used is satguru. The true teacher.

And he did not mean an instructor. That is the whole difficulty. A weaver who has publicly declared that the Veda is worth nothing, that a mosque is a pile of stones, that pilgrimage is a walk and fasting is going hungry, has no obvious use for a man to explain things to him. He was not short of explanations. He had heard every school in north India go past his door.

What he meant by the satguru is not a man teaching. It is the thing itself arriving, in the shape of a man, at a particular hour, in a particular place, where you happen to be lying.

Put it beside what actually occurred and it stops being mysterious. Rāmānand did not instruct him. Rāmānand gave him nothing he could not have heard shouted across any courtyard in Banaras on any morning of the year. Half the city said that name all day long. There was no secret in it, no technique, no doctrine, nothing that had to be handed over in private. And yet a word that had been in the air of that city his entire life came out of that particular mouth at that particular moment and went into him and did not come out again. That is not information changing hands. Something arrived.

So he said the enormous thing, and he said it in a couplet that people in the north still repeat and still argue about:

The guru is standing here and God is standing here,

and whose feet do I take first?

I take the guru's. I will take the guru's.

He is the man who pointed out God to me.

Read it slowly, because it is not a compliment. It is a ruling. He is standing in front of God, with God present, in the body, available, and he is asked to choose, and he chooses the other one, and he gives his reason and his reason is not affection. It is that without the guru he would not have known which one God was. God was there the whole time. God was there while he lay on the step and God was there while he was being called a kāfir in the street at six years old. What he did not have was the one who pointed, and everything he ever knew came in through that pointing, and you do not step over the man who did it in order to get to the thing he did it towards.

It is the only authority Kabīr ever accepted from another human being, and he took it from a man who did not know he had given it, in the dark, by accident, which makes the claim stranger rather than weaker. He is not saying that a guru is a gate you must be admitted through by someone with the keys. He said the opposite of that all his life and he had walked round that gate himself. He is saying that what happened to him on that stone was not his own doing, that he did not think his way to it or earn it or deserve it, and that the debt is owed to the person it came through, whatever that person knew about it at the time.

And he was consistent about it afterwards in the one way that costs something. When a famous disputant came to Banaras with ox-loads of books to destroy him and was destroyed instead, and asked on the spot to be made Kabīr's disciple, Kabīr would not take him. He sent him up the steps to Pañcgaṅgā to be initiated by the old man, which is the story for another day. He had one guru and he knew where the line ran and he was not going to start a second one out of his own doorway.

He had spent his youth being told he had nobody behind him.

He was not going to set up as anybody's guru either. He was going to be his teacher's disciple, loudly, in public, for the rest of his life, and he said so at the very end, dying in a strange town where dying was held to be worthless, with his teacher called to witness in his last song.

Now put them all in one room, because they were, and because nothing else in the fifteenth century looked like it.

There is Ravidās, who lived a few lanes away and worked in hides. He was a Chamār of Banaras. His trade was buying leather, cutting it, and making shoes, and the same trade in that city meant going out when word came and carrying a dead cow out of a lane, because nobody else would touch it and somebody had to. He was the most polluting kind of man the city recognised. He was also, as anybody who met him found out inside ten minutes, one of the clearest minds in it, and he never once apologised for his work or pretended to be something else. He said in his own songs that he was a tanner and famously a tanner, and then said what he thought about God, and let the two stand side by side. Whenever a holy man came past his door he gave him shoes and would not take money for them. He gets two days of this book to himself and they come later.

There is Pīpā, who at this stage of his life is a king. He held a state called Gagaraungarh, with a fort, and he worshipped Durgā, and he was by every account a capable ruler and a brave one. He will walk out of the whole of it, give the money away, come to Banaras, be refused at the door on the grounds that a teacher's house is for faqīrs and what is a king doing here, go home, give away what was left, come back and say that he was now a faqīr, and be told to throw himself down a well. He went at it without stopping to think and they caught him. That is the last day of this book.

There is Sain, a barber, who worked at the court of Rewa. A barber in that world is not only a barber. He shaves and cuts and he also carries messages, arranges marriages, knows every household's business and touches everybody, high and low, because he has to. He is in the room because a man who shaved a raja's face for a living turned out to be somebody Rāmānand wanted.

And there is Dhannā, a Jāṭ, a farmer, a man who worked his own land with his own hands. There is a hymn of his in which he asks God for what he wants, and it is worth knowing what a farmer in fifteenth-century India asked God for, since nearly everything else in these books is about renunciation. He asked for lentils. He asked for flour and for ghee to put on it. He asked for a good mare. He asked for a good wife. He asked, in other words, for a life: enough to eat, something to ride, somebody to come home to. He put it to God directly and without embarrassment and somebody thought it good enough to write down and keep for five hundred years, which it is.

Now look at the room.

A brahmin of an ancient southern order is sitting in it, and there are four more brahmins in it whose names are in the list. There is a man who shaves faces, a man who ploughs, a man who cuts up dead cattle, a man who weaves, and a man who rules a kingdom. They are eating together. They are drinking water out of the same vessels. Nobody is being fed round the back. Nobody is being handed his food on a leaf at the edge of the courtyard and told to take it away.

That was not a thing that happened. It is difficult to convey how much it was not a thing that happened. Everything in the society they had all been born into was arranged to make it impossible: the well you may draw from, the door you may stand inside, the plate that must be broken afterwards, the distance at which your shadow becomes an insult. It was not an opinion people held that could be changed by arguing with them. It was the plumbing of daily life, worked out to the inch, and enforced by everybody on everybody, including by the poor on the poorer.

And a brahmin at the top of a flight of steps in the holiest city in the world had thrown it out of his house on the grounds that it had nothing to do with God.

He paid for it. He was expelled from his own order and died outside it and his order has never taken him back, because he never asked. Whether he understood what he had started is not recorded. Probably not. Men who open doors seldom do. He was arguing about a tray of rice and a screen, and four hundred years later the songs of the weaver and the tanner who came through that door are sung by people who have never heard of Rāmānuj, in villages where nobody could tell you what a Bairāgī is.

One more thing about that room, because it comes back at the end of this book. When Pīpā had gone home to his kingdom to serve holy men for a year, and wrote to remind his teacher of a promise, Rāmānand came to Gagaraungarh, and he did not come alone. He came with forty of his chosen disciples, and the two who are named in the party are the weaver and the tanner.

So they travelled together, on the roads, in the dust, the old brahmin and his forty, with a Muslim weaver and a Chamār among them, and at the end of the road a king came out of his fortress with a palanquin and put his face on the ground in front of each of them in turn.

He died at Banaras, at a great age.

That is the whole of it. There is no scene, no last words, no year, no month, no disciple sitting up with him, no account of who was in the room. For the founder of one of the largest religious orders in India, a man whose disciples include four of the best-known saints in the country, that is an astonishing silence, and it is not an accident.

His own order keeps what it knows of him to itself. It has done so from the beginning, deliberately, as a matter of practice, and it has never been talked out of it. Whatever they have about him they consider theirs. So a man who could be asked and could answer has been sitting in Banaras for five hundred years declining to, and the rest of us have what the outside could see.

When he lived can be said only by working backwards through other people. He stands fourth in the line of teachers from Rāmānuj, which is four generations of men, and Rāmānuj was born in 1017. And the weaver who lay down on his steps was born in 1398, and was a young man when he did it. Put those two facts at either end and pull them tight, and Rāmānand comes out at the close of the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth, and that is as close as anyone will ever get.

The arithmetic runs backwards. The teacher is dated from the disciple. The one fixed point in the whole calculation is the birthday of a foundling picked up off a water lily at the edge of a lake by a Muslim weaver, and the reason it is fixed is that his own people counted the years from it afterwards and have never stopped counting. The man at the top of the steps is dated by the man on the steps.

There is one object. A hundred years after he was gone, when somebody sat down to write the lives of the devotees of God, the sandals were still at Pañcgaṅgā, and it was worth recording that they were. Somebody had put them aside on the last day and somebody had gone on keeping them through four generations of people who had never seen him wear them.

Everything else is what he let happen.

What that was can be said plainly, because the man is mostly a door in this book and doors are easy to walk through without looking at. He was born into an order that had worked out in nine hundred years of careful practice exactly who may eat what, and where, and in whose sight. He kept it for most of his life. Then he was asked to agree that a tray of food could be ruined by a glance, and he would not, and he said so out loud in a room full of his seniors, and they put him out, and he was an old man by then with nowhere else to be.

And instead of doing what an expelled man usually does, which is to keep the whole apparatus and simply argue that he was right about the one rule, he went the other way entirely. He looked at the fence he had just been thrown over and concluded that the field was not in there at all. So he opened the kitchen. He opened the water. He opened the door of his house to any man who came to it, and he sat down and ate with a barber and a tanner and a weaver in the city of Śiv, and when the pandits came to him about it he did not plead for indulgence. He fetched the books out and made them argue it with him on their own ground, and told them that a man who has taken God's protection is loose from the whole of it, and that this is what their own books say if they will read them.

He did not write a movement and he did not write a manifesto. He wrote almost nothing at all. A century and a half later, when men in the Panjab were gathering everything worth keeping into a scripture, they went looking through the compositions of Rāmānand, the founder, the first Bairāgī, the teacher of Kabīr and Ravidās and Pīpā and Sain and Dhannā, and they found one hymn.

One. It is the last thing in this day's reading.

It is a small song and it is about a man who set out to go somewhere and did not go.

He is getting ready for worship, and the getting ready is the beautiful part, because he does it properly. He grinds the sandalwood, which is done by hand on a wet stone until there is a little grey paste at the bottom of it and the whole room smells of it. He fetches the aloe wood for the smoke. He gathers the perfumes. All of this is real work and it takes time and it is the work he has done every day of his life, and there is no irony in it anywhere. He is a brahmin of an ancient order preparing to go to the temple.

And on the way out of the door it ends.

Where am I to go? I am happy where I am.

My heart will not come with me.

One day I did have it in mind to go.

I ground the sandal, I took the aloe wood and all the perfumes,

and I was on my way to worship God in a temple,

and my teacher showed him to me inside my own chest.

Wherever I go now it is water, or it is stones.

You are in every bit of it the same.

I have been all through the Vedas and the Purāṇas looking.

Go there yourself, if he is not here.

That last line is the whole of him.

Nothing has been said against the sandalwood. He does not tell the reader that grinding it was a waste, or that the temple is a fraud, or that the men going down the lane with their trays are fools. That is not his voice and it never was. He simply stops, on his own doorstep, holding everything he needs, because the errand has been cancelled from inside.

It is said to somebody. There is another man in the room, and the other man is on his way out, and he has stopped at the door and turned round to ask why his teacher is still sitting down. And the answer he gets is not a sermon. It is nearly rude, in the mildest possible voice. You go, if you think he is not in this room.

Everything he did comes out of that sentence, and now it can be seen from the other end. A man who has found God inside his own chest is not going to throw out a tray of rice because somebody looked at it on the way past. He is not going to refuse a barber at his door. He is not going to keep two sets of vessels. The rules were built to guard a distance, and he has just reported that there is no distance, and a fence round nothing is only a fence.

Wherever I go it is water or it is stones. He had gone as far as a man could go. He had walked up into the mountains to the shrine under the snow and walked down again and settled by the river, and he had spent the whole of his life among the greatest concentration of holiness in the world, and what he had to say about all of it was that it was water, or it was stones, and that God was equally in the lot of it and equally at home where he was sitting.

And listen to who does the showing. My teacher showed him to me. Not the temple. Not the śāstras, which he had been through and which had not done it. A man.

That is where the weaver got it.

Because on a cold step at Pañcgaṅgā, in the last watch of a night, this old man came down to the water with the name in his mouth and put his foot on somebody lying in the dark, and what he said then he never knew he had said. And the man on the ground got up and walked home with it, and spent a hundred years telling the pandits of Banaras that their stones were stones and their river was water, and that the thing they were all looking for was already in them, and that he had it from his teacher.

Which is what his teacher had said. In the one song anybody ever managed to get out of him.

---

A weaver's day starts in the dark and it starts with the yarn.

Somebody in the house has to wind it. The spun cotton comes in skeins, and it cannot go into a shuttle as a skein; it has to be wound onto small reeds, one reed at a time, turning a wheel with one hand and guiding the thread with the other so that it lies even and does not snarl when it is running out at speed between the threads of the warp. The job goes to whoever has the smallest hands and the most patience, which means the children and the women, and it goes on for hours, and a household that runs out of wound reeds in the middle of the morning has a man sitting idle in a hole in the floor with nothing to throw.

So the wheel is going before there is light to see by, and the sound of the wheel is the first sound in a weaving street, and after it comes the sound of the water.

The warp has to be made. This is the long business, and it is done outside, because nothing inside a one-room house is long enough. Pegs are driven into the ground down the length of the lane and the thread is walked back and forth between them, hundreds of threads laid side by side, counted, kept in order, and then brushed over with boiled rice paste from end to end so that every thread is stiffened and will stand the rubbing it is going to get. Then it is left in the sun. In the hot months it dries in an hour. In the cold months the mist sits on it until the middle of the morning and everybody waits.

While it is drying nobody can walk down the middle of the lane. This is why a weaving quarter looks the way it does. There are long pale shining lengths of thread stretched at knee height down the whole street, and men walking with loads on their heads step over them without breaking stride and without looking down, and a dog that runs through one is shouted at by four houses at once.

Then it goes on the loom, and the man goes into the pit.

He sits on the edge with a plank under him and his legs down in the trench and his feet on the treadles. The warp comes in through the doorway from the street. He presses one treadle, half the threads lift, a gap opens across the whole width of the cloth, and he throws the shuttle through it, catches it, and beats the new thread home with the comb. Then the other treadle. The gap opens the other way, back goes the shuttle, down comes the comb. Four thousand times, five thousand times, six thousand times, and there is a piece of cloth.

It is loud and it is regular and after the first hour a man stops hearing it. That is the whole trouble with weaving, or the whole gift of it, depending on what sort of man is in the pit. The hands are busy and the feet are busy and the eyes have to watch the selvedge, and none of it wants the head. The head is left over. It has ten hours of daylight and nothing to do, and it will do something.

In Kabīr's house, by his middle years, what it did was talk to God, out loud, with the comb going.

The cloth came off the loom in the evening and somebody had to sell it. That was the market, and the market was a man sitting on the ground in a line of other men sitting on the ground with lengths of cotton across their knees, waiting for buyers to come along and pick things up and pull at the edge of them and say what they thought. The weaver has made a thing that took him nine days and he will be told in nine seconds what it is worth. He has no stock and no store and nowhere to put it if he does not sell. Rent is due, thread has to be bought for the next warp, and the family has eaten the last of the grain. So he takes what he is offered.

Everybody in that street knew this and nobody in the city that bought the cloth knew it or wanted to.

Set the household beside the trade and you can see where the strain fell. Nīrū and Nīmā were old. There was a wife. There was the boy Kamāl. There was a loom that fed all of them and needed a man in it from first light. And there was Kabīr, who had the fastest mouth in Banaras and a house that had become a place where holy men called, and who bought new cooking pots every single morning so that the strictest of them could eat under his roof, and who was very often not in the pit at all.

He wove. He did it well enough that a broker would take his cloth, and it is known the price he asked for it, which is more than can be said for almost any other poor man of that century. But the weaving came second and everybody in the house could see that it came second, and the money came in unevenly, and the thread went grey in the lane while he sat inside with somebody in ochre robes.

He is not being defended here. It is simply worth knowing, before the rest of this day, what the arrangement actually was. The man who said the freest things ever said in that city said them out of a pit in the floor of a rented room, in a trade where a bad month is a hungry month, supported by people who had not volunteered for it. The freedom was real. The bill for it was paid by the household, in cloth.

He took a piece of cloth to market one day and asked five double paise for it.

He had worked out what it cost him and what his time was worth and he named that, and it was the truth, and he stood there with it. Nobody would give him five. They offered three. They went on offering three all morning, because he was a weaver alone with one piece of cloth and it was obvious he had to sell it, and three is what a man is offered when the whole line of buyers can see he is going home either way.

A broker was watching. A broker in that market was a man who took other men's cloth and got a price for it and kept a share, and he knew the trade in a way that Kabīr, for all his hands, did not. He saw what was happening. He saw a weaver selling a good piece at a bad price because he had made the mistake of saying what it was worth.

He picked the cloth up and asked twelve.

Nobody gave twelve. Of course nobody gave twelve. The buyers came back at seven, and at seven the bargain was struck, and the cloth went away with a man who was pleased with himself for having beaten a greedy broker down by five.

Kabīr got seven for a piece he had valued at five, and he had got it by the one method he had spent his life attacking.

Nothing in that morning is unusual. It happens in every market in the world every day and it will happen tomorrow. What is unusual is that a man in a weaving street noticed it and turned it in his hands and found the whole of human dealing inside it, and put it into a couplet that has been going round the north of India ever since:

I told you the truth and you beat me down for it.

Lie, and the world is delighted with you.

A sheet worth five double paise

was sold, in the end, for seven.

There is no moral on the end of that. He does not say the buyers were wicked. He does not say the broker was wicked; the broker was the only person present who did anything for him. He does not even say he was right to ask five. He says what happened, in the order it happened, and stops.

And because he stops, the thing goes on working. Anyone who has ever quoted a fair price and watched the room go quiet knows the couplet is about him. Anyone who has ever padded a figure because it is expected knows it is about him. The priest reciting a genealogy at the top of the steps knows it. The man who tells a pilgrim what a ceremony costs knows it.

That is the sākhī doing what a sākhī does. It is two lines of witness out of an ordinary Tuesday, and it goes into the head like a nail, and it is waiting there years later on the morning somebody does it to you.

It also tells you something about him that the hymns do not. He was in the market. He was not being supported by a king or a monastery or a fund. He had made the cloth with his own legs and he had to get money for it from men who had no interest in him at all, and when they treated him the way markets treat people he did not get up and denounce them. He went home and made a couplet about it, and he put the joke on himself, because the man in the couplet who looks like a fool is the man who told the truth.

He came back to the market the next week. There was nowhere else to go. And as far as anybody can tell he went on asking what he thought a thing was worth, and went on being offered three, for the rest of his working life, which is either very stupid or the whole of his teaching in one habit, and he would not have seen much difference between the two.

A faqīr stopped him on the road and asked for something to cover himself with.

Kabīr had a piece of cloth. It was the piece he was taking to market and it was that week's money and the house was waiting for it. He did what a reasonable man does when he is asked for more than he has: he offered half. He was ready to tear it across and hand over one half and sell the other, and half a length of Banaras cotton is not a small gift from a man who has nothing else in his hands.

The faqīr said half was not enough.

No dialogue is recorded after that. Kabīr gave him the whole piece and the faqīr went away with it.

Then Kabīr did not go home. He could not. He had nothing to carry in and nothing to put down and nothing to say, and the thought of the room and the loom and his mother's face was more than he could manage, so he went and hid. A man of enormous nerve who had faced down the learned men of Banaras in public hid from an old woman in a weaving street, and anyone who has ever come home without the money will understand it exactly.

While he was hiding, a corn merchant arrived at his house with ox-loads of grain and had it unloaded at the door.

Nīmā came out. She had been managing that household for a lifetime on very little and she knew what charity looked like and she would not have it. She stood in front of the sacks and told the man that her son did not take a single grain from anybody, and asked him who he thought he was, throwing all this down at her door.

She meant it. It is the one recorded speech of hers besides the song, and both of them are about the same thing, which is a woman defending a house that is being carried away from her by other people's piety. She would rather have had nothing at the door than that. Nothing at the door was at least hers.

Men went and found Kabīr and brought him home.

He gave the grain away. All of it, to the holy men who came to the house, in the usual way, and the ox-loads went out again in handfuls, and the house was where it had been the day before.

That is the story, and it has an edge on it that is easy to miss if it is read as a lesson about generosity. Look at where everybody is standing at the end of it. The faqīr is warm. The holy men have eaten. Kabīr has given away a fortune twice in one day, once in cloth and once in grain. And Nīmā is standing in the doorway of a house with no cloth and no grain and no money, having been overruled, by her son, in front of the street.

He does not hide that from us. It is there in the account because he did not mind it being there. He never once produced a version of his life in which the cost fell on him alone. The cost fell on the people who lived with him, and it is written down, and he let it be written down.

There is a hardness in him here that the gentle pictures do not carry. A man who gives away half of what he has is doing something admirable and calculable. A man who is told that half is not enough and hands over the whole has stopped calculating, and a man who has stopped calculating is dangerous to live with. Kabīr knew this about himself and never corrected it. It was not that he was generous the way a rich man is generous, by settling on a figure and keeping to it. The figure never got settled. Whatever happened to be in his hands when somebody asked was what that person got, and there was no floor under it.

The household saw all of it go, several times, and stayed. That is a different kind of courage and nobody made a song about it.

The grain went out of that house in hundreds of maunds, which is a great deal of grain, and every sack of it went to faqīrs and wandering holy men and the kind of people who sleep under a tree. Not one grain of it went to a brahmin.

In Banaras that was not an oversight. It was a statement, and the brahmins read it correctly.

The feeding of brahmins was the religious economy of that city. A householder with a death in the family fed brahmins. A man with a sin on him fed brahmins. A pilgrim discharged his vow by feeding brahmins. It was not a sideline; it was the mechanism by which merit was bought and by which several thousand families ate. And here was a Muslim weaver with a sudden windfall of corn, giving it out at his door to anybody in a patched coat, in quantities the priesthood could count from the end of the lane, and passing the priesthood over as though it were not there.

They came in a body.

What they said is recorded and it is worth having in their own order, because they do not begin with religion. They begin with his manners. Weaver, they said, you have grown proud. You have given to low-caste faqīrs and to Śūdras. Leave the city.

He asked them what he had done. He asked it flatly and with a straight face, the way he asked everything, and he made them list the offence. Have I broken into a house? Have I robbed anyone on the road?

No. He had honoured faqīrs instead of them. That was the whole charge and they said so without embarrassment, because in their world it was a real charge and it did not need dressing up. Make us an offering, they said, or go.

So there it is, said out loud in front of witnesses: pay us or leave. The holiest city on earth, the trident, the river running north out of respect, the release promised to anyone who dies inside the line, and at the bottom of it, on a weaver's doorstep, a demand for money with a threat behind it.

He did not argue and he did not pay. He said they could have the house.

Then he walked out of Banaras and went a long way off into the forest, and for a time nobody knew where he was.

What he had just handed over was one room with a trench in the floor, and it was everything he owned, and it was the only place in the city where a wandering brahmin could eat food cooked by a Muslim, which had cost him a new set of pots every morning for years. He gave it to the men who had come to take it, and left, without a speech. It is the most Kabīr thing in the whole day. He would not buy them off, and he would not defend the house, and he would not stand there and be told what he owed. He put the thing down and walked away from it, and by walking away he made them owners of a hut and nothing else.

What happened next he did not arrange.

People in Banaras who thought well of him found out what had been done. They went to the brahmins and gave them money, and gave them provisions, and went on giving until the brahmins had far more than they had asked for. The quarrel was settled by the neighbours over the heads of both parties. And the effect of it was the exact opposite of what the complainants had wanted: by the time it was over, every street in the city was talking about the weaver who had been driven out for feeding the poor, and his name was louder in Banaras after he left than it had ever been while he was in it.

A holy man went out to the forest and found him and brought him home.

He came back to the same room and the same loom and the same street, and as far as anyone can tell he never mentioned the business again. But the brahmins of Banaras had now tried three things on him. They had tried argument, and been beaten in public. They had tried the one word they had, which was that he had no teacher, and he had gone and got a teacher. Now they had tried to price him out of the city, and the city had paid for him.

They were running out of methods that could be used by private persons. What was left was the sort of method that requires the state, and in time the state came to Banaras with an army and a fever, and they were ready for it.

There was a brahmin called Sarvajīt who had beaten everybody.

He was a professional disputant, which was a real occupation and a respected one. A man of that sort travelled from centre to centre, presented himself, was given an opponent, argued in public before an audience that knew the rules, and went on to the next place with his reputation a little larger. It was how a scholar made a name and how a patron chose which scholar to keep. The name Sarvajīt means one who conquers everything, and whether he was born with it or took it up along the way, he had earned the use of it.

His mother told him he had not finished. There was Banaras, and until he had taken Banaras he had taken nothing.

So he came, and he came properly. He brought his books on oxen. Several cartloads of them, bound bundles of palm leaf and paper, the accumulated apparatus of a lifetime of winning: the grammars, the commentaries, the commentaries on the commentaries, everything a man might need to prove anything in front of anybody. It must have been an impressive thing to watch coming up the road, and it was meant to be.

Somewhere on the way in he passed Lahartārā, where a young woman was drawing water, and he stopped and asked her the road to Kabīr's house.

She was Nīrū's daughter. She had grown up with that name in her ears and she had also grown up in a weaving street, where nobody has any illusions about grand arrivals, and she looked at the oxen and the books and gave him directions.

Kabīr's house, she said, stands on a high place, and the road to it is so narrow that an ant could not get along it. Your oxen will certainly not.

Then she gave him a lota of water, or he asked her for one, and he asked her to take it and set it down in front of Kabīr. She did.

Kabīr took a needle and dropped it into the water and sent the lota back.

Nothing else was said and nothing else needed to be said. It is the whole argument, conducted twice, in an alley, without either man being present. The brahmin's message is a pot filled to the brim: I am complete, I have everything, there is no room in me for anything more. The weaver's answer is a needle, which takes up no room at all, which goes in anyway, and which is what you use to sew up cloth that has been cut. Take it how you like; he did not explain it, and the woman carried it back down the road, and Sarvajīt understood it perfectly well.

The brahmins of Banaras heard what had arrived and were frightened. They had been losing arguments to Kabīr for years and they did not want him added to Sarvajīt's list, and they also did not want Sarvajīt to win the city, and they were in the awkward position of needing the weaver to be strong. They went to Rāmānand.

Rāmānand heard them out and said: go into the street, and whoever is the first person you meet, bring him in. Through him I will beat Sarvajīt.

They went out into the street. The first person they met was Kabīr.

It is not recorded what they said when they saw him. There is no need for it to be recorded. Rāmānand looked at the man his own brahmins had led in and said he could not be defeated.

Then the two of them faced each other, and Sarvajīt did the thing that men in his position had been doing to Kabīr all his life. He asked what caste he was.

Weaver, he was told.

He turned up his nose and said: and what is a weaver?

He should not have asked. Of all the questions available to him, in front of an audience, against that man, he picked the one Kabīr had been preparing an answer to since he was nine years old.

Nobody has got to the bottom of the Weaver.

The warp of the whole world is his. He stretched it himself.

Ask the Veda. Ask the Purāṇa. He is in both of them saying:

this is the length I drew the thread out to.

I keep my workshop between the ground and the sky.

Sun on one treadle, moon on the other,

down and up, down and up, and I have not stopped yet.

I made the whole piece with my own legs.

Kabīr says: that is a weaver worth being.

The question itself has been taken away from him. Sarvajīt asked what a weaver is, meaning a nobody, meaning a man whose touch is a nuisance and whose opinion is not required. He has been answered with a description of the making of the world, in which the weaver is the only workman on the site, and the scriptures that Sarvajīt has brought up the road on oxen are called as witnesses for the defence. The Veda is not disputed. The Veda is quoted, by a man who has never heard it, in support of the proposition that God sits in a pit with his legs down in the dark and works the treadles.

And the last line does not argue at all. It admires. He is standing there looking at the work like a tradesman looking at another tradesman's cloth, turning up the corner, seeing how the border was done.

Sarvajīt said he was beaten. He did not have to; nobody could have made him. He said it, and then he asked Kabīr to take him as a disciple.

Kabīr would not.

He sent him to Rāmānand. He said, in effect, that the man in the room who gave initiation was Rāmānand, and that he himself was a weaver who had been fetched in off the street. Rāmānand initiated Sarvajīt, and the conqueror of everything stayed in Banaras.

That refusal is worth more than the victory. Kabīr had just been handed the one thing his enemies said he could never get, which is a famous brahmin calling him teacher, and he gave it away within the hour to the old man on the ghāṭ steps. He had spent his life saying the apparatus was worth nothing. He was not going to start collecting it the first afternoon somebody offered.

Two brahmin brothers called Tātā and Jīvā lived in retirement on the bank of the Narmadā.

They had a guru, as such men do, and they had begun to doubt him. This is a miserable position and it is more common than the books admit. A man does not lightly decide that the person he has given his allegiance to is not what he thought, because the allegiance is not an opinion, it is where he has put his life. So the brothers did what people in that position do, which is look for a test they can believe.

They planted a shoot of the Indian fig in the ground by their hut. A fig shoot cut and pushed into the earth is a fair choice for the purpose, because it may take and may not, and there is nothing a man can do to make it.

Then they made their vow. Every holy man who came to them would be received properly, and his feet would be washed, as any guest's feet are washed. The water that ran off the guest's feet would be poured on the shoot. If it sprouted, that man was the one they would follow, and they would leave their guru and go to him.

Saints came. Men of reputation, men with followings, men who had been to the places and could speak. The brothers received all of them, washed their feet, and poured the water on the shoot, and the shoot sat in the ground and did nothing.

How long that went on is not said. Long enough for the shoot to be watered many times and to go on standing in the ground like the dead stick it was, and long enough for two men to start wondering whether they had set a test that nobody alive could pass, which is the other thing that happens to people who set tests.

Kabīr came to the Narmadā and they washed his feet and poured the water on the shoot and it sprouted.

They transferred their allegiance and became his disciples, and that is the whole of what is known about Tātā and Jīvā.

He was not told what had been arranged until afterwards. He sat down, somebody washed his feet because that is what is done to a guest, the water went into the ground in the ordinary way, and a fig cutting put out a leaf.

The man who had an answer for everything left no remark about it. No couplet, nothing. When people brought him wonders he was unhelpful about them. He held that the whole trade in them was a distraction from the name, and that a man who went looking for power had picked up the wrong thing and would find it heavy.

There is a second thing in the story, quieter, and it belongs to the brothers rather than to him. They were brahmins on a holy river with a guru of their own caste and a settled life, and their test was rigged in nobody's favour, and it came back with an answer they can hardly have wanted: a Muslim weaver from Banaras, a man they could not have eaten with a year earlier. They took it. They had said they would follow the water, and the water had gone into the ground, and the leaf was there in the morning where anyone could see it.

So they got up and went with him, and the fig went on growing on the bank of the Narmadā, where a fig will stand for two hundred years and put its roots down through anything.

The next thing they tried was cleverer, and it very nearly worked, because it did not attack him at all. It used his own reputation as the weapon and left him nothing to push against.

The brahmins took a number of men and dressed them as holy men. Then they sent them round the dignitaries of Banaras and the country about it, and to every house of any standing, with invitations to a great banquet, to be held on such a day, at the house of Kabīr, in Kabīr's name.

It was the perfect stroke. He was famous. He was known to feed holy men. He was known to give away everything that came into his hands. Nobody who received the invitation had the least reason to doubt it, and a great many of them were pleased to be asked, because by this time being at Kabīr's table was worth something. The invitations went out and the city made its arrangements and people set out from a distance.

And Kabīr had nothing. He had a loom and a room and a family who were used to going short, and word came to him that several hundred people were on the roads towards his door expecting to be fed for days.

He went to Ravidās.

That is one of the few places where the two of them stand in the same scene, and nothing about it is ceremonious. A Muslim weaver in trouble walked across Banaras to a Chamār who worked hides and made shoes, and told him what had been done, and asked him what to do. They were the two most notorious men in the city and both of them were people whose touch a brahmin would have washed off. Ravidās told him to go.

So he went. He left the city and went into a forest, and the guests came up the road to an empty house.

Except that the house was not empty.

There was a man at the door who was Kabīr. He met each party as it arrived and took them in and gave them somewhere to put their things. He washed their feet. He fed them. When they had eaten he sat down with each group in turn and talked to them about God, without hurry, as though there were no other party waiting, and then went to the next. The festival ran for several days and the food did not run out and nobody went away unserved.

When it was over and the last of them had gone, the man went and found Kabīr in the forest and told him what he had been doing.

Afterwards Kabīr made a slok about it, and the slok is the most careful thing he ever said, and every line of it is doing a separate job:

I did not do it.

I will not be doing it again.

I could not do it if I tried.

How would I know what God has been up to?

And the whole of it was Kabīr.

Take that apart. The first three lines are a flat denial with no modesty in it whatever; he is not being humble, he is stating a fact about his own capacity, and the third line is almost annoyed. The fourth line refuses to explain, which is what he always does when the explanation would be the interesting part. And then the last line, which does not take any of it back, and does not claim it either, and simply says that it was him, all of it, every plate and every washed foot, and leaves the reader holding both ends of the sentence at once.

He does not say it was a miracle. He does not say it was not. He says: I was in a forest, somebody who was me fed everyone who came, ask God.

The brahmins had meant to show the city that Kabīr was a boaster who could not meet his own claims. What the city got instead was several days of hospitality at a weaver's house and a hundred people who would say for the rest of their lives that they had eaten there and that he had washed their feet himself.

They say the temple called the Chaurā Kabīr stands on that ground, and that his writings are kept in it. There is a picture in it of Kabīr with Dharmdās and Surat Gopāl kneeling and the boy Kamāl fanning him, and another of Kabīr sitting with Ravidās, which is the only place in Banaras where the two of them are still in the same room.

By his middle years he could not get any work done.

This is what happens to a man who wins. The crowds that had come to watch him beat pandits now came simply to be near him. People stood in the lane. People waited at the door from early morning. People arrived from other towns having walked for days and had to be spoken to. He could not sit down in the pit. He could not sit still anywhere. The life he had built the whole apparatus for, the new pots and the arguments and the name going round and round in his head over the noise of the comb, had been eaten by his own reputation.

So he ruined it.

He did it deliberately and he did it with his eyes open. He pretended to be drunk. He went round the streets of Banaras with his arm round the neck of a courtesan, in daylight, where the whole city could see him, and he did it more than once, and he did it until the point had gone home.

The pious were horrified, which was the entire object.

The woman had a trade and a name and nobody wrote either of them down. She was walked through Banaras on a famous man's arm so that the city could look at her, and what it bought was his quiet.

He would not have denied any of it. He was not a man who explained himself and he never once claimed to be good. The stories that came down about him were not cleaned up before they were handed on, and this is one of them, and the people who loved him best kept it in.

There is another from about this time, and it is the same man doing the same thing from the other end. He went to the king's court in Banaras in some strange guise, and sat down in the middle of the assembly, and behaved so oddly that the king and the courtiers had him put out.

Afterwards the king thought about what he had done, and could not get easy about it. So he took an axe and put it over his shoulder, and had a bundle of firewood set on his head, and he walked barefoot through his own city with his queen beside him, in front of everybody, to the weaver's door.

He went down full length at Kabīr's feet with the wood still on him.

Kabīr had the load taken off, and forgave him the discourtesy, and showed him how a man goes about devotion to God.

What he wanted was the seclusion, and he got it. Reputation is a door that opens inwards; break it and people stop coming. The pilgrims went elsewhere. The respectable stayed away. And a weaver was left in a room with a loom and a mouthful of the name, which is all he had ever asked for.

There is another story from those years and it runs the other way.

His enemies sent a woman to him. She was beautiful and she had been chosen for it and she had been told what to do, and what she was to do was ruin him in earnest, so that the scandal would be a real one and could be proved. She came to him and she left nothing out. She displayed everything she had.

He was not interested. Not shocked, not outraged, not lecturing; simply not interested. She stayed as long as there was any point in staying and then she went away crestfallen, which is the word that has come down, and it is a good one. She had never failed before.

Put the two stories side by side, because they are usually kept apart and they belong together. In one of them he walks through the city with a courtesan on his arm to destroy his own name. In the other a woman is sent to destroy it for him and cannot. The same man, in the same years, in the same streets.

What it tells you is that he did not care about the name at all, in either direction. His enemies thought reputation was the thing that could be taken from him, because in their world it was: a brahmin without standing has nothing, a qāzī without standing has nothing, the whole structure runs on who is respected by whom. He had worked out that it was a rope round his own neck and had cut it himself before they got to it.

You cannot blackmail a man who has already published the worst thing about himself. You cannot shame a man who threw his own reputation in the river in front of witnesses. They kept trying. They had nothing else, and the weaver had made himself, in the most literal way available, unusable.

There is a kind of verse he made that nobody has ever been able to do anything with, and it is called ulaṭbāṃsī, which means speech turned over.

It sounds like this. The son has taken his mother to wife. The daughter is in love with her own father and is still a virgin. She has left her husband and married her father-in-law. One who was born a man has become a woman. The clove tree bears no fruit and the sandal puts out no blossom. The fish has gone up into the forest and is hunting there. The lion is out at sea, floating. The castor, which is a weed, has turned into sandalwood and the whole place smells of it. A blind man sits watching the three worlds go by like a play. A cripple has jumped over Meru. A man with no tongue is explaining wisdom to the rest of us. The sky has been tied up and sent down below, and Śeṣanāg, who holds the earth on his head, is up there ruling in heaven.

There is a tree standing with no roots.

It bears fruit and it never flowered.

It has no branches on it and not one leaf,

and it puts its head up into the eight heavens.

Now. The thing to do with that is not to solve it.

It can be solved. People have been solving it for five hundred years and every one of the images has three or four settled readings, some of them worked out by men who knew exactly what they were doing, most of them drawing on the private vocabulary of the jogis, in which the body is a landscape with rivers and mountains in it and every organ has a secret name. The mother is this. The father-in-law is that. The fish is the mind and the forest is the world. It all comes out. And the moment it comes out, the verse is dead on the table, because the only thing it was made to do was stop you.

That is the function. It is not a riddle and it is not a code and it is certainly not nonsense. It is a deliberate obstruction, put across the road at the point where the road is about to run out anyway.

What he is trying to do is not obscure. He has spent the whole day telling people that what he means by God is nirguṇa, without a single quality you could name, nothing you can picture, no face, no story, nothing that can be said. Then he has to say something. Every word he owns was made for describing things that can be seen, and he is using them on the one thing that cannot. So he does the only honest thing available, which is to use the words in a way that will not settle.

An ordinary sentence closes. You hear it, you understand it, it is over, and you have gained a small piece of information and lost the moment. An upside-down sentence will not close. It hangs there in the mind, refusing to be finished, and while it is refusing, the mind is doing something it almost never does, which is hold still with its hands open.

He is also, and this is the part people miss, enjoying himself enormously.

The man is funny. The upside-down verses are not solemn. A lion paddling about in the sea is a joke, and so is a man with no legs going over the highest mountain in the world, and so is the dumb man delivering a lecture. He is doing to language exactly what he does to a pandit in argument: taking the rules, accepting them completely, and then following them out of the building. If a weed can be sandalwood then caste is nothing. If the sky can be underneath then high and low are a habit of speech. He never says either of those things in the upside-down verses. He does not have to. He has simply arranged for the arrangement to come apart in your hands while you are holding it.

And there is a second shape he uses that does the same work from the other end, and yesterday's reading gave one of them whole. Instead of turning the world over, he takes it away altogether and describes what there was before there was anything, which in his hands comes out as a list of the things that were not there: no prophets, no holy men, no moon or sun or stars, no Veda and no Book, nothing anybody had done wrong and nothing anybody had done right, no call to prayer, no creed, no Rām and no Khudā.

Hear that in the street where he sang it. Every single item on that list is something a man in Banaras was prepared to fight about, and several of them are things men had been killed over within living memory. The prophets belong to one side. The Veda belongs to the other. The call to prayer goes up five times a day from the end of his own lane and the temple bells start before it is light. And he stands there and takes the whole inventory away, calmly, one item at a time, and puts the two names last, side by side, so that the listeners of both religions arrive at the end of the verse together and find the same nothing waiting for them.

He is not saying that God does not exist. He is saying that nothing you have been handed, including the names, including his own favourite name, was there at the start, and that therefore none of it is the thing itself.

The upside-down verses and the empty lists are the same move, and together they are the reason he is unmanageable. You cannot make a doctrine out of them. You cannot put them on a banner. Every time somebody gets him into a shape that can be taught in a school, there is a fish in the forest waiting in the next verse to knock it over.

Now the abuse, and it has to be given whole, because he gave it whole.

Start with what a pandit was in that city, because the English word scholar does him no justice at all. He was the licensed man. He had the language the gods were addressed in, he had the thread that permitted him to hear it, he had the genealogies, he had the calendar, he knew which day was fit for a marriage and which words made a funeral effective, and he was the necessary party to every important thing that happened to anybody from birth to burning. He was also, in very many cases, poor, hard-working, genuinely learned and personally decent. Kabīr did not care. It was the office he was after, not the man in it, and the office he attacked the way a man attacks a wall he has been shut behind.

Caste first.

He would not accept it for a moment, and he would not argue against it on its own ground either, because arguing on its own ground concedes that there is a ground. His position was that the whole thing was a piece of bookkeeping that the bookkeepers had come to believe, and that a man who wanted God should simply put it down and walk off:

Rub out your caste. Rub out your pride with it.

That takes more nerve than anything the brave ever do,

and the man who does it turns out to be a saint.

Then the purity, which is where he is funniest and most vicious.

Purity in Banaras was an enormous daily labour. Food had to be cooked by the right hands and eaten in the right place and could be spoiled by a shadow falling on it. Water could be taken from one man and not another. Pots were thrown away because a night had passed over them. A man might have to bathe again because of who had brushed against him in a lane two feet wide.

Kabīr kept the pot rule himself, and he kept it, as everyone knew, for the pleasure of inviting the people who believed in it into a Muslim house. And then he asked the question that finishes the whole system, and it is a question about the body:

You were nine months in a woman.

Nobody recited the Veda to you in there.

One woman gave birth to the whole world.

So who taught you that you came out separate?

There is no answer to that. There is a long answer, and it exists, and it is not very good, and it certainly cannot be given at the top of a lane with forty people listening and laughing.

Then the rest of the apparatus, one piece at a time, always the same way: take the practice seriously, follow it out, and see where it goes.

The rosary. He watched men turn beads by the hour, and he asked what exactly had been counted, and whether anything inside the man had turned along with the string. A bead goes round. Does anything go round with it?

The fast. He pointed out that a poor man in that city went without food most weeks and got no credit for it at all, and asked why a full stomach kept empty for one day should be worth more to God than an empty one kept empty for a lifetime.

The pilgrimage. He had the holiest city in the world outside his door and he watched the traffic of it his whole life, and what he could not get past was the geography. If a man is the same man after eight hundred miles as he was before them, what has the walking done? He never denied that the rivers were holy. He said the man was not, and that the man was the problem, and that carrying a problem to a river does not leave it there.

And the feeding of brahmins, which was not a practice but an industry, and which he attacked hardest of all because he could count it. He held that it was worth nothing without the name of God in it. Not less. Nothing. And worse than nothing, because it looked like something, so that a man could spend his whole life buying merit in a shop that had none to sell and die satisfied with the transaction.

He went further than most of his own side about living things. He would not have killing, and he pushed it out past the animals to the flowers, on the grounds that a bud is alive in the morning and is broken off to be laid on something that has never been alive at all.

What he does not do, anywhere, is claim the Veda is false. He had never heard it. He was forbidden to hear it and he knew it and he mentions it. What he says instead is that he has not needed it, that he has got where it is supposed to take a man without ever being allowed in the door, and that this is a fact about his own life which no amount of recitation can argue with. He called his couplets witness statements and he meant the word in its courtroom sense. He was not passing anything on. He was deposing.

That is the real offence, and it is why they could not leave him alone. A heretic can be refuted. A man who says the whole shop is unnecessary, and who is visibly getting on perfectly well without it, in the middle of the street, with an audience, cannot.

Anyone who thinks that was a Hindu quarrel has not heard him on his own people, and he went at them with exactly the same voice, which is the entire point.

He had already asked, out loud, in a street with a mosque at the end of it, whether God had gone deaf, since the man on the roof was shouting. That question went round Banaras and it has never stopped going round. It was not a joke at the expense of one muezzin on one morning. It was the same objection he made to the temple bell, put to the other house.

Then the book.

The qāzī read out of a book that nobody in the congregation understood. Kabīr had listened to it all his life, at every prayer and every funeral and every naming, including his own, when a lot was cast in that book and the word that came up became his name. He never learned a word of the language. Neither had the weavers standing beside him. They were Muslims who had come into it three generations back out of the Hindu castes on the same street, and what they had been given was a new name for God and a book in a foreign tongue and a man to read it for them and take the fee. He had seen that arrangement before, from the other side of the lane, with a different language and a different fee, and he said so, in the couplet from yesterday's reading, about the Hindu who says Rām belongs to him and the Turk who says Rahmān belongs to him and the two of them quarrelling their whole lives without either one finding anything out.

Then the meat.

He would not have the killing. He held it on the Hindu side against everybody who sacrificed and he held it on his own side against the butcher and the feast and the slaughter that is done with a prayer over it, and he could not be moved on the subject, and it did not make him popular in a weaving quarter where meat was one of the few good things that ever happened to a family. Saying a name over an animal, in his view, did not change what had been done to the animal. It only meant that God had been made a party to it.

Then the fast, which he treated exactly as he had treated the Hindu fast: hunger, on purpose, for a month, by men who ate very well after dark, in a street full of people who were hungry all year without arranging it.

Then the road west, which he treated exactly as he had treated the road to Banaras. A man gets on a boat and crosses a sea and comes back with a title. Did he take himself with him, or did he leave himself at home?

And then the professionals, and here the two religions get one verse between them, which is the most contemptuous thing he ever arranged:

I have had a look at your pīrs and your holy ones.

They read the Book out. They take disciples.

They teach the little they know and are very pleased with it.

They sit there swollen with themselves.

They bow to brass and bow to stone.

They are proud of the distances they have walked.

Beads on them, caps on them, marks on their faces,

singing my couplets in their meetings,

and not one of them has been introduced to his own soul.

Count the sides in that. The Book and the disciples are Muslim. The brass and the stone and the forehead marks are Hindu. The beads and the caps and the pilgrimage belong to both. He has put them in one list, in one breath, without separating them, and then he has done the cruellest thing in it, which is the line about the couplets. They are singing him. His own verses are being performed in the meetings of the men he is describing, by people who have learned them by heart, who will sing this one too, tonight, and be pleased with how it goes.

He was never even-handed in the diplomatic sense, and he was not looking for a middle way between the two houses. He thought there was nothing at either end worth connecting. What he was even-handed about was the insult, and he distributed it with real care, so that nobody in the crowd could stand there enjoying the half that was aimed at his neighbour.

The Hindus said he was an unbeliever. The Muslims of his own street said he was an apostate. Both of them were right, and both of them had to go on living with him, and in the end they solved it in the only way left, which was to go to the same emperor together.

There was a third party in the street and he owed them more than he ever admitted.

The Nāth jogis were everywhere in the north then. You knew one at a distance by his ears: the cartilage had been split open and a heavy ring set into each side, which is why people called them the split-eared ones, and it was the mark of the order and it could not be undone. They worked on the body. They had postures and they had breath work and they had a long training with a teacher, and they held that a man could go up through his own frame like a man going up a ladder, and that at the top of it, inside the skull, there was a moon dripping something that would keep him alive indefinitely if he could catch it. They said that death could be beaten. Some of them said they had beaten it. They had a map of the inside of a person that was detailed, consistent, hundreds of years old and taught nowhere else.

And they had a vocabulary, which is what matters here, because Kabīr used it from one end of his life to the other.

The knot at the base of the spine. The channels. The lotuses. The tenth door in the top of the head. The sound that is not made by two things striking, which goes on all the time whether anybody is listening or not. And the word sahaj, which means what is simply natural, the state a man falls into when everything forced has been let go of, the way sleep comes when you stop trying to sleep. All of that is theirs. He took the lot. When he describes the making of the sheet in one of his best songs he is counting lotuses and wheels the way a jogi counts them, and when he says the name goes on by itself without your saying it, he is using their word for it.

Then he was rude to them, at length, for a hundred years.

He looked at the ears and asked what a hole in a man's head had to do with God. He looked at the ash and the matted hair and the begging bowl and said the same thing he said about the thread and the cap: that it was a uniform, and that a uniform is for being seen in. He watched men sit in a posture for hours and asked what had been achieved by holding a body still, since a stone holds still permanently and has never got anywhere. He was blunt about the whole discipline. It was not merely useless to him. Without the name of God in it and the love of God in it, he held it to be improper: a thing a man does to himself, for himself, to get power over his own death, which is the oldest greed there is wearing the clothes of renunciation.

And the immortality. He was not gentle about that. Men who claimed to have conquered death were dying in the usual way in front of everybody, and the cremation ground at the bottom of the lane never once ran short of them.

So what was left, after he had thrown away the ears and the ash and the postures and the breath?

Two things, and he kept both of them for life.

He kept sahaj. But he took it away from technique altogether and gave it to the name. For a jogi, the natural state is arrived at by a discipline, at the end of a great deal of work, in a body that has been made fit for it. For Kabīr it comes the way morning comes, to anybody, without permission, to a man in a pit with a shuttle in his hand, and it cannot be made to come by any amount of effort, and effort is mostly what is in the way.

And he kept the sound. The śabda, the word, the thing heard and not said: the one part of the jogis' map he never made fun of. He talked about it all his life as something already going on inside a man who is not listening, like a household noise you stop hearing. Everything else he ever said rests on it. The word is already sounding. Nobody is producing it. The work is not to make it happen but to stop making enough noise to miss it.

That is his usual arrangement with anything he borrows. He takes the tools and leaves the shop. He would not join the Nāths, he would not wear anything they wore, he would not do a single one of their exercises, and he spent his life using their language to say things they would not have said, in a street, to people who had never been initiated into anything, for nothing.

The jogis thought he was a nuisance. They were right.

Against all that pulling down there is one thing he built up, and he was unqualified about it, which for him is unusual.

He thought that sitting with people who were after the same thing was worth more than anything else available to a human being. The word is satsang, the company of the true, and what it meant in practice was nothing grand. A room, or a courtyard, or a patch of ground under a tree. A drum. A single-stringed instrument with a gourd on the end of it. Somebody starting a line and everybody else coming in on the refrain. It went on for hours and it went on late and it was free, and anybody could come.

Understand what that was in that city. Every other gathering in Banaras had a door on it. The recitation had a door: you needed the thread to hear it. The temple had a door, and there were people who could not go through it, and everybody knew who they were. The mosque had a door, and a language behind it. And here was a weaver's room at the edge of town with no door at all, where a Chamār who dressed hides and a brahmin who had come out of curiosity and a faqīr off the road and a woman who had walked over from the next lane all sat on the same floor and sang the same line, and nobody asked anyone what he was.

That was the whole of it, and it was more subversive than anything he ever said out loud, because it was not an argument. It was a fact happening every evening in a particular street, which anybody could come and look at.

He put it very high. His couplets on it are among the coolest things he made, and by cool I mean that he refuses to be enthusiastic about it in the way a preacher would be. He does not say: come to the meeting. He says: you will not get in unless it was coming to you.

Nobody arranges the company of the good.

It falls to a man or it does not.

A gharī of it, or half a gharī,

or half of that again, and you are in profit.

A gharī is not long, less than half an hour. He is haggling, in a weaver's way, over the smallest quantity he can get, and saying that even at that size the deal is good. This is the same man who stood in the market and would not shift off five double paise. He knew what value was and how to say it, and when he wanted to praise something he put a price on it.

And then, because he could not leave any comfortable thing alone, he made the couplet that complicates it.

The sugar has gone into the sand.

An elephant will never get it up.

Kabīr says: here is the teacher's advice.

Be an ant, and eat.

That is not a nice saying. It is an instruction about size, and it is aimed at exactly the kind of person who is likely to be sitting in a satsang feeling pleased with himself. What is good has been scattered through what is worthless and the two cannot be separated, and anybody who arrives with a large presence and a large appetite and a large opinion of his own reach will come away with a trunkful of sand. The only creature that eats in that field is the one small enough to take a grain at a time and low enough to have its face in the dirt.

He was rough with his own people. He did not run a school and he did not flatter a following. There is nothing in him about the fellowship of believers or the consolations of belonging. What there is instead is a sequence of couplets that sound like a foreman: get smaller, get lower, stop counting what you have learned, and if you cannot be an ant then do not come.

And he had reason to be wary of the room filling up, because he had seen what a crowd does. The crowd at the door was what drove him out of his own house and into the business with the courtesan. The crowd that came up the road to the banquet came because his name was worth something. The moment a company becomes a following it starts wanting things: a building, a succession, a rule about who may sing. He could see that coming from a long way off. He arranged one anyway, before the end, and appointed a man to carry it on, which is either a contradiction or the most ordinary thing in the world, and he never explained it, and it is not clear that he thought it needed explaining.

Half an hour of the real thing, he said, and you have made money. He did not promise anybody the rest of the evening.

Of everything he made, the verses that have travelled furthest are the ones about time running out.

That is worth a moment's thought, because they are not the profound ones. The upside-down verses are cleverer. The songs about the weaver and the sheet are finer. The attacks on the pandit and the mullā are funnier. But the ones that went into the language, that are quoted by people who could not name him, that turn up in the mouths of schoolteachers and bus drivers and grandmothers all over the north, are the plain ones that say: you are going to die, and sooner than you think, and you are currently doing nothing about it.

What you were going to do tomorrow, do today.

What you were going to do today, do now.

It comes down in a moment, the whole thing,

and then when will you be doing it?

Nothing in that is beautiful. It is a man leaning in the doorway telling you to get on with it. The force is entirely in the sequence: tomorrow pulled back to today, today pulled back to this minute, and then the floor removed. He has taken the ordinary human arrangement with time, which is that there is always more of it further along, and shown that the arrangement is a private fiction with nothing on the other side of it.

He came at the body the same way, and he came at it as a man who knew what things are made of.

The body is a pot and the clay was never fired.

Carry it about as carefully as you like.

It is waiting for one knock.

A weaver's house had those pots in it. Kabīr had them in his by the dozen, because he bought new ones every morning and threw the old ones out, and he had watched them go in and out of that room for fifty years: made of river mud, dried in the sun, useful for a day, finished by a knee catching them on the way past. He does not say the body is like a pot. He says it is one. He is not reaching for an image; he is naming a thing on the floor beside him.

And then the one that goes furthest, which is about leaving:

One day the swan gets up and goes.

He goes on his own. The marsh stays where it is.

All that water, all those reeds, all that noise,

and it turns out he never belonged to any of it.

Everybody on that plain had seen it. The tanks and marshes of the eastern country fill up in the cold months with birds that have come from somewhere nobody there could name, and they sit on the water for a season, and one morning the water is empty and nothing whatever has changed about the water. The marsh is not diminished. The marsh does not notice. He is not consoling anyone. He is pointing out, with a certain dryness, that the place you have spent your life arranging will get along without you, and will not be able to tell you have gone.

Set these beside the city he was living in and the edge comes out.

Banaras had solved death. That was its business and its boast. Anyone who died inside the boundary was released, whoever he was, whatever he had done, because at the last moment the word was said in his ear. People came from four hundred miles and waited years for it. It was the most generous promise ever made and it took all the urgency out of everything, because if the geography does the work then the man has nothing to do but arrive and be patient.

Kabīr spent his life in that city saying: there is no time, do it now, the pot is unfired, the swan is leaving in the morning.

The two positions cannot both be held, and he knew it, and he was not making a subtle point. He was telling several hundred thousand people that the thing they had built their city on was going to be no help to them at all, and that the only useful hour any of them had was the one they were in.

Fifty years later he settled the question in the only way that could not be argued with, and that is the fourth day, and it is not far off now.

A man like that does not gather a congregation. He gathers a handful, and they are an odd handful, and the reason they are odd is that nothing about him made it comfortable to be near him.

There was Dharmdās, who is the one he appointed to carry it on after him. There was Surat Gopāl. There was Ratan, who was at Mathurā. There was Sarvajīt, the conqueror of everything, who had come up the road with his books on oxen and stayed in Banaras. There were Tātā and Jīvā off the Narmadā bank, who had left their own guru because a fig cutting put out a leaf. And there was the boy.

Kamāl was his son. The Kabīr Panth holds that he was a child Kabīr brought back to life.

That is all that is said about it and nothing more is needed. There is a picture of them in the temple at Banaras: Kabīr sitting, Dharmdās and Surat Gopāl on their knees in front of him, and Kamāl standing at the side with a fan, keeping the air moving over his father the way a boy does in that country in the hot months, because somebody has to and it is the youngest one who is given the job.

There is no king on that list. There is no minister, no rich merchant's endowment, no landholder giving a village. Other saints of that century had patrons and were carried in litters and were fed by states. Kabīr had a weaver's house and a shifting company of men who had mostly given something up in order to be in it. Two brahmins had given up their guru. One brahmin had given up a career of winning. A householder who took the succession was taking on a job with no building and no income and an enormous amount of trouble in it.

And it cost them. It should be said plainly what being one of his people involved, because the pictures make it look restful.

You were attached to a man whose name was under continuous attack in the city you lived in. The brahmins had tried to have him expelled and had stood at his door demanding money. Forged invitations had gone out in his name to make a fool of him. He had deliberately destroyed his own reputation in public, with a courtesan, in daylight, and anybody who stayed with him after that had to answer for it to his own family and his own street. His house had no money in it, because whatever came in went out again to whoever was at the door that afternoon. And he was not kind to his followers in the way followers usually expect. He told them to get smaller. He told them that nobody arranges this and that half an hour is as much as they should count on. He gave his own mother's curse a verse of its own and sang it in company.

Nobody was in that room for the comfort.

What they got instead was the thing itself, undecorated, from a man who had no interest in dressing it up and no position to protect. And they got the songs, which is the part that lasted, because the songs were the one piece of property that could not be taken off them. They carried them in their heads. They sang them at the meetings and taught them to people who taught them to people, and about a hundred years later men at the far end of north India, in a different kingdom speaking a different dialect, went to the trouble of collecting about five hundred of his compositions for a book they were compiling, because they had heard him coming down the roads and could not leave him out.

He never wrote a line. Everything that survives of him survives because people who had almost nothing else decided to carry it.

That is the return on it, and it was paid out long after everyone concerned was dead, which is the usual arrangement.

By the end of these years Banaras had had enough of him, and the enemies he had made separately began, at last, to find each other.

This was not obvious. They had nothing in common. The brahmins of the city held that Muslims were impure and would not eat with them or take water from them. The Muslim divines held that the brahmins worshipped stones and were going to hell. Neither party had any reason to speak to the other and they had spent their lives not doing it.

But they had one man in common, and he had been at both of them for fifty years in the same voice, and the injury was identical.

Think of it from their side for a moment, which the accounts do not trouble to do. Here was a weaver, of no family, who had never read anything, who had been found on a lake as a baby. He had put on the thread and nobody had been able to make him take it off. He had beaten the learned men of the city in public and the crowd had laughed. He had given away a mountain of grain and left the priesthood out of it, and when they came to collect, the city had paid for him and made his name louder. He had been hauled in front of a professional disputant who had never lost and the disputant had ended up initiated in Banaras. He held meetings in a room with no door, where caste did not operate and people sang until late. And he was now old, and famous, and impossible to catch in anything, because he had already blackened his own name himself and there was nothing left to expose.

They came to the same conclusion at the same time, and when they said it out loud they found they were saying it together. Shaikh Taqī spoke for the Muslims. The brahmins spoke for themselves. The charge they agreed on was not that Kabīr was a Hindu or that he was a Muslim, and this is the one thing they got exactly right about him.

They said that he had so led the city astray that the people who listened to him were not Hindus any more and were not Muslims either.

That was true. Nobody ever put it better in his lifetime. Men and women who sat in that courtyard in the evening and sang about a weaver stretching the warp of the world went home with no use for the thread and no use for the qāzī, and they still had to live in a city where one or the other was required of everybody. He had taken several hundred people out of both houses and had built them nothing to live in except a name and a sound.

For that there was no remedy in the hands of pandits or of shaikhs. A private man can be argued with, or shunned, or priced out. This required the state.

An emperor in a city is not a visit. It is an army sitting outside the walls, a court set down in requisitioned houses, a treasury, a chief judge with power over life, and a queue of local men waiting for a hearing about their neighbours. Every quarrel in the district that has been going nowhere for twenty years gets its chance while the court is in town. The brahmins of Banaras had no standing at all with a Muslim emperor. Shaikh Taqī had a great deal. That was the use each party had for the other, and it was the only use they ever had for each other, and it was enough.

And the state came to Banaras. Sikandar Khān Lodī, son of Bahlol Lodī, came to the city with his court, and the damp came off the river in the mornings the way it does there, and the emperor took a fever and an ague that nobody about him could do anything with. While he lay shaking, certain people in that city saw their opportunity and went in to him, and mentioned that there was a weaver.

That is tomorrow.

---

The emperor came into the eastern country in the cold weather, because that is when an army can move on that plain. In the hot months the brick and the dust give the heat back all night and the horses go down before the men do. In the rains the rivers are up, the roads are gone, and a column with carts in it can spend a day covering two miles. Between the two there are a few months when the mornings are cold enough that a man wants a blanket over his shoulders at the cooking fire, and in those months every king in the north was on the move, and everybody in the country knew it and got the grain in.

His name was Sikandar Khān Lodī. He was the son of Bahlol Lodī, and they were Afghans.

It is worth being exact about what that meant, because the word emperor puts the wrong picture in the head. The Lodīs did not come down out of any long grand line. They were Afghan chiefs whose families had come into India over several generations the way fighting men come into a rich country, by taking service first and land afterwards, and one of them had ended by taking Delhi. Bahlol had made the kingdom out of that material. His son held it. A king of that kind is not a remote figure on a cushion at the far end of a hall. He is the first man among a set of chiefs who are his kinsmen, who remember perfectly well being his equals, and whose loyalty is a thing he has to keep up in person, by giving, by being seen, and by taking the field in the cold weather so that everyone can count his horses.

That is what an Afghan sultan of Delhi was doing on the Ganges. The east was the part of the kingdom that had to be visited. The towns along that river paid when there were horsemen within a week's ride and thought carefully about it when there were not, and the only argument that settled the matter was the arrival of the court itself.

A court on the march is a city. The tents go up in lines with lanes between them, the sultan's enclosure in the middle behind a wall of screening cloth, and within an afternoon there is a bazaar down the main lane selling grain, fodder, oil, sweets and shoes. Smiths set up. Water carriers work all day. The elephants stand at their picket lines behind the camp with their forefeet chained, swinging, taking dust up in their trunks and throwing it over their backs. The whole thing is put up in an afternoon and taken down in an afternoon and moved twelve miles and put up again.

At a city the size of Banaras a part of all this comes indoors. Houses are requisitioned, the treasury and the writing offices and the courts are set down in somebody else's rooms, and the local men who have business with a king start queuing in the lane outside. But the sultan's own enclosure went up under canvas, as it always did, because a king of that kind does not sleep in another man's house while his own is in the baggage.

They pitched it near the water, because a camp has to be near water, and the water at Banaras in the cold months is a particular thing.

Anyone who has been in that country in December knows what comes off the river before dawn. The mist stands on the surface as high as a man and then higher, and it comes up over the ghāṭs and fills the lanes, and at first light the far bank is not there at all. It lifts by nine and by noon the sun is pleasant and by four it is going, and the cold that follows is a wet cold that gets into bedding and leather and stays there. Men who live in it manage. Men who come down from the dry north and sleep on the ground under canvas beside a great river in that season do not always manage.

The emperor took fever. It was the fever with ague in it, the kind that comes in fits: first the cold, which is the worst part, an hour of shaking that no number of blankets will touch, so that a strong man lies under everything the camp can find and his teeth go like a machine. Then the heat, which turns him red and stupid and thirsty. Then the sweat, which soaks the bedding through, and then a kind of peace, and he sleeps. Then a day, or two days, when he is well enough to sit up and believe it has finished with him. Then it comes back at the same hour and does it again.

Nothing takes the strength out of a man faster. A fortnight of it will empty a soldier. A king on the road travels with physicians, and they did what physicians of that time did, which was a good deal, none of it any use against this.

So the sultan of Delhi lay in a tent on the bank of the Ganges, above a city that had been burning its dead at the water's edge since before anybody could count, shaking under his blankets at the hour the fit came on, and his court stood about outside with nothing to give him.

There is always somebody at a court with an idea, and there were men at this one who had been waiting years for an opportunity of exactly this shape.

They were not friends of the weaver. They were the people who had been losing arguments to him in the lanes of Banaras since before some of them were born: the learned men of the city, and the men of his own religion who had long since decided what he was. They came forward now and made a suggestion, and the suggestion was reasonable, and it was made with a straight face.

There is a man in this city, they said, who is held to be a saint. Send for him.

A sick king in that country is a religious occasion, and everybody with a lineage and a cure comes to the tent door. Sects sent their men. Every order had something: an amulet, a water, a recitation, a fast to be undertaken on the patient's behalf by somebody else. And it was worth doing, because whoever's man was standing there when the fever broke had a certificate for life, and his order had land.

So the suggestion did not sound like what it was. What it was, was a trap, and the men who made it were very clear about the mechanics of it. The weaver had spent fifty years telling the whole city that the name of God did everything and that the men in the middle did nothing. Very well. Let him come and stand in front of the emperor and do it. He would fail, because they were certain he would fail, and he would have failed in the one place where failure has consequences, and an Afghan king with a fever is not a patient man. It would be over in an afternoon. Nobody would have to argue with him in the street again.

They had lost every argument they had ever had with him, and they knew it. This was not an argument.

The summons went to the weavers' quarter and the old man came up to the camp.

A royal summons arriving in a weavers' lane is not a quiet event. It comes with men on horses who cannot get down the street and have to leave the horses at the end of it, and by the time they have reached the right door every household within three lanes knows, and the women are in the doorways, and somebody has already run to tell somebody else. Nobody in that quarter would have expected him to come back.

He was taken through the lanes of tents and in past the screens to where the emperor was lying, and he presented himself, and the fever left. That is the whole account. He did not put his hands on him, so far as anybody recorded. He did not say anything over him, or if he did, nobody thought to keep it. He was brought in, he stood there, and the man on the bed got up well.

Kabīr made no song about it. He made songs about a piece of thread, about a knife, about his mother saying she wished he were dead, about a length of cloth he priced at five double paise and sold for seven, and, within a few days of this, about an elephant. The curing of an emperor got nothing out of him at all. It did not interest him.

The men who had arranged it now had a difficulty of their own making. They had put the weaver of Banaras inside the royal enclosure and the emperor had come out of a fortnight's fever the hour he arrived. Whatever else they had achieved, they had not achieved what they came for.

So they went back in with the other charge, which was the true one, and which they should have brought in the first place.

At the head of the Muslims was Shaikh Taqī. The brahmins came with him.

Stop on that for a moment, because it is not a small thing. These were two bodies of men who did not eat together, would not drink from one another's vessels, and did not use the same word for God. The brahmins held the Muslims to be unclean by the fact of what they ate and whom they touched. The Muslims held the brahmins to be idolaters, worshippers of painted stone, which is the worst thing their book has a word for. In the ordinary run of a year in that city the two groups transacted business, avoided each other's festivals, and agreed on nothing whatever.

They walked up to the same tent together and waited in the same anteroom and made the same complaint.

And they brought his mother with them.

She is in the oldest account of that morning, standing among the brahmins and the Muslims in the imperial anteroom, one of the body of people laying a complaint against the weaver. It is not said what she said there. It is only said that she went.

The first day of this reading gave her song, the one he wrote down himself and kept, in which she calls the women of the household in to witness and asks why this boy of hers is not dead. Twenty years or forty years had gone by since then, and the loom had never come back, and the house had never recovered, and her son was now a man the whole city talked about and she had got nothing out of any of it. So when the brahmins went up the hill to the emperor's tent, she went with them.

The complaint was this. There is a weaver in this city, and he has led the people so far astray that those who listen to him are left neither Hindus nor Muslims.

It is the most accurate sentence anybody ever said about Kabīr. Both parties meant it as an indictment, and it was true, and he would not have denied a word of it. He had been doing precisely that, in public, for most of a century, and he had never once pretended otherwise.

Notice what the charge is not. It is not that he had made converts, because he had not made any; he had nothing to convert people to and no organisation to put them in. It is not that he taught a false doctrine, because to say that you must first agree on a true one, and these two parties could not. It is not even that he was disrespectful, though he was, magnificently. The charge is about a condition he left people in. They came away from him neither one thing nor the other.

And that is the exact and honest description of what happens to a man who has listened to Kabīr and understood him. A weaver's son goes to hear him in the evening and comes home and eats what his mother has cooked and buries his people the way his people are buried, and does all of it, and is no longer able to believe that any of it is the point. He has not changed sides. He has lost the capacity to think there are sides. The mosque is stone and mortar. The temple is stone and mortar. The man who shouts from one and the man who recites at the other are both selling him a thing he now suspects he already has for nothing.

That condition is invisible from outside and it is fatal from inside, and the people whose living depended on the arrangement could feel it going.

They could feel it in the ordinary way such things are felt, which is in the takings. A man who has stopped believing that the ceremony does anything still pays for his father's ceremony, because his family expects it and his street expects it, but he pays for the plain one and not the elaborate one, and he does not add the extra day, and he does not come back the following year, and when the collector arrives he says he has had a bad season. Multiply that by a quarter of a city over fifty years. Nobody has to announce that he has left a religion for a religion to be losing him.

So the two establishments arrived at the same tent from opposite directions with the same grievance, which was that he was emptying their houses, and they put it in the only form a king could act on. He is unsettling the city. He is making men of no religion. He is a public disorder.

They were careful, all the same, to bring a second charge behind the first, in case the first was not enough. That one waited a few days and it will come in its place.

The emperor listened. He had been ill and was well again, and the men in front of him were the respectable men of the city, the ones a king on progress has to work through if he wants anything done between one visit and the next: the ones who keep the registers and hold the endowments and can put a crowd into a street or keep it out.

He sent for the weaver a second time.

A sultan's court is a machine for showing rank, and almost the whole of it is in the greeting.

There is a floor and a carpet, and where a man is allowed to stop on that carpet is his standing in the kingdom, exactly and visibly, in front of everyone who matters to him. There are men who may sit. There are men who may sit only when told. There are men who stand at the edge for an hour with their hands crossed and go home content, because being in the room at all is the thing. And when a man comes in he makes the obeisance: the hand to the ground and then to the forehead, or the full prostration, depending on who he is and what he wants, and he does it at the right distance and the right number of times.

None of this is decoration. It is the whole apparatus by which one Afghan chief persuades a hall full of other Afghan chiefs that he is the king, and it is watched very closely, and a man who gets it wrong disgraces not only himself but whoever brought him in.

So the courtiers did what courtiers always do with a stranger. Before he went in, they told him what to do: go forward to there, not further, and prostrate yourself.

He said he had never been at a court and did not know how it was done.

He said he had no business with the emperor.

He said he knew one thing, which was the name of God, and that the name was what held his soul up, and that it belonged to the only king there was in the world.

He did not shout it and there is no sign he thought he was doing anything remarkable. It has the flatness of all his best answers. He is not defying the throne; defiance would concede that there is something there to defy. He is saying, in the mildest possible way, that he is an old weaver who does not know the etiquette, that he did not ask to come, that there is nothing between the two of them to discuss, and that as for sovereigns, he is already in service.

Every man in that hall had arranged his entire life around the person of one other man. That was what the room was for. They had bought their places and married their daughters into other men's places and waited years for permission to sit down in it. And an old man in a weaver's cloth had just told them, without any heat at all, that he had not come for that and did not know how.

The emperor was enraged.

It is easy to be superior about that and it would be a mistake. Put it plainly: he was a king in front of his chiefs, half of whom were his own relations and several of whom would have been glad to see him made small, and a weaver had declined to bow and had given as his reason that he served somebody else. A man in that position does not have the luxury of finding it funny. He had to do something in the next minute, in public, and what he did was order the old man killed.

And here is the thing that makes the next three chapters what they are. He did not have him taken away and quietly finished in a yard. He ordered the kind of death that is done in front of a city, with the city watching, so that everybody should see the lesson and carry it home. That is normal. That is what such deaths were for.

So the whole of Banaras came out, and the men who had laid the charge came out with them and stood where they could see, and the old man was brought down to the river in chains.

Chains are not a figure of speech. They are a quantity of iron, and somebody has to make them.

A smith heats the rings and closes them with a hammer on an anvil while the man who is to wear them holds his wrists still and the ring is closed an inch from his skin. Fetters go on the ankles, joined by a length that will let a man shuffle and not walk. Wrists are done separately and then the two are joined up the middle if the order is severe. For a man who is going into water they added weight, which is what weight is for. The point of loading a prisoner before drowning him is that drowning is otherwise a slow and untidy business that sometimes does not work.

They took him down to the Ganges.

They took him down through the city to do it, which was part of the sentence. A man in irons is walked, slowly, because irons do not let him do anything else, and the route goes where the people are. He went down the lanes he had lived in for a hundred years, past the wood yards and the shops and the open fronts of houses where he had argued with half the men now standing in them, with the chains going on the stone at every step, and everybody in Banaras who could get out of a doorway came out of it.

At Banaras the river comes round the outside of the bend and runs deep and strong along the foot of the stairs, and it is cold in that season, and it is wide. There is no shelving. A man goes off the bottom step or off a boat and he is in it. The whole city can watch from the steps, and the steps are built like the seats of a theatre, and on that day they were full.

They put him in.

He came up, and swam to the bank, and walked out of the water.

The chains stayed in the river. He had come out of them somewhere between the surface and the bottom, and the iron went down into the mud where the Ganges puts everything it is given, and the old man walked up the wet stone with his clothes running and stood there.

Nothing is recorded about what he said. There is no hymn about it. He seems not to have regarded it as a subject.

The city held that the Ganges was a goddess. It drank her and bathed in her and put its dead in her and held that a mouthful of her at the last moment settles the account. It had just given her a man to drown, and she had handed him back onto the steps.

The men who had laid the charge were standing on those steps.

So was most of the city. The ghāṭs of Banaras will hold a very large number of people and on that morning they were holding them, ranked up the stone in the cold sunlight with the mist off the water only just gone, and every one of them had watched the same thing happen.

An emperor who has ordered a public execution and not got one is in a worse position than he was an hour before, because now the crowd has seen something, and a crowd that has seen something talks. It could not be left there. Within the logic of that morning there was only one thing to do, which was to try again with something more certain, and there is nothing in the world more certain than fire.

In Banaras, fire is a trade.

Wood comes to that city in boats and by cart in quantities that have to be seen: mango, and the cheap soft woods, and sandal for those who can pay, stacked in yards above the burning ground and sold by weight. There are men whose family has done nothing else for as long as the family has existed. They know how much a body takes, and how to lay it so it burns through, and what to do when it does not, and they are paid at every stage and they are untouchable at every stage. A householder with money buys enough. A poor man buys what he can afford and goes home with the work half done.

Nobody in India knows more about burning a human body than the people of that city, and the fire they use is said to come from a hearth that has never been allowed to go out.

So when the emperor ordered the weaver burned, there was no difficulty about arrangements. They built the pile and lit it and threw him on it.

Lighting it is the one part of the business that takes any skill at all, and in that city there is nobody who lacks it. You want dry straw under, and small stuff over the straw, and the heavy wood laid so the air can come up through it, and a little ghee if there is any, and then it goes with one flame and cannot be stopped by anything. There was a crowd standing well back, because you have to stand well back. The heat of a proper pyre will take the hair off a man's arm at ten paces.

The fire went out.

He came up out of the wood and walked away from it, and the accounts say that his body was not marked anywhere, and that he looked better when he came out than when he went in.

What was left on the ground was a heap of wood with most of the wood still in it, smoking at the edges in the way a fire smokes when it has been put out rather than when it has finished. The men whose trade it was went and stood over it. A crowd that has come out to see an execution and has now seen two of them fail does not go home quickly, and it does not go home quietly.

That is all there is. It is told in two lines in the old books.

The wood was there. The men who built it knew their work. Nothing had been done wrongly and nobody suggested afterwards that it had.

Every soul in that crowd had a settled idea of what fire was for. Fire was the last thing that happened to you and the necessary thing, the transaction at the bottom of the steps that everybody in the city would eventually be party to, first as a mourner and then once as the other thing. The whole promise of Banaras ended at a fire. Pilgrims had come from the other side of the country and waited in rented rooms for years for the sake of that fire.

They had just used it on a living man on purpose and it had refused.

He stood up out of the ashes and was taken away to be killed a third time.

The third way of killing a man at a court of that time was the elephant, and it is the most public of the three because it needs an open ground and a crowd on every side.

A killing elephant is a trained animal, and the training is the whole business. The driver sits on the neck with his legs behind the ears and a steel hook in his right hand, and he can make the beast do a number of things that no elephant would ever do on its own. He can make it go forward at a man tied on the ground. The animal does not want to. Elephants are careful about what they put their feet near, and a great deal of the work is getting one past that carefulness.

They tied Kabīr. His arms were bound and he was rolled into a bundle and thrown down on the ground, which is how it was done, so that the thing on the earth should not look like a man.

Then they beat the elephant on the head to drive him at it.

The elephant screamed and went backwards.

The qāzī was there, and the qāzī shouted. He shouted at the driver, because that is the available thing to shout at, and he told him to force the animal on, and promised the man that if he did not he would be cut up small. It is a detail that nobody would have invented in that direction. The learned man of the law, the one who reads and settles and rules, is the one standing at the edge of the ground screaming at a servant about mincemeat.

The elephant would not go.

Then he put his trunk down to the bundle lying in the dust, and lifted it, and bowed his head to it.

Kabīr made a song about that day, and the song is told from the elephant's side.

Before the song, one word about why the qāzī was on that ground at all. He was not a spectator. An execution is a legal act and the law has to be represented at it, and the man who represents the law at a Muslim court is the qāzī: the one who reads, who rules on marriages and inheritances and blasphemy, who had opened the Quran over a weaver's baby in a mud house a hundred years before and drawn out the word that became the name of the bundle now lying in the dust in front of him.

They tied my arms and rolled me up and threw me down like a ball.

They beat the elephant on the head and pushed him at me.

He screamed and went back on his haunches.

I am a sacrifice, he said, to the shape that stood up in front of me.

I cannot do it.

The qāzī shouted at the driver: on, get him on,

or I will have you cut into pieces where you sit.

Hook him. Beat him. Chop him if you like.

He would not go.

He put his trunk down to the thing on the ground and picked it up

and bowed his head to it.

Three times they tried to kill me.

Three times it came to nothing.

There is no grandeur in it and he has not put any in. It is a report, with the sequence of events in the order they occurred, and the only line in it with any warmth is the one given to the animal.

One account says what the elephant saw. It says that where the crowd saw a bound man on the ground, the elephant saw a lion sitting in front of it.

The only one on that ground who would not do the thing he was being made to do was the elephant.

Then they brought the second charge, which had been held back, and it was the charge of blasphemy. He had called himself God.

Men who had heard him sing would have had no trouble finding lines to bring, and there is no need to pretend otherwise. He said things all his life that could be carried to a court by anyone who wanted to carry them. He said that what he knew he had seen with his own eyes. He said that the name had been handed to him and that nobody stood between him and it. He said, in one place or another, that the distance between himself and God had closed. Any of that, taken out of the lane and set down in front of a king, is a capital matter under either law.

The emperor set a test.

He had a cow slaughtered, and he told Kabīr to bring her back.

The choice of animal was not an accident, and it would not have been read as one by a single person in that city. In Banaras the cow is the creature you do not touch. She goes where she likes, she stands in the narrowest lane, and the whole street goes round her. Killing one is the thing for which a man loses his caste and his village and his family. To take that animal and cut her throat in front of the holiest city in India, in order to test a weaver of the other religion, was a deliberate act by men who knew exactly what they were doing and it was watched by a crowd that knew exactly what it was seeing.

The cow was killed and laid on the ground.

It should be understood what a crowd on that ground was actually looking at. Half of them had been raised to believe that the killing itself was the end of the world, and were standing in the presence of it, at a king's order, unable to do anything. The other half had been told since childhood that the fuss about the animal was an absurdity, and were watching their own law used as an instrument in a quarrel about a weaver. Nobody there was comfortable. That was the point of choosing her.

Kabīr came and stood by her. He put his hand on her and stroked her along the flank, the way a man quiets an animal he wants to move. Then he made a noise with his lips, the small clicking noise that every drover in India makes at cattle on a road.

The cow got up. There was no wound on her.

The emperor came down off his seat and put himself at the old man's feet. That is what is recorded, and it is a considerable thing to have recorded about an Afghan king in front of his own chiefs. He offered money. Then he offered land, which is a much larger offer, because money is spent and land goes on producing for a man's sons after him and is how a king actually rewards anybody.

Kabīr said he had no concern with anything but the name of God.

He was a poor man and had been poor all his life and had a household behind him that had gone short for sixty years to keep holy men fed. There was no pose in the refusal and no pleasure taken in making it. He said it the way a man declines a dish he does not eat.

Then he went home, which in his case meant back through the lanes to the weavers' quarter, to a mud house with a trench in the floor and a warp running out through the doorway into the street, where his family had been waiting to hear whether he was dead.

Nothing in the accounts says what he did the next morning. What a weaver does the next morning is weave.

A man who has been chained and thrown into the Ganges, laid on a burning pile, put down in front of a maddened elephant and seen to raise a dead cow, all of it inside a few days and all of it in front of the city he lives in, does not go back to being a weaver in a lane.

This is the part of the story that nobody tells, and it is the part he would have thought most important.

What his enemies had actually accomplished is worth adding up. They had gone to the emperor to have him disposed of by the state, cheaply, without any further argument. What they got was three public executions that did not take, a cow standing up in front of a crowd, and the sultan of Delhi on the ground at the old man's feet offering him land. If there is a worse result available from a plan, it is hard to imagine what it would be. Every man in Banaras who had ever wondered about the weaver had now seen the question settled in the most vulgar and unanswerable way there is, which is publicly, by an authority nobody could dispute, with the learned men of both religions standing at the edge of the ground watching it happen.

And they had not withdrawn the charge. That is the thing to hold on to. The charge was that men who listened to him were left neither Hindus nor Muslims, and the charge was true, and nothing in those few days had made it less true. They would go on making it for the rest of his life and for five hundred years afterwards, and they would be right every time.

What it did to him was the opposite of what they intended and worse for him than what they intended.

He had spent his whole working life on one proposition. There is a name. It costs nothing. No priest can charge you for it, no pandit can withhold it, no qāzī can license it, no temple contains it and no book has a monopoly on it, and the entire apparatus that stands between a man and that name is an industry and nothing else. That was the argument. He had made it in couplets that people carried away in their heads, and he had made it by putting a sacred thread on a weaver's shoulder in the street, and he had made it by asking the qāzī what he proposed to do about women.

Now he was a man who cured emperors and raised cattle.

He knew what that meant and he had seen it coming years before, which is why, once already, he had gone to some trouble to ruin his own reputation on purpose. He had found that crowds were making it impossible for him to sit still, and instead of taking it as a compliment he had set about making himself a scandal, by a method that was crude and effective and that horrified every pious person in Banaras. That tells you exactly what he thought of a following. He was not being modest. A man who is worshipped has become a stone in front of the thing he was pointing at, and the worshipper will stop at the stone, because stopping is easier, and Kabīr had spent fifty years watching people stop at stones.

After the emperor's business there was no possibility of doing that again. You cannot blacken the name of a man the sultan has knelt to. The story was out of his hands and it would now go where such stories go. Within a hundred years there would be pictures of him in a temple in that city with disciples kneeling at his side and his son fanning him. Wandering men would sing his couplets to villagers who believed he had never been born of a woman. The two religions that had brought the charge would eventually both claim him, and both would do it by keeping the miracles and quietly setting aside the sentence about being left neither one thing nor the other.

He was, by then, extremely old. It should be kept in mind through everything that follows. He had been on a plank over a hole in an earth floor with a shuttle in his hand since he was a boy in a city that has been known to break men at forty. He had outlived everybody who found him at the lake, everybody who objected to his thread, the qāzī who named him, most likely the emperor who tried three times to kill him, and certainly the pandits who first called him a man with no teacher.

And he had one thing left that he had never done. He had said, all his life, that a place cannot do for a man what the man has not done for himself, and nobody in Banaras believed him, and there was one argument left that could not be talked around.

Some time after that, God came to him.

It is set down without any preparation, and it will be set down the same way here. He had a vision. God put a hand on his head and invited him to come, bodily, as he stood, with the body he had.

That last part is the whole of it, and it wants saying plainly, because it is easy to read past. He was not told that he would be received when he died. Every religion in that city offered something of that kind and the offers were the business of the place. He was told to come as he was.

There is nothing in the account about light, or music, or a company of the blessed, or any of the furniture that gets attached to such things afterwards by people who were not there. A hand was put on his head. He was asked to come. It is told with about as much ceremony as a neighbour putting his head round a door to say that the food is ready, and that is how he told it, and he was not a man who understated things when he thought they deserved more. Not a soul detached at the end from a thing left behind on a mat, and not a body burned at the water's edge by men of a caste nobody would touch, but the man, walking, brought over with his bones in him.

He did not go at once. He had something to do first.

For most of a century he had been saying one thing that the people around him could not and would not hear, and it was not any of his remarks about pandits, which they enjoyed, or his remarks about mullās, which they also enjoyed, especially when the other party was the target. It was this. Banaras will not save you.

He had said it in the lanes and he had said it on the steps and he had said it to old men and women who had come four hundred miles on foot to die inside a line drawn on the ground. He had said that if a man has it in him, any place at all will do, and that if he has not, then the holiest ground on earth will not do him the smallest good, and that the word said in his ear at the last moment by a god who could not be bothered with him for the previous eighty years is not a thing worth selling a field for.

Nobody had believed him. It is not hard to see why. The city had made its promise before anybody could remember, and it was the most generous promise on offer anywhere, because it asked nothing: no merit, no caste, no learning, no fitness of any kind, only the geography. Against a promise like that, a weaver with a couplet has no chance at all. He had been arguing against the only hope a great many extremely poor people had, and they went on buying wood and renting rooms and waiting, and the priests went on collecting, and the fire went on all night and all day, and the smoke went up over the lanes where he sat working.

There was one argument he had never made. He had never made it with his own death, because a man can only do that once, and until now it had not been the right time.

So he decided to go and die in the wrong place.

Not somewhere neutral. There would have been no argument in that. He would go to the one town in the north of India that everybody agreed was the worst possible place in the world for a man to die, and he would die there, on purpose, at the end of a hundred and nineteen years of saying that it made no difference.

And then he began, at an age at which most men are being carried from one room to another, to get ready to leave the city he had lived in for a hundred and eighteen years.

Maghar is a small town beyond the Ghāghrā, about eighty-five miles east of Ajodhyā and fifteen miles west of Gorakhpur, and there is no reason on earth for anybody to go there.

That is not a slight on the place. It is what it was and largely what it is: an ordinary country town of the eastern plain, with a market on certain days, a tank with steps going down into it and buffalo standing in it up to the shoulder, a mango tope on the edge of the houses where the grain is threshed, mud walls, tiled roofs, a lane of shops, and in every direction from the last house, fields. Nothing has ever happened there. Nobody has ever written a poem about the beauty of it. Men from Maghar went to Banaras; men from Banaras did not go to Maghar.

And there was one more thing about it, which is the only thing anybody in that country knew about it, and which had probably been true for longer than anyone could account for. To die at Maghar was to lose everything.

It was held, flatly and without much argument, that a man who dies at Maghar has no hope.

Nobody could tell you where the belief came from. No text was produced for it and no priesthood at Maghar had any interest in keeping it up, since it drove business away rather than bringing it in. It was simply known, the way the country knew a hundred other things: a carter would tell you, a woman at a well would tell you, and if you asked who said so, they would look at you. The formula preserved among Kabīr's own people is very exact about whom it applies to: the man who has put his trust in the exercises the śāstras prescribe, the fasts and the postures and the bathing and the giving to brahmins, and who has been scrupulous about all of it, and who then dies at Maghar, comes back as a donkey. Not as a low man. As a donkey, in the road, with a load on it.

So there were two towns in the north of India that everybody had an opinion about, and they were opposite ends of one idea. In the one, nothing you have done matters because the ground saves you. In the other, nothing you have done matters because the ground damns you. In neither case does the man himself come into it at all.

Set against that what Kabīr's own people said, because they said it very simply and it is the whole of his teaching in one line. For a man who actually worships God, every place on earth is worth thousands of cities like Banaras. And the devotee of God who dies at Maghar goes to heaven.

That is not a claim that Maghar is a holy place. It is the destruction of the entire category. He is not moving the boundary line; he is saying that the line is not there, that it never was there, and that the men who drew it on both sides of the Ganges have been taking money for a map of a country that does not exist.

And notice the difference in the economics, because he certainly noticed it. Banaras had a promise and the promise had an industry attached: the wood, the rooms, the priests, the genealogies, the positions on the steps that a man inherited from his father, the whole machine described on the first day of this reading. Maghar had nothing to sell. Nobody at Maghar made a living from the belief about Maghar. It was simply a fact that the country carried around, the way it carried the belief about Banaras, and the two beliefs held each other up, and between them they had settled the death of every poor man on that plain for centuries.

A weaver who had spent his life saying that both of them were nonsense had exactly one way left of saying it so that it could not be answered.

He was going to have to go there.

So an old man walked out of Banaras in the direction of the place where dying was worthless, on purpose.

He had been there a hundred and eighteen years. That is a long time in a street. He had been found at a lake outside the city and carried in as a few days old infant, and he had lived in the weavers' quarter ever since, and now every person he had ever known was dead. He had outlived the neighbours who told his mother she should not have kept him, and their children, and their children. There would have been men in that lane who had heard from their grandfathers what the old weaver had said to the brahmin about the thread. He was the oldest thing in the quarter. He was older than the houses.

He went anyway, and he went on foot in the way of that country, by the roads, through the villages, north and east towards Gorakhpur, out of the river country where everything is built up and paved and crowded, into the open plain where the road is a pale line between fields and the only buildings are a well head and a shrine with a red flag on it, and a man walks from one mango tope to the next and sits in the shade at noon.

Nothing is recorded about the journey, and nothing will be invented about it here.

What is recorded is what people said to him before he went, and the reason it is recorded is that he kept it, and put it in a song, exactly as he had once kept the thing his mother said about him in her kitchen and put that in a song. He did this all his life. He gave the other side its lines. He let people say the worst they had about him in their own words, and then he wrote his name at the bottom.

What they said was this. The old man has lost what little sense he had. He is leaving Banaras. He has spent his whole life here in the city of Śiv and thrown it away, and now, with death actually on him, when the one thing any sane man wants is to be inside the boundary when it comes, he is getting up and moving to Maghar to die.

You can hear the voices. They are not cruel voices. They are the voices of people in a lane who are genuinely appalled and who think he has gone soft in the head at last, and one or two of them may have been fond of him. Some of them would have followed him out to the edge of the houses arguing. What they were saying was the only sensible thing to say. In the terms everybody in that city had agreed on before he was born, he was about to throw away the single advantage a poor man could get in this world, and he was doing it at the last possible moment, when it could not be got back.

He also knew perfectly well what the other party would say, and the other party would say the same thing from the opposite direction: that the weaver had finally found out that the Hindus were wrong, and had gone off east to die in a place where their promise did not apply, which proved that he had never really believed it, and that all those years of saying Rām had come to nothing in the end. Both halves of the city could take comfort. He was going to be misunderstood in two directions simultaneously, which had been the condition of his entire life, and he had never once let it change a word.

He was not going to Maghar to prove anything to Maghar. Maghar had no opinion about him. He was going in order to prove something to Banaras, and the only way to prove it to Banaras was to leave, and the only way to make the proof stick was not to come back.

So he went down through the lanes for the last time, past the wood yards and the positions on the steps, out through the fields where the warp had been stretched between pegs in the sun every morning of his working life, and took the road.

There is a river at Maghar called the Āmī. It is not a great river. It is the sort of stream that runs full and brown for three months of the year and then goes down through the autumn until it is a chain of pools, and then goes to sand.

On the margin of it there was a saint's cell, and Kabīr took it.

A cell of that kind is one room, perhaps of mud and perhaps of brick, with a thatch on it, standing by itself where the town stops and the fields begin, and it belongs to nobody. Holy men use it and go on and the next one finds it empty. There is a mat. There is a water pot. There is a place outside where the last man made his fire. There is no door worth the name. It is the standard accommodation of a wandering man in that country and there is one on the edge of most towns.

The bed of the Āmī was dry when he came. There has been water in it since.

He sat down in that room, in a town where his death was going to be worth nothing, at the end of the longest life anybody in that part of the world could remember, and he made two songs. They are not the most famous things he made. The couplets are what went round the country and are still going round it. But these two are the ones he made at the end, knowing it was the end, in the place he had chosen, and everything he had been saying since he was a boy in a doorway is in them, said once more, without heat, by a man with nothing left to gain from saying it.

The first begins with the plainest confession of weakness in his entire work.

I am a fish that has been lifted out of the water.

Whatever I did in the life before this one, it was not enough.

They say the old man has no sense: he has left Banaras.

They say he threw his whole life away in the city of Śiv

and has come off to Maghar now to die.

I sat in Banaras a great many years and did my penance there.

Death has come close, so I have come here to live.

Banaras, Maghar. I hold the two of them the same.

A man with a little thin devotion: how is he to be got across?

My teacher knows it, Gaṇeś knows it, Śiv knows it,

and every man standing here knows it:

Kabīr said the name of God with his mouth while he was dying.

He does not say he is unafraid. He says he is a fish out of water, which is the condition of a creature that is going to die and knows it and cannot do anything about it, and he says it first, before anything else. He does not claim a special dispensation. He asks the question that anybody would ask, which is how a man with only a little devotion is supposed to be carried over, and he does not answer it.

And he repeats the jeering exactly as it was said to him in the lane, twice, in their words, before he says a syllable of his own.

Then the line the whole day has been walking towards, and it is barely a sentence: Banaras, Maghar, the same. Not Maghar is better. Not Maghar is holy after all. The same. There is no ground anywhere that does the work for you, and the man who has been saying so for a hundred years is sitting in the worse of the two towns saying it with his own death in the room.

The second song is the other half of it, and it is not about him at all.

You are my mountain and I have come in under you.

You do not shake, so I do not fall.

I have leaned my weight on you and lived here at Maghar.

At Maghar I first saw you, and afterwards I went to live in Banaras.

As Banaras, so Maghar. There is nothing to choose.

I am a poor man and I have got hold of this,

and the pandits are bursting with it, watching me.

What is hell? What is heaven? Two wretched places.

The saints have refused the pair of them.

My teacher gave me this, and now I take my hat off to nobody.

I have taken the seat that belongs to God. I have met him.

God and Kabīr have become one thing.

Nobody can tell which of us is which.

That is the end of the argument and it is also the end of the map. He has thrown out both destinations. Hell is a wretched place and heaven is a wretched place and the saints have declined both, which leaves the whole machinery of reward and punishment, the entire stock in trade of every religious professional he ever met, standing in the road with nothing in its hands.

And there is one detail in it that is easy to go past. He calls his teacher to witness in the first song. Sixty or seventy years after he lay on the steps at Pañcgaṅgā in the dark and took a word off an old man's mouth by a trick, at the end of his life, in a town where he had gone to die badly on purpose, the first witness he calls is his teacher. He had spent his life telling people that no man stands between them and God, and he never once pretended he had got there on his own.

Then the last two lines, which are the reason his enemies were not wrong to be frightened of him. He does not say he loves God, and he does not say he has been received by God. He says the two of them have come out as one thing and that nobody can tell them apart, and he says it in the flat voice of a man reporting a fact about his own situation, sitting on a mat by a dry river bed fifteen miles from Gorakhpur.

He died at Maghar on the eleventh day of the bright half of the month of Māgh, in 1518.

The Indian month has two halves. The bright half is the fortnight while the moon is filling, from the dark of it to the full; the dark half is the fortnight while it empties again. The eleventh day of a bright half is a day people keep in that country, a day of fasting and not eating grain, so it is a day that gets noticed and gets remembered, which is probably why it survived.

The town is Maghar and the month was Māgh. Nobody arranged that.

How the date came down is worth a paragraph, because it is not a grand piece of record-keeping and it is better than one. His people put it in a couplet. That is what you do in a country where most of the men who care about a thing cannot read: you pack the year and the month and the day into two rhyming lines, tight enough that they cannot be got wrong and short enough that a child can hold them, and you set it in the child's mouth, and a hundred years later somebody who never met anybody who met him can still tell you exactly when it was. Nobody made that couplet beautiful. It was not supposed to be beautiful. It was supposed to be exact and portable, and it was both, and it worked. Far away to the west, the followers of Dādū kept the same reckoning, and their count and the Kabīr Panth's count agree.

His age is given to the day: a hundred and nineteen years, five months and twenty-seven days.

Count it back and it lands where this book began, on a Monday in 1398, on the full moon of Jeṭh, the worst month of the year on that plain, when a weaver called Nīrū was walking his wife home along the road past a lake and saw something at the edge of the water among the leaves.

There is another account. A Marathi book gives his death seventy years earlier, in 1448. The two cannot both be true, they cannot be turned into a third thing that would suit everybody, and this book has told the first. The second is set down here in one sentence because it exists and because a reader is entitled to know that it does.

And some of his followers hold that he did not die at all, and never has.

Both those things are carried by the same people, at the same time, without any embarrassment: an age counted out to the day, and a conviction that the count does not apply. That is how it has come down and that is how it is given here.

Of the death itself there is almost nothing to tell. No last words are recorded. Nobody wrote down who was in the room or what the weather was doing or whether the cell was cold, and none of it will be supplied here. He was extremely old and had been extremely old for a long time, and on a day in the bright half of that month, in a mud room by a dry river bed, he stopped.

There is one thing, and it comes from the oldest telling. He had flowers brought in first. He had them spread on the floor of the cell, and he lay down on them, and he drew a single plain sheet up over himself.

So the thing that was found there the next morning had been put there by him.

The only testimony about the last minutes is his own, and he gave it in advance, in the song, in the flattest line he ever wrote: that his teacher knew, and Gaṇeś knew, and Śiv knew, and every man standing there knew, that Kabīr said the name of God with his mouth while he was dying. He had spent a century telling people that the name was the whole of it and that everything else was furniture. He was not going to make an exception for himself at the end, and by the sound of that line he expected to be doubted about it, and put the witnesses in the verse in advance so that the question would already be answered when it came.

Then the news went out of Maghar in both directions at once, and two men who had never in their lives agreed about anything got up and came.

Bīr Siṅh Baghelā, king of Banaras, came to burn him.

Bijlī Khān, Nawāb of Gorakhpur, came to bury him. Gorakhpur is fifteen miles off.

Each of them came the way such men travel, with retainers, and in the case of a king of Banaras with a good many of them, and they arrived at a one-room cell on the edge of a country town by a dry river, and inside it, under a sheet, was the body of a weaver.

The positions were fixed before either party set out, and neither man had to think about it for a moment.

The Hindus would burn him. That is what is done. The body goes to the fire and the fire takes it apart and what is left goes into running water, and the man has been properly dealt with, and until it is done he is not dealt with at all. For the king of Banaras there was more in it than that, because the body in the room was the body of the greatest man his city had produced in living memory, and Banaras is where the burning is done, and there was every reason to take him home.

The Muslims would bury him. That is what is done. The body goes into the ground whole, laid on its right side with the face turned towards Mecca, and it waits there, and burning a body is an abomination, because the body is to be raised. For the Nawāb of Gorakhpur there was more in it than that too. Kabīr was a Muslim. He had been named out of the Quran by a qāzī in a weaver's house. Whatever he had said for a hundred years about mullās and mosques and the call to prayer, he was of that community by birth and by trade and by street, and his own people were not going to let him be burned like a Hindu.

So two parties of armed men stood in front of a cell by the Āmī and quarrelled over the body of a man who had told both of them, for a lifetime, in the plainest language either of them had ever heard, that what they were quarrelling about was nothing.

It went far enough that it was going to be settled the way such things are settled.

Then a voice separated them.

Where it came from is not described. It stopped the quarrel. When the quarrel was over and the men had come back from wherever the voice had put them, somebody went in and lifted the sheet.

There was no body under it. There were flowers.

Flowers in that country are not an ornament on a dead man. They are what you bring. Marigold and jasmine are sold by the basket at every gate of every temple and at the top of every flight of steps down to the water, and a body going to the fire or to the ground goes under them, heaped, so that the last thing anybody carries out of a house is a weight of blossom with a shape under it.

These were the ones he had sent for himself and lain down on. They were fresh and they had a scent on them and they were lying where he had been lying, and that is all that is said about it.

The Muslims made a grave.

The Hindus raised a shrine beside it.

The two stand close together at Maghar, near enough that a man can put a hand on both, and from that day each party kept its own, and tended it, and came to it, and behaved in every particular as though it had his remains in the ground under it.

Two hundred years afterwards, when the lives of the saints came to be told again, Kabīr's end was given a single line: trusting his devotion, he let his body go at Maghar, and he is in the lap of the undying now.

It is said that some days later he came back.

He appeared at Mathurā to a disciple called Ratan and gave him instruction. He met Dharmdās, whom he had appointed his successor before he ever went to Maghar, and he laid down forty-two articles and called them the pillars of the faith, and he went through them and explained them one at a time, which is a very domestic thing for a man in that situation to be doing, and exactly like him. Then he departed, and this time he did not come back.

Forty-two. Not forty, which is the number a story rounds itself off to when nobody is minding it. His people kept the awkward number because he gave them the awkward number, and the fact that nobody has tidied it in five hundred years says something about the care with which the material was handed on. Dharmdās had the succession already. It had been settled before Maghar, in the ordinary way, while the old man was alive and able to say what he wanted, which is how a sensible householder arranges his affairs.

What was left behind was words, which is the only thing he had ever produced.

He never wrote any of it. That has been said on the first day and it bears saying again at the end, because of the size of what came out of it. A man who could not write his own name made, out loud, in a lane, over a hundred years, a body of work that the north of India has not stopped repeating since.

The most famous of the books is the Bījak. Its language is the Hindi of the country around Mirzāpur with Gorakhpurī forms running through it, which is why people who know the dialects say that the last of it was made in those months at Maghar, in the Gorakhpur district, in the cell by the Āmī. Its parts are not chapters of an argument. They are ways of singing. There are the long strange rhymed pieces, eighty-four of them. There are spring songs and swing songs and songs for carrying a load. And there are several hundred of the two-line nails he drove in all his life. Seasons, swings, tunes, and the two-line nails he drove in all his life. That is the shape of his book, and it is the shape of the work of a man who never had a desk.

Then, about a hundred years after Maghar, at the far end of north India, in the Panjab, men who were compiling a scripture of their own went looking for him. They gathered something like five hundred of his compositions and put them into their book, and the book has been recited every day since in places he never heard of, in a country he never went to, by people whose language he did not speak. They put a couplet of Ravidās's in among his, which is a considerable thing, because it means the men doing the compiling heard the Muslim weaver and the Chamār tanner of Banaras as one voice and filed them together accordingly.

And the rest of it went the way he would have wanted, which is to say it went loose.

His verses are sung by wandering faqīrs on the roads of the plain. They are sung by men who own nothing and are going nowhere in particular and stop at a village and sit down under a tree, and half the time they could not tell you who made the lines they are singing, and the other half they attribute them to Kabīr whether he made them or not. Weavers sing them at the loom, which is where they came from. Women sing them grinding corn. They go into other people's books and come out again changed. Nobody has ever been able to establish what is his and what has been put on him, and there is no prospect of anybody ever doing it now, and the whole situation would have suited him exactly, since his opinion of writing things down was low and his opinion of the people who guard written things was lower.

A man who spent a century telling everybody that the name is free, that nobody may charge for it, and that a thing which needs a priest, a licence, a temple and a fee is not the thing itself, has ended as a set of couplets that anybody can pick up off a road for nothing.

Four days of this reading have gone on him. He was born to a widow who could not keep him and left on the water outside the city at night. He was carried home by a Muslim weaver and given a name out of the Quran by the fall of a lot. He put on a thread he had no right to and would not put it off. He got himself a teacher by lying on the steps in the dark. He fed holy men his family could not afford to feed. He beat the learned men of two religions in public in the street for fifty years and made the whole city laugh at them, and they went to an emperor about him, and the emperor tried three times to kill him and then knelt. And at the end he got up and walked out of the holiest city in the world, at a hundred and eighteen years, to go and die in the one town where dying was held to be good for nothing, and he did it, and the two parties who came for the body quarrelled over it and found flowers.

At Maghar the grave and the shrine are still standing side by side. And the Āmī, which was a dry bed when the old man came up the road from Banaras and sat down beside it, has water in it.

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