Ik Onkar

How should I see people. The young have asked me this, in one form or another, for a long time, and for years, I gave them clever answers. I have stopped doing that. The honest answer turned out to be shorter, and it took me most of my life to arrive at it. We see people the way we have already decided to see them, before they have so much as sat down. Most of the work, I have come to think, is only in noticing that the deciding has already happened.

There is an old story about Baba ji that I keep going back to. He was travelling, and a wealthy man, Malik Bhago, had laid out a great feast and expected Baba ji at it. Baba ji did not come. He went instead to the small house of a carpenter, Bhai Lalo, who lived on what his own two hands could earn. Bhago took offence, the way such men do, and sent to ask why his table had been passed over.

Baba ji asked for a piece of bread from each house. He held the carpenter’s plain bread in one hand and the rich man’s food in the other, and he pressed them together. From Lalo’s bread, they say, ran milk. From Bhago’s feast ran blood.

Believe the miracle or leave it; it hardly matters. What stays with me is the plain thing sitting underneath it. One man’s bread was the honest fruit of his own labour. The others had been squeezed out of people he never had to look in the face. Baba ji was not shaming a man for being rich. He was showing where a thing had come from. And he was saying, without quite saying it, that a man’s title will tell you almost nothing about him worth knowing.

Long after, in the fighting at Anandpur, there was a Sikh called Bhai Kanhaiya who carried water to the wounded. The trouble, to the soldiers’ eyes, was that he carried it to everyone—to their own fallen, and to the men who had come to kill them, without troubling to tell one from the other. They complained of it. Guru Gobind Singh called him and asked whether it was true. Kanhaiya said that it was, but that out on the field, he had somehow lost the knack of telling whose face was whose; he saw only the thirst. The Guru did not scold him. He gave him ointment and sent him back to bind the wounds and sent him back to bind the wounds,.

Nearer our own time, a writer named Amrita Pritam looked hard at what we did to one another when the country was cut in two, and she would not write for one side of it. She wrote for the person caught in the middle, the one with no flag to shelter behind. Grief, she understood, does not stop at a border, and mercy has never once asked to see a passport.

And many centuries later, Martin Luther King Jr. stood before a great crowd in 1963 and spoke of his dream that his children would one day be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character. He had come to it through his own life and his own grief, but the truth beneath it was very old, and not his alone. He was speaking, in his own language and in his own time, of the same human dignity that saints and sages had recognised long before him.

ਮਾਨਸ ਕੀ ਜਾਤ ਸਬੈ ਏਕੈ ਪਹਚਾਨਬੋ ॥

“Manas ki jaat sabhai ekai pehchanbo.”

Recognise all of humankind as one.

— Guru Gobind Singh

This is less an instruction than a description—a plain account of what a person finally sees, if he lives long enough and keeps his eyes a little open. We arrive in the world busy sorting one another. This one above, that one below. This one is worth the trouble; that one is to be stepped around. We give the sorting fine names and up-to-date words, but it is the oldest and laziest thing the mind does, and very nearly the first.

A label is a passing thing. The worth underneath it does not move. The one on the platform and the one standing in the dark at the back of the hall came out of the same place and are headed for the same one. Everything in between is noise we have agreed, among ourselves, to take seriously.

When the floods came to England some years back, and the water took people’s homes, a few men from a group called Khalsa Aid turned up with sandbags, dry clothes and something hot to eat. They did not first settle who the drowning were, or where they prayed, or whether they had it coming. When the water is rising in a man’s house, there is no time for any of that, and no reason for it either. They saw people in trouble, and they helped. That was the whole of it.

None of this was new, even when Baba ji did it. At Kartarpur, five hundred years ago, he sat everyone down on the same floor to eat from the same kitchen—the labourer and the landlord, the priest and the stranger passing through, the one held high and the one who had been told his whole life that he was beneath touching. It was not charity. It was a quiet taking apart of the whole arrangement. It is hard to keep a man beneath you for long while your knees are on the same floor as his.

It is an easy thing to be gentle with a stranger. It costs you nothing, and you will likely never see him again. The hard work is nearer home. The people who have sat across the table from you for thirty years—you stopped seeing them a long time ago. What you see now is the idea of them you formed early and have carried about ever since, gone soft at the edges, like an old photograph that no longer quite matches the face.

We treat people as though we had finished learning them. We take a man’s measure once and put him away on a shelf. But no one stays on the shelf. A person is nearer to a river than to a photograph, and the water you knew last year went downstream long ago. The discipline, if there is one, is not in learning to see the unfamiliar face. It is in refusing to believe you have finished seeing the familiar one.

Our judgments tend to be right about the surface and wrong about everything under it. You meet a loud man, a proud one, the sort who pushes to the front of every queue, and you have him fixed inside a minute. What you seldom hear is the question under the noise. Notice me, it is usually saying. I am afraid of being passed over. We are quick to read what a person does and very nearly blind to why he does it—and the why is where the person actually lives.

I have noticed that the older I get, the fewer people I can look down on. For a while, I took that for wisdom and was rather pleased with myself. I am not so sure now. I suspect it is only that I have lived long enough to have done, at one time or another, most of the foolish and unkind things I once stood ready to condemn in others. It is hard to stand above a man for falling into a ditch you have climbed out of yourself. Forgiveness, when it finally comes, is mostly just honest memory.

I have buried people I loved, and I can tell you that grief never once asked to see their papers, or mine. At a graveside, no one is high, and no one is low. We learn it there, for an hour, and then we file back out through the gate and have forgotten it again by evening. That forgetting is the only real sickness. Ik Onkar is the cure, but it is not swallowed once and done with. It is taken daily, in small doses, no one will ever think to praise you for.

So do not sit waiting for some great wave of love for all of mankind to break over you. It will not come, and if it does, it will not outlast the week. Look instead to the small things. How you speak to the one clearing your plate. Whether you let the other person finish his sentence. Whether you can sit down with someone you decided about years ago and ask him, honestly, how he is—and then keep quiet long enough to hear the answer.

That is where it is settled. Not in the temple, though the temple may send you home ready for it. Not in the books, though the books point the way. It is settled at the table, in the street, in the long ordinary evenings, in the hundred small chances each day either to see a person or to look past him. One Creator, one creation. The words are easily said. They are kept the way a house is kept—not once, with a grand gesture, but daily, in small acts of attention nobody notices. That is enough. I have come to believe it has always been enough.

To Sit With

Who do I quietly treat as though they matter a little less?

Where have I mistaken success for worth—in others, and in myself?

When have I been the one standing in the dark at the back of the hall?

What changes tomorrow, if I take it as true that no one is above me and no one below?

If we begin here—that every person carries the same worth—then the next question asks itself. Not how to see people, but how to live among them. How a man earns his bread, and whether he can earn it without taking the milk out of someone else’s. That is where we go next.