So the tumult continued and the tears continued to course down her cheeks. Her gray head was full of dew and her limbs stiff with cold and damp. Why did the Guru not guide her in her hour of need? Had she lost faith? She recalled the time when she had come to this very temple to take part in the cleaning of the sacred pool. The water had been pumped out and the enormous carp that ate out of people’s hands had been put away in another tank. Millions of Sikhs had volunteered to carry on their heads the slime which had accumulated for over a hundred years. People said that the hawk of the last Guru would come to see the cleaning. Non-believers had laughed their vulgar laughter, shrugged their shoulders, and said: ‘What can you do to people like that?’ But the hawk had come. With her own eyes she had seen it swoop down from the heavens, scattering the thousands of pigeons that nested in the temple precincts. It had perched on the pinnacle of the golden dome, preened its lustrous white plumage, and looked down on the throng waist deep in slime and mire. The people had wept and prayed. Over and over again men had hurled the Guru’s challenging cry: ‘Ye who seek salvation, shout,’ and the crowd had roared back: ‘God is Truth.’ People with faith had seen; those without faith neither saw nor believed that others had seen. Sabhrai also recalled the terrible days when the Sikhs wanted to take over their shrines from the clutches of corrupt priests and the police had decided to help the priests against the people. They had killed and tortured passive resisters. But for each one who was killed, beaten, or imprisoned, another fifty had come. Word had gone round that whenever a band of passive resisters prayed with faith, the Guru himself would appear in their midst and all the lathi blows the police showered on them would fall on him and not on them. That was exactly how it had happened. Frail men and women, who had not known the lash of a harsh tongue, had volunteered and taken merciless beatings without wincing. The police had tired and the priests had panicked. The faith of the Sikhs had triumphed. Was her faith shaking? She tried to dismiss all other thoughts and bring the picture of the last warrior Guru to her mind. He came as he was in the colour print on her mantelpiece: a handsome bearded cavalier in a turban, riding his roan stallion across a stream. On his right hand was perched his white falcon with its wings outspread. There was a man. He had lost all his four sons and refused to give in to injustice. She was to lose only one. How had the Guru faced the loss of his children? She began to recite his stirring lines: