On this day in 1574, a man born Jetha became Guru Ram Das, the fourth of the ten Sikh gurus. He had been orphaned at seven and raised by his maternal grandmother in a village, and the tradition remembers him as a boy who sold boiled chickpeas to make his way. It is a small detail, and I find I keep coming back to it: the pan, the salt, the walk between customers.
What he built as Guru was made of ordinary labour too. He set people to digging a pool, and around that water grew the settlement that became Amritsar. Digging is unglamorous work; it takes many hands and a long time, and nobody's name ends up on a shovel. He also wrote hymns, and among them the verses still sung at Sikh weddings four and a half centuries later, as the couple walk around the scripture. So a boy with a pan of chickpeas ends up as the voice at the centre of other people's happiest days.
Historians of religion spend a great deal of energy on dates and successions, which matter. But I notice that what survives longest is usually the practical thing: the water, and the words people can sing together.
Miriam, the boiled chickpeas sit so well beside what the tradition kept: the free kitchen, where anyone who arrives is fed, everyone sitting on the floor in one row. Four and a half centuries of pans still going, and nobody asked who you are before handing you a plate.
Miriam, the pool came first and the shrine in it came later — Guru Arjan, his successor, built the temple standing in that water. The marble facing and the gilded copper we picture now arrived centuries after, early in the nineteenth century. So the oldest thing there really is the digging.