Sometime in the 11th century, a scholar named Ali Hujwiri arrived in Lahore from Ghazni, by some accounts against his will, complaining that he had left his library behind. He never went back. In Lahore he wrote Kashf al-Mahjub, the Unveiling of the Veiled, one of the first books on Sufism in Persian, and the city still calls him Data Ganj Bakhsh, the one who gives away treasure.
In the first part of this series, we followed three masters through Basra, Konya, and Shiraz. Hujwiri was among the first to carry their river across the mountains, and on the plains of India, it found a new home and some of its most beloved voices.
A century after him, Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti settled in Ajmer, and the order that grew from him set a pattern that would last for centuries: live simply, keep an open kitchen, take nothing from kings, and let poetry and music in the people’s own language carry what sermons could not. The Chishtis passed their teaching from master to disciple, the way one lamp is lit from another, from Moinuddin in Ajmer to Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki in Delhi, then to Baba Farid in Punjab, to Nizamuddin Auliya back in Delhi, and through him to a poet named Amir Khusrau.
This part follows the last stretch of that chain.
Baba Farid of Punjab: Sabr (Patience)
Sabar manjh kamaan e, sabar kaa neehano
Sabar sandaa baan, khaalak khataa na karee
Patience is the bow, patience is the bowstring, and patience is the arrow. With these, the Creator will never let you miss.
— Baba Farid, Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Ang 1384
Baba Farid spent most of his life in Ajodhan, a small town on the banks of the Sutlej, far from the courts of Delhi. Travellers reached it by ferry, and anyone who crossed the river and came to his door was fed. Whatever people brought him in the morning had been given away by nightfall, and on the days when nothing came, his household simply went without. That happened often.
People called him Ganj-e-Shakar, the treasury of sugar, though no one quite agrees on how he earned the name. In one story, his mother used to hide a little sugar under his prayer mat when he was a boy, to coax him into praying, and on the day she forgot, he found sugar there anyway. In another, he had gone three days without food and put pebbles in his mouth to keep the hunger down, and the pebbles turned sweet. The two stories sit well side by side. In one, a child is hungry for God. In the other, a grown man is hungry for bread. Both times, the hunger is met with something sweet.
Even kings could not buy him. When Balban, who would later rule Delhi, sent him money and the deeds to four villages, Farid is said to have given the money to the poor and sent the deeds back.
To anyone watching, it must have looked like plain poverty. Farid had another name for it: sabr. The word is usually translated as patience, but in English, patience often means waiting for something better to come. Farid’s sabr wasn’t waiting for anything. It meant being at peace with little and bearing hardship without letting it make you bitter.
Nor was it the calm of a man who had stopped feeling. In one of his most tender verses, Farid admits that his own sorrow once filled his whole world until he climbed high enough to see beyond it:
Fareedaa main jaaniaa dukh mujh koo, dukh sabaaeiai jag
Oochae charh kai dekhiaa, taan ghar ghar eaehaa agg
I thought the sorrow was mine alone. But sorrow fills the whole world. I climbed up high and looked around and saw the same fire burning in every home.
— Baba Farid, Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Ang 1382
His patience seems to grow out of that moment on the roof. Once you have seen that every house is already burning, you no longer want to add to the fire. Which may be why the verse he is best remembered for asks something that sounds nearly impossible:
Fareedaa jo tai maaran mukeeyaan, tinhaa na maare ghumm
Aapnarai ghar jaaeeai, pair tinhaa de chumm
Farid, if someone strikes you with their fists, do not turn and strike them back. Go home, and kiss their feet.
— Baba Farid, Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Ang 1378
Most of us could never kiss the feet of someone who has just struck us. But the verse asks something simpler first. Go home. Return to yourself before you do anything at all, and do not let another person’s anger decide who you become.
Once, the story goes, someone brought him a pair of scissors as a gift. Farid thanked him, set them aside, and asked for a needle instead. Scissors cut things apart, he said, but a needle brings them together. That was his work in this world. Hearts that had torn away from one another and from God, he stitched back together, slowly, one at a time, with love as his thread.
Beneath all that patience burned a longing as fierce as anything in Rumi. In one of his most startling verses, Farid imagines his own body after death, left out in the open, with crows picking at what remains:
Kaagaa karang dhandholiaa, sagalaa khaaeiaa maas
E do nainaa mat chhuhau, pir dekhan kee aas
Hey Crow, you have picked through my skeleton and eaten all my flesh. But do not touch these two eyes. I still hope to see my Beloved.
— Baba Farid, Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Ang 1382
Let everything else be taken: the flesh, the bones, life itself. Farid asked only that his eyes be spared, because he had not yet seen the face he had waited his whole life to see. In the end, that was what his patience was for.
Farid died in 1266, and Ajodhan took a new name from his shrine: Pakpattan, the pure ferry. His words travelled much further than he ever did. According to Sikh tradition, some two hundred years later, Guru Nanak came to Ajodhan and carried Farid’s verses away with him, and Guru Arjan Dev later placed 112 of his shloks and four of his hymns in the Guru Granth Sahib. To this day, in gurdwaras across the world, the words of a Muslim saint from a small town in Punjab are sung as scripture.
Among those who found their way to Ajodhan was a young man from Delhi named Nizamuddin. He had dreamed of meeting Farid since he was a boy, and he was about 20 years old when he finally arrived—destitute and unknown. Farid welcomed him with warmth and taught him with great care. In time, he chose him as his successor and handed him the lamp of the Chishtis. Nizamuddin carried that lamp back to Delhi, where he made a home on the edge of the city and kept its door open to everyone. Of all the people who would come to love him there, none would love him more than a young poet named Khusrau.
Amir Khusrau of Delhi: Ishq (Love)
Khusrau dariyaa prem kaa, ulti waa kee dhaar
Jo utraa so doob gayaa, jo doobaa so paar
Khusrau, the river of love flows backward. Whoever tries to float on it drowns, and whoever drowns reaches the other shore.
— attributed to Amir Khusrau
Khusrau grew up in a world run by the sword. His father, a Turkish soldier, died when the boy was about eight. He grew up in Delhi in the household of his grandfather, the powerful noble Imad-ul-Mulk. By one early account, it was there that he first met a poor young scholar who had taken shelter under the same roof. The scholar was Nizamuddin.
Khusrau could make words do almost anything, from polished Persian ghazals for the court to playful songs in Hindavi, the everyday speech of Delhi’s lanes. People called him Tuti-e-Hind, the parrot of India, and he is traditionally credited with shaping the music that grew into qawwali. He spent half a century as a poet to more than seven rulers of the Delhi Sultanate, through coups and assassinations, praising whoever held the throne that year. Kings came and went, but Khusrau’s heart never moved. It belonged to Nizamuddin, a saint who refused every invitation to the royal court.
One morning, the story goes, the two of them stood by the Yamuna, watching Hindus bathe and pray at the water’s edge. Nizamuddin spoke half a line of Persian verse:
“Har qaum raast raahe, deene wa qibla gaahe.”
Every community has its path, its faith, its direction of prayer.
Khusrau finished the line before the moment had passed:
“Man qibla raast kardam bar samt-e kajkulaahe.”
I have turned my own heart toward the one whose cap is tilted.
Nizamuddin wore his cap at a slant. In a single breath, Khusrau entrusted every faith on that riverbank to God’s care and told his teacher where his own heart lay.
The Sufis call this ishq, a love so complete that it no longer keeps anything back for itself. Two stories show what it looked like in Khusrau’s life.
A poor man once came to Nizamuddin, hoping for help with his daughter’s wedding. After three days, with nothing else to give, Nizamuddin handed him his own worn sandals, and the man left, disappointed. On his way home, he passed a great caravan. At its head rode Khusrau, returning from royal service with everything he owned. As the man went by, Khusrau caught the scent of his master. He turned back, heard the man’s story, and gave him the entire caravan in exchange for the sandals. It is said that he carried them all the way to Delhi on his head, as a king carries his crown.
When he laid them at his master’s feet, Nizamuddin learned what the sandals had cost him. He smiled and said,
“Khusrau, you bought them very cheap.”
In the old tellings, Khusrau answered through his tears:
“If I had paid with my life, they would still have been cheap.”
When love is that complete, nothing given for it feels like a loss, because there is no longer a separate self left to lose. Khusrau put that feeling into a single couplet, still sung wherever qawwali is sung:
Man tu shudam, tu man shudi, man tan shudam, tu jaan shudi
Taa kas na goyad baad azeen, man deegaram tu deegari
I have become you, and you have become me. I am the body, and you are the soul. So from now on, no one can say that I am one person and you another.
— Amir Khusrau
The second story is still told at Nizamuddin’s shrine. When his young nephew died, Nizamuddin was so stricken with grief that he stopped smiling. Then one spring morning, Khusrau saw village women dressed in yellow, carrying mustard flowers to a temple for Basant.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked them.
“To make our god happy,” they said.
So Khusrau tied a yellow cloth around his head, filled his arms with mustard flowers, and went to his master. He arrived singing a song he had composed for that moment, Sakal ban phool rahi sarson, the mustard is blooming in every field. He danced for the one he loved, holding nothing back, until at last, for the first time since the young man’s death, his Beloved smiled.
In the final years of Nizamuddin’s life, a new sultan sat on Delhi’s throne, determined to get rid of him. Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq had little patience for the saint. In 1324, he marched to Bengal, taking Khusrau with him. As he journeyed home in victory, he sent word ahead to Delhi: by the time the royal army arrived, Nizamuddin was to pack his things and leave the city.
The message was delivered. Nizamuddin heard it and replied calmly, in four Persian words: Hanuz Dilli door ast. (Delhi is still far).
The sultan never reached Delhi. Just outside the city, they built a wooden pavilion to welcome him home. During the celebrations, it collapsed, crushing him beneath its weight. Historians still argue over whether it was an accident. Those who loved Nizamuddin never did. To them, it was simply what happens when a man who has given his whole self to God speaks. His words do not fall to the ground.
In April 1325, only months after the sultan’s death, Nizamuddin left this world. Khusrau was still far from Delhi when the news reached him. It is said that he tore his clothes and blackened his face, as if the darkness that had fallen inside him had to find its way to the outside. He set out for Delhi at once and did not rest until he reached his master’s grave. There, tradition holds, these lines came to him:
Gori sove sej par, mukh par daare kes
Chal Khusrau ghar aapne, rain bhaee chahun des
The lady sleeps on the bed, covering her face with her hair. Let’s go home, Khusrau. Night has fallen over the whole world.
— attributed to Amir Khusrau
Read quickly, and the verses sound like a lover’s lament. But Khusrau speaks in the language of the Sufis, for whom a saint’s death is not an ending. It is visal, union: the moment when the soul, after a lifetime of longing, finally meets its beloved face-to-face. So Khusrau does not see a grave. He sees his master resting on a bridal bed, his face veiled, finally united with the One he loved. For Nizamuddin, it is a wedding night. For Khusrau, left standing outside, the sun has gone down on the whole world. All that remains is longing to follow his master home into eternity.
It is said that Nizamuddin once gently urged Khusrau to pray for his master’s long life, because Khusrau would not live long after him. He was right. Khusrau’s heart never recovered. In October 1325, six months after his master, Khusrau too went home to his Beloved. They laid him to rest just a few steps from Nizamuddin’s grave. To this day, pilgrims pay respect to the poet first, as Nizamuddin is said to have wished, before walking those last few steps to the saint.
Khusrau had believed that the night that fell over the world that day would never lift. Perhaps, for him, it never needed to. He followed his master into the darkness and found on the other side the same Beloved they had both spent their lives loving.
For the rest of us, the night was never as dark as it seemed. Every evening at Nizamuddin’s shrine, as the sunlight fades, the courtyard lights up with lamps and the qawwals begin to sing. The songs are Khusrau’s. The love in them was Nizamuddin’s first, and Farid’s before him. For seven hundred years it has passed from one heart to the next, the way one lamp lights another, and it has never once gone out.
The river that flows backward
Farid learned patience on a rooftop, the day he saw that sorrow was burning in every home, not just his own. From then on, he met the world’s pain with gentleness, trusting that no hardship borne with patience goes unseen by God. Khusrau learned what love asks of us. He gave up everything he owned for his master, and through his master, for God. He lost all his wealth, and gained the only thing he had ever truly wanted. For both of them, the way to God ran through letting go: of comfort, of pride, and at last of the self, until nothing stood between them and the Beloved, and only the One remained.
The world we live in teaches us the opposite of everything these masters lived by. Hold on tight. Protect yourself. Keep score, and never give more than you get in return. It seems the only sensible way to stay afloat.
But the Sufis, from Basra to Delhi, saw it differently. To them, love was a river that flows backward, against everything we expect of it. Those who cling to the surface risk being swept under. Those who surrender to its depth discover, somehow, that they are being carried to the other shore.
Across these two parts, we have met five people who let themselves sink. A freed slave who chose to love for nothing. A celebrated scholar who laid down his books to follow Shams, the friend who set his heart on fire. A wanderer who refused to look down on anyone. An old man by a river who asked for a needle instead of scissors. And a court poet who gave a caravan for a pair of worn sandals and still thought he had paid too little.
Their way is still open to us, and it runs through the most ordinary moments: a kindness no one sees, a friend chosen with care, a harsh word answered gently, a person loved while they are still here to be loved.
The river has not stopped flowing. It is only waiting for us to step in.
Agrim Verma can be contacted at agrim.works@gmail.com
To read the first part of this 2-part series go to…
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