your bridge home
True Valor
Forty men have put their names to a paper saying they are finished, and then they go home to the district she lives in.
Forty men signed a piece of paper saying they were finished, and Mai Bhago, a woman from Jhabal, made them take it back.
Anandpur had been under siege for months. Guru Gobind Singh was inside with his family and what was left of his people; outside were the armies of the Mughal governors and the hill rajas. The supplies had run out. People were eating bark.
In 1704, forty Sikhs decided they had reached the end of it.
They did not simply slip away in the dark, and the whole story hangs on that detail. They wrote a document. It was called a bedava, a disclaimer, a formal renunciation. You are not our Guru and we are not your Sikhs. Forty men, led by Mahan Singh, put their names to it, handed it over, and walked out of Anandpur.
You have to grant them something for that. Deserting quietly would have been easier.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.