your bridge home
Saints and Poets
A group of pilgrims needed cash at Dwarka. He wrote them a promissory note drawn on an account he did not have.
He had no money. That is the standing condition of every story about him.
Narsinh Mehta was born around 1414 at Talaja in Gujarat, into a Nagar Brahmin family, and by tradition he did not speak until he was eight years old. He lived most of his life at Junagadh with his wife Manekbai and their two children, Shamaldas and Kunwarbai, and he was poor throughout, a poet composing devotional songs in Gujarati, supported by nothing in particular.
A hundi is a promissory note. It is a real financial instrument, used across India for centuries: you hand over cash in one town, receive a written note, and present it to an agent in another town who pays you out. It is how travellers moved money without carrying it, and it works entirely on the credit of the person whose name is on it.
A group of pilgrims came through Junagadh on their way to Dwarka, and they had a problem. They were carrying cash and did not want to carry it further, and they wanted a note they could redeem at the other end.
They were directed, as a joke, in some tellings, to Narsinh Mehta.
He had no agent at Dwarka. He had no funds anywhere. He had no commercial standing of any kind and everybody involved knew it.
He took their money and wrote them the note.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.