“Then you shall not be Lachhman Dev the hermit,” the Guru declared. “You shall be Banda Singh Bahadur—the ‘Slave of the Sword,’ the ‘Honored One.’ You will go to Punjab. You will take my sword, Pothi Mai , and you will wash the blood of my sons with the blood of the tyrant.”
The battle began at Chappar Chiri on a hot May morning. The Mughal elephants, armored and drunk, charged the Sikh lines. Men were crushed under their feet. For a moment, the Sikhs faltered. Banda Singh saw a young boy, barely older than Guru Gobind Singh’s martyred sons, drop his sword and run.
“You do not understand,” he said, spitting blood. “I am already a slave. I am the Banda —the slave of the true King. And a slave does not betray his master.”
Lachhman Dev, who had once only sought spiritual solitude, felt a fire ignite in his chest. It was not the fire of meditation, but the raw, furious fire of justice.
But empires do not die easily. The Mughals gathered a massive force. In 1715, after a brutal siege at Gurdas Nangal, Banda Singh was captured. They brought him to Delhi in an iron cage. His men were lined up and executed one by one.
He found Guru Gobind Singh in the forest of Machhiwara, the great warrior-poet lying on a cot, his face etched with a sorrow so deep it had carved new lines into his skin. The Guru looked up, and their eyes met.