Source Note
Diary Entry: #1
Date: 1–2 April 1944
Source: Diary of Sardar Surjit Singh Khera (1911–2008), Gurmukhi manuscript, 1944–1945.
The following excerpt comes from the first entry in the diary of Sardar Surjit Singh Khera, preserved in Gurmukhi and written between 1944 and 1945. The diary records conversations, reflections, and personal anecdotes shared by Bhai Vir Singh during Sardar Khera’s time in Amritsar.
The diary was located by Dr. Jaswinder Singh of the Guru Gobind Singh Department of Religious Studies at Punjabi University, Patiala. He brought this excerpt to me because our conversations have been shaped by scholarship, trust, and a mutual love for Bhai Vir Singh. It came to me not as an isolated archival fragment, but through a reverence we both hold for Bhai Vir Singh, whom I lovingly call my Pita ji.
Sardar Khera was deeply influenced by Bhai Vir Singh. At Bhai Vir Singh’s suggestion, he left his legal practice in Indore and accepted a position as a law officer at Punjab & Sind Bank. This was not a small professional change. He had been earning approximately 500 rupees per month as a lawyer and accepted a bank position at approximately 60 rupees per month. His decision reflected not career advancement, but a reorientation of life toward service, discipline, and spiritual pursuit.
In 1944, Sardar Khera was posted to Amritsar. During that period, he and his wife, Sardarni Jaswant Kaur, visited Bhai Vir Singh regularly and engaged him in conversations on life, meditation, the self, and the higher aims of human existence. His diary, written across 132 pages, preserves some of these exchanges. Each entry carries the date of the event being recorded.
The excerpt below is one such recollection from the first diary entry. It appears within a larger reflection on remembrance, dhian, and simran. In it, Bhai Vir Singh recounts a personal moment from Amrit Vela, when an act of love offered by his wife opened into a rare spiritual glimpse.
Gurmukhi Original
“ਫਿਰ ਇਕ ਹੋਰ ਵਾਕਿਆ ਦਸਿਆ ਕਿ ਇਕ ਵਾਰੀ ਰਾਤ ਨੂੰ ਤਿੰਨ ਵਜੇ ਦੇ ਕਰੀਬ ਅਸੀਂ ਉਠਕੇ ਆਪਨਾ ਕੰਮ ਕਰਨ ਲਗ ਪਏ। ਚਾਰ ਸਾਢੇ ਚਾਰ ਵਜੇ ਸਾਡੀ ਸਿੰਘਣੀ ਨੂੰ ਜਾਗ ਆਈ ਤਾਂ ਉਸਨੂੰ ਖਿਆਲ ਆਇਆ ਕਿ ਅਸੀਂ ਰਾਤ ਦੇ ਕੰਮ ਕਰਦੇ ਥਕ ਗਏ ਹੋਵਾਂਗੇ, ਉਸਦੇ ਹਿਰਦੇ ਵਿਚ ਪਿਆਰ ਆਇਆ ਤੇ ਉਸਨੇ ਉਸੇ ਵੇਲੇ ਅਪਨੀ ਹਥੀ ਚਾਹ ਤਯਾਰ ਕਰਕੇ ਸਾਡੇ ਪਾਸ ਲਿਆ ਖੜੀ ਹੋਈ। ਸਾਡਾ ਧਿਆਨ ਉਸ ਵੇਲੇ ਕਿਸੇ ਉਚੇਰੇ ਮੰਡਲ ਵਿਚ ਸੀ। ਜਾਂ ਅਸੀਂ ਅਪਨੇ ਕੰਮ ਤੋਂ ਨਿਗਾਹ ਚੁਕ ਕੇ ਅਪਨੀ ਇਸਤ੍ਰੀ ਵਲ ਤਕਿਆ ਤਾਂ ਸਾਨੂੰ ਆਪਨੀ ਇਸਤ੍ਰੀ ਦਾ ਸ੍ਰੀਰ ਨਜ਼ਰ ਹੀ ਨਾ ਆਵੇ ਸਗੋਂ ਕੋਈ ਨੂਰ ਦਾ ਫ਼ਰਿਸ਼ਤਾ ਖੜ੍ਹਾ ਜਾਪੇ। ਉਹ ਕੋਈ divine personality ਨਜ਼ਰ ਆਂਵਦੀ ਸੀ ਤੇ ਉਸ ਵਿਚੋਂ divinity flow ਕਰ ਰਹੀ ਸੀ। ਇਹ ਸਾਨੂੰ ਪ੍ਰਤੱਖ ਦਿਸਦਾ ਰਿਹਾ ਤੇ ਕਿਤਨੇ ਮਿੰਟ ਹੀ ਇਹੋ … ਅਪਨੀ ਇਸਤ੍ਰੀ ਨਜ਼ਰੀ ਪੈਣ ਲਗੀ। ਇਹ ਉਸਦੇ ਪਿਆਰ ਦਾ ਨਤੀਜਾ ਸੀ, ਜਿਸ ਕਾਰਨ ਉਹ ਉਸ ਮੰਡਲ ਦੀ ਹੀ ਹੋ ਦਿਸੀ, ਜਿਸ ਵਿਚ ਕਿ ਸਾਡਾ ਧਿਆਨ ਉਸ ਵੇਲੇ ਲਗਾ ਹੋਇਆ ਸੀ। ਸੋ ਇਹ ਸਾਡੀ ਇਸਤ੍ਰੀ ਦੇ ਪਿਆਰ ਭਰੇ ਖਿਆਲ ਦਾ ਨਤੀਜਾ ਸੀ ਤੇ ਸਾਡਾ ਧਿਆਨ ਉਸ ਵੇਲੇ ਖੁਦ divinity ਵਿਚ ਸੀ। ਅਪਨੀ ਇਸਤ੍ਰੀ ਫ਼ਰਿਸ਼ਤਾ ਰੂਪ ਹੋ ਦਿਸੀ।”
A Close Contextual Translation
Bhai Vir Singh recounted another incident:
Once, around three o’clock at night, I got up and began doing my work. Around four or four-thirty, my Singhni awoke. The thought came to her that I must have grown tired from working through the night. Love arose in her heart, and at that very moment, she prepared tea with her own hands and brought it to me, standing near me.
At that time, my attention was in some higher realm. When I lifted my gaze from my work and looked toward my wife, I could not see the body of my wife at all. Instead, it appeared as though an angel of light was standing there. She appeared as some “divine personality,” and “divinity flow” was coming from her.
This remained directly visible to me for several minutes, and then … my wife began to appear to me again.
This was the result of her love. Because of that love, she appeared to be of that very realm in which my attention was absorbed at that time. Thus, this was the result of my wife’s love-filled thought, and my attention at that time was itself in “divinity.” My wife appeared in the form of an angel.
Reflection
Why has this small diary entry stayed with me for months?
Perhaps because it carries a tenderness that is difficult to name. Bhai Vir Singh lets us enter a deeply vulnerable moment, not as an idea about love, not as a teaching about love, but as an experience in which love changed sight itself.
He is awake at Amrit Vela, absorbed in his work. Around four or four-thirty, his wife wakes and thinks he must be tired from working through the night. She could have returned to sleep, but love rises in her heart. She prepares tea and brings it to him.
This was not a small act. At that hour, she could have stayed wrapped in sleep. Instead, she rose and did what love had asked of her with her own hands. What came to him was not tea alone. It was love made visible.
And he recognized it.
That is what moves me.
He received not only the act, but the tenderness from which it came. When he lifted his gaze toward her, he did not see only his wife or only the body before him.
I am in awe that such tenderness was remembered and recorded.
He does not say only that he felt grateful. He does not say that he smiled at her care. He does not even say that she seemed radiant in the ordinary way love makes the beloved radiant. He says he could not see the body of his wife at all. Instead, an angel of light seemed to be standing there. A divine personality. Divinity flowing through her.
These are not casual words. Bhai Vir Singh did not use such language lightly. They come after the veil had thinned. They carry the grace of what was given.
In the diary, this moment is placed within a larger reflection on the power of dhian. Bhai Vir Singh is not separating love from remembrance. Her love-filled concern, his absorbed attention, and the grace of that hour come together. The moment becomes an opening into what love-filled remembrance can reveal.
It begins with an act of love, but it does not remain there. It opens into what I hear again and again in Sabad: the Divine is not elsewhere; the One is present in the very being before us.
But to know this in words is one thing. To have the gaze changed, even for a moment, is another.
There are states in which attention becomes so absorbed, and love so pure, that the body is not denied; it becomes transparent. The person before us remains the one we know, yet something more is revealed.
The names remain: wife, husband, friend, companion. But they cannot hold the fullness of the being. For a moment, the sage-presence within the being is no longer hidden.
This is rare.
Love prepares the gaze; grace opens what the eyes can receive.
Guru Arjan Sahib says:
ਸਬੁ ਗੋਬਿੰਦੁ ਹੈ ਸਬੁ ਗੋਬਿੰਦੁ ਹੈ ਗੋਬਿੰਦ ਬਿਨੁ ਨਹੀ ਕੋਈ ॥
Sab gobind hai, sab gobind hai, gobind bin nahi koi.
All is Gobind. All is the Divine. Nothing exists apart from the Divine.
—Sri Guru Granth Sahib, 485
I have heard this line many times. I have recited it. I have reflected on it. Yet this diary entry brings me to it in another way.
This recollection offers a glimpse into Bhai Vir Singh’s inner life, as remembered and recorded by Sardar Khera. Bhai Vir Singh did not only write about the spiritual path. He lived it quietly. What another might have taken as kindness, he received as revelation.
Not for display.
For remembrance.
So that we too may understand: the Divine is not absent from the ordinary. Perhaps our gaze has not yet softened enough to recognize what has always been there.
