Fateh Singh and the Quiet Morning

The Storm

The wind woke Fateh Singh.

Not gently, the way Mum's voice did on school mornings — soft and warm, with a cup of tea waiting downstairs. This was different. The wind hit the house sideways, rattled the letterbox, and shook the kitchen window so hard that something fell off the sill. He heard it shatter on the tiles below.

He pulled the duvet to his chin and listened.

Rain hammered the glass like tiny fists. The gutters gurgled. Somewhere down the street, a car alarm started, then stopped, then started again. The old sycamore in Mrs. Kapoor's garden was groaning — a deep, slow sound, like a ship in a film.

The storm had been building all day. At school, Mrs. Okafor had closed the blinds because the Year 1s were frightened. The 207 bus was twenty minutes late. By home time, the sky above Southall was the colour of a bruise — dark purple and yellow at the edges — and a plane coming in to Heathrow flew so low that Fateh Singh could see its landing lights blinking through the rain.

Now it was night, and the house was making sounds he'd never heard before. The pipes ticked. The floorboards popped. A draft came under his bedroom door and pushed across the carpet like a cold hand.

He couldn't sleep.

He rolled onto his side. He rolled onto his back. He pulled the duvet over his head, but under the duvet was hot and stuffy, and outside the duvet was cold and noisy, and neither was right.

Then — at some hour he couldn't guess — he heard a door open. Not his. Not Mum and Dad's. The door at the end of the landing. Dadi ji's door.

Soft footsteps on the carpet. The creak of the top stair, then nothing. Then, from below, a sound he almost didn't catch — a low murmuring, steady as breathing, rising and falling beneath the storm.

Dadi ji was awake. And she was talking to someone.

Four in the Morning

Fateh Singh crept out of bed.

The landing was dark except for a thin line of gold light coming from under the spare room door downstairs — the room Dadi ji used for her prayers. He tiptoed to the top of the stairs and sat on the carpet, his knees pulled up, his back against the banister.

Through the gap at the bottom of the door, the light was warm and still. The murmuring continued — Gurmukhi words he half-recognised from the Gurdwara, steady and unhurried, as if Dadi ji had all the time in the world and the storm outside was someone else's problem.

He sat there for five minutes. Maybe longer. The storm battered the house, but the murmuring didn't speed up or slow down. It just continued, like a river underneath the noise.

Eventually he got cold and crept back to bed. He didn't fall asleep for a long time.

At breakfast, the kitchen smelled of paratha and rain. Mum had come off the night shift and was asleep upstairs. Dad had already left for work. Dadi ji stood at the hob, flipping a paratha with her fingers the way she always did — no spatula, just a quick flick, as if the heat couldn't touch her.

"Dadi ji," said Fateh Singh, pouring milk into his cereal. "Why were you awake at four in the morning?"

She didn't turn around. "I'm always awake at four, Fateh."

"Always?"

"Every day."

He knew this, in the way you know things without ever thinking about them — the way you know the front door sticks, or that the third step creaks. Dadi ji woke early. That was just how it was. But last night, awake in the dark with the storm shaking the windows, it had felt different. Strange. She'd been sitting in a room by herself, talking to someone who wasn't there.

"But why do you wake up so early?"

She slid the paratha onto his plate. "Because the early morning is the quietest time."

"But why does it have to be quiet?"

She sat down across from him. "Because when everything is quiet, you can hear what you usually miss."

He chewed his paratha. It was good — crispy and buttery — but his brain was louder than his stomach this morning. "But why can't you just hear it during the day?"

Dadi ji looked at him. She had her thinking face on — the one where her eyes went soft and her head tilted slightly, as if she was listening to something behind his words.

"Have you ever tried to hear someone whisper," she said, "when everyone around you is shouting?"

His Experiment

That night, the storm had moved on. The air smelled clean, the way it did after a long rain — wet pavement and cold leaves. The house was quiet.

Fateh Singh set his alarm for five o'clock. Not four — he wasn't that brave. But five felt like a decent start. Early enough to be impressive. Late enough that it wasn't actually the middle of the night.

The alarm buzzed in the dark. He slapped it off and sat up.

His room was cold. The streetlight outside threw an orange stripe across the ceiling. He could hear nothing — no storm, no rain, no cars. Just the fridge humming downstairs and, somewhere far away, a siren.

He sat cross-legged on his bed, pulled the duvet around his shoulders, and closed his eyes.

Be quiet, he told himself. Just be quiet.

Three seconds passed.

He thought about the Lego spaceship on his desk. It still needed the cargo bay doors. He'd need the grey hinge pieces, and he only had two, and one of them was slightly chipped —

No. Stop. Be quiet.

Five seconds.

He thought about football. They were playing St. Mary's next Tuesday. Ruby said their goalkeeper was enormous, but Ruby always exaggerated —

Quiet!

Eight seconds.

He thought about whether they'd have chips at lunch tomorrow. Mrs. Okafor said the canteen was changing the menu, and if they got rid of chips he would —

He opened his eyes. Thirty seconds. Maybe less.

He tried again. This time he got to about twenty seconds before his brain served up a memory of Dad trying to fix the bathroom tap last weekend and water spraying across the ceiling.

He tried a third time. Fourteen seconds.

"It doesn't work," he said to his empty room. "My brain won't be quiet."

He lay back down and pulled the duvet over his head. Outside, the streetlight buzzed. Inside his mind, the Lego spaceship, the football match, the chips, the bathroom tap, and Ruby's voice all tumbled over each other like clothes in a washing machine.

He fell asleep thinking: How does Dadi ji do it every single day?

The Fox

The next morning, he woke in the dark.

Not because of the alarm — that wasn't set to go off for another hour. His throat was dry. He needed water.

He crept downstairs. The house was silent. The kitchen tiles were cold under his bare feet. He reached for the tap, filled a glass, and drank.

Then he saw it.

Through the kitchen window, in the grey light before dawn, something was standing in the back garden. At first he thought it was next door's cat — but it was too big, too still, too upright. It stood in the middle of the wet grass, its body lean and sharp, its fur the colour of autumn leaves.

A fox.

Fateh Singh froze. His hand was still on the tap. The glass was still at his lips. He didn't breathe.

The fox turned its head. Slowly, as if it had all the time in the world. Its eyes found the window — found him — and held.

Amber. The fox's eyes were amber, like the streetlights, like the line of light under Dadi ji's prayer room door. They looked right at him, and for five seconds — maybe less, maybe more — nothing moved. Not the fox. Not Fateh Singh. Not the air between them.

Then his foot shifted. The floorboard under the kitchen mat let out a creak — a small sound, barely anything — and the fox was gone. Not slowly. Not gradually. Just gone, like a thought you can't quite catch.

Fateh Singh stood at the window, his heart thumping.

At breakfast, he told Dadi ji.

She smiled — not a surprised smile, but a knowing one. "The fox comes every morning," she said. "I see it from my window during Paath."

"Every morning? And you never told me?"

She buttered her toast. "You were never still enough to see it, Fateh."

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"That's not fair," he said. "How was I supposed to see it if I didn't know it was there?"

"Exactly," she said.

The Early Morning

He went to Dadi ji's room at half past four.

He didn't knock. The door was slightly open, the way it always was, as if she'd been expecting him — or as if she left it open every night, just in case.

She was sitting on the floor on a folded blanket, her back straight, her white chunni glowing faintly in the lamplight. A small Gutka Sahib lay open in front of her. Her reading glasses were on, the ones with the thin gold frames.

She looked up when he appeared in the doorway. She didn't say what are you doing up? or go back to bed or you have school tomorrow. She just moved the blanket sideways, making a space next to her, and went back to reading.

Fateh Singh sat down. The floor was hard through the blanket. The lamp was the only light — small and golden, sitting on the bedside table, making the room feel like the inside of a candle. Outside the window, the garden was dark.

Dadi ji began to recite.

Japji Sahib. He recognised the opening — he'd heard it a thousand times at the Gurdwara Sahib, rolling over the speakers in the main hall. But here, in this small room, in the dark, with just the lamp and Dadi ji's voice, it sounded different. Closer. Like it was being said just for this room, just for this moment.

He didn't understand the Gurmukhi — not all of it. He caught words: Sach. Hukam. They floated past like boats on a river. Dadi ji's voice rose and fell, steady as the tide, and the rhythm of it settled into his chest the way music does when you stop trying to listen and just let it in.

He watched the window.

The garden was a dark rectangle. The fence, the shed, the washing line — all shapes without colour. Then, at the edge of the lawn, a movement. Something low and quiet, slipping along the base of the fence.

The fox.

It padded across the wet grass, unhurried, nose to the ground. It reached the middle of the garden, stopped, and lifted its head. It looked at the window — at them — and this time Fateh Singh was ready.

He didn't move. Didn't breathe. Didn't blink.

The fox sat down. Right there, in the middle of the garden, as if this was its spot and always had been. It tucked its tail around its paws and went still. Its amber eyes caught the lamplight from the window.

Dadi ji's voice continued. The fox sat. Fateh Singh watched.

And then — for twenty seconds, or maybe a minute, he couldn't tell — his mind went quiet.

Not empty. Not asleep. Quiet. Like the space between the storm and the morning. Like the house after the wind stops. His brain, which had been a washing machine for six years — spinning Lego and football and chips and Ruby and But why? But why? But why? — just stopped.

In the quiet, something was there. Something warm. Something that had been there all along, the way the fox had been in the garden every morning, the way Dadi ji's voice was always murmuring through the wall at 4am. It wasn't new. It was just that he'd never been still enough to notice it.

The fox stood up, stretched, and padded across the garden towards the fence. It slipped through a gap in the panels and was gone.

Fateh Singh exhaled. He hadn't realised he'd been holding his breath.

Dadi ji finished the pauri she was reading. She closed her Gutka Sahib and put her hand on Fateh Singh's knee.

Neither of them said anything. They didn't need to.

What He Noticed

At breakfast, Fateh Singh was quiet.

Mum came downstairs in her dressing gown, yawning. She put the kettle on, glanced at him, and frowned.

"Are you feeling ill?"

He shook his head.

"You're very quiet."

"I'm thinking."

She raised an eyebrow — the same eyebrow he'd inherited, the one that went up when things didn't quite add up — and poured her tea.

Fateh Singh ate his cereal slowly. He was trying to hold onto something — a feeling, a shape, a sound that wasn't a sound. It was like trying to hold water in your hands. The harder he gripped, the more it slipped through.

Dadi ji came in and sat across from him. She didn't ask. She just waited.

"Dadi ji," he said, putting his spoon down. "When I was sitting with you... I felt something. Like everything was already there." He frowned, searching for words. "The fox, your voice, the dark, the garden. All of it was already happening. I just never noticed before."

Dadi ji nodded. She didn't look surprised. She looked like someone who'd been waiting a long time for a letter that had finally arrived.

"That's Simran, Fateh."

"Simran?"

"Simran. Remembrance." She held her tea in both hands, the steam curling between them. "Not talking to Waheguru. Not asking for things. Just becoming still enough to notice that Waheguru is already here."

He turned this over in his mind. "But I wasn't saying anything. I wasn't even praying. I was just... sitting."

"You don't always have to say words." She sipped her tea. "Sometimes Simran is just remembering. The way you remember that your mum loves you, even when she's at work and you can't see her. You don't have to say it out loud. You just know."

"And that's what you do every morning? At four o'clock? You just... remember?"

"I remember." She smiled. "And sometimes, when I'm very still, I notice things I missed. Like the fox."

He picked up his spoon, then put it down again. "Dadi ji — how long did it take you? To be able to be still?"

She laughed — a soft laugh, not unkind. "Oh, Fateh. I'm still learning. Every morning, my mind is noisy too. I think about the gas bill, and whether your mum is eating enough, and what to cook for dinner." She leaned forward. "But the Gurbani helps. Japji Sahib gives my mind something steady to hold onto. Like a rope in the dark."

"A rope in the dark," he repeated. He liked that. It made sense. When his mind was spinning, the Gurbani had been the only steady thing in the room — a rhythm to hold onto until the spinning stopped.

"The fox was doing it too," he said suddenly.

"Doing what?"

"Simran. Just sitting there. Completely still. Noticing everything."

Dadi ji looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached across the table and patted his cheek.

"You're a strange boy, Fateh Singh," she said. "But you're not wrong."

Explaining to Ruby

Ruby was waiting by the climbing frame at break time, kicking a football against the post.

"You look tired," she said.

"I woke up at half four."

She caught the ball with her foot and stared at him. "Half four? In the morning? Are you ill?"

"No. I was sitting with Dadi ji. She does prayers every morning before dawn. Japji Sahib."

"Every morning?" Ruby looked appalled. "Even weekends?"

"Even weekends."

"That's mad." She went back to kicking the ball. "Why?"

He told her about the fox. About standing at the kitchen window in the dark and seeing it for the first time. About going to Dadi ji's room and sitting on the floor while she recited. About watching the fox pad across the garden and sit down, completely still, while Dadi ji's voice filled the room. About the twenty seconds when his mind went quiet.

Ruby stopped kicking. She was holding the ball now, turning it in her hands.

"So... the fox just sits there?"

"Every morning. You just have to be still enough to see it."

"That's actually cool." She bounced the ball once. "But the prayer bit — what's the point? You said you don't even understand the words."

He thought about this. It was a fair question — the kind he would have asked.

"You know when you're playing football," he said, "and everything goes quiet? Like, your brain stops thinking and your feet just know where to go?"

She nodded. She knew that feeling. It happened in the good matches — the ones where she didn't think about the score or the crowd or what she'd have for dinner. The ones where she just played.

"It's like that," he said. "But without the football. Just sitting. The words are like... the ball. They give your brain something to follow until everything else goes quiet."

She screwed up her face. "That sounds rubbish."

He laughed. "It wasn't. It was like being really awake for the first time. Like everything was already there and I just hadn't noticed."

"The fox was already there," she said.

"Exactly."

She thought for a moment. "So could anyone do it? You don't have to be Sikh?"

"I think anyone could. You just have to be still. Really still."

Ruby looked at the ball in her hands. She put it down on the ground, stood straight, closed her eyes, and didn't move. Five seconds passed. Ten. Fateh Singh watched her, half-expecting her to laugh and start kicking the ball again.

But she didn't. Around them, the playground carried on — someone shrieking on the monkey bars, a whistle from the football pitch, a ball smacking against the wall. She stood there, completely still, in the middle of all of it, for maybe fifteen seconds. When she opened her eyes, her face was different — softer, surprised.

"I could hear the birds," she said. "I've never heard birds at school before."

"They were always there," said Fateh Singh. "You just weren't still enough."

The bell rang. They walked back towards the classroom. Ruby was quiet, which was unusual for Ruby.

"I'm going to try that again," she said, just before they went inside.

Before the Alarm

A week later, the storm was a memory. London was grey and damp, as it always was in autumn, the sky low enough to touch.

Fateh Singh's alarm was set for five o'clock. But he woke at a quarter to — fifteen minutes early, without any sound, as if something inside him had learned the time.

He lay still for a moment. The house was quiet. Through the wall, he could hear Dadi ji murmuring — Japji Sahib, steady and low, the same rhythm that had been there every morning of his life. He'd just never been awake to hear it.

He got up. Washed his face. The water was cold and woke his skin. He dried his hands, sat on his bed, and closed his eyes.

Dadi ji had been helping him memorise the first five pauris of Japji Sahib. Every evening after dinner, they sat together and she recited a line, and he repeated it, and she recited it again, and he repeated it again, until the words stuck. It had taken a week. Some of the sounds were hard to hold onto — they slipped away like water if he didn't practise. But five pauris he had.

He began to recite. Quietly, under his breath, the way Dadi ji did. The words came slowly — he had to feel for each one, the way you feel for the next step on a dark staircase. But the rhythm was there — the same rising and falling he'd heard through the wall, the same tide that had carried his mind to stillness in Dadi ji's room. His lips moved, his breath steadied, and for a few minutes the Lego spaceship and the football match and Ruby's voice all went quiet.

He opened his eyes and sat for a moment in the silence.

Then he went downstairs.

The kitchen was dark. He didn't turn on the light. He stood at the window and looked out at the garden.

The grass was silver with frost. The fence was a dark line against the sky. The shed, the washing line, the neighbours' rooftop — all still, all waiting. The streetlight at the end of the alley threw a stripe of orange across the fence, the same stripe he'd seen that first morning.

He waited.

One minute. Two. His breath made a small cloud on the glass.

Then — a shape. Low and quick, slipping through the gap in the fence panels. The fox padded across the frozen grass, its paws leaving dark prints in the silver. It reached the middle of the garden, stopped, and sat.

Fateh Singh watched. The fox watched back.

Through the wall, Dadi ji's voice murmured on, steady and warm. Outside, the sky was just beginning to lighten at the edges — not light yet, not even close, but the darkness had softened, the way it does when dawn is thinking about arriving.

The fox was still. Fateh Singh was still.

Everything was already there. It had always been there.

He just hadn't been still enough to notice.

Gurbani Verse

Punjabi Glossary

Discussion Questions

1. Have you ever woken up very early? What did the world sound like?
2. Why do you think Dadi ji says the early morning is different from the rest of the day?
3. Fateh Singh saw the fox only when he was still. What might you notice if you sat very quietly for one minute?
4. What does it mean to "remember" the Divine? Do you think you have to say words, or can you remember in silence?
5. Fateh Singh started reciting five pauris of Japji Sahib. What is one small thing you could try every morning?

About This Story

This is the second story in the Fateh Singh series — five stories set in London, each woven around one of the five core values of Sikhi. In this story, Simran — remembrance of the Divine — is explored through a six-year-old boy who needs to understand why his grandmother wakes before dawn to pray. Fateh Singh is Simran Kaur's cousin. Where Simran discovers her faith by feeling, Fateh Singh discovers his by asking. Together, they represent two paths to the same place.

The word Simran means to remember the Divine. In Sikhi, Simran is not just reciting prayers — it is the practice of becoming still enough to notice Waheguru's presence in every moment. Guru Nanak Dev Ji taught that the early morning hours, the Amrit Vela, are the most powerful time for this practice, when the world is quiet and the mind can turn inward.

Explore More

• Why Daily Paath Matters — What Simran means and how to practise it
• Fateh Singh and the Saturday Kitchen — A story about Seva
• Simran Kaur and the Inner Gift — A story about the Kesh, by Fateh Singh's cousin Simran