The Mountain Shadow

When she left, I let my eyes drift into the maze of leaves that only trees understand. Hatred has its gravitational web, locking stray specks of confusion into spirals of violence. I had my own reasons to hate the acid throwers, if I wanted to hate them, and I wasn’t immune to the tremble in the web. But it wasn’t hatred that I tried to clean off myself, in that forest, on the mountain: it was a shame I didn’t create, but didn’t stop.

Sometimes, for some reason, I couldn’t stop it, or I didn’t stop it. Sometimes, for some reason, I was a part of something wrong, before I knew that I wasn’t right any more.

In the forest, alone, I forgave what was done to me. In the kneeling place within my own faults I forgave them for what they did, and hoped that someone, somewhere, would forgive me. And the wind in lavish leaves said, Surrender. One is all, and all is one. Surrender.

Chapter Seventy-Nine

Faith is honesty inside, a renegade priest once said to me. So, fill up whenever you can, son. Faithful students of the mystic teacher Idriss hoping that the exchange with his inquisitors would fill them with wisdom, gathered on the white-stone mesa in late-afternoon sunlight.

Some unfaithful observers gathered as well: a few followers of the great sages, who were hoping to see Idriss, the arrogantly humble thinker, tumble from a cliff of contumacy. Faith is also its own challenge, like sincerity, and purity draws swords in fearful hearts.

Didier, faithful to his own pleasures, found a hammock strung between trees, and wrestled with the alligator of knotted rope for a while, hoping to find a way to stay on it beneath a shady tree for the duration of the discourse.

Karla wouldn’t let him.

‘If you miss this,’ she said, pulling his jacket, ‘I won’t be able to talk to you about it. So you can’t miss it.’

She put our group together with a view of the questioning faces and the interrogated sage.

The spectators had made an arena of cushions, arranged around the pagoda close enough to hear every inflection or inference. Expectation, the ghost of reputation, moved through the crowd as students swapped stories about the legendary sages who’d challenged Idriss.

The holy men emerged from the largest cave, where they’d meditated together in preparation for the thought contest. They were senior gurus with their own followings, the youngest of them thirty-five, and the eldest perhaps seventy, a few years younger than Idriss.

They were dressed in identical white dhoti garments, wrapped luxuriously about their skin, and wore rudraksha beads in chains around their necks. The beads were reputed to have significant spiritual powers to detect positive and negative substances. As legend has it, rudraksha beads held over a pure substance rotate in a clockwise direction, and in an anticlockwise direction over negative substances, which is one of the reasons why no guru is far from a high-quality strand.

They also wore rings and amulets to maximise the power of friendly planets in their astrological charts, and minimise the harm of unfriendly spheres, far away, but never powerless.

The students had whispered that we were forbidden from speaking the names of the famous sages, because they wanted their challenge to Idriss to remain anonymous, out of modesty.

In my mind, as I saw them walk out to take their places on the large cushions, with students throwing rose petals in their path, I called them Grumpy, for the youngest one, Doubtful, for the next, Ambitious for the third, and Let Me See for the eldest in the group, who was the quickest to find his seat, and the first to reach for a lime juice and a piece of fresh papaya.

‘How long will this take?’ Vinson whispered.

‘Okay,’ Karla said, holding frustration at bay with very tight lips. ‘Do you want to spend seven years studying philosophy, and theology, and cosmology, Vinson?’

‘I’m gonna say No,’ he replied, uncertainly.

‘Do you wanna sound to Rannveig like you’ve done seven years of study?’

‘I’m gonna say Yes.’

‘Good, then be quiet, and listen. These challenges to Idriss only happen once a year or so, and this is my first. It’s a chance to get all of it in one shot, and I’m gonna hear it, from start to finish.’

‘Will there be an intermission?’ Didier asked.

Idriss knelt at the feet of each sage, eldest to youngest, and took their blessings before he took the small stage, settled himself, and greeted the assembly.

‘Let us smoke,’ he suggested gently. ‘Before we begin.’

Students brought a large hookah pipe into the pagoda, and gave a smoking hose to each of the sages. The longest hose reached to Idriss, who puffed the bowl alight.

‘Now,’ he said, when all had smoked, including Didier, who kept pace with the holy men on a finely tapered joint. ‘Please, challenge me with your questions.’