The Mountain Shadow

‘I don’t know,’ I replied, trying not to hope for something I wasn’t sure they wanted. ‘But I know Naveen will never give up on Diva. No matter what he says, he’s crazy about her. And if you put an Indian and an Irishman together, like him, you get a guy who can’t give up on love.’

Customers of Love & Faith gathered on the footpath, holding up T-shirts, and occasionally exchanging them.

‘What’s that about?’

‘Remember the T-shirt version of what Idriss was saying? The one that we gave Vinson?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Vinson and Rannveig used Randall’s notes, from what Idriss said, and they put his quotes on T-shirts. They’re giving them away as opening-night gifts.’

A young man, not far from us, was holding a T-shirt up to read it. I read it with him, over his shoulder.

A heart

filled with greed, pride or hateful feelings

is not free.

When I heard Idriss say it, on the mountain, I agreed with it, and I was glad to see it preserved and living, somehow, in the world, even just on a T-shirt. And I also had to admit that I’d found shares of greed and pride inside myself, and too often.

But I wasn’t alone any more. As Rannveig said, I’d reconnected.

‘What do you think?’ Karla asked me, watching people swap quotations from Idriss on their free T-shirts.

‘Teachers, like writers, never die while people still quote them.’

‘I love you, Shantaram,’ she said, cuddling in beside me.

I looked at the happy, laughing group, crammed into the narrow coffee shop. The people we’d lost, in our Island City years, would fill the same space.

Too many, too many dead who were still alive, whenever I thought of them. And almost all of them were lives that humility or generosity would’ve saved. Vikram, Nazeer, Tariq, Sanjay, Vishnu, and all the other names chanted at me, always ending in Abdullah, my brother, Abdullah, my brother.

Karla relaxed against me, her foot tapping to the music coming from Love & Faith. I tipped her face to the light until she was the light, and kissed her, and we were one.

Truth is the freedom of the soul. We’re very young, in this young universe, and we often fail, and dishonour ourselves, even if only in the caves of the mind. We fight, when we should dance. We compete, cheat and punish innocent nature.

But that isn’t what we are, it’s simply what we do in the world that we made for ourselves, and we can freely change what we do, and the world we made, every second that we live.

In all the things that really matter, we are one. Love and faith, trust and empathy, family and friendship, sunsets and songs of awe: in every wish born in our humanity we are one. Our humankind, at this moment in our destiny, is a child blowing on a dandelion, without thought or understanding. But the wonder in the child is the wonder in us, and there’s no limit to the good we can do when human hearts connect. It’s the truth of us. It’s the story of us. It’s the meaning of the word God: we are one. We are one. We are one.

Proclaimer

This novel depicts some characters who are living self-destructive lives. Authenticity demands that they drink and smoke and take drugs. I don’t endorse drinking, smoking or drug-taking, just as I don’t endorse crime and criminality as a lifestyle choice, or violence as a valid means of conflict resolution. What I do endorse is doing our best to be fair, honest, positive and creative with ourselves and others. GDR

This Is A Read Anywhere Book

First published in the United States as an ebook in 2015 by Zola Books, Inc.

Copyright © 2015 by Gregory David Roberts

Edited by AMB

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those

clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance

to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without

the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-9391-2623-8

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