The Year of Rice and Salt

This great opening prayer, so appropriate to his situation, Bistami repeated hundreds of times per day. Sometimes he repeated only the prayer 'Sufficient for us is God and excellent the Protector'; once he said it thirty three thousand times in a row. Then he switched to 'Allah is merciful, submit to Allah, Allah is merciful, submit to Allah', which he repeated until his mouth was parched, his voice hoarse, and the muscles of his face cramped with exhaustion.

All the while he swept the courtyard clear, and then all the rooms of the shrine, one by one, and he filled the lamps and trimmed the wicks, and swept some more, looking at the skies as they changed through the days, and he said the same things over and over, feeling the wind push through him, watching the leaves of the trees surrounding the shrine pulse, each in its own transparent light. Arabic is learning, but Persian is sugar. He tasted his food at sundown as he had never tasted food before. Nevertheless it became easy to fast, perhaps because it was winter and the days were a bit shorter. Fear still stabbed him frequently, causing his blood to surge in him at enormous pressure, and he prayed aloud in every waking moment, no doubt driving his guards mad with the droning of it.

Eventually the whole world contracted to the tomb, and he began to forget the things that had happened before to him, or the things that presumably were still happening in the world outside the shrine grounds. He forgot them. His mind was becoming clarified, indeed everything in the world seemed to be becoming slightly transparent. He could see into leaves, and sometimes through them, as if they were made of glass; and it was the same with the white marble and alabaster of the tomb, which glowed as if alive in the dusks; and with his own flesh. 'All save the face of God doth perish. To Him shall we return.' These were the words from the Quran embedded in the Mowlana's beautiful poem of reincarnation,

'I died as mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose as animal, I died as animal and I was Man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar With angels blessed; but even from angelhood I must pass on: "All save the face of God doth perish." When I have sacrificed my angelic soul, I shall become what no mind has ever conceived, Oh, let me not exist! for non existence Proclaims in organ tones: "To Him shall we return".'

He repeated this poem a thousand times, always whispering the last part, for fear the guards would report to Akbar that he was preparing himself for death.

Days passed; weeks passed. He grew hungrier, and hypersensitive to all tastes and smells, then to the air and the light. He could feel the nights that stayed hot and steamy as if they were blankets swaddling him, and in the brief cool of dawn he walked around sweeping and praying, looking at the sky over the leafy trees growing lighter and lighter; and then one morning as dawn grew, everything began to turn into light. '0 he, 0 he who is He, 0 he who is naught but He!' Over and over he cried these words out into the world of light, and even the words were shards of light bursting out of his mouth. The tomb became a thing of pure white light, glowing in the cool green light of the trees, the trees of green light, and the fountain poured its water of light up into the lit air, and the walls of the courtyard were bricks of light, and everything was light, pulsing lightly. He could see through the Earth, and back through time, over a Khyber Pass made of slabs of yellow light, back to the time of his birth, in the tenth day of Moharram, the day when the Imam Hosain, the only living grandson of Mohammed, had died defending the faith, and he saw that whether or not Akbar had him killed he would live on, for he had lived before many times, and was not going to be done when this life ended. 'Why should I be afraid?

When did I ever lose by dying?' He was a creature of light as everything else was, and had once been a village girl, another time a horseman on the steppes, another time the servant of the Twelfth Imam, so that he knew how and why the Imam had disappeared, and when he would return to save the world. Knowing that, there was no reason to fear anything. 'Why should I be afraid? 0 he, 0 he who is He, sufficient is God and excellent the Protector, Allah the merciful, the beneficent!' Allah who had sent Mohammed on his isra, his journey into light, just as Bistami was being sent now, towards the ascension of miraj, when all would become a light utterly transparent and invisible.

Understanding this, Bistami looked through the transparent walls and trees and earth to Akbar, across the city in his clear palace, robed in light like an angel, a man surely more than half angel already, an angel spirit that he had known in previous lives, and that he would know again in future lives, until they all came to one place and Allah rang down the universe.