Gregory Roberts - The Mountain Shadow

Let it go , those different wise men said . Hating them, like they hate us, will ruin your mind, and that’s the one thing they can’t hit.

‘Are you good, baby?’ Karla’s voice called from behind the trees. ‘The debate starts soon, and I’m gonna reserve seats for us.’

‘I’m good,’ I called back, not good, not even not-good-okay. ‘I’m good.’

‘Two minutes,’ she called back. ‘We can’t miss this. It’s made for us, Shantaram.’

I knew why Karla had brought us to the mountain and the fabled sage: she wanted to heal me. She wanted to save me. I was breaking inside, and she could see it. And maybe she was, too. Like Karla and every other soldier I knew, I joked and laughed about things that made other less wounded hearts weep, and I’d learned to harden myself against loss and death. I look back now, and the past is a slaughter: almost everyone I’ve ever loved is dead. And the only way to live with the constant cull of what you love is to take a little of that cold grave into yourself, every time.

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 .

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.’

The sages looked at Let Me See, offering him the first assail. The elderly sage smiled, drew a breath, and waded into the shallows to skip a semantic stone across the water.

‘What is God?’ Let Me See asked.

‘God is the perfect expression of all the positive characteristics,’ Idriss answered.

‘Only the positive characteristics?’

‘Exclusively.’

‘Can God not do evil, then, or commit sin?’ Let Me See asked.

‘Of course not. Are you suggesting that God can commit suicide, or lie to an innocent heart?’

There was a conference among the holy men. I could see their problem. Gods in all ages, according to many sacred texts, kill human beings. Some gods torture human souls eternally, or permit it. Idriss’s version of a God incapable of evil was difficult to reconcile with some of the great books of faith.

The conference broke up, with the baton still in Let Me See’s hands.

‘And what is life, great sage?’ Let Me See asked.

‘Life is an organic expression of the tendency toward complexity.’

‘But are you saying that life was created by the Divine, or that it created itself?’

‘Life on this planet began from the strangely improbable but perfectly natural cooperation of inorganic elements, in alkaline vents under the seas, leading to the first bacterial cells. That process is both self-creating, and Divine, at the same time.’

‘You are speaking science, great sage?’

‘Science is a spiritual language, and one of the most spiritual pursuits.’

‘And what is Love, great sage?’

‘Love is intimate connection.’

‘I was speaking about the purest form of love, great sage,’ Let Me See replied.

‘As was I, great sage,’ Idriss answered. ‘A scientist applying her talents, trying to find a cure for a disease, is making an intimate connection, and is flooded with love. Walking a dog that trusts you through a meadow is an intimate connection. Opening your heart to the Divine, in prayer, is an intimate connection.’