The Mountain Shadow

by Gregory David Roberts

  ‘Hypocrisy is the spiritual language of greed,’ Idriss continued. ‘Ruthlessness is the spiritual language of power, and bigotry is the spiritual language of fear.’

  ‘Are you taking notes, Randall?’ I asked, as Idriss took a breath.

  ‘Aye aye, sir,’ he replied.

  ‘Violence is the spiritual language of hate,’ Idriss said, ‘and arrogance is the spiritual language of vanity.’

  ‘Idriss!’ several students called out.

  ‘Wait!’ Idriss requested, his gentle hands parting the waters of interjection. ‘We are gathered here in the quest for understanding. Please, dear students and guests, do not call out in the presence of these great sages, even though I have encouraged you to call out freely in our discussions.’

  ‘Your wish, master-ji!’ Ankit called out in an unexpectedly commanding tone, his finger to his lips as he scanned the crowd, and all was silent again.

  ‘May I ask you to travel with me on a path of higher spiritual languages, great sages?’ Idriss asked.

  ‘Certainly,’ Let Me See said.

  ‘With what examples, master-ji?’ Doubtful asked.

  ‘I invite you to give them to me, great sage,’ Idriss replied. ‘Because I would love to see what happy birds fly from your mind.’

  ‘This is another trick,’ Ambitious interjected. ‘You have prepared your responses in advance, have you not?’

  ‘Of course,’ Idriss laughed softly. ‘And memorised them. Haven’t you?’

  ‘Once again I remind you, master-ji, that you are the answer on this occasion, and we are the question,’ Ambitious said, retiring behind a reputation-barricade.

  ‘Good,’ Idriss said, his back straight. ‘Are you ready for my response?’

  ‘We are ready, great sage,’ Let Me See replied.

  ‘Emotion is the spiritual language of music,’ Idriss said, ‘and sensualism is the spiritual language of dance.’

  Idriss paused, waiting for comment, and then continued.

  ‘Birds are the spiritual language of the sky,’ Idriss said. ‘And trees are the spiritual language of the earth.’

  He paused again, as if listening.

  ‘I think I died,’ Karla whispered, ‘and went to Smartass Heaven.’

  ‘Generosity is the spiritual language of love, humility is the spiritual language of honour, and devotion is the spiritual language of faith.’

  Many of the students had seen Idriss face the fire before. And loving him as they did, they were joining with him innocently: not willing him to win, but willing him toward truth, no matter who uttered it in the séance.

  ‘Truth is the spiritual language of trust, and irony is the spiritual language of coincidence.’

  Students swayed in place, obeying the silence.

  ‘Humour is the spiritual language of freedom,’ Idriss said, ‘and sacrifice is the spiritual language of penance.’

  He stopped again, struggling with vanity, knowing that he could go on for a long time with the same poem. He looked at the students, his face lashing itself with a blush, and he smiled his way back.

  ‘Everything is spiritual, and everything is expressed in its own spiritual language. The connection to the Source can never be broken, only disturbed.’

  The students shouted and applauded, then silenced themselves, proud and penitent at the same time.

  ‘If you do not mind,’ Idriss suggested, ‘I would appreciate another break, of an hour, perhaps, if it is agreeable.’

  Students rose on instinct, guiding the sages back to their cave.

  ‘I don’t know about you,’ I said to Karla, glad of the break, ‘but I need something unholy.’

  ‘My thought exactly,’ she said. ‘And I don’t mind if I drink it or smoke it. My nerves are in my mouth.’

  ‘You wanted to be out there, didn’t you?’

  ‘That was some serious smartass shit,’ she said, her happy eyes gleaming.

  Idriss was clever and charismatic, but he’d faced inquisitions many times. He knew where the solid ground was, and the philosophical sand. I’d brought questions to teachers before, many of them, and I found that sometimes cleverness covered a lack of principle, and charisma cloaked ambition. I liked the teacher, but he was a saint already in the eyes of his students, and that worried me a little, because every pedestal is taller than the man who sits on it.

  The sages returned, and the discourse continued for three interrogative hours, until the sages ran out of questions. Then they knelt at Idriss’s feet, asking for a blessing in return for the one they’d given him at the start of the contest.

  ‘I do love our games, Idriss,’ Let Me See remarked, the last to part. ‘I am always grateful to the Divine that we are free to be generous with our ideas, and all the new ones to come, may we be so blessed.’

  The sages left along the easier path, with rose petals protecting their feet. And they were thoughtful, perhaps, if not less doubtful, ambitious and grumpy.

  Idriss retired to bathe and pray. We helped to pull the temporary pagoda down, and gathered up the carpets and trays.

  Karla took over the kitchen as a volunteer, and cooked vegetarian pulao, cauliflower and potato pieces in coconut-cream gravy, green beans and peas in coriander and spinach sauce, carrot and pumpkin pieces foil-roasted in the fire, and basmati rice scented with almond milk.

  Watching Karla operate large pots and woks of rice and vegetables on six gas jets at the same time, her mastery of taste and colour sizzling in hurricanes of steam, I was mesmerised, marvelling at it like an owl, until she pulled me in to wash the dishes.

  We worked in the kitchen shelter with three young women from the community of students. They chatted with Karla about music, fashion and movies, while preparing food for twenty-eight devoted people. They regarded cooking for Idriss and the others on the mountain as a sacred duty, and they put their love in the food that their teacher would taste.

  When not cooking, praying or studying, the devotees liked to eat, and not a crumb of Karla’s fragrant preparations remained when the feast ended. She didn’t eat much herself, but raised her glass to the many compliments, offering a toast at the sated end.

  ‘That’s it for me, for another year,’ she said. ‘To cooking once a year!’

  ‘To cooking once a year!’ devotees who cooked every day shouted.

  When all was stacked in gleaming towers, and most of the devotees left the camp or went to sleep, the mountain sinners sat around the fire: Karla, Didier, Vinson, Randall, Ankit and me.

  Didier suggested a suggestive game, where anyone who inadvertently said a suggestive word in the conversation had to take a drink. His theory was that the one who was most obsessed with sex would get drunk the fastest, and then we’d all know.

  I already knew that it was Didier, who was also, as it happens, almost immune to alcohol. Karla knew it, too, and redirected the conversation.

  ‘How about this, guys,’ she suggested, standing to leave. ‘Why don’t you tell each other the true story of why you’re sitting here, and not sitting somewhere else, with the love of your life?’

  ‘Rannveig’s in an ashram,’ Vinson began without help. ‘And it’s my fault. I love her so much that I think I made her, like, holy, you know? And I don’t think there’s a reverse exorcism for that.’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Randall averred. ‘But I wish I didn’t.’

  Karla and I said goodnight. I grabbed one of the rolls of carpet, a canvas sheet, a coil of rope, and my backpack of essential supplies. Karla carried two blankets and her own bag of indispensables. We walked by torchlight to the knoll, scaring ourselves with leaping shadows when the path turned suddenly.

  ‘You almost shot that shadow, didn’t you?’ I asked, tucked in beside her on the narrow path, the torch in her hand throwing circles of coherence on the dark canvas of night’s f
orest.

  ‘You’re the one who reached for a knife,’ she said, cuddling close.

  I used the rope to set up a fairly decent shelter. With the right rope, the president of a trucker’s union once said to me, and enough of it, a trucker can do just about anything.

  In my trucker’s tent we talked, and kissed, and went through every argument and reply we’d heard in the discourse.

  ‘You guys are so completely not getting it,’ Karla said sleepily, when we’d run through the valley of ideas together.

  ‘Us guys?’

  ‘You guys.’

  ‘Not getting what?’

  ‘The truth,’ she said.

  ‘What truth?’

  ‘The big truth.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘That’s the point, exactly,’ Karla said, her eyes green mirrors.

  ‘The point about what?’

  ‘You men are obsessed with the truth,’ Karla said. ‘But the truth isn’t such a big deal. The truth is just inhibition, after three drinks.’

  ‘I don’t need a drink,’ I smiled, ‘to be disinhibited with you.’

  We kissed and loved and kept talking, and arguing, working our way back to the end of the beginning until we slept, as a half-moon proclaimed the sky with fuzzy brilliance.

  I woke suddenly, aware that we weren’t alone. I lifted my head slowly and saw Idriss, with his back turned. He was standing at the edge of the knoll a few metres away, and staring at the silver cup of the moon.

  I glanced at Karla. She was still sleeping beside me, wearing my T-shirt like a nightdress.

  ‘I am glad that you see me,’ Idriss said, not turning around.

  ‘I’m always glad to see you, Idriss,’ I whispered. ‘I’d stand up, but I’m not dressed for it.’

  He chuckled, leaning on his staff to look at the stars.

  ‘I am very happy that you and Karla are here,’ he said. ‘And I want you to understand that you’re welcome to stay, for as long as it pleases you to remain.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  Karla woke beside me, and saw Idriss.

  ‘Idriss,’ she said, sitting up. ‘Please, sit and be comfortable.’

  ‘I am always comfortable, Karla, wherever I am,’ he said cheerfully, still not turning to face us. ‘And, I suspect that this is true for both of you as well, isn’t it?’

  ‘Can we offer you something?’ Karla asked, rubbing her eyes awake. ‘Some water or juice?’

  ‘In offering something to me with those words,’ Idriss said, ‘I am nourished already.’

  ‘We’ll get dressed, and join you,’ I suggested. ‘I can make you a cup of tea by the fire.’

  ‘I will leave, in a minute or two,’ he replied. ‘But there is something that I must tell you both, and my mind will not allow me to ignore it, so I must apologise for the intrusion.’

  ‘We’re the intruders,’ Karla said.

  He laughed again.

  ‘Did you wish that you were beside me today, Karla,’ he said, ‘when I was facing the inquisitors?’

  ‘I did, Idriss,’ she laughed. ‘Pencil me in, next time.’

  ‘Done,’ he replied, already leaving us in his mind. ‘Are you two ready to receive my instruction?’

  ‘Yes,’ Karla whispered uncertainly.

  ‘You must renounce violence, both of you, and do whatever it takes to live peacefully.’

  ‘It’s hard to be non-violent in a violent world, Idriss,’ Karla said.

  ‘Violence, tyranny, oppression, injustice, these are all mountains on the topography of life’s journey,’ Idriss said. ‘Life is an encounter with those mountains. The safest way to pass beyond the mountain is to walk around it. But if you choose that path it becomes the whole of your life, because walking around becomes a circle that never stops, and one of those mountains becomes your destiny. The only way onwards, to something else beyond the circle, and to see clearly enough to avoid new mountains, is to climb the mountain and cross it from the peak. But the thing about a mountain is that no part of the climb is less dangerous than the part you just completed.’

  ‘Which means?’ I asked.

  ‘I worry about you both,’ he said. ‘I worry about you often. The view from the top, after the dangerous climb, is something you can’t have if you take the safer path within the circle, but it has great risks. And you must rely on each other and help each other more than ever before. You are already climbing through the mountain shadow, both of you.’

  ‘Have you climbed all your mountains, Idriss?’ Karla asked.

  ‘I was married once,’ he said softly and slowly. ‘A long time ago. And my wife, may her soul know happiness, was a constant companion in the spiritual search, as you are for one another. I would be nothing, without all the many things we learned together. And now I climb through the mountain shadow alone.’

  ‘You’re never alone, Idriss,’ Karla said. ‘Everyone who knows you carries you inside.’

  He laughed softly.

  ‘You remind me of her, Karla. And you remind me of myself, Lin, in another life. I was not always the peaceful man you know. Never give up on the love you feel for one another. Never stop searching for peace, within yourselves.’

  He turned silently, and walked back toward the camp.

  Night noises returned, and a bell tolled at a railway signal somewhere far away. Karla was silent, staring at the leaf shadows where Idriss had vanished.

  ‘We’ve got some stuff to work out, you and me, if we’re gonna get this right,’ she said, looking back at me, her eyes green moonlight. ‘And I want to get this right, for once, with you.’

  ‘I thought we already had it pretty right.’

  ‘We just got started,’ she smiled, stretching sleepily, and snuggling in beside me. ‘Couple of months up here, like this, we’ll work all the kinks in just right.’

  She pulled away from me suddenly, and fetched around among her things until she found the letter she’d been holding for me.

  ‘This is the right time for a mountain shadow letter, if ever there was,’ she said, giving me the letter and cuddling in beside me again.

  She yawned, gorgeously, closed her eyes, and slept. I opened the single-page letter. It was from Gemini George. I read it by the light of the torch.

  Hey, mate, Gemini here, letting you know that me and Scorpio haven’t found the guru that cursed him yet, but we’re still on the trail. We was in Karnataka, on a mountain, then Bengal, and somewhere in between I got sick, mate, and I’m not feeling too good, but I can’t let Scorpio down, so we’ll keep on searching. I just wanted someone who cares about me to know that I don’t have no regrets, if I don’t come back, because I love my life, and I love my friend Scorpio.

  Yours sincerely,

  Gemini

  I put the letter away, and held Karla close until she slept deeply in my arms, but it took me a while to find sleep.

  I was thinking of the men sitting together by the fire, Ankit and Vinson, Didier and Randall, separated from love but finding it again in shared stories, thrown into the fire one wooden tribute at a time.

  I thought of Abdullah, who never lost his faith in anything, but was almost always alone. I saw Vikram in a dark lane of memory, as alone in death as he was in the half-life of addiction.

  I thought of Naveen, knowing that he was in love with Diva Devnani, but that he was staring at her through a wall of thorns called polite society.

  I thought of Ahmed, of the House of Style, who told me once, during a very close shave, that he’d loved the same young woman passionately all his life, though both his family and hers had torn them apart, and he hadn’t seen her since he was nineteen years old.

  I thought of Idriss, alone, and Khaderbhai alone, and Tariq alone, and Nazeer alone, and Kavita, alone without Lisa, and all the others who were li
ving and dying alone, but always in love, or believing in love.

  The wonder isn’t that love finds us, as strange and fated and mystical as that is. The wonder is that even when we never find it, even when love waits in the wings of dream too long, even when love doesn’t knock on the door, or leave messages, or put flowers in our hands, so many of us never stop believing in love.

  Lovers, too happy loving, don’t need to believe. Lives unloved that never stop believing are saints of affection, keeping love itself alive in gardens of faith.

  I looked at Karla, breathing into my chest. She flinched in the corner of a dream. I soothed her until her breathing was my personal music of peace again.

  And I thanked whatever Fate or stars or mistakes or good deeds gave me that beautiful peace, when she was with me. And I slept, at last, and the half-moon, a silver chalice, showered stars on our dreams of the mountain shadow.

  Chapter Eighty-One

  The mountain made its own place in time, marked by rit­uals and sunsets, meals and meditations, fires, penance, prayers and laughter. One by one our crew of friends left the teacher’s mesa, and finally only Karla and I remained with Idriss, Silvano and a few students.

  And she’d been right to ask for the time away from the city: simplified living, strangely enough, added new complexities to our relationship, and the splinters of city life were slowly blunted on the handle of understanding. We talked for hours every day and night, visiting the past while the present escaped us.

  ‘He saved me,’ Karla said one day, weeks into the stay, when the conversation drifted into the Khaderbhai years.

  ‘You met him on the plane, when you were on the run.’

  ‘I did. I was a mess. I’d killed a man, a rapist, my rapist, and even though I knew I’d do it again if I had to, I was a mess. I made it to the airport, and I bought a ticket, and got on the plane, but I fell apart in the air, five miles above the earth. Khaderbhai was sitting beside me. He had a return ticket to Bombay, and I had a one-way ticket. He talked to me, and when the plane landed he brought me here, to the mountain. And I went to work for him the next day.’

  ‘You loved him,’ I said, because I’d loved him.