The Years of Rice and Salt (14 page)

“Blessed is that intelligence into whose heart's ear from heaven the sound of ‘come hither' is coming. The defiled ear hears not that sound—only the deserving gets his desserts. Defile not your eye with human cheek and mole, for that emperor of eternal life is coming; and if it has become defiled, wash it with tears, for the cure comes from those tears. A caravan of sugar has arrived from Egypt; the sound of a footfall and bell is coming. Ha, be silent, for to complete the ode our speaking king is coming.”

After many days of that, Bistami began to repeat the Quran sura by sura, returning often to the first sura, the Opening of the Book, the Fatiha, the Healer, which the guards would never fail to recognize:

“Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds! The compassionate, the merciful! King on the day of reckoning! Thee only do we worship, and to Thee do we cry for help. Guide Thou us on the straight path, the path of those to whom Thou has been gracious;—and with whom Thou are not angry, and who go not astray.”

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 their 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. “O he, O he who is He, O 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 Muhammad, 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? O he, O he who is He, sufficient is God and excellent the Protector, Allah the merciful, the beneficent!” Allah who had sent Muhammad on his isra, his journey into light, just as Bistami was being sent now, toward 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.

Except this Akbar of light turned his head, and looked through the lit space between them, and Bistami saw then that his eyes were black balls in his head, black as onyx; and he said to Bistami, We have never met before; I am not the one you seek; the one you seek is elsewhere.

Bistami reeled, fell back in the corner formed by the two walls.

When he came to himself, still in a colorful glassine world, Akbar in the flesh stood there before him, sweeping the courtyard with Bistami's broom.

“Master,” Bistami said, and began to weep. “Mowlana.”

Akbar stopped over him, stared down at him.

Finally he put a hand to Bistami's head. “You are a servant of God,” he said.

“Yes, Mowlana.”

“ ‘Now hath God been gracious to us,' ” Akbar recited in Arabic. “ ‘For whoso feareth God and endureth, God verily will not suffer the reward of the righteous to perish.' ”

This was from Sura Twelve, the story of Joseph and his brothers. Bistami, encouraged, still seeing through the edges of things, including Akbar and his luminous hand and face, a creature of light pulsing through lives like days, recited verses from the end of the next sura, “Thunder”:

“ ‘Those who lived before them made plots; but all plotting is controlled by God: He knoweth the works of every one.' ”

Akbar nodded, looking to Chishti's tomb and thinking his own thoughts.

“ ‘No blame be on you this day,' ” he muttered, speaking the words Joseph spoke as he forgave his brothers. “ ‘God will forgive you, for He is the most merciful of those who show mercy.' ”

“Yes, Mowlana. God gives us all things, God the merciful and compassionate, he who is He. O he who is He, O he who is He, O he who is He . . .” With difficulty he stopped himself.

“Yes.” Akbar looked back down at him again. “Now, whatever may have happened in Gujarat, I don't wish to hear any more of it. I don't believe you had anything to do with the rebellion. Stop weeping. But Abul Fazl and Shaikh Abdul Nabi do believe this, and they are among my chief advisors. In most matters I trust them. I am loyal to them, as they are to me. So I can ignore them in this, and instruct them to leave you alone, but even if I do that, your life here will not be as comfortable as it was before. You understand.”

“Yes, master.”

“So I am going to send you away—”

“No, master!”

“Be silent. I am going to send you on the haj.”

Bistami's mouth fell open. After all these days of endless talking, his jaw hung from his face like a broken gate. White light filled everything, and for a moment he swooned.

Then colors returned, and he began to hear again: “. . . you will ride to Surat and sail on my pilgrim ship, Ilahi, across the Arabian Sea to Jidda. The wagf has generated a good donation to Mecca and Medina, and I have appointed Wazir as the mir haj and the party will include my aunt Bulbadan Begam and my wife Salima. I would like to go myself, but Abul Fazl insists that I am needed here.”

Bistami nodded. “You are indispensable, master.”

Akbar contemplated him. “Unlike you.”

He removed his hand from Bistami's head. “But the mir haj can always use another qadi. And I wish to establish a permanent Timurid school in Mecca. You can help with that.”

“But—and not come back?”

“Not if you value this existence.”

Bistami stared down at the ground, feeling a chill.

“Come now,” the emperor said. “For such a devout scholar as you, a life in Mecca should be pure joy.”

“Yes, master. Of course.” But his voice choked on the words.

Akbar laughed. “It's better than beheading, you must admit! And who knows? Life is long. Perhaps you will come back one day.”

They both knew it was not likely. Life was not long.

“Whatever God wills,” Bistami murmured, looking around. This courtyard, this tomb, these trees which he knew stone by stone, branch by branch, leaf by leaf—this life, which had filled a hundred years in the last month—it was over. All that he knew so well would pass from him, including this beloved awesome young man. Strange to think that each true life was only a few years long—that one passed through several in each bodily span. He said, “God is great. We will never meet again.”

5
                                                                                                            

The Road to Mecca

From the port of Jidda to Mecca, the pilgrims' camels were continuous from
horizon to horizon, looking as if they might continue unbroken all the way across Arabia, or the world. The rocky shallow valleys around Mecca were filled with encampments, and the mutton-greased smoke of cooking fires rose into the clear skies at sunset. Cool nights, warm days, never a cloud in the whitish blue sky, and thousands of pilgrims, enthusiastically making the final rounds of the haj, everyone in the city participating in the same ecstatic ritual, all dressed in white, accented by the green turbans in the crowd, worn by the sayyids, those who claimed direct descent from the Prophet: a big family, if the turbans were to be believed, all reciting verses from the Quran, following the people in front of them, who followed those before them, and those before them, in a line that extended back nine centuries.

On the voyage to Arabia, Bistami had fasted more seriously than ever in his life, even in the tomb of Chishti. Now he flowed through the stone streets of Mecca light as a feather, looking up at the palms dusting the sky with their gently waving green fronds, feeling so airy in God's grace that it sometimes seemed he looked down on the palm tops, or around the corners into the Kaaba, and he would have to stare at his feet for a while to regain his balance and his sense of self, though as he did so his feet began to seem like distant creatures of their own, thrusting forward one after the other, time after time. O he, O he who is He . . .

He had separated himself from the representatives of Fatepur Sikri, as he found Akbar's family an unwelcome reminder of his lost master. With them it was always Akbar this and Akbar that, his wife Salima (a second wife, not the empress) plaintive in a self-satisfied way, his aunt egging her on—no. Women were on their own pilgrimage in any case, but the men in the Mughal retinue were almost as bad. And Wazir the mir haj was an ally of Abul Fazl, and therefore suspicious of Bistami, dismissive of him to the point of contempt. There would be no place for Bistami in the Mughal school, assuming that they established one at all, rather than just disbursing some alms and city funds from an embassy, which was how it looked as though it would come about. Either way Bistami would not be welcome among them, that was clear.

But this was one of those blessed moments when the future was no matter for concern, when past and future both were absent from the world. That was what struck Bistami most, even at the time, even in the act of floating along in the line of belief, one of a million white-robed hajis, pilgrims from all over Dar al-Islam, from the Maghrib to Mindanao, from Siberia to the Seychelles: how they were all there together in this one moment, the sky and the town under it all glowing with their presence, not transparently as at Chishti's tomb, but full of color, stuffed with all the colors of the world. All the people of the world were one.

This holiness radiated outward from the Kaaba. Bistami moved with the line of humanity into the holiest mosque, and passed by the big smooth black stone, blacker than ebony or jet, black as the night sky without stars, like a boulder-shaped hole in reality. He felt his body and soul pulsing in the same rhythm as the line, as the world. Touching the black stone was like touching flesh. It seemed to revolve around him. The dream image of Akbar's black eyes came to him and he shrugged them away, aware they were distractions out of his own mind, aware of Allah's ban on images. The stone was all and it was just a stone, black reality itself, made solid by God. He kept his place in the line and felt the spirits of the people ahead of him lifting as they passed out of the square, as if they were climbing a stairway into heaven.

Dispersal; return to camp; the first sips of soup and coffee at sundown; all occurred in a silent cool evening under the evening star. Everyone at such peace. Washed clean inside. Looking around at all the faces, Bistami thought, Oh why don't we live like this all the time? What is important enough to take us away from this moment? Firelit faces, starry night overhead, ripples of song or soft laughter, peace, peace: no one seemed to want to fall asleep, to end this moment and wake up the next day, back in the sensible world.

Akbar's family and haj
left in a caravan back to Jidda. Bistami went to the outskirts of town to see them off; Akbar's wife and aunt said good-bye to him, waving from camelback. The rest were already intent on the long journey to Fatepur Sikri.

After that Bistami was alone in Mecca, a city of strangers. Most were leaving now, in caravan after caravan. It was a lugubrious, uncanny sight: hundreds of caravans, thousands of people, happy but deflated, their white robes packed away or revealed suddenly to be dusty, fringed at the foot with brown dirt. So many were leaving that it seemed the city was being abandoned before some approaching disaster, as perhaps had happened once or twice, in time of war or famine or plague.

But a week or two later the ordinary Mecca was revealed, a whitewashed dusty little town of a few thousand people. Many of them were clerics or scholars or Sufis or qadis or ulema, or heterodox refugees of one sort or another, claiming the sanctuary of the holy city. Most, however, were merchants and tradespeople. In the aftermath of the haj they looked exhausted, drained, almost stunned, it seemed, and inclined to disappear into their blank-walled compounds, leaving the remaining outsiders in town to fend for themselves for a month or two. For the remnant ulema and scholars, it was as if they were camping out in the empty heart of Islam, making it full by their own devotions, cooking over fires on the edges of town at dusk, trading for food with passing nomads. Many sang songs through most of the night.

The Persian-speaking group was big, and congregated nightly around fires of its khitta on the eastern edge of town, where the canals came in from the hills. Thus they were the first to experience the spate that burst onto the town after storms to the north, which they heard but never saw. A wall of muddy black water slammed down the canals and spread out through the streets, rolling palm trunks and boulders like weapons into the upper half of the town. Everything flooded after that, until even the Kaaba itself stood in water up to the silver ring that held it in place.

Bistami threw himself with great pleasure into the efforts to drain the waters, and then to clean up the town. After the experience of the light in Chishti's tomb, and the supreme experience of the haj, there was little more he felt he could do in the mystic realm. He lived now in the aftermath of those events, and felt himself utterly changed; but what he wanted to do now was to read Persian poetry for an hour in the brief cool of the mornings, then work outside in the low hot winter sun in the afternoons. With the town broken and waist-deep in mud, there was a lot of work to be done. Pray, read, work, eat, pray, sleep; this was the pattern of a good day. Day after day passed in this satisfying round.

Then as the winter wore on, he began to study at a Sufi madressa established by scholars from the Maghrib, that western end of the world that was becoming more powerful, extending as it was both north into al-Andalus and Firanja, and south into the Sahel. Bistami and the others there read and discussed not just Rumi and Shams, but also the philosophers Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, and the ancient Greek Aristotle, and the historian Ibn Khaldun. The Maghribis in the madressa were not as interested in contesting points of doctrine as they were in exchanging new information about the world; they were full of stories of the reoccupation of al-Andalus and Firanja, and tales of the lost Frankish civilization. They were friendly to Bistami; they had no opinion of him one way or another; they thought of him as Persian, and so it was much more pleasant to be among them than with the Mughalis in the Timurid embassy, where he was regarded uneasily at best. Bistami saw that if his being stationed in Mecca was punishment in the form of exile from Akbar and Sind, then the other Mughalis assigned here had to wonder if they too were in disfavor, rather than honored for their religious devotion. Seeing Bistami reminded them of this possibility, and so he was shunned like a leper. He therefore spent more and more of his time at the Maghribi madressa, and out in the Persian-speaking khitta, now set a bit higher in the hills above the canals east of town.

The year in Mecca always oriented itself in time to the haj, in just the same way that Islam oriented itself in space to Mecca. As the months passed, all began to make their preparations, and as Ramadan approached, nothing else in the world mattered but the upcoming haj. Much of the effort involved simply feeding the masses that would descend on the town. A whole system had developed to accomplish this miraculous feat, astonishing in its size and efficiency, here on this out-of-the-way corner of a nearly lifeless desert peninsula. Though of course Aden and Yemen were rich, to the south below them. No doubt, Bistami thought as he walked by the pastures now filling up with sheep and goats, mulling over his readings in Ibn Khaldun, the system had grown with the growth of the haj itself. Which must have been rapid: Islam had exploded out of Arabia in the first century after the hegira, he was coming to understand. Al-Andalus had been Islamicized by the year 100, the far reaches of the Spice Islands by the year 200; the whole span of the known world had been converted, only two centuries after the Prophet had received the Word and spread it to the people of this little land in the middle. Ever since then people had been coming here in greater and greater numbers.

One day he and a few other young scholars went to Medina, walking all the way, reciting prayers as they went, to see Muhammad's first mosque again. Past endless pens of sheep and goats, past cheese dairies, granaries, date palm groves; then into the outskirts of Medina, a sleepy, sandy, delapidated little settlement when the haj was not there to bring it alive. In one stand of thick ancient palms, the little whitewashed mosque hid in the shade, as polished as a pearl. Here the Prophet had preached during his exile, and taken down most of the verses of the Quran from Allah.

Bistami wandered the garden outside this holy place, trying to imagine how it had happened. Reading Khaldun had made him understand: these things had all happened. In the beginning, the Prophet had stood in this grove, speaking in the open air. Later he had leaned against a palm tree when he spoke, and some of his followers had suggested a chair. He had agreed to it only as long as it was low enough that there was no suggestion he was claiming any sort of privilege for himself. The Prophet, perfect man that he had been, was modest. He had agreed to the construction of a mosque where he taught, but for many years it had gone roofless; Muhammad had declared there was more important business for the faithful to accomplish first. And then they had made their return to Mecca, and the Prophet had led twenty-six military campaigns himself: the jihad. After that, how quickly the word had spread. Khaldun attributed this rapidity to a readiness in people for the next stage in civilization, and to the manifest truth of the Quran.

Bistami, troubled by something he could not pin down, wondered about this explanation. In India, civilizations had come and gone, come and gone. Islam itself had conquered India. But under the Mughals the ancient beliefs of the Indians endured, and Islam itself changed in its constant contact with them. This had become clearer to Bistami as he studied the pure religion in the madressa. Although Sufism itself was perhaps more than a simple return to the pure source. An advance, or (could one say it?) a clarification, even an improvement. An effort to bypass the ulemas. In any case, change. It did not seem that it could be prevented. Everything changed. As the Sufi Junnaiyd at the madressa said, the word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. After the winter's great flood, this image was particularly vivid and troubling. Islam, spreading over the world like a spate of mud, a mix of God and man; it did not seem very much like what had happened to him in the tomb of Chishti, or at the moment of the haj, when it seemed the Kaaba had revolved around him. But even his memory of those events was changing. Everything changed in this world.

Including Medina and Mecca, which grew in population rapidly as the haj approached, and shepherds poured into town with their flocks, tradesmen with their wares—clothing, traveling equipment to replace things broken or lost, religious scripts, mementos of the haj, and so on. In the final month of preparation the early pilgrims began to arrive, long strings of camels carrying dusty, happy travelers, their faces alight with the feeling Bistami remembered from the year before, a year which seemed to have gone so fast—and yet his own haj at the same time seemed as if it were on the far side of a great abyss in his mind. He could not call up in himself the feeling that he saw on their faces. He was no pilgrim this time, but a resident, and he found himself feeling some of the residents' resentment, that his peaceful village, like a big madressa really, was swelling to a ridiculous engorgement, as if a great family of enthusiastic relatives had descended on them all at once. Not a happy way of thinking of it, and Bistami set himself guiltily to a full round of prayers, fasting, and aid of the influx, especially those exhausted or sick: leading them to khittas and finas and caravanserai and hostelries, throwing himself into a routine to make himself feel he was more in the spirit of the haj. But daily exposure to the ecstatic faces of the pilgrims reminded him how far he was from that. Their faces were alight with God. He saw how clearly faces revealed the soul, they were like windows into a deeper world.

So he hoped that his pleasure at greeting the pilgrims from Akbar's court was obvious on his face. But Akbar himself had not come, nor any of his immediate family, and no one in the group looked at all happy to be there, or to see Bistami. The news from home was ominous. Akbar had become critical of his ulema. He received Hindu rajas, and listened sympathetically to their concerns. He had even begun openly to worship the sun, prostrating himself four times a day before a sacred fire, abstaining from meat, alcohol, and sexual intercourse. These were Hindu practices, and indeed on every Sunday he was initiating twelve of his amirs in his service. The neophytes placed their heads directly on Akbar's feet during this ceremony, an extreme form of prostration known as sijdah, a form of submission to another human being that was blasphemous to Muslims. And he had not been willing to fund much of a pilgrimage; indeed, he had had to be convinced to send any at all. He had sent Shaikh Abdul Nabi and Malauna Abdulla as a way of exiling them, just as he had Bistami the year before. In short, he appeared to be falling away from the faith. Akbar, falling away from Islam!