Shantaram (93 page)

Hajji Mohammed liked my answer so much that he invited our group to attend the wedding celebrations of his youngest son. Concerned that a refusal might offend the elderly leader, and genuinely touched by the generous invitation, Khader accepted. When all the tributes were exacted-Hajji Mohammed drove a hard bargain, demanding and receiving Khader's own horse as an additional, personal gift-Khaderbhai, Nazeer, and I agreed to accompany the leader to his khel.

The rest of our column made camp in a pastured valley with plentiful fresh water. The break in our forced march allowed the men to groom and rest the horses. The pack animals were in constant need of attention and, with the cargo concealed in a protected cave, the unburdened beasts were free to gambol and roam. Our men prepared to feast on four roasting sheep, aromatic Indian rice, and fresh green-leaf tea provided by Hajji's village as their contribution to our part in the jihad. With the practical business of tributes negotiated and received, the senior men of Hajji Mohammed's village-like all the Afghan clan leaders we'd encountered on the journey-acknowledged us as fighters in the same cause, and offered every help they could provide. As Khader, Nazeer, and I rode away from the temporary camp toward the khel, the sounds of singing and laughter followed us, echo chasing playful echo. It was the first time we'd heard that lightness of heart from our men in the twenty-three days of the journey. Hajji Mohammed's village was in celebration when we arrived. His profitable, bloodless encounter with our column of armed men had added to the gathering thrill of anticipation for the wedding.

Khader explained how the elaborate rituals of Afghan matrimony had been unfolding for months before we'd arrived. There'd been ceremonial visits between the family of the groom, and the family of the bride. In every case, small gifts such as handkerchiefs or scented sweets had been exchanged, and precise courtesies were observed. The bride's dowry of extravagantly embroidered cloths, imported silks, perfumes, and jewellery had been publicly displayed for all to admire, and was then held in trust for her by the groom's family. The groom had even visited his bride-to-be in secret, and he'd presented her with personal gifts as he spoke to her. According to custom, it was strictly forbidden for him to be seen by the men in her family during that secret visit, but custom also required him to be helped by the girl's mother. The dutiful mother, Khader assured me, had remained with the couple while they spoke to one another for the first time, and had acted as their chaperone. With all that achieved, the couple was ready for the culmination of the marriage ceremony itself, to be held in three days' time.

Khader took me through the finest details of the rituals, and it seemed to me that there was a kind of urgency in his normally gentle, teacher's manner. At first I guessed-rightly, I think- that he was reacquainting himself with the customs of his people, after his five long decades in exile. He was reliving the scenes and celebrations of his youth, and he was proving to himself that he was still Afghan, in all that his heart knew and felt. But as the lessons continued through the following days, and the intensity of his attention to them never failed, I finally realised that the long explanations and histories were for my benefit more than his. He was giving me a crash course in the culture of the nation where I might be killed and where my body might be laid to rest. He was making sense of it-my life with him, and my possible death-in the only way that he knew. And understanding that, without ever speaking of it to him, I listened dutifully and learned everything I could.

Kinsmen, friends, and other invitees streamed into Hajji's village during those days. The four main houses of Hajji Mohammed's fortress-like men's kal'a, or compound, were tall, square, mud-brick buildings. High walls surrounded the kal'a, and one large dwelling stood in each of the four corners. The women's kal'a was a separate set of buildings behind even higher walls. In the men's compound we slept on the floor and cooked all our own meals. It was already crowded in the house that Khader, Nazeer, and I joined but, as new men arrived from distant villages, we all simply squashed in further.

Sleeping in our clothes, we top-and-tailed across the whole floor, each man sleeping with his head beside the feet of the next. There's a theory that snoring at night in sleep is a subconscious defence reflex-a warning sound that frightened potential predators away from the mouth of the cave when our lower-Palaeolithic ancestors huddled in vulnerable sleep. That group of Afghan nomads, cameleers, sheep and goat herders, farmers, and guerrilla fighters lent credibility to the idea, for they snored so thunderously and with such persistent ferocity through the long, cold night that they would've frightened a pride of ravenous lions into scattering like startled mice.

During the day, the same men prepared complex food dishes for the Friday wedding. Those dishes included flavoured yoghurts, piquant goat's or sheep's milk cheeses, oven-baked cakes made with corn flour, dates, nuts, and wild honey, biscuits baked with richly churned goat's milk butter and, of course, a variety of halal meats and vegetable pulao. While the foods were being prepared, I watched as men dragged a foot-operated grinding wheel into an open space, and the groom devoted a tense hour to putting a razor's edge to a large, ornate dagger. The bride's father watched that effort with a critical eye. After satisfying himself that the weapon was suitably lethal, he gravely accepted it as a gift from the younger man.

"The groom has just sharpened the knife that the bride's father will use on him, if he ever mistreats the girl," Khader explained to me as we watched.

"That's a pretty good custom," I mused.

"It is not a custom," Khader corrected me, with a laugh. "It is his idea-the bride's father. I have never heard of it before this. But if it works, it might become a custom."

Each day the men also rehearsed ritual group-dances with the musicians and singers who'd been hired to complement the formal, public celebration. The dancing gave me the chance to see a new and completely unexpected side of Nazeer. He hurled himself into the whirling chorus line of men with grace and passion. Moreover, my short, bow-legged friend, whose bulky arms seemed to jut outward from the tree trunk of his thick neck and chest, was by far the best dancer in the entire assembly, and quickly earned their admiration. The whole secret and invisible inner life of the man, his full creative and spiritual endowment, was expressed in the dance. And that face-I'd said, once, that I'd never seen another human face in which the smile was so utterly defeated-that scowl-creased face was transfigured in the dance until his honest, selfless beauty was so radiant that it filled my eyes with tears.

"Tell me once more," Abdel Khader Khan commanded, with a roguish smile in his eye, as we watched the dancers from a vantage point beneath a shaded wall.

I laughed. When I turned to look at him, he laughed as well.

"Go on," he urged. "Do it to please me."

"But you've heard this twenty times from me already. How about you answer me a question instead?"

"You tell me once more, and then I will answer your question."

"Okay. Here goes. The universe began about fifteen billion years ago, in almost absolute simplicity, and it's been getting more and more complex ever since. This movement from the simple to the complex is built into the web and weave of the universe, and it's called the tendency toward complexity. We're the products of this complexification, and so are the birds, and the bees, and the trees, and the stars, and even the galaxies of stars. And if we were to get wiped out in a cosmic explosion, like an asteroid impact or something, some other expression of our level of complexity would emerge, because that's what the universe does.

And this is likely to be going on all over the universe. How am I doing so far?"

I waited, but he didn't reply, so I continued with my summary.

"Okay, the final or ultimate complexity-the place where all this complexity is going-is what, or who, we might call God. And anything that promotes, enhances, or accelerates this movement toward God is good. Anything that inhibits, impedes, or prevents it is evil. And if we want to know if something is good or evil- something like war and killing and smuggling guns to mujaheddin guerrillas, for example-then we ask the questions: What if everyone did this thing? Would that help us, in this bit of the universe, to get there, or would it hold us back? And then we have a pretty good idea whether it's good or evil. What's more important, we know why it's good or evil. There, how was that?"

"Very good," he said without looking at me. While I'd run through the summary of his cosmological model, he'd closed his eyes and nodded his head, pursing his lips in a half smile. When I concluded it, he turned to look at me, and the smile widened as the pleasure and the mischief sparked in his eyes. "You know, if you wanted to do it, you could express this idea every bit as well and as accurately as I do. And I've been working on it and thinking about it for almost all of my life. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me feel to hear you tell it to me in your own words."

"I think the words are yours, Khaderji. You've coached me often enough. But I do have a couple of problems. Do I get my question now?"

"Yes."

"Okay. We've got things like rocks in the world that aren't alive, and living things like trees and fish and people. Your cosmology doesn't tell me where life and consciousness come from.

If rocks are made out of the same stuff that people are made out of, how come rocks aren't alive, but people are? I mean, where does life come from?"

"I know you well enough to be sure that you want me to give you a short, direct answer to this question."

"I think I'd like a short, direct answer to _every question," I replied, laughing.

He raised an eyebrow at the foolishness of my flippant response and then shook his head slowly.

"Do you know the English philosopher Bertrand Russell? Have you read any of his books?"

"Yeah. I read some of his stuff-at university, and in prison."

"He was a favourite of my dear Mr. Mackenzie Esquire," Khader smiled. "I do not often agree with Bertrand Russell's conclusions, but I do like the way he arrives at them. Anyway, he once said, Anything that can be put in a nutshell should remain there. And I do agree with him about that. But now, the answer to your question is this: life is a feature of all things. We could call it a characteristic, which is one of my favourite English words. If you do not speak English as your first language, the word `characteristic` has an amazing sound-like rapping on a drum, or breaking kindling wood for a fire. To continue, every atom in the universe has the characteristic of life. The more complex way that atoms get put together, the more complex is the expression of the characteristic of life. A rock is a very simple arrangement of atoms, so the life in a rock is so simple that we cannot see it. A cat is a very complex arrangement of atoms, so the life in a cat is very obvious. But life is there, in everything, even in a rock, and even when we cannot see it."

"Where did you get this idea? Is it in the Koran?"

"Actually, it is a concept that appears in one way or another in most of the great religions. I have changed it slightly to suit what we have learned about the world in the last few hundred years. But the Holy Koran gives me my inspiration for this kind of study, because the Koran commands me to study everything, and learn everything, in order to serve Allah."

"But where does this _life _characteristic come from?" I insisted, sure that I had him trapped in a reductionist dead-end at last.

"Life, and all the other characteristics of all the things in the universe, such as consciousness, and free will, and the tendency toward complexity, and even love, was given to the universe by light, at the beginning of time as we know it."

"At the Big Bang? Is that what you're talking about?"

"Yes. The Big Bang expansion happened from a point called a singularity-another of my favourite five-syllable English words - that is almost infinitely dense, and almost infinitely hot, and yet it occupies no space and no time, as we know those things.

The point is a boiling cauldron of light energy. Something caused it to expand-we don't know yet what caused it-and from light, all the particles and all the atoms came to exist, along with space and time and all the forces that we know. So, light gave every little particle at the beginning of the universe a set of characteristics, and as those particles combine in more complex ways, the characteristics show themselves in more and more complex ways."

He paused, watching my face as I struggled with the concepts and questions and emotions that looped in my mind. He got away from me again, I thought, suddenly furious with him for having an answer to my question, and yet struck with admiring respect for the same reason. There was always something eerily incongruous in the wise lectures-sometimes they were like sermons-of the mafia don Abdel Khader Khan. Sitting there against a stone wall in an all-but-Stone Age village in Afghanistan, with a cargo of smuggled guns and antibiotics nearby, the dissonance created by his calm, profound discourse about good and evil, and light and life and consciousness, was enough to fill me with exasperated irritation. "What I have just told you is the relationship between consciousness and matter," Khader proclaimed, pausing again until he had my eye. "This is a kind of test, and now you know it. This is a test that you should apply to every man who tells you that he knows the meaning of life. Every guru you meet and every teacher, every prophet and every philosopher, should answer these two questions for you: What is an objective, universally acceptable definition of good and evil? And, What is the relationship between consciousness and matter? If he cannot answer these two questions, as I have done, you know that he has not passed the test."

"How do you know all this physics?" I demanded. "All this about particles and singularities and Big Bangs?"

He stared at me, reading the full measure of the unconscious insult: How is it that an Afghan gangster like you knows so much about science and higher knowledge? I looked back at him, remembering a day at the slum with Johnny Cigar when I'd made the cruel mistake of assuming him to be ignorant simply because he was poor.