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The voice, Afghan matchmakers say, is more than half of love.
A clamp like a tightening fist seized my heart. A voice in my blood said yes, yes, yes . . . The ancient Sanskrit legends speak of a destined love, a karmic connection between souls that are fated to meet and collide and enrapture one another. The legends say that the loved one is instantly recognised because she’s loved in every gesture, every expression of thought, every movement, every sound, and every mood that prays in her eyes. The legends say that we know her by her wings—the wings that only we can see—and because wanting her kills every other desire of love. The same legends also carry
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When I got to know him well enough, when I began to cherish his friendship, I discovered that Prabaker believed with the whole of his heart that his smile made a difference, in people’s hearts and in the world. He was right, of course, but it took me a long time to understand that truth, and to accept it.
The simple and astonishing truth about India and Indian people is that when you go there, and deal with them, your heart always guides you more wisely than your head. There’s nowhere else in the world where that’s quite so true.
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The world and I are not on speaking terms, Karla said to me once in those early months. The world keeps trying to win me back, she said, but it doesn’t work. I guess I’m just not the forgiving type.
My heart moved through deep and silent water. No-one, and nothing, could really hurt me. No-one, and nothing, could make me very happy. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man.
And it really helped me to . . . to put things in focus. Sometimes you break your heart in the right way, if you know what I mean.’
‘You learn something or you feel something completely new, when you break your heart that way,’ she said. ‘Something that only you can know or feel in that way.
‘Yes. You’re a good listener. That’s dangerous, because it’s so hard to resist. Being listened to—really listened to—is the second-best thing in the world.’
‘Love is the opposite of power. That’s why we fear it so much.’
she flirted with the world because flirting was the only real kindness she ever knew or shared: it was her way of being nice, and of making sure that people—men—were nice to her. She believed that there wasn’t enough niceness in the world,
‘We have a saying in Marseilles: a man in no hurry gets nowhere fast.
The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business.
Civilisation, after all, is defined by what we forbid, more than what we permit.’
I’m a people person, if you know what I mean. If the people in it were interesting, I’d prefer a tin shed to the Taj Mahal
Hypocrisy is just another kind of cruelty.
The truth is a bully we all pretend to like.
Some loves are like that. Most loves are like that, from what I can see. Your heart starts to feel like an overcrowded lifeboat. You throw your pride out to keep it afloat, and your self-respect and your independence. After a while you start throwing people out—your friends, everyone you used to know. And it’s still not enough. The lifeboat is still sinking, and you know it’s going to take you down with it.
And I’d learned, the hard way, that sometimes, even with the purest intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better.
There’s a truth that’s deeper than experience. It’s beyond what we see, or even what we feel. It’s an order of truth that separates the profound from the merely clever, and the reality from the perception. We’re helpless, usually, in the face of it; and the cost of knowing it, like the cost of knowing love, is sometimes greater than any heart would willingly pay. It doesn’t always help us to love the world, but it does prevent us from hating the world. And the only way to know that truth is to share it, from heart to heart,
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It is the mark of the age in which we live that the style becomes the attitude, instead of the attitude becoming the style.’
This is India. Everyone who comes here falls in love—most of us fall in love many times over. And the Indians, they love most of all.
Optimism is the first cousin of love, and it’s exactly like love in three ways: it’s pushy, it has no real sense of humour, and it turns up where you least expect it.
‘I think the future is like anything else that’s important. It has to be earned. If we don’t earn it, we don’t have a future at all. And if we don’t earn it, if we don’t deserve it, we have to live in the present, more or less forever. Or worse, we have to live in the past. I think that’s probably what love is—a way of earning the future.’
The facts of life are very simple. In the beginning we feared everything—animals, the weather, the trees, the night sky—everything except each other. Now we fear each other, and almost nothing else. No-one knows why anyone does anything. No-one tells the truth. No-one is happy. No-one is safe. In the face of all that is so wrong with the world, the very worst thing you can do is survive. And yet you must survive. It is this dilemma that makes us believe and cling to the lie that we have a soul, and that there is a God who cares about its fate.
‘I want everything,’ she replied with a faint, wry smile. ‘You know, I said that once, to a friend of mine, and he told me that the real trick in life is to want nothing, and to succeed in getting it.’
I think wisdom is very over-rated. Wisdom is just cleverness, with all the guts kicked out of it.
There’s a kind of luck that’s not much more than being in the right place at the right time, a kind of inspiration that’s not much more than doing the right thing in the right way, and both only really happen to you when you empty your heart of ambition, purpose, and plan; when you give yourself, completely, to the golden, fate-filled moment.
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But the soul has no culture. The soul has no nations. The soul has no colour or accent or way of life. The soul is forever. The soul is one. And when the heart has its moment of truth and sorrow, the soul can’t be stilled.
One of the reasons why we crave love, and seek it so desperately, is that love is the only cure for loneliness, and shame, and sorrow. But some feelings sink so deep into the heart that only loneliness can help you find them again. Some truths about yourself are so painful that only shame can help you live with them. And some things are just so sad that only your soul can do the crying for you.
the monstrous and pitiable understanding that no happiness exists without its woe, no wealth without its cost, and no life without its full measure, sooner or later, of sorrowing and death.
I knew that every smile I took from them was swindled. Life on the run puts a lie in the echo of every laugh, and at least a little larceny in every act of love.
that a dream is the place where a wish and a fear meet. When the wish and the fear are exactly the same, he said, we call the dream a nightmare.
Waiting for nothing, that is what kills the heart of a man, isn’t it?
If fate doesn’t make you laugh, Karla said, in one of my first conversations with her, then you just don’t get the joke.
‘There is no act of faith more beautiful than the generosity of the very poor,’
Sometimes the lion must roar, just to remind the horse of his fear.
Nothing exists as we see it. Nothing we see is really there, as we think we are seeing it. Our eyes are liars. Everything that seems real, is merely part of the illusion. Nothing exists, as we think it does. Not you. Not me. Not this room. Nothing.’
The agents of creation, the energy that actually animates the matter and the life that we think we see around us, cannot be measured or weighed or even put into time, as we know it. In one form, that energy is photons of light. The smallest object is a universe of open space to them, and the entire universe is but a speck of dust. What we call the world is just an idea—and not a very good one, yet. From the point of view of the light, the photon of light that animates it, the universe that we know is not real. Nothing is.
‘The sane man is simply a better liar than the insane man. You and Abdullah are brothers. I know this. Your eyes lie, and tell you that this is not so. And you believe the lie, because it is easier.’
You will prefer to make a convenient lie, and to believe it—the lie that we are strangers, and that there is no connection between us. But fate—you know fate? Kismet is the word, in the Urdu language—fate has every power over us, but two. Fate cannot control our free will, and fate cannot lie. Men lie, to themselves more than to others, and to others more often than they tell the truth. But fate does not lie.
‘What I am saying is that reality—as you see it, and as most people see it—is nothing more than an illusion. There is another reality, beyond what we see with our eyes. You have to feel your way into that reality with your heart. There is no other way.’
All you have to do is close your eyes. We can know God, for example, and we can know sadness. We can know dreams, and we can know love. But none of these are real, in our usual sense of things that exist in the world and seem real. We cannot weigh them, or measure their length, or find their basic parts in an atom smasher. Which is why they are possible.’
‘I said that the truth is found more often in music,’ he repeated, ‘than it is in books of philosophy.’
‘The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,’ he said. ‘It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men—it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone—the noblest man alive or the most wicked—has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God.’
‘In this life, we do what we can to improve ourselves.’
I fell as fearlessly into my fate, that afternoon, as a man falls into love with a shy woman’s best smile.
Suffering, Khaderbhai once told me, is the way we test our love, especially our love for God.
because justice is a judgement that is both fair and forgiving. Justice is not done until everyone is satisfied, even those who offend us and must be punished by us.
justice is not only the way we punish those who do wrong. It is also the way we try to save them.’
