The Mountain Shadow

by Gregory David Roberts

‘Fuck you,’ I said. ‘I’m the guy you have to get past, if you came here to hurt my friend.’ ‘I so get you!’ Oleg said, disconcerting my concert.

‘What the hell?’ I said, speaking my think.

I should’ve stopped. I didn’t. ‘You know, Kavita, you work at a newspaper that sells white-skin potions to a country full of brown-skinned people,’ I said. ‘You talk about the environment, and you take money from oil companies and coal companies for advertising. You lecture people who wear fur, and accept advertising from battery-fed chicken chains and hormone hamburgers. Your economists forgive bankers no matter what they do, your opinion pages shrink opinion, and your criticism is a flea on the elephant of intolerance. The women in your pages are dolls, while the men are sages. You cover up as many crimes as you report, and you’ve campaigned against innocent men just for ratings, and we both know it. Come down off your throne, Kavita, and leave me alone.’

Only love and forgiveness heal all wounds.

‘I can sell a story, Lin. I once played Othello, in –’ ‘Nice doing business with you, Jaswant.’ ‘That’s it!’ he said. ‘That’s what I was trying to tell you before! I like you, see, but when you’re like a child, and you’re not a child, you take all the fun out of being an adult, see?’

‘If it’s tricks you like, Miss Pari,’ Didier said. ‘Look no further than Didier.’ ‘Wow. I want to see every single trick, Didier,’ Charu said. ‘Make it thrilling, Didier,’ Pari added. Things got back to unusual. Everybody said something essential, inessentially.

Peace, Idriss once said, is perfect forgiveness, and is the opposite of fear.

‘To cover her assets,’ Karla said, tapping me on the chest in agreement. It was the first time she ever did it: the first time that little gesture born in who she was, when she was completely relaxed in love, made its way to my skin. ‘So, you set up fetish games, and cameras?’

‘Ankit makes a drink that’s gonna make Randall absinthe with envy. It’s like a liquid portal between dimensions. You’ve gotta try it.’ ‘Always a pleasure to prepare the portal for you, sir.’ ‘You girls have got so much in common,’ I said, and thought to say more, but Blue Hijab and Karla looked at me in exactly the same not very flattering way, and I unthought it. ‘You marry them,’ Blue Hijab said, ‘hoping they’ll change, and grow. And they marry us, hoping that we won’t.’ ‘The connubial Catch 22,’ Karla said, taking Blue Hijab by the arm and leading her back to the Bedouin tent. ‘Come with me, you poor girl, and freshen up. You look very tired. How far have you come today?’

awesomoness

‘Okay, okay,’ she surrendered. ‘Here’s one. Men are wishes wrapped in secrets, and women are secrets wrapped in wishes.’ ‘Damn nice.’ ‘You like it?’ ‘I do.’

But every execution kills justice, because no life deserves to be killed. I survived the desert-inside of prison beatings, and stumbled on, because I forgave the men who tortured me. I learned that trick from tortured men, who felt it their duty to pass it on, when I was chained and beaten in my turn. 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.

And the wind in lavish leaves said, Surrender. One is all, and all is one. Surrender.

‘Very well. I believe that the Source that birthed our Universe came with us into this reality as a spiritual tendency field. I believe that Will, our human will, is in a constant state of superposition, interacting with, and not interacting with the spiritual tendency field, like the photons of light from which it’s made.’

‘I repeat,’ Idriss smiled patiently, ‘there is no such thing as a trivial choice. Every choice is significant, no matter how unconsciously made. The choices we make, every time we make them, collapse the superposition that we call human life into one reality or another, and one perception or another, and that decision has minute or great but nonetheless eternal effects on the timeline.’ ‘You call that power?’ Ambitious challenged. ‘This is energy,’ Idriss corrected. ‘Spiritual energy, sufficient to alter Time, which is no small thing. Time was the lord of all living things, for billions of years, until Will arose to greet him.’

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.’

The word family is derived from the word famulus, meaning a servant, and in its early usage, familia, it literally meant the servants of a household. In its essence, the longing for family, and the ravenousness that the loss of family creates in us, isn’t just for belonging: it’s for the grace that abides in serving those we love.

‘Have you got a joint?’ Diva asked. ‘Yes,’ Karla and Martini said at the same time, turning their heads instantly to look at one another. It looked tense, to me. But silent struggles between beautiful women are feminal magician’s tricks, faster and subtler than male eyes and instincts can follow. I couldn’t be sure what was going on, so I smiled at everybody.

‘They say Maa Kali is terrifying,’ he said to me, his hand on my arm. ‘But only to hypocrites. If your heart is innocent, She cannot help but love you. She’s the Mother of the universe, and we are Her children. How could She not love us, if we make a place of innocence for Her inside ourselves?’

‘What is it, Dev?’ Karla asked. ‘It’s a yantra,’ he replied. ‘If you look at it with a truthful heart, it will clear the negative from your mind, so that you can make wise, caring choices.’

‘Wait a minute. You were checking on me, for two years?’ ‘Of course. I love you.’ So clear, so light: trust in a human eye.

So clear, so light: trust in a human eye

Truth is the freedom of the soul. We’re very young, in this young universe, and we often fail, and dishonour ourselves, even if only in the caves of the mind. We fight, when we should dance. We compete, cheat and punish innocent nature. But that isn’t what we are, it’s simply what we do in the world that we made for ourselves, and we can freely change what we do, and the world we made, every second that we live. In all the things that really matter, we are one. Love and faith, trust and empathy, family and friendship, sunsets and songs of awe: in every wish born in our humanity we are one. Our humankind, at this moment in our destiny, is a child blowing on a dandelion, without thought or understanding. But the wonder in the child is the wonder in us, and there’s no limit to the good we can do when human hearts connect. It’s the truth of us. It’s the story of us. It’s the meaning of the word God: we are one. We are one. We are one. Proclaimer This novel depicts some characters who are living self-destructive lives.