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She could not envision a God who demanded such particularity of belief, whose mercy and forgiveness were confined to such a precise segment of humankind. Nor, if it came to that, could she fathom hell, which seemed a somewhat contradictory place: you could be sent there for behaving in the right way but believing in the wrong God, or for believing in the right God but behaving in the wrong way. And that, in turn, threw heaven into disarray, since those who both believed and behaved rightly were invited to indulge in the very pleasures for which those who behaved wrongly had been sent to hell.
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Belief never seemed to enter into anything: it was simply a matter of selecting the correct system of enticements.
“Does that mean you know what it is?” asked Fatima, sitting up straighter. “Is there a name for what Hassan does?” “Oh, undoubtedly. It’s a miracle.” “Don’t make fun of me,” protested Hassan. “Who’s making fun of you? I’m as serious as I ever get.” “But Hassan isn’t a holy man,” said Fatima. The image of Hassan as a wandering ascetic, with a long beard and a short robe and a pious scowl, was so comical that she almost laughed. “Neither are most miracle workers,” said Vikram. “Most are ordinary men and women with all the usual flaws and hypocrisies. People would rather call them witches and
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“I think I’m much smaller than the things I set out to do, that’s all. It’s not selfishness. I spent all my life in the same place. You get no sense of proportion that way.”
“To find the Bird King, you needed to rid yourself of all the parts of you that were not the Bird King. I had nothing to do with it, and neither, for that matter, did anyone else. If you had made your choices differently, you might be in Morocco now, comforting a deposed sultan; or in Castile, crowning an empress; or in the Empty Quarter, sitting at my sister’s feet. You could have clung to hope. Instead, you chose something more radical.” “What? What did I choose?” “Faith.”
