The Greatest Meeting. None
I wanted to let them know at a more opportune time, but he pushed me to it.
“To where, my dear son?” my concerned mother asks affectionately.
My mother has a delicate soul, so I try to answer her as tenderly as I can. “I don’t know myself, mother, but I will go around to find and visit as many saints and allâmehs [learned men], and pirs [wise elders] as I can find. I’ll wander from city to city, sit in on the khatâbehs [lectures], learn from them, and perhaps be enlightened by their knowledge and wisdom that I no longer receive from books. Maybe they can enlighten me.”
“There are many men in Tabriz, great jurists, from whose knowledge you can benefit. Why do you have to leave us?” she persists.
“Whatever was there in the minds and the hearts of the learned men in Tabriz, I’ve learned. Look, my own teacher tells me that there’s nothing else he or any other man in Tabriz can teach me.”
“I’ll find you a new teacher, and will bring him from another town if I must,” my father suggests, concerned.
“There’s no one in this city that understands what I say, or knows what I seek. You don’t understand, father. I’m fed up and tired of the people of Tabriz. They’re forged. It’s true that they’re in human forms but their bodies don’t have any souls. In assessing my own life, here and now, I don’t see any significant or valuable thing in it that I will remember many years later and say, ‘It was good.’”
“I still don’t understand you. ... What are you looking for?” father asks.
“I know there must be and there is someone out there who is waiting for me, who is also looking for someone who can understand him. Now, I must travel to the four corners of this Islamic empire, to big learning centers, to various colleges in Baghdâd and Damascus and other great cities. The winds of turbulence are blowing from the East. I must go, see and seek, to find my beloved one, who is unknown to all, but only known to me ... in my dreams.”
“I don’t understand you, son,” my father repeats the same words I’ve heard a thousand times before. I often wonder, whether it is because he doesn’t know how to communicate with me intellectually, or because I frustrate him so much that he doesn’t know how to handle me? Whatever the reasons, I feel this mohebbat [affection] for him in my heart. I respect him and feel sorry that he’s not free from the inconsequential chores of his daily life, to allow himself to question the purpose of his own existence.
“Don’t you know, father ... that the scripture writer of the universe wrote the truth in three scripts:
One he could read and no one else!
One he could read and everyone else!
One he could not read nor could anyone else!
And I am that third Script,” I explain myself as best as I can.
Frustrated, my father turns his face and shakes his head in utter disgust. “You’ve lost your senses. I don’t understand a word you speak.”
“I don’t understand myself either, father. I’m as weary of myself as you are. I’ve only one friend in this whole wide world, one who can understand this turbulent sea of passion I feel in my heart.”
“Who is that friend?” he asks.
“I know him, but I’ve never met him, nor do I know his whereabouts.”
“Then how do you know him?”
“In my solitude, this saint is always in my heart, in my soul. I know he’s out there, like me, waiting.”
Father shows his disgust by rising and coming toward me. Infuriated, he stands near me and, without uttering a word he stares at me with his two fiery eyes. I look up at his face and wonder. I see him so enraged that I’m afraid he might throw himself at me, beat me and throw me out of his house. In all honesty, I wouldn’t blame him if he did.
“You are hallucinating,” he says before leaving the room. I don’t reply.
If for no other reason than my father’s iron need to chart the turbulent waters of my life, I’m certain that I can no longer live in this house.
It is way past midnight. Only the sporadic sound of a lonely owl breaks the silence of the night. Perhaps, in owl language, it is a sad song that expresses the anguish of being separated from his loved ones. Or maybe the bird, with his own ballad, is telling the world how the love of God has disappeared from the hearts of men.
Everybody has gone to bed, and the house is quiet and peaceful. The flame of the lantern is flickering now. The imprinted images on the curtains are blurry. The lantern’s oil is almost burned to the last drop. I get up, refill the lantern with oil in the kitchen, and take it to my bedroom so that I may finish reading my book before dawn arrives.
I open my eyes to the bright beam of early morning sunlight, coming through the window of my small bedroom uninvited to drive away the last vestiges of sleep. Because I had only three hours of sleep, maybe fewer, last night, I blink a few times in confusion and for a fraction of a second wonder where I am. I kept dreaming about strange exotic cities where I’m wandering around aimlessly, totally lost. Every segment of my dreams, though always starting pleasantly, would gradually deteriorate into horrifying nightmares – countless beastly-looking men on their wild horses massacring innocent people with their sabers.
Reality rushes in on the warm aroma of freshly baked bread coming from the kitchen. The flame of the lantern that I had forgotten to turn off last night before falling asleep is faintly flickering.
Through the half-opened door of my bedroom, I see my mother, bent over a counter, busily preparing breakfast for the family. I remain there and watch her fragile and tired body with amazement. I wonder how far I would be away from her house before I will start missing this hard-working, fragile woman, this angel of goodness. I’m certain not far, for the thought of being away from her makes me miss her already; so badly that I have to swallow several times to clear the lump in my throat. I lie awake and let my mind roam the unknown and possibly dangerous trails and landmarks ahead of me on this journey.
As I rise, she notices me. She turns around and acknowledges my presence with a smile that she forces to replace the melancholy expression that normally covers her face. I, too, do a good job of covering up my own sadness. I know that once I’m on my own, out in the wilderness, I’ll have enough time in my solitude to shed enough tears to wash away the pain of my own sorrow.
I get up and wash, put on my long black felt robe, the baggy white pants, my white turban, and a pair of sandals. I join the rest of the family in the big room with a warm greeting. To make my parents happy, I force a few morsels of bread and cheese into my mouth and wash it down with a cup of hot milk sweetened with honey.
Outside the house the early morning August sun is still mellow, rising in the vast clear blue of the eastern sky. Although the sun shines brilliantly, it doesn’t have the intensity to warm up the cool breeze the air has patiently inherited from the night before. The hunchbacked old man, Mostafâ Khan, who works for us, has saddled up a mule. He is patiently waiting for me with a sad smile. He looks at me with more tenderness in his eyes than I’ve ever seen before.
A sudden realization that I’m about to cut the umbilical cord connecting me to my family is about to break loose in my mind with the force of an avalanche. It overwhelms my mind. Am I going to quickly slide down to oblivion on the steep slope of this journey on which I’m about to embark? It is the nagging question I’ve no answer for. I hide the suffocating fear that is holding me in its embrace tightly and gathering momentum as the moment of saying goodbye nears.
Before I mount the mule, I hug Mostafâ Khan, whose forehead is slick with sweat from working hard preparing my mule. Then I embrace all my siblings with their tear-weary eyes. I look into my father’s tear-filled eyes before embracing him and see waves of worries, but it pleases me to notice that there is no more contempt or annoyance in them. I bury myself in the warm embrace of my mother and inhale her sweet smell, struggling to hold back my tears, hoping she can hear my love