like two rivers

Chapter 68, from Like Two Rivers

The Beginning

Kheerganga. Parvati Valley. May. 1968. Walking barefoot across the steep alpine meadow. Away from the log cabin. The first bright spring morning made the short grass shine verdant and glossy. Babaji was sitting at a distance, cross-legged and erect on a smooth, flat rock that the sun had dried of the night dew and warmed. Around him, a couple of dark khaki, woollen shawls and thin, white cotton loincloths had been laid out to dry. He had washed them in the warm holy spring, Kheerganga. When Gabriel came closer, he could see that the sadhu was engaged in polishing the copper snake bracelet with ruby eyes.

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Seeking Sage

“So…he is a character in your novel?” she asks as we walk up towards his tiny house. A familiar anticipatory silence unfurls itself softly along the mountain path.

“He is the inspiration,” I say quietly and think about the enormous and old Himalayan cedar that shades his slate roof. I often imagine when he is no more, he will exist as this majestic tree and I will continue to visit, to rest my back against the sturdy and immortal trunk, inhale its fragrance and close my eyes. “For more than thirty years I lost contact with him, he was by my side all along, but I only realized it when I found him again,” I attempt to explain.

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Lost in the Mind; A Medieval Madhouse in Aleppo

“Madness is an inability to know dream from reality “-Ibn Sina

Aleppo, Syria, December 1984: “Unexpectedly Nabil stepped out into an octagonal courtyard. In the centre sat a beautiful star shaped sandstone basin. Two overlaid squares turned around a shared centre. Eight-pointed. Around him there were twelve dark door openings. Above them were twelve black portholes. He had never seen anything like it. Everything was built in stone. Again, the reliable and solid aesthetics of the Mamelukes. He could have stumbled into a Sufi monastery, a zawiya. But it did not look like the ones in Cairo and he thought of himself as an expert of everything that caught his interest. Through a circular aperture in the top of the tall dome, he saw above him the distant paleness of the Aleppo sky.

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