The Mountain Shadow

‘I do love our games, Idriss,’ Let Me See remarked, the last to part. ‘I am always grateful to the Divine that we are free to be generous with our ideas, and all the new ones to come, may we be so blessed.’

The sages left along the easier path, with rose petals protecting their feet. And they were thoughtful, perhaps, if not less doubtful, ambitious and grumpy.

Idriss retired to bathe and pray. We helped to pull the temporary pagoda down, and gathered up the carpets and trays.

Karla took over the kitchen as a volunteer, and cooked vegetarian pulao, cauliflower and potato pieces in coconut-cream gravy, green beans and peas in coriander and spinach sauce, carrot and pumpkin pieces foil-roasted in the fire, and basmati rice scented with almond milk.

Watching Karla operate large pots and woks of rice and vegetables on six gas jets at the same time, her mastery of taste and colour sizzling in hurricanes of steam, I was mesmerised, marvelling at it like an owl, until she pulled me in to wash the dishes.

We worked in the kitchen shelter with three young women from the community of students. They chatted with Karla about music, fashion and movies, while preparing food for twenty-eight devoted people. They regarded cooking for Idriss and the others on the mountain as a sacred duty, and they put their love in the food that their teacher would taste.

When not cooking, praying or studying, the devotees liked to eat, and not a crumb of Karla’s fragrant preparations remained when the feast ended. She didn’t eat much herself, but raised her glass to the many compliments, offering a toast at the sated end.

‘That’s it for me, for another year,’ she said. ‘To cooking once a year!’

‘To cooking once a year!’ devotees who cooked every day shouted.

When all was stacked in gleaming towers, and most of the devotees left the camp or went to sleep, the mountain sinners sat around the fire: Karla, Didier, Vinson, Randall, Ankit and me.

Didier suggested a suggestive game, where anyone who inadvertently said a suggestive word in the conversation had to take a drink. His theory was that the one who was most obsessed with sex would get drunk the fastest, and then we’d all know.

I already knew that it was Didier, who was also, as it happens, almost immune to alcohol. Karla knew it, too, and redirected the conversation.

‘How about this, guys,’ she suggested, standing to leave. ‘Why don’t you tell each other the true story of why you’re sitting here, and not sitting somewhere else, with the love of your life?’

‘Rannveig’s in an ashram,’ Vinson began without help. ‘And it’s my fault. I love her so much that I think I made her, like, holy, you know? And I don’t think there’s a reverse exorcism for that.’

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Randall averred. ‘But I wish I didn’t.’

Karla and I said goodnight. I grabbed one of the rolls of carpet, a canvas sheet, a coil of rope, and my backpack of essential supplies. Karla carried two blankets and her own bag of indispensables. We walked by torchlight to the knoll, scaring ourselves with leaping shadows when the path turned suddenly.

‘You almost shot that shadow, didn’t you?’ I asked, tucked in beside her on the narrow path, the torch in her hand throwing circles of coherence on the dark canvas of night’s forest.

‘You’re the one who reached for a knife,’ she said, cuddling close.

I used the rope to set up a fairly decent shelter. With the right rope, the president of a trucker’s union once said to me, and enough of it, a trucker can do just about anything.

In my trucker’s tent we talked, and kissed, and went through every argument and reply we’d heard in the discourse.

‘You guys are so completely not getting it,’ Karla said sleepily, when we’d run through the valley of ideas together.

‘Us guys?’

‘You guys.’

‘Not getting what?’

‘The truth,’ she said.

‘What truth?’

‘The big truth.’

‘About what?’

‘That’s the point, exactly,’ Karla said, her eyes green mirrors.

‘The point about what?’

‘You men are obsessed with the truth,’ Karla said. ‘But the truth isn’t such a big deal. The truth is just inhibition, after three drinks.’

‘I don’t need a drink,’ I smiled, ‘to be disinhibited with you.’

We kissed and loved and kept talking, and arguing, working our way back to the end of the beginning until we slept, as a half-moon proclaimed the sky with fuzzy brilliance.

I woke suddenly, aware that we weren’t alone. I lifted my head slowly and saw Idriss, with his back turned. He was standing at the edge of the knoll a few metres away, and staring at the silver cup of the moon.

I glanced at Karla. She was still sleeping beside me, wearing my T-shirt like a nightdress.

‘I am glad that you see me,’ Idriss said, not turning around.

‘I’m always glad to see you, Idriss,’ I whispered. ‘I’d stand up, but I’m not dressed for it.’

He chuckled, leaning on his staff to look at the stars.