The Year of Rice and Salt

One life. It was an idea Budur had trouble accepting, even though the sciences and everything else had made it clear that one life was all you had. As a girl her mother had said, Be good or you'll come back as a snail. At funerals they said a prayer for the next existence of the deceased, asking Allah to give him or her a chance to improve. Now all that was dismissed, with all the rest of the afterlives, heaven and hell, God himself – all that claptrap, all the superstitions of earlier generations in their immense ignorance, concocting myths to make sense of things. Now they lived in a material world, evolved to what it was by chance and the laws of physics; they struggled through one life and died; that was what the scientists had revealed by their studies, and there was nothing Budur had ever seen or experienced that seemed to indicate otherwise. No doubt it was true. That was reality; they had to adjust to it, or live in a delusion. Adjust each to his or her own cosmic solitude, to nakba, to hunger and worry, coffee and opium, the knowledge of an end.

'Did I hear you say we should visit Madam Sururi?' Kirana asked from across the table. 'A good idea! Let's do it. It would be like a historical field trip for the class like visiting a place where people still live as they did for hundreds of years.'

'From all I've heard she's an entertaining old charlatan.'

'A friend of mine visited her and said it was great fun.'

They had spent too many hours sitting there, looking at the same ashtrays and coffee rings on the tabletops, the same rain deltas on the windows. So they gathered up their coats and umbrellas, and took the number four tram upriver to a meagre neighbourhood of apartments abutting the older shipyards, the buildings displaying small Maghribi shops at each corner. Between a seamstress's workshop and a laundry hid a little walk up to rooms over the shops below. The door opened to their knock, and they were invited in to an entryway, and then, farther in, to a dark room filled with couches and small tables, obviously the converted living room of a fairly large old apartment.

Eight or ten women and three old men were sitting on chairs, facing a black haired woman who was younger than Budur had expected but not all that young, a woman who wore Zotti clothing, heavy kohl and lipstick, and a great deal of cheap glass jewellery. She had been speaking to her devotees in a low intent voice, and now she paused, and gestured to empty chairs at the back of the room without saying anything to the new arrivals.

'Each time the soul descends into a body,' she resumed when they were seated, 'it is like a divine soldier, entering into the battlefield of life and fighting ignorance and evil doing. It tries to reveal its own inner divinity and establish the divine truth on Earth, according to its capacity. Then at the end of its journey in that incarnation, it returns to its own region of the bardo. I can talk to that region when conditions are right.'

'How long will a soul spend there before coming back again?' one of the women in her audience asked.

'This varies depending on conditions,' Madam Sururi replied. 'There is no single process for the evolution of higher souls. Some began from the mineral and some from the animal kingdom. Sometimes it starts from the other end, and cosmic gods take on human form directly.' She nodded as if personally familiar with this phenomenon. 'There are many different ways.'

'So it's true that we may have been animals in a previous incarnation?'

'Yes, it is possible. In the evolution of our souls we have been all things, including rocks and plants. It is not possible to change too much between any two incarnations, of course. But over many incarnations, great changes can be made. The Lord Buddha revealed that he had been a goat in a previous life, for instance. But because he had realized God, this was not important.'

Kirana stifled a little snort, shifted on her chair to cover it.

Madam Sururi ignored her: 'It was easy for him to see what he had been in the past. Some of us are given that kind of vision. But he knew that the past was not important. Our goal is not behind us, it is ahead of us. To a spiritual person I always say, the past is dust. I say this because the past has not given us what we want. What we want is Godrealization, and contact with our loved ones, and that depends entirely on our inner cry. We must say, "I have no past. I am beginning here and now, with God's grace and my own aspiration. – There was not much to object to in that, Budur thought; it cut strangely to the heart, given the source; but she could feel scepticism emanating from Kirana like heat, indeed the room seemed to be warming with it, as if a qi burning heater had been placed on the floor and turned on high. Perhaps it was a function of Budur's embarrassment. She reached over and squeezed Kirana's hand. It seemed to her that the seer was more interesting than Kirana's fidgets were allowing.