by Ankur Barua
Once upon a time, in a land not too far from where you are, there lived Abdul-of-the- desolate-mountain.
Now Abdul was a boy of few words, and he grew up to become a man of even fewer words.
The very act of speaking seemed pointless to him. He disliked having to repeat himself – indeed, so worried he was that he was using the same words or articulating the same thoughts that he preferred to remain silent.
Everywhere he looked, it was some form of unity that he discerned.
In all the four directions, there was luminosity; in all the towns and cities, there was humanity; and in all the gatherings of poets he sometimes attended, there was language. And in all the eyes of the people he listened to there was an unfathomable silence.
“If I have found the centre, why should I bother about the details of the circumference?”, he often asked himself.
One evening as the sun was beginning its slow descent into the horizon, he walked into a small village. There he saw an old woman sitting under an ancient tree. She was surrounded by an arc of young boys and girls who were gazing attentively at her face – speechless and yet eloquent.
For a few fleeting moments, she looked in the direction of Abdul, and gently pointed her finger towards the blue mountains.
The sun was beginning to glide past the summit as Abdul started to walk on the dusty road. After a while, he saw a little boy standing beside a big black rock.
“Abdul”, he declared gently, “five times every day, you must repeat “there is no god but God””.
Abdul reached the misty summit, and he stayed there for forty days and forty nights.
Five times every day, he repeated “there is no god but God”, just as the little boy had advised him.
When he returned to the village, everyone was surprised to see the dramatic change in Abdul.
No longer was he tongue-tied: effortlessly did he speak his mind in all the marketplaces of the world.
He had found the words whose identity cannot be exhausted by any human repetition. By constantly articulating the same, he had become continually different.
*Cover image: https://www.istockphoto.com/vector/persian-colored-carpet-gm1130644617-299090338?clarity=false
Ankur Barua is University Senior Lecturer in Hindu Studies at Cambridge University. He read Theology and Religious Studies at the Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge. His primary research interests are Vedantic Hindu philosophical theology and Indo-Islamic styles of sociality.
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