"I don't accept everything that our brother Madjid said," Abdul Ghani put in, "but I do agree that there is an element of control that we have over suffering. I don't think you can deny that."
"Where do we get this control, and how?" Khaderbhai asked.
"I would say that it is different for all of us, but that it happens when we grow up, when we mature and pass from the childishness of our youthful tears, and become adults. I think that it is a part of growing up, learning to control our suffering. I think that when we grow up, and learn that happiness is rare, and passes quickly, we become disillusioned and hurt.
And how much we suffer is a mark of how much we have been hurt by this realisation. Suffering, you see, is a kind of anger. We rage against the unfairness, the injustice of our sad and sorry lot.
And this boiling resentment, you see, this anger, is what we call suffering. It is also what leads us to the hero curse, I might add."
"Hero curse! Enough of your hero curses! You bring every subject back to this," Madjid growled, scowling to match the smug smile of his portly friend.
"Abdul has a pet theory, Lin," said Khaled, the dour Palestinian.
"He believes that certain men are cursed with qualities, such as great courage, that make them commit desperate acts. He calls it the hero curse, the thing that compels them to lead other men to bloodshed and chaos. He might be right, I think, but he goes on about it so much he drives us all crazy." "Leaving that aside, Abdul," Khaderbhai persisted, "let me ask you one question about what you have said. Is there a difference, would you say, between suffering that we experience, and suffering that we cause for others?"
"Of course, yes. What are you getting at, Khader?"
"Just that if there are at least two kinds of suffering, quite different to each other, one that we feel, and one that we cause others to feel, they can hardly both be the anger that you spoke of. Isn't it so? Which one is which, would you say?"
"Why... ha!" Abdul Ghani laughed. "You've got me there, Khader, you old fox! You always know when I'm just making an argument for the sake of it, _na? And just when I thought I was being bloody clever, too! But don't worry, I'll think it around, and come back at you again."
He snatched a chunk of sweet barfi from the plate on the table, bit a piece of it, and munched happily. He gestured to the man on his right, thrusting the sweet in his pudgy fingers.
"And what about you, Khaled? What have you to say about Lin's topic?"
"I know that suffering is the truth," Khaled said quietly. His teeth were clenched. "I know that suffering is the sharp end of the whip, and not suffering is the blunt end-the end that the master holds in his hand."
"Khaled, dear fellow," Abdul Ghani complained. "You are more than ten years my junior, and I think of you as dearly as I would of my own younger brother, but I must tell you that this is a most depressing thought, and you're disturbing the good pleasure we've gained from this excellent charras."
"If you'd been born and raised in Palestine, you'd know that some people are born to suffer. And it never stops, for them. Not for a second. You'd know where real suffering comes from. It's the same place where love and freedom and pride are born. And it's the same place where those feelings and ideals die. That suffering never stops. We only pretend it does. We only tell ourselves it does, to make the kids stop whimpering in their sleep."
He stared down at his strong hands, glowering at them as if at two despised and defeated enemies who were pleading for his mercy. A gloomy silence began to thicken in the air around us, and instinctively we looked to Khaderbhai. He sat cross-legged, stiff-backed, rocking slowly in his place and seeming to spool out a precise measure of respectful reflection. At last, he nodded to Farid, inviting him to speak. "I think that our brother Khaled is right, in a way," Farid began quietly, almost shyly. He turned his large, dark brown eyes on Khaderbhai. Encouraged by the older man's nod of interest, he continued. "I think that happiness is a really thing, a truly thing, but it is what makes us crazy people. Happiness is a so strange and power thing that it makes us to be sick, like a germ sort of thing. And suffering is what cures us of it, the too much happiness. The-how do you say it, bhari vazan?"
"The burden," Khaderbhai translated for him. Farid spoke a phrase rapidly in Hindi, and Khader gave it to us in such an elegantly poetic English that I realised, through the haze of the stone, how much better his English was than he'd led me to believe at our first meeting. "The burden of happiness can only be relieved by the balm of suffering."
"Yes, yes, that is it what I want to say. Without the suffering, the happiness would squash us down."
"This is a very interesting thought, Farid," Khaderbhai said, and the young Maharashtrian glowed with pleasure in the praise.
