Each day the men also rehearsed ritual group-dances with the musicians and singers who'd been hired to complement the formal, public celebration. The dancing gave me the chance to see a new and completely unexpected side of Nazeer. He hurled himself into the whirling chorus line of men with grace and passion. Moreover, my short, bow-legged friend, whose bulky arms seemed to jut outward from the tree trunk of his thick neck and chest, was by far the best dancer in the entire assembly, and quickly earned their admiration. The whole secret and invisible inner life of the man, his full creative and spiritual endowment, was expressed in the dance. And that face-I'd said, once, that I'd never seen another human face in which the smile was so utterly defeated-that scowl-creased face was transfigured in the dance until his honest, selfless beauty was so radiant that it filled my eyes with tears.
"Tell me once more," Abdel Khader Khan commanded, with a roguish smile in his eye, as we watched the dancers from a vantage point beneath a shaded wall.
I laughed. When I turned to look at him, he laughed as well.
"Go on," he urged. "Do it to please me."
"But you've heard this twenty times from me already. How about you answer me a question instead?"
"You tell me once more, and then I will answer your question."
"Okay. Here goes. The universe began about fifteen billion years ago, in almost absolute simplicity, and it's been getting more and more complex ever since. This movement from the simple to the complex is built into the web and weave of the universe, and it's called the tendency toward complexity. We're the products of this complexification, and so are the birds, and the bees, and the trees, and the stars, and even the galaxies of stars. And if we were to get wiped out in a cosmic explosion, like an asteroid impact or something, some other expression of our level of complexity would emerge, because that's what the universe does.
And this is likely to be going on all over the universe. How am I doing so far?"
I waited, but he didn't reply, so I continued with my summary.
"Okay, the final or ultimate complexity-the place where all this complexity is going-is what, or who, we might call God. And anything that promotes, enhances, or accelerates this movement toward God is good. Anything that inhibits, impedes, or prevents it is evil. And if we want to know if something is good or evil- something like war and killing and smuggling guns to mujaheddin guerrillas, for example-then we ask the questions: What if everyone did this thing? Would that help us, in this bit of the universe, to get there, or would it hold us back? And then we have a pretty good idea whether it's good or evil. What's more important, we know why it's good or evil. There, how was that?"
"Very good," he said without looking at me. While I'd run through the summary of his cosmological model, he'd closed his eyes and nodded his head, pursing his lips in a half smile. When I concluded it, he turned to look at me, and the smile widened as the pleasure and the mischief sparked in his eyes. "You know, if you wanted to do it, you could express this idea every bit as well and as accurately as I do. And I've been working on it and thinking about it for almost all of my life. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me feel to hear you tell it to me in your own words."
"I think the words are yours, Khaderji. You've coached me often enough. But I do have a couple of problems. Do I get my question now?"
"Yes."
"Okay. We've got things like rocks in the world that aren't alive, and living things like trees and fish and people. Your cosmology doesn't tell me where life and consciousness come from.
If rocks are made out of the same stuff that people are made out of, how come rocks aren't alive, but people are? I mean, where does life come from?"
"I know you well enough to be sure that you want me to give you a short, direct answer to this question."
"I think I'd like a short, direct answer to _every question," I replied, laughing.
He raised an eyebrow at the foolishness of my flippant response and then shook his head slowly.
"Do you know the English philosopher Bertrand Russell? Have you read any of his books?"
"Yeah. I read some of his stuff-at university, and in prison."
