"He was a favourite of my dear Mr. Mackenzie Esquire," Khader smiled. "I do not often agree with Bertrand Russell's conclusions, but I do like the way he arrives at them. Anyway, he once said, Anything that can be put in a nutshell should remain there. And I do agree with him about that. But now, the answer to your question is this: life is a feature of all things. We could call it a characteristic, which is one of my favourite English words. If you do not speak English as your first language, the word `characteristic` has an amazing sound-like rapping on a drum, or breaking kindling wood for a fire. To continue, every atom in the universe has the characteristic of life. The more complex way that atoms get put together, the more complex is the expression of the characteristic of life. A rock is a very simple arrangement of atoms, so the life in a rock is so simple that we cannot see it. A cat is a very complex arrangement of atoms, so the life in a cat is very obvious. But life is there, in everything, even in a rock, and even when we cannot see it."
"Where did you get this idea? Is it in the Koran?"
"Actually, it is a concept that appears in one way or another in most of the great religions. I have changed it slightly to suit what we have learned about the world in the last few hundred years. But the Holy Koran gives me my inspiration for this kind of study, because the Koran commands me to study everything, and learn everything, in order to serve Allah."
"But where does this _life _characteristic come from?" I insisted, sure that I had him trapped in a reductionist dead-end at last.
"Life, and all the other characteristics of all the things in the universe, such as consciousness, and free will, and the tendency toward complexity, and even love, was given to the universe by light, at the beginning of time as we know it."
"At the Big Bang? Is that what you're talking about?"
"Yes. The Big Bang expansion happened from a point called a singularity-another of my favourite five-syllable English words - that is almost infinitely dense, and almost infinitely hot, and yet it occupies no space and no time, as we know those things.
The point is a boiling cauldron of light energy. Something caused it to expand-we don't know yet what caused it-and from light, all the particles and all the atoms came to exist, along with space and time and all the forces that we know. So, light gave every little particle at the beginning of the universe a set of characteristics, and as those particles combine in more complex ways, the characteristics show themselves in more and more complex ways."
He paused, watching my face as I struggled with the concepts and questions and emotions that looped in my mind. He got away from me again, I thought, suddenly furious with him for having an answer to my question, and yet struck with admiring respect for the same reason. There was always something eerily incongruous in the wise lectures-sometimes they were like sermons-of the mafia don Abdel Khader Khan. Sitting there against a stone wall in an all-but-Stone Age village in Afghanistan, with a cargo of smuggled guns and antibiotics nearby, the dissonance created by his calm, profound discourse about good and evil, and light and life and consciousness, was enough to fill me with exasperated irritation. "What I have just told you is the relationship between consciousness and matter," Khader proclaimed, pausing again until he had my eye. "This is a kind of test, and now you know it. This is a test that you should apply to every man who tells you that he knows the meaning of life. Every guru you meet and every teacher, every prophet and every philosopher, should answer these two questions for you: What is an objective, universally acceptable definition of good and evil? And, What is the relationship between consciousness and matter? If he cannot answer these two questions, as I have done, you know that he has not passed the test."
"How do you know all this physics?" I demanded. "All this about particles and singularities and Big Bangs?"
He stared at me, reading the full measure of the unconscious insult: How is it that an Afghan gangster like you knows so much about science and higher knowledge? I looked back at him, remembering a day at the slum with Johnny Cigar when I'd made the cruel mistake of assuming him to be ignorant simply because he was poor.
"There is a saying-When the student is ready, the teacher appears-do you know it?" he asked, laughing. It seemed that he was laughing at me, rather than with me.
"Yes," I whistled patiently, through clenched teeth.
