Life of Pi - Yann Martel [28]
I nearly jumped out of my skin. It's happened to all of us: there's sunlight and shade, spots and patterns of colour, your mind is elsewhere-so you don't make out what is right in front of you. Not four feet away, sitting cross-legged before his breads, was a man. I was so startled my hands flew up and the bread went sailing halfway across the street. It landed on a pat of fresh cow dung.
"I'm so sorry, sir. I didn't see you!" I burst out. I was just about ready to run away. "Don't worry," he said calmly. "It will feed a cow. Have another one." He tore one in two. We ate it together. It was tough and rubbery, real work for the teeth, but filling. I calmed down.
"So you make these," I said, to make conversation.
"Yes. Here, let me show you how." He got off his platform and waved me into his house. It was a two-room hovel. The larger room, dominated by an oven, was the bakery, and the other, separated by a flimsy curtain, was his bedroom. The bottom of the oven was covered with smooth pebbles. He was explaining to me how the bread baked on these heated pebbles when the nasal call of the muezzin wafted through the air from the mosque. I knew it was the call to prayer, but I didn't know what it entailed. I imagined it beckoned the Muslim faithful to the Mosque, much like bells summoned us Christians to church. Not so. The baker interrupted himself mid-sentence and said, "Excuse me." He ducked into the next room for a minute and returned with a rolled-up carpet, which he unfurled on the floor of his bakery, throwing up a small storm of flour. And right there before me, in the midst of his workplace, he prayed. It was incongruous, but it was I who felt out of place. Luckily, he prayed with his eyes closed. He stood straight. He muttered in Arabic. He brought his hands next to his ears, thumbs touching the lobes, looking as if he were straining to hear Allah replying. He bent forward. He stood straight again. He fell to his knees and brought his hands and forehead to the floor. He sat up. He fell forward again. He stood. He started the whole thing again. Why, Islam is nothing but an easy sort of exercise, I thought. Hot-weather yoga for the Bedouins. Asanas without sweat, heaven without strain. He went through the cycle four times, muttering throughout. When he had finished-with a right-left turning of the head and a short bout of meditation-he opened his eyes, smiled, stepped off his carpet and rolled it up with a flick of the hand that spoke of old habit. He returned it to its spot in the next room. He came back to me. "What was I saying?" he asked. So it went the first time I saw a Muslim pray-quick, necessary, physical, muttered, striking. Next time I was praying in church-on my knees, immobile, silent before Christ on the Cross-the image of this callisthenic communion with God in the middle of bags of flour kept coming to my mind.
Chapter 19
I went to see him again.
"What's your religion about?" I asked. His eyes lit up. "It is about the Beloved," he replied. I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion. The mosque was truly an open construction, to God and to breeze. We sat cross-legged listening to the imam until the time came to pray. Then the random pattern of sitters disappeared as we stood and arranged ourselves shoulder to shoulder in rows, every space ahead being filled by someone from behind until every line was solid and we were row after row of worshippers. It felt good to bring my forehead to the ground. Immediately it felt like a deeply religious contact.
Chapter 20
He was a Sufi, a Muslim mystic. He sought fana, union with God, and his relationship