The good son: a novel by Michael Gruber

Author:Michael Gruber [Michael Gruber]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Policier
ISBN: 9780805091281
Published: 2010-05-11T20:44:05+00:00

Everyone except Manjit Nara and Sonia gathers around the trays, sits, and starts eating and drinking, as at a school picnic. Nara sits carefully on the edge of Sonia’s charpoy and says, “I will bring you your breakfast and we will chat, yes?”

He does so. The naan is soaked in clarified butter and is warm, greasy, and delicious. The tea is thick, sweet, milky.

“You have a different look,” he says. “At first I thought it was mere shock after what has been done to you, but now I don’t believe so.”

“No. They shut me in a dark stable and I thought I was going to die. Then I had a certain experience. It’s hard to explain. I did spiritual exercises that I had been taught long ago, in despair, you understand, and it was as if I dissolved, and what was left didn’t care about the pain and the fear. It was almost amusing. And now, sitting here, eating bread, talking about professional subjects, I feel I’m being drawn back into the world, and something in me doesn’t want to return. Does that make any sense?”

“Indeed it does. Some people are broken by suffering and others transcend it and become more than they were before. The Christian martyrs are examples, but we also see it in daily life, especially in places like India, where we are among the world leaders in suffering. If there were an Olympics in suffering, India would take all the gold.” He laughs nervously. “I must say, although it shames me, that I am glad we are to be chosen for death at random.”

“Are you? Why is that?”

“Because otherwise I would have been the first, idolator that I am, and representative of the most hated nation.”

“After the United States.”

He smiled at that and coughed politely. “Yes, but al-Faran is a Kashmiri insurgent organization. Rest assured, they would have picked me. And I have been trying to prepare myself for death, to meet it with dignity, but I find I cannot. My insides turn to water when I think of the moment, having my head cut off. When they hold up the severed head, will there still be thoughts in it, even for a few seconds? What horror to imagine it!”

Sonia says, “The self slays not, neither is it slain.”

“Yes, but I find the wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita is of little comfort to me now, knowing it is all a dream of Vishnu and I will be reborn, and so on. I have been poisoned by my education as a modern physician. The Brahmins are perhaps wise to avoid contact with the dead. Corpses are so undeniably real, it is hard to have lofty thoughts around corpses.”

He shuddered and drank the rest of his tea greedily, as if it were an elixir of amnesia.

“But I didn’t seek a private conversation with you only to expose my pathetic cowardice. I ask you to observe Mr. Ashton, over my right shoulder.”

Sonia looks. Ashton has brought breakfast loaves and cups to where the Cosgroves are sitting.

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