The Opium Eater and Other Stories [a potpourri set primarily in India]

4. The Birth of Faith

This story is dedicated to bibliophile_96 who has been extremely supportive of my own book (& of me, if she remembers a particular PM exchange ;-). As I haven't been able to dedicate a chapter (of my book) to her yet, I'm dedicating this story, which I also find (along with the previous one, Mother) to be one of the most moving ones in the collection—at least it moved me ;-). Thank u so much, Siddhika—hope u enjoy it :-)!

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Mehdi Hasan, professor of philosophy, was dying of brain cancer. He could not be operated upon, for the removal of the malignant tumour would involve the destruction of too much brain-tissue. The news, when the doctor told him, hit him, as they say, like a truck, knocking the vehicle of his life off the highway into a ditch. His reason, on which he had relied heavily all his life, was the first casualty. How could an occasional headache and a stiff neck add up to death? How can one and one make infinity? His emotions fared no better. Fear heaved and sloshed in his whole being with a force that threatened to split the container.

But time is a healer, or at least a deadener. Within a few weeks he had calmed down and his faculties regained a measure of self-control and resumed, at least partly, their ordinary functioning. For example, his reason, though still unable to join a minor cause to a major effect with the straight line of logic, managed to draw the crooked line of paradox between his harmless symptoms and catastrophic diagnosis. His emotional tumult also subsided to a dull quiescence. He became sadly reconciled to the fact that the colourful, noisy show of life would go on merrily but shortly he would no longer be a part of it.

However, the semblance of repose that his resignation had brought him did not last long. It began to be threatened by an image. He would be sitting by himself in a headache-free period or lying awake at night, when an image would appear before his mental vision, the image of a dark wall. He could see himself standing before it, his progress and view completely cut off. He was an intelligent as well as a highly educated man. So he knew immediately what the wall stood for. It was his mind's way of telling him in concrete terms that he had reached the end of his street. Every man's life is a dead-end street, and one day he reaches the point after which there is nowhere else to go. He must accept this finality. Mehdi had done exactly that.

But his imagination would not go along with him. It created difficulties for him. It said: 'This is a wall. A wall has two sides. There must be something on the other side.' Mehdi thought that in his weakened state old religious superstitions that he had successfully driven off were beginning to return. He had been sure—the training of a life-time had taught him so—that death is extinction, a total annihilation. He remembered stepping on insects, sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately. That was death—being rubbed out of existence. But his imagination would not listen. Unreasonably it kept on repeating its demand for the perspective on the other side. What made Mehdi uneasy in the beginning and tense and frustrated later on was the easy erosion of his reasoned conviction and the increasing presence of the illusion of the other side. He could not get the thought out of his mind. His devout Muslim friends tried to come to his aid. They said they knew what was on the other side. First of all there was God. Then there were his angels, and his devils. And that he would be met by an angel in the grave who would ask him for an account of his life. Mehdi, who had been brought up in a Muslim household, was familiar with those beliefs. But they were fictions for him that did not carry conviction. They did not touch his imagination, which stood there obstinately before the dark wall, trying to pierce it with its eyes. What was he to do? He started to fear his headache-free periods. The headache was a pain that he could understand, but the pain of the imagination, the heavy anxiety, the constant but futile spinning of the mind drove him to utter exhaustion, yet made no sense.