By inadvertently checking my hem for blood, I had given myself away.
It is true. I did join them in the tavern that evening. I am the one who told the killer that Shams had the habit of meditating every night in the courtyard. And later that night, when Shams was talking to his killer under the rain, I was one of the six men eavesdropping by the garden wall. And when we decided that we should attack, because there was no going back and the killer was taking things too slowly, I showed them the way into our courtyard. But that’s it. I stopped there. I didn’t take part in the fight. It was Baybars who attacked, and Irshad and others helped him. And when they panicked, Jackal Head did the rest.
Later on, I lived that moment over and over in my mind so many times that it is hard to tell what part is real and what part a figment of my imagination. Once or twice I conjured a memory of Shams escaping from our hands into the pitch-black night, and the image was so vivid I almost believed it.
Though he is gone, there are traces of him everywhere. Dance, poetry, music, and all the things that I thought would vanish once he was gone have stayed firmly planted in our lives. My father has become a poet. Shams was right. When one of the jars was broken, so was the other jar.
My father had always been a loving man. He embraced people of all faiths. He was kind toward not only Muslims but also Christians, Jews, and even pagans. After Shams came into his life, his circle of love became so vast it included even the most fallen of society—prostitutes, drunks, and beggars, the scum of the scum.
I believe he could even love Shams’s killers.
There was, and still is, only one person he could not manage to love: his son.
Sultan Walad
KONYA, SEPTEMBER 1248
Beggars, drunks, prostitutes, orphans, and thieves … He distributes all his gold and silver to criminals. Since that awful night, my father has never been the same. Everyone says he has lost his mind to grief. When asked what he is doing, he tells the story of Imra’ul-Qays, the king of Arabs, who was very well liked, notoriously rich and handsome, but one day, unexpectedly, walked out of his perfect life. Qays put on dervish robes, gave up all his wealth, and from then on wandered from one landscape to another.
“This is what losing your beloved does to you,” my father says. “It dissolves your king-self into dust and brings out your dervish-self. Now that Shams is gone forever, I am gone, too. I am not a scholar or a preacher anymore. I am the embodiment of nothingness. Here is my fana, herein my baqa.”
The other day a ginger-haired merchant who looked like the worst liar on earth knocked on our door. He said he had known Shams of Tabriz way back from his years in Baghdad. Then, dropping his voice to a confidential whisper, he swore that Shams was alive and well, hiding and meditating in an ashram in India, waiting for the appropriate time to emerge.
As he said all this, there wasn’t a trace of honesty on his face. But my father got delirious. He asked the man what he wanted in return for this wonderful news. Without the least bit of shame, the merchant said that as a young boy he had always wanted to become a dervish, but since life had taken him in another direction, he would at least love to have the caftan of a scholar as famous as Rumi. Upon hearing this, my father took out his velvet caftan and handed it to him, just like that.
“But, Father, why did you give your precious caftan to that man when you knew so well that he was lying?” I inquired as soon as the man was gone.
And this is what my father said: “You think a caftan is too high a price to pay for his lie? But my dear son, imagine, if he were telling the truth, if Shams were really alive, I would have given my life!”
Rumi
KONYA, OCTOBER 31, 1260
By and large over time, pain turns into grief, grief turns into silence, and silence turns into lonesomeness, as vast and bottomless as the dark oceans. Today is the sixteenth anniversary of the day Shams and I met in front of the Inn of Sugar Vendors. Every year on the last day of October, I retreat into a solitude that grows in weight day by day. I spend forty days in chilla, thinking of the forty rules. I remember and review each of them, but there in the far reaches of my mind there is only Shams of Tabriz, glittering.
You think you cannot live anymore. You think that the light of your soul has been put out and that you will stay in the dark forever. But when you are engulfed by such solid darkness, when you have both eyes closed to the world, a third eye opens in your heart. And only then do you come to realize that eyesight conflicts with inner knowledge. No eye sees so clear and sharp as the eye of love. After grief comes another season, another valley, another you. And the lover who is nowhere to be found, you start to see everywhere.