In the sixteenth century there lived a religious fanatic called Mashrab, which means “wine-drinker.” In fact Mashrab didn’t drink at all . . . except for the Wine of Love. Mashrab got his name when his pregnant mother went to the market, stole two grapes, and ate them. The baby in her womb kicked and shouted, “Give back the price of two grapes, otherwise I’ll leave this house!” Because grapes had such a strong effect on his temperament, scholars named the unborn child Mashrab. Even in adulthood Mashrab was concerned about injustice. He was constantly giving away his clothes to poor people. As a result, he often walked around naked. He was in love with God, and at age three could tell by looking at a man’s shoes whether he would go to heaven or hell. Mashrab single-handedly fought society by defecating on the king’s throne—right there in front of the odalisques. He refused to eat anything gained through labor. At difficult times he would spin with a nail between his toes with one arm in the air, until he achieved ecstasy and lost consciousness.
A great sultan wanted Mashrab to marry his daughter. Mashrab put his hand on the bride’s belly and heard voices saying, “Father—food—water.” He explained to the sultan that he was unable to support a baby, and left. On the way home he fell asleep and dreamed that his mother was rubbing his feet. When he woke up, a lion was licking his feet. This continued for three or four hours.
Mashrab loved owls because they live in deserted places. He had an owl who was his constant companion.
“Give me one thousand houses,” the sultan once commanded this owl.
“One thousand houses? I’ll give you two thousand houses,” the owl replied. “In our country the people leave their houses because they are hungry. So go take their houses.” Only Mashrab’s owl had the courage to speak candidly to the sultan about the current economic situation.
The sultan convicted Mashrab of fomenting social unrest and sentenced him to hanging. Three days after the execution, a merchant came to town in a caravan. “Why are you all in mourning?” the merchant asked the townspeople.
“Because Mashrab has been hanged.”
“No, no, I just saw him,” the merchant said. “He’s walking on the street, singing, wearing no clothes.” Mashrab had become a saint, and saints can be in several places at the same time.
A certain sixteenth-century saint once read that Mohammed had a broken tooth. A stone had broken it. To become like Mohammed, the saint took a stone and knocked out his own tooth. Then he felt good . . . until he began to worry that he had knocked out the wrong one. Months of study and contemplation did not reveal to him the location of Mohammed’s missing tooth. Just to be safe, the saint knocked out his remaining thirty-one teeth. Things weren’t easy after that—especially eating and speaking. “Maybe I was wrong to knock out all my own teeth,” the saint sometimes thought. But one day toward the end of his life, Mohammed came to him in a dream. “I died a long time ago,” Mohammed explained, “but that was my ghost, giving you training.”
Posterity has handed us a book of seven hundred lives of saints, and all of them achieved sainthood in the same way: through love and work. Saints never lie. They can travel from Samarkand to Tashkent in ten minutes.
“Tell me, qizim, how long did it take you to get here to Samarkand from the airport in Tashkent?” Dilorom asked.
“Four or five hours,” I said.
“And how did you travel—by bus, by car?”
“By car.”
“Well, saints can travel this distance in ten minutes . . . without a bus or a car.”
There are a total of seventy-eight flaws and two hundred virtues in the human character. Everyone has three cardinal flaws that they must battle throughout their lives. The most difficult flaws to overcome are sloth and guile. Saints have not only to conquer their flaws, but to master all two hundred of the human virtues, such as talking to animals and ghosts and exchanging ideas with vegetable life.
Some saints can cure diseases by prayer. One particular saint who had this ability himself suffered from hemorrhoids. “Why don’t you cure yourself?” someone asked him.
“Because it improves my character,” he replied.
A very holy pilgrim who lived in Mecca for thirty years didn’t defecate once the whole time, because it would have been sacrilege.
One saintly virtue is the ability to recognize thieves. A saint was once sitting by a window, reading a book, when a thief crept up outside the window and started unwinding the saint’s turban. “I see you want to steal my turban,” the saint said, not looking up from his book. “But, in fact, it’s so old and torn you won’t get anything for it at the market. Why not just leave it on my head?”
The astonished thief paused. But the saint wasn’t looking at him—to all appearances he was still deeply absorbed in his book. So the thief went back to unwinding the turban. The saint, still not raising his eyes from his book, grabbed on to one end of the turban while the thief pulled on the other. For a long time, the saint held fast and the robber tugged. Finally, the saint said, “OK, take the turban.” The robber took the turban and left . . . but the saint quietly followed him.
The patron saint of Khiva was named Pahlavon Mahmud, or “Wrestler Mahmud.” He was such a great wrestler that he ran out of opponents and had to go to India to wrestle the rajahs. Dilorom gave me one of his poems to read. I was able to decipher only one stanza:
On the streets, with nothing:
the fourth one is still little; he hasn’t left his family for the street.
The family juts out like the branches of a fruit tree;
those who pass by will take advantage.
Saints alone are free from the tyranny of human desires, which follow a precise timetable. From birth to age five, Dilorom told me, we desire affection and petting. From age five to puberty, we desire candy and sweets. From puberty to age twenty-five, we desire sex. Until age forty-five, our desires turn toward children. After age sixty, we desire quietude and remembrance. It is only from age forty-five to sixty that we desire fruits of the intellect. “In intellectual terms, age forty-five to sixty is the cream on the milk.” Dilorom looked down at her hands on the table, smiling faintly. “Soon I will be forty-five,” she said, raising her eyes. “I’m hoping to finish writing my book.”
“Today, we’re going to talk about love,” Muzaffar announced.
“OK,” I said.
“Love is a difficult condition . . .”
Muzaffar had fallen in love once, with a Bulgarian girl whom he met in Heidelberg, where he had been studying Kant. They had spent every minute together. He told her that if she loved him, she would quit smoking. She said that love and smoking were completely unrelated.
“We came from two different worlds,” Muzaffar concluded.
Muzaffar still dreamed of finishing his doctorate abroad, in Germany or the United States. For one of my Uzbek compositions, I decided to explain how to apply to the comp lit and philosophy departments at Stanford, stressing the importance of the personal statement and plan of study. It took three late nights to write; I submitted it in installments.
“This is interesting,” Muzaffar said cautiously, crossing out all the wrong verb tenses in pencil.
A few days later, Muzaffar came to class looking unusually pale, with shadows under his eyes. “I have had a funny adventure,” he informed me. After dinner the previous night, his parents had piled the entire family into the car and told Muzaffar to start driving. They said they were going to get some medicine for his father: an obvious falsehood, since the pharmacy had been closed for hours. They gave directions, and he drove, passing the closed pharmacy. They ended up on a dark residential street, near the house of some people his parents knew.