In his effort to popularize teaching stories and the Sufi tradition, my father's work [the work of Idries Shah] has attracted a wide range of readers across the world. They come from all types of social strata, backgrounds, and professions. Since my earliest childhood, I have met thousands of them, because they have beat a path to our front door.
Most of them are pretty conventional. A few are questionable. And a handful are downright odd.
When my father died from a heart attack a decade ago, his mail--sent to his publishers— was forwarded to me. Over the years, I wrote to hundreds of his readers, explaining that my father, Idries Shah, was no longer alive. The majority took the news with sadness, but were satisfied to have an answer nonetheless.
There was, however, one reader from Andalucia in Spain, who refused to believe that my father was no longer alive. Every month he wrote an airmail letter addressed to Idries Shah, sometimes begging and at other times ordering him to make his whereabouts known. At first I wrote back, assuming the gentleman had not heard the news. But the years passed, and the letters continued with increased regularity.
My father used to say that the answer to a fool is silence.
And so, I refrained from correspondence. Then, on the Monday morning before I set out for the desert, Osman came to tell me there was a visitor at the door. I asked who it was. The guardian motioned the confused outline of a man.
"He's both tall and short," he said.
"You'd better bring him in."
A minute passed. I had turned the dining room into a makeshift office, and was working in there. Osman trudged through the house, and stood to the side to allow the visitor to enter. I finished what I was doing on my computer. When I looked up a tall man with a hunched back was standing over my desk. He had a fatigued face, gray-blue eyes, and a froth of salt-and-pepper hair. I hadn't been prepared and so did not make the connection. I introduced myself. The visitor extended his hand. It was rough and clammy.
"Jose Gonzales," he said.
I narrowed my eyes, then opened them wide in an involuntary action. "As in ... the Jose Gonzales?"
The gentleman seemed content to have elicited a response.
I stayed quite still. Perhaps he half-expected me to show him out.
"My father is dead," I said. "He's been dead quite a while now."
Gonzales didn't flinch. "I have heard this before," he said, in a heavy accent.
" I wrote to tell you."
"Yes."
And you have not believed me."
The visitor seemed to stoop a little lower. "I am searching for Truth," he said.
"Are you sure that you are not really searching for Idries Shah?"
Gonzales looked at me coldly. He didn't reply.
A year before my father died, he sat me down in a quiet corner of his garden. We shared a pot of Darjeeling tea and listened to the sound of a pair of wood pigeons in a nearby tree. I poured a second cup of tea. As I was putting the strainer back on its holder, my father said "Some time soon I will not be here anymore. My illness has reached another phase. I can feel it."
I sat there, touched with sadness. I didn't say anything because I could not think of anything appropriate to say.
"When I am not here," my father continued, "some people we have always trusted will betray us. Beware of this. Others will stand forward as true friends, people who were in the shadows before. Many more will ask who I left as my successor. They will hound you, asking for a name. It is important that you tell them that my successor is my printed work. My books form a complete course, a Path, and they succeed when I cannot be there."
He stopped talking, raised the porcelain cup to his lips, and took a sip. I finished my tea, and we walked back to the house. I was going to leave, when he told me to wait.
"One day," he said, "you may meet someone who is misguided. It might not make sense now, but at the time when it happens, you will know. If this happens, take this piece of paper and give it to him."
He held up the sheet, folded it in half once, and then again, and gave it to me. The following November he died. I grieved, but I was consoled by the thought that he was inside me, alive in the stories he had told. Our lives rattled forward. Ariane and Timur were born, and we moved into the Caliph's House. Nine years eventually passed. The paper was kept safe in a box file, along with my own papers.
And so came the morning on which I found Jose Gonzales standing over me. I took a deep breath, and he repeated himself. "I am searching for Truth."
I asked him to wait for me, and I went into my storage room and rooted about until I found the file and the paper. It was still folded as it had been when my father handed it to me. Before I stepped back into the dining room, I opened the sheet and read what was written on it.
It was this story:
There were once three men, all of whom wanted fruit, though none of them had ever seen any, since it was very rare in their country.
It so happened that they all traveled in search of this almost unknown thing called fruit. And it also happened that, at about the same time, each one found his way to a fruit tree.
The first man was heedless. He got to a fruit tree, but had spent so much time thinking about the directions that he failed to recognize the fruit.
His journey was wasted.
The second man was a fool, who took things very literally. When he saw that all the fruit on the tree was past its best, he said: "Well, I've seen fruit, and I don't like rotten things, so that is the end of fruit as far as I am concerned."
He went on his way, and his journey was wasted.
The third man was wise. He picked up some of the fruit and examined it. After some thought, and racking his brains to remember all the possibilities about this uneatable delicacy, he found that inside each fruit there was a stone.
Once he knew that this stone was a seed, all he had to do was to plant, and tend the growth, and wait for — fruit.
-- Tahir Shah, In Arabian Nights, p. 214-217.
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