Namaste (21 page)

“Woo did not abandon me. You abandoned him.”
 

Suni looked at Amit for a long, quiet second. Then his smile returned.
 

“You want to kill me.”

“Yes.”
 

“Because you know of the shadow monks’ role as assassins. As swords for karma.”

It was mildly surprising to hear the abbot say it aloud. Suni had out-thought him at every step during this humiliating encounter. Rage betrayed his every thought like a flashing red light.
 

“Because you have manipulated us. Because you’ve been turning us into killers without our permission. Brainwashing us into believing we were doing right, then turning us toward doing the bidding of criminals in the interest of profit.”
 

The abbot laughed.
 

“Your foolishness knows no bounds, Amit.” He didn’t sound condescending. It was almost as if they shared a joke that both should find hilarious. Amit was supposed to slap his palm to his forehead, agree, and laugh along. It filled him with even more fury. He wanted more than ever to strike at the abbot’s throat, to rip Suni’s voice box from his neck and leave a dripping red hole filled with tendons and gore.
 

“It is true,” said Amit. “Don’t insult me by denying it.”
 

“Oh, it’s all true,” said Suni. “But your quarrel is with Woo.”
 

Chapter 21

T
HERE
WAS
ANOTHER
MOUNTAIN
IN
the chain, not distant, where the Sri order made its true home. The abbot knew where it was in general, but had no knowledge of specifics. He could have found out, but did not wish to know.
 

“There are things I can control and things I cannot,” he told Amit. “This, I cannot.”
 

It was too fatalistic a perspective for Amit, and the abbot mocked even his conviction that he could affect change.
 

“You do not understand, Amit,” he said, his voice ripe with a surprising understanding. “The entanglement has become too large.”

Once Amit had stopped fighting and they’d settled down to tea, Suni’s manner had immediately softened. He pitied Amit, the former monk thought, but that was better than condescending to him. He could work with pity. Pity would allow the abbot to help, because he’d know that all was lost, that Amit would only harm himself, but that nothing could be helped.
 

“What do you mean, ‘The entanglement has become too large’?”
 

“You think this is about a sensei who went bad. You see it as your job to find the rotten sensei and his recruited monks so you can eradicate them like a nest of spiders. But it is not so simple, Amit. As you have been too stupid to see through your time here, karma does not understand ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ Karma understands the spin of its own wheel. Woo believes he is doing what is right. The organization has funded us from the beginning, since even before we knew it. Because
they
had plans, too. By the time they started pulling strings — we were on land they owned; they had leaders with spiritual understanding among them; they pointed out that we were bred to kill, whether we did so or not, and hence could argue that killing was in our dharma. They knew enough to give us choice. If they’d forced our hand, we would have fought, and won. If they’d pressed, we’d have done our homework earlier, and learned that they were not just on the edge of society, but actively brewing chaos within it. But they did not force, or press. They allowed us to grow and paid for our needs. They left us alone. Through my youth, it was like having benefactors. They began to persuade a few of the elders. The ‘sword of the righteous’ argument is compelling, because no one else could right the wrongs that we could. The elders began to subtly persuade others. It happened slowly, and in many ways, we were blind to it all, because we were allowed to do as we wished, free from interference.

“Woo saw it in a new way — clearer and more twisted than how any of us had ever seen those underworld dealings. His passion for exterior thought allowed him to question something the rest of us never had. Specifically, he said, ‘Is murder for hire so wrong?’ It was a repugnant thing to consider, and only a mind such as Woo’s would think to do so. It felt wrong, but in his mind, the fact that something was difficult, odd, or obviously wrong was all the more reason to investigate. The more he did the more reasons he found. The ends justified the means. Money could improve the Sri. Woo could build a separate compound to train his elite. You see, as much as you were a thorn in our side, Amit, Woo’s arrogance dwarfed yours like the sun swallows the darkness. He was certain of so much. He needed only resources to realize his truth. The organization could give him those resources.

“So, he moved. You remember when he left, though you could not have known why. He splintered our order, and took those he could persuade to go with him. You remember when he left, and how tense it was. You cannot think of them as a nest, because they are not swords for hire. They believe they are doing what is right, and that those who oppose them are wrong, just like the monks here, in this monastery. Our division balances on a sliver. Anyone here, who I see as an honorable Sri, could choose to go there. Some have over the years — people you yourself grew up with. If I tried to fight Woo’s group I would face opposition here. We are still both Sri, you understand. Men and women from this camp still go to his, as if it were a recruiting ground. I do not stop them. It is a matter of belief, and seems almost arbitrary. Sometimes, monks return to us with blood on their hands. Should I reject them after they have teetered back into our arms?”
 

Amit sipped his tea, unable to believe what he was hearing. And
he
was supposed to be the blind one?
He
was supposed to be foolish?
 

“It is not a matter of opinion. They are working for organized crime.”
 

“In service of what they feel is a greater good,” argued the abbot. “A Sri monk is, above all else, calculating and intuitive and logical. You cannot fight properly if you do not possess those traits, and if you possess those traits, you will tend to leave small obstacles behind on your way to larger truths. Why do you think we make the difficult choice of divorcing ourselves from the modern world? Life is easier down from the mountain, as I hear. They can learn most things at the touch of a button. They don’t tire their bodies with work. Yet we became monks because we believe that hard work is rewarded later, and that suffering leads to what is proper and true.”
 

“But killing … ”
 

“ …
 
is a matter of perspective. Have you ended no lives?” The abbot chuckled. “Of course, you have. And I believe you have done so rather unpleasantly. Have you never considered that there might be two sides to every death? Were there none you killed who would vehemently agree that you were the wrong one? Do you really think that an entire nation’s legal system wouldn’t disagree that what you did was ‘right’?”

“Their perspectives are incorrect and timid.”
 

“Your opinion,” said the abbot. “And as a dealer of death yourself, who are you to say that Woo is wrong?”
 

Amit’s ears were lying.
 

“Are you saying you agree with what Woo has done? How he’s picked and sifted your spiritual pilgrims and hired them off to criminals for profit?”
 

“Of course not. But as wrong as I believe he is, Woo sees me as equally wrong.”
 

Amit shook his head. He felt as stupid as the abbot had accused him of being. Woo was wrong. It was not a matter of opinion. The organization was wrong. The Right Hand had been wrong. Alfero had been wrong. The people who’d ended Nisha’s life — “just following orders and nothing personal” or not — had been wrong. Ending a life was wrong … unless you were ending a life to avenge the ending of another.
 

“You are timid,” said Amit. “You are afraid.”
 

“Perhaps. But it is good to be afraid sometimes, and it does not change the reasons I have stated for not trying to convince Woo.”
 

“And you call me weak?”
 

“You
are
weak.”
 

Amit shook his head. “I am willing to do what you are not.”
 

“Or to commit the fallacy that I know is best left at rest.”
 

“It is not a matter of opinion, Abbot.”

Suni shook his head. “At best, you will be killed. At worst, you will join him.”
 

Amit set down his tea. It was the most ludicrous thing a monk on a quest for vengeance had ever heard.
 

“I would
never
join him.”

“Won’t you?” Suni’s old, wrinkle-bunched eyes met Amit’s.
 

“Why would you ever think I would join my enemy?”
 

“Because,” said the abbot, “you and Woo are so very alike.”
 

Chapter 22

A
MIT
WENT
ON
FOOT
.
 

T
HERE
was no other way to move from place to place without returning to the city below unless he wanted to ride a donkey or something equally quaint and rural. He would have gone on foot even with a superhighway or railroad running between the Sri camps.
 

Amit’s world had been turned upside down by Nisha, then flipped again by her death. For a while after that, things made sense. His life was filled with blood, pain, and clarity. There were bad people who had to pay. He needed only to keep moving relentlessly forward until the bad people were gone. Then he’d found out about the Sri — supposedly his brothers — and what they’d been training for whether they knew it or not. That turned his world a third time. But this last was a blow beyond all blows. Not only was the ultimate bad man his mentor, he was no longer even sure that there was any objective truth about good and bad. He had shed a lot of blood. At the time, it was righteous bloodshed, plain and simple. In his mind, those ahead of his deadly hands wore black hats, clearly indicated as those to hate. Based on the abbot’s words — and against which Amit’s tired mind struggled and fought — the hats were shades of gray. There were peaceful monks in his home monastery who could easily be on the wrong side, and mercenaries in the other compound who could easily come back to the right. Directly above that lever’s fulcrum were the abbot (whom Amit had always hated) and Woo (whom Amit had always loved), tipping balance with the smallest motions of mind and body, spirit and whim.
 

Amit and Woo.
Very alike.
 

Amit didn’t want to believe that. Not after knowing Suni’s story to be true. He’d believed it all his life; he’d grown up with Woo and had trusted him like a father. Whenever Amit found himself in trouble, Woo had pulled him out. When things grew difficult, Woo had been there to lean on. He offered guidance when needed. When the abbot had wanted to toss young Amit out into the streets to starve and die, Woo argued for him to stay. Woo was his defender, protector, and greatest champion. But Suni and Woo had agreed on one thing: Amit was one of the most skilled monks whom either had seen — possibly
the
most skilled. There were drills given to Amit by Woo that had proved superiority, feats of strength, speed, balance, and agility that Woo had never expected him to master, but which he’d mastered handily in days or weeks — whichever time frame was appropriately impressive or absurd.
 

Amit once overheard the two discussing his future. Woo said,
We need him because he will do great things.
Suni had said,
We must release him, because with our training and without discipline, he will do terrible things.
Same skills, same excellence, same level of appreciation. To Woo, Amit’s emotional instability — always under observation but never truly contained — was an asset. To the abbot, a liability.
 

Amit put one foot in front of the other, barely aware of the perilous drop to his one side. He topped scree after scree of rocks, sliding only as far as his eye had told him he’d slide, climbing in places, never caught off guard. The air was rare and thin, but it didn’t bother Amit. It was as if his time away from the monastery had been extinguished in a blink, and his lungs had retained all their former power. A hawk circled in the distance, searching for prey, like Amit.

What was the difference, really, between himself and Woo? According to Suni, Woo had embraced the idea of doing wrong so that one day he might do that which he thought of as good. But was the wrong truly wrong? Was the good he sought truly righteous? Or was it all, as the abbot said, a matter of opinion? He himself had done wrong — in the eyes of many — for a noble cause. At least, that was the way it had seemed when he’d left. The abbot saw it coming; Amit remembered his grave warning to control himself. It was the same warning the abbot had given him throughout his entire life.
 

Stop.

Think.
 

Meditate, but do not act from passion, because passion is deceptive.