In the city of Marud, where the streets were older than the trees surrounding them, there lived a man called Sabu, known to everyone as Sabu the Fool.
He had earned the title honestly.
He asked inconvenient questions at weddings, spoke to stray dogs as though they were retired ministers, and once spent an entire afternoon staring at a wall because he claimed he could hear the walls thinking. He had been dismissed from three occupations, rejected by two universities and once escorted out of a philosophy conference for asking the keynote speaker whether the Philosopher had ever actually improved anybody's life.
"Look at him," people said. "Sabu the Fool, contemplating the mysteries of the universe."
Sabu did not mind. He had discovered that people who knew everything were generally the least curious. He would rather be a fool than be a know-it-all. He knew imagination was much greater than knowledge.
Marud, meanwhile, was celebrating the greatness of knowledge. Its towers pierced the clouds, its ships crossed the oceans, its mathematicians calculated the age of stars, and its merchants had invented a complicated financial instrument that allowed a man to sell tomorrow before purchasing today. The city considered itself the pinnacle of civilisation.
Its mayor, a magnificent gentleman with a magnificent moustache, frequently declared that humanity had conquered nature.
Sabu found this amusing.
"Conquered?" he once asked a passing professor. "Then why does the river still decide where the city gets its drinking water?"
The professor reported him to the authorities.
Sabu's awakening began with a fig.
He was sitting beneath an ancient tree when a ripe fig fell into his lap. He examined it as if it were a royal decree. Inside it were hundreds of tiny seeds, each containing the possibility of another tree.
He looked up. The tree had grown from a seed, which had come from another tree, which had come from another, in an ancestry extending beyond the memory of men.
"Who began this?" he whispered.
A rich man passing by laughed. "Nature, you fool."
"And who began nature?"
The rich man shrugged. "Nobody. It simply is."
Sabu considered this answer. It was a popular answer, he noticed, especially among people who had stopped asking questions.
That night he dreamt of a vast garden. Rivers ran through it, mountains rose like sleeping animals, and stars hung from the branches of invisible trees. A voice moved through the garden, not from above or below, but through everything.
"Look carefully, nature is angry" it said.
When Sabu awoke, he began looking. He became suspicious of Man's knowledge.
His suspicions deepened during the Great Drought.
The river withdrew from Marud. Wells became dark holes, gardens turned grey, and the mayor called an emergency meeting to discuss the failure of nature to fulfil its contractual obligations.
The engineers proposed a dam. The merchants proposed importing water. The politicians proposed a commission to investigate why the poor were consuming more than their permitted share. But no solution seemed to work.
Sabu walked to the dry riverbed.
He found an old woman sitting among the stones, holding a small clay jar.
"Where will you find water?" he asked.
She pointed towards the mountains.
"From the snow, when it melts. From the clouds, when they gather. From the underground streams, if we stop poisoning them."
"But the mayor says we must announce a solution soon. We have run out of water."
The woman laughed. "Your mayor believes everything begins when he announces it."
She told Sabu that the village elders knew of an ancient channel beneath the hills, built generations earlier to carry water into the valley. It had been forgotten when a newer modern system was constructed. Sabu gathered a group of village children and farmers. Together, they cleared the stones and made a pathway to open the old channel.
Water returned and flowed with a gush in all its glory. Drinking water was restored.
The mayor claimed credit. He conducted a grand celebration in the city.
The engineers received medals. The newspapers called it a triumph of modern innovation and a tidal wave of the Mayor's ingenuity. The old woman too came to the celebration but the crowds went home without mentioning her name or even knowing she existed. The village children and farmers who actually opened the old channel; enthusiastically clapped their hands for the Mayor having forgotten their own contribution.
Sabu stood beside the flowing channel and smiled. He had seen the hand of the past reaching into the present, and beyond it, something that seemed to connect every cause to every consequence.
"Why do the people never see?" he asked the wind.
Perhaps, he thought, because gratitude is more difficult than pride.
Years passed. Sabu travelled beyond Marud.
He visited the great libraries, where men argued over who had invented the alphabet, as though letters had been waiting in heaven for somebody to claim a patent. He visited the laboratories, where scientists studied the invisible particles that held matter together. He visited the palaces, where kings imagined their signatures would outlive the mountains.
Everywhere, he found the same comedy.
The astronomer named the stars and believed he had brought them into existence. The physician discovered a remedy and forgot the centuries of observation that had prepared the discovery. The king built a road and called the land his achievement, forgetting the feet that had travelled it long before his birth.
Yet Sabu did not despise these people. He began to understand that human pride was not always wickedness. Sometimes it was simply a small creature becoming intoxicated by its small accomplishments.
The universe was immense, and man had learned to make a wheel. It was understandable that he should celebrate.
But Sabu had begun to see something more.
He saw that every civilisation rested upon gifts it had not created: language, reason, gravity, water, memory, imagination, the stubborn fertility of soil, the mysterious human capacity to love a stranger. Even the ability to question the universe was itself a gift of the universe.
In the stories of the ancient Hebrews, he found a recurring pattern. The sea opened when escape seemed impossible. Bread appeared in the wilderness in the form of Manna. A shepherd became a king. A prisoner interpreted dreams and helped preserve a civilisation. The underdog survived the ambitions of empires as luck would have it.
The characters struggled, schemed, doubted and triumphed. They believed themselves to be making history. Yet behind their histories moved a power they could neither command nor contain but the Hebrew characters had the wisdom to understand.
Sabu began calling that power the Great Presence.
Not because he had discovered its name, but because he had finally understood that names were the only meaningful way to describe it..
One evening, at the edge of a desert, Sabu met a boy who asked him whether he was a wise man.
"No," said Sabu. "I was Sabu the Fool. I may have merely become a more foolish fool."
The boy laughed.
"Then what have you learned?"
Sabu looked towards the horizon. The setting sun had turned the sand copper, and the first stars were appearing. Somewhere far away, cities were lighting their lamps, ships were crossing black oceans, and children were being born into families who had no idea what the future held.
"I have learned that a man can spend his entire life looking at the world and never really see it."
"See what?"
"That the world is not merely a thing we inhabit. It is a wonder that is happening through us."
He paused.
"Look at your eyes. They are made of the same ancient matter as the stars. The iron in your blood was forged in the hearts of distant suns. The water in your body has travelled through rivers, clouds, oceans and living things. You are not standing outside the universe, looking at it. You are the universe, for a brief moment, looking at itself."
The boy was silent.
"And who makes this possible?" he asked.
Sabu smiled.
"That is the question that has followed me all my life. I call it the Great Presence"
He closed his eyes.
For once, he did not ask for an answer. He felt the wind passing across his face, heard the desert settling into night and sensed the extraordinary continuity of things. There was no boundary between the small and the vast, the living and the dead, the known and the unknowable. Everything depended upon everything else, and everything seemed held within a presence that required neither applause nor recognition.
He remembered the fig, the river, the bridge and the old woman. He remembered the thousands of invisible hands that had carried humanity from its caves to its cities. He remembered the discoveries that had arrived as accidents, the kindnesses that had changed history, and the moments when an entire civilisation had survived because of what people nowadays call Luck but were actually Miracles. The effects of Divine Intervention.
And suddenly he understood.
God's greatness was not diminished because men failed to recognise it. The ocean did not become smaller because a sailor was too busy sailing his vessel. The sun did not require the praise of flowers to rise.
For a long time, Sabu sat beneath the stars.
When he opened his eyes, the boy was gone.
In the sand beside him was a drawing: a small circle surrounded by thousands of larger circles, all connected by fine lines. At the centre, the boy had written:
SABU THE WISE.
He laughed. "Even the children have begun making mistakes."
Then he noticed something.
The lines did not lead towards Sabu. They passed through him, as they passed through the mountains, the oceans, the cities and the stars. He was not the centre of the drawing. He was one of its countless meeting points.
He was not the author of the great story. He was one of the ways in which the story had become conscious of itself.
In the morning, he returned to Marud.
The mayor was still mayor. The professor was still a professor. The newspapers had discovered a new genius and were busy explaining how the genius had single-handedly changed the course of civilisation.
Nobody noticed Sabu walking through the marketplace.
"Look!" somebody shouted. "Sabu the Fool!"
He turned, smiling.
"Not quite," he said. "Sabu the Wise, perhaps."
The crowd roared with laughter.
Sabu walked on, entirely content.
For he had discovered the final paradox: the more he understood the greatness of God, the less important he became in his own eyes. And the less important he became, the more magnificently the universe revealed itself.
Above him, the sky held its ancient silence.
Below him, the earth carried on its mysterious work.
And everywhere, in every human invention, every act of kindness, every seed, every star and every breath, the Great Presence continued its quiet creation.
Humanity called it progress. The proud called it genius. The fortunate called it luck. The devout called it a blessing. Sabu realized he could no longer comprehend the incomprehensible. He had learned, at last, to see and hear the greatness that permeated all of Universe. Sabu was grateful to have been a seed of this Glorious Greatness.
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