Instead, one morning, three guards appeared there. They had been assigned to guard Bistami at the tomb, also back at his own compound. They informed him that he was not allowed to go anywhere else but these two places. He was under house arrest.

This was the usual prelude to the interrogation and execution of traitors. Bistami could see in his guards' eyes that this time was no exception, and that they considered him a dead man. It was hard for him to believe that Akbar had turned on him; he struggled to understand it. Fear grew daily in him. The image of the mirza's headless body, gushing blood, kept recurring to him, and each time it did the blood in his own body would pound through him as if testing the means of escape, eager for release in a bursting red fountain.

He went to the Chishti tomb on one of these frightful mornings, and decided not to leave it. He sent orders for one of his retainers to bring him food every day at sundown, and after eating outside the gate of the tomb, he slept on a mat in the corner of the courtyard. He fasted through the days as if it were Ramadan, and alternated days reciting from the Quran and from Rumi's 'Mathnawi', and other Persian sufi texts. Some part of him hoped and expected that one of the guards would speak Persian, so that the words of the Mowlana, Rumi the great poet and voice of the sufis, would be understood as they came pouring out of him.

'Here are the miracle signs you want,' he would say in a loud voice, that you cry through the night and get up at dawn, asking that in the absence of what you ask for, your day gets dark, your neck thin as a spindle, that what you give away is all you own, that you sacrifice belongings, sleep, health, your head, that you often sit down in a fire like aloes wood, and often go out to meet a blade like a battered helmet. When acts of helplessness become habitual, those are the signs. You run back and forth listening for unusual events, peering into the faces of travellers. Why are you looking at me like a madman? I have lost a Friend. Please forgive me. Searching like that does not fail. There will come a rider who holds you close. You faint and gibber. The uninitiated say, he's faking. How could they know? Water washes over a beached fish.

'Blessed is that intelligence into whose heart's ear from heaven the sound of "come hither" is coming. The defiled ear hears not that sound – only the deserving gets his desserts. Defile not your eye with human cheek and mole, for that emperor of eternal life is coming; and if it has become defiled, wash it with tears, for the cure comes from those tears. A caravan of sugar has arrived from Egypt; the sound of a footfall and bell is coming. Ha, be silent, for to complete the ode our speaking King is coming.'

After many days of that, Bistami began to repeat the Quran sura by sura, returning often to the first sura, the Opening of the Book, the Fatiha, the Healer, which the guards would never fail to recognize: 'Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds! The compassionate, the merciful! King on the day of reckoning! Thee only do we worship, and to Thee do we cry for help. Guide Thou us on the straight path, the path of those to whom Thou has been gracious; – and with whom Thou are not angry, and who go not astray.'

This great opening prayer, so appropriate to his situation, Bistami repeated hundreds of times per day. Sometimes he repeated only the prayer 'Sufficient for us is God and excellent the Protector'; once he said it thirty three thousand times in a row. Then he switched to 'Allah is merciful, submit to Allah, Allah is merciful, submit to Allah', which he repeated until his mouth was parched, his voice hoarse, and the muscles of his face cramped with exhaustion.

All the while he swept the courtyard clear, and then all the rooms of the shrine, one by one, and he filled the lamps and trimmed the wicks, and swept some more, looking at the skies as they changed through the days, and he said the same things over and over, feeling the wind push through him, watching the leaves of the trees surrounding the shrine pulse, each in its own transparent light. Arabic is learning, but Persian is sugar. He tasted his food at sundown as he had never tasted food before. Nevertheless it became easy to fast, perhaps because it was winter and the days were a bit shorter. Fear still stabbed him frequently, causing his blood to surge in him at enormous pressure, and he prayed aloud in every waking moment, no doubt driving his guards mad with the droning of it.

Eventually the whole world contracted to the tomb, and he began to forget the things that had happened before to him, or the things that presumably were still happening in the world outside the shrine grounds. He forgot them. His mind was becoming clarified, indeed everything in the world seemed to be becoming slightly transparent. He could see into leaves, and sometimes through them, as if they were made of glass; and it was the same with the white marble and alabaster of the tomb, which glowed as if alive in the dusks; and with his own flesh. 'All save the face of God doth perish. To Him shall we return.' These were the words from the Quran embedded in the Mowlana's beautiful poem of reincarnation,

'I died as mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose as animal, I died as animal and I was Man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar With angels blessed; but even from angelhood I must pass on: "All save the face of God doth perish." When I have sacrificed my angelic soul, I shall become what no mind has ever conceived, Oh, let me not exist! for non existence Proclaims in organ tones: "To Him shall we return".'

He repeated this poem a thousand times, always whispering the last part, for fear the guards would report to Akbar that he was preparing himself for death.

Days passed; weeks passed. He grew hungrier, and hypersensitive to all tastes and smells, then to the air and the light. He could feel the nights that stayed hot and steamy as if they were blankets swaddling him, and in the brief cool of dawn he walked around sweeping and praying, looking at the sky over the leafy trees growing lighter and lighter; and then one morning as dawn grew, everything began to turn into light. '0 he, 0 he who is He, 0 he who is naught but He!' Over and over he cried these words out into the world of light, and even the words were shards of light bursting out of his mouth. The tomb became a thing of pure white light, glowing in the cool green light of the trees, the trees of green light, and the fountain poured its water of light up into the lit air, and the walls of the courtyard were bricks of light, and everything was light, pulsing lightly. He could see through the Earth, and back through time, over a Khyber Pass made of slabs of yellow light, back to the time of his birth, in the tenth day of Moharram, the day when the Imam Hosain, the only living grandson of Mohammed, had died defending the faith, and he saw that whether or not Akbar had him killed he would live on, for he had lived before many times, and was not going to be done when this life ended. 'Why should I be afraid?

When did I ever lose by dying?' He was a creature of light as everything else was, and had once been a village girl, another time a horseman on the steppes, another time the servant of the Twelfth Imam, so that he knew how and why the Imam had disappeared, and when he would return to save the world. Knowing that, there was no reason to fear anything. 'Why should I be afraid? 0 he, 0 he who is He, sufficient is God and excellent the Protector, Allah the merciful, the beneficent!' Allah who had sent Mohammed on his isra, his journey into light, just as Bistami was being sent now, towards the ascension of miraj, when all would become a light utterly transparent and invisible.

Understanding this, Bistami looked through the transparent walls and trees and earth to Akbar, across the city in his clear palace, robed in light like an angel, a man surely more than half angel already, an angel spirit that he had known in previous lives, and that he would know again in future lives, until they all came to one place and Allah rang down the universe.