We sat outside Hinduja Hospital, my father and I, waiting. The report was coming and we both knew what it would say. The doctors had been careful with their words, in that way doctors are careful when there is nothing left to soften. Prostate cancer. Terminal. The words were somewhere inside the building, sealed in an envelope, and so we had come outside to sit by the sea.

I am not sure which of us suggested it. Perhaps neither. Perhaps that is simply where we found ourselves, the way people find themselves standing at windows when they do not know what else to do with their bodies. The Arabian Sea moved the way it always moves, forward and back, forward and back, with no interest in what was happening to us on the shore. My father was quiet. I was quiet. There was nothing left to perform for each other. The waves had been doing this long before we arrived and would go on doing it long after. In its terrible way, it was an honest morning.

I had read Martin Lings before that day but I had not really taken him in until I was sitting there with my father watching the water. In What is Sufism?, Lings opens with the image of a wave. From time to time, he writes, a Revelation flows like a great tidal wave from the Ocean of Infinitude to the shores of our finite world, and Sufism is the vocation and the discipline and the science of plunging into the ebb of one of these waves and being drawn back with........

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