I was in the northern corner of India, where the tip of the nation collides with Nepal and China in the Himalayan mountains. Imposing snowcapped peaks glare down at the cities squeezed into the valleys. These are the world’s tallest mountains, and they are as intimidating as you might imagine them to be. They make man’s largest creations look like children’s toys. They are the quintessential images of imposing authority.

Just on the western edge of some of these snowcapped towers rests the village of McLeod Ganj. The village teeters on the peak of a small mountain with the Himalayas on one side and a precipitous drop down into a valley on the other side. Its buildings seem nearly ready to topple over and roll down into the valley below. It appears to be perched on a pinpoint.

…

The Muslims held the rickety village of McLeod Ganj together. They operated most of the shops, many of the restaurants, and some of the hotels. India boasts the world’s second-largest Muslim population, so this was not surprising. Every major city has dozens of mosques, and predawn calls to prayer frequently pierce the quiet of the night.

Muslims happen to have a lot of business savvy. Amrit was among the least faithful Muslims of McLeod Ganj, but he was one of the most entrepreneurial. He was a kind of MTV Muslim who was culturally connected to Islam but who also enjoyed dancing with the devil. He prayed hard on Friday after partying hard on Thursday, and he enjoyed the Imam’s sermon as much as making love with Europeans tourists.

When I met him, I think he was about 22 and very jaded. I think that’s why we immediately connected.

I had rushed into Amrit’s store for a little refuge when a torrential rainstorm unexpectedly rolled over the nearby mountains. He politely invited me to dry off inside and offered me a cup of piping hot mint tea. We sat together and talked for more than an hour. Our conversation was accompanied by the sound of a monsoon swarming just out- side the hanging cloth that served as a makeshift door to his roadside business.

At first, Amrit was very guarded. He had been well indoctrinated with a caricatured image of Americans and their caricatured opinions of Muslims, but eventually he realized I wasn’t like the Americans he had heard about. I have always enjoyed speaking with Muslims and especially admire their zealous attention to hospitality. I have genuinely liked most of the Muslims I’ve met around the world. Perhaps that’s why they have looked past their own prejudices and risked trusting me. This is what happened with Amrit. I liked him, and he started to trust me.

We drank more tea, the rain fell, and friendship sprouted. Soon he had really opened up his life to me. I learned that Amrit had grown up in the gorgeous but war-torn region of Kashmir. He told me that more than 50,000 people had been killed there in skirmishes between Muslims and Hindus, so his family moved their shop from Kashmir to McLeod Ganj. The once-lucrative tourism industry of Kashmir had been decimated by the bomb blasts and gunfights in the streets, and they hoped to rebuild their business in a new city.

I was surprised by Amrit’s openness and honesty. He treated me like a lifelong friend. Eventually, with some trepidation, I felt safe to ask my new Muslim buddy a risky question. “Amrit, I’ve heard about bombs blowing up in Kashmir and gun fights breaking out in the streets. Have you ever personally witnessed any of this?”

Immediately, Amrit’s face changed. I had triggered something in his psyche, something long suppressed and rarely revealed. The blood drained from his dark Indian skin. He wasn’t angry; he was deeply, deeply distressed.

Amrit began to tell me about family members who had been killed in the violence, about childhood horrors of hearing gunshots in the streets, and about two close relatives who had died simply because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Suddenly, I realized I was sitting with a civilian survivor of war. My gentle-hearted, hospitable friend had grown up in hell. His childhood was horrifying. All the pain I had personally experienced seemed so small as I listened to him, and I slowly felt myself wondering what it would have been like to have lived his life. Almost accidentally, I was embracing empathy.

The sound of the storm outside was sometimes difficult to talk over. The clouds were pelting the earth with arrows of rain, and each drop created a splash six inches tall. The scene seemed almost apocalyptic. Raising his hand and pointing at the downpour, Amrit said something that was branded onto my heart and haunts me to this day. “Johnnie, only when the rain fell like this was the blood washed off my streets.”

He rolled his right hand into a fist and beat his chest just above his heart three times. “It makes you so hard, so hard...it just makes you so hard.”

We finished our tea. The rain stopped. I went back to my hotel room and wept.

The next day Amrit told me that he wasn’t very religious anymore. He spent nearly every evening getting drunk at a local pub or sleep- ing with a tourist (except on Friday, when he went to the mosque). Amrit dulled his childhood pain by separating himself from God and embracing pleasure.

Later, I began to think more about Amrit’s decision to become a liberal Muslim. I realized that he could have just as easily gone the other way. Rather than losing his devotion to his faith after being left so emotionally mangled, he could have become a radical. Rather than running from his pain and suppressing his hurt with pleasure, his pain might have fueled a lust for revenge and a willingness to fight to the death for vengeance. Amrit could have become a terrorist just easily as he had become a hedonist.

Islamic terrorism is often a cocktail of extremist propaganda mixed with festering, personal pain. Seasoning this mix with a touch of vengeance creates a dangerously volatile brew. This is how sensible people are persuaded to engage in a jihad. In a slightly different situation, Amrit might have responded to his hopelessness by becoming a suicide bomber. Life sometimes makes decisions for you, and if a few scenarios in Amrit’s life had played out differently, who knows what he could have become?

My conversation with Amrit deeply affected me in a number of ways. It drew me into his experience and helped me understand and feel what life must have been like for him as a child. As we talked, empathy sprouted in my heart. I liked Amrit. He was my age. He was intelligent. He was a hard worker who had been hurt by life and who had plenty of hang-ups but who was trying his hardest to make the best of his situation.

When he revealed to me his masked pain, I started wondering how I would have reacted had I experienced the same childhood. How would I have responded if I had repeatedly been startled out of a deep sleep by bullets ricocheting off the streets outside my home? What would I have thought about God or the world or my enemies had I attended the unnecessary funerals of people I loved?

I was somehow able to take Amrit’s feelings upon my own shoulders. My imagination made a bridge from my world to his reality and sparked deep and penetrating questions. The more questions I asked myself, the more I was humbled by my own weaknesses, and the more I was burdened to help people like Amrit who had been dealt a hard lot in life.

Had I endured such suffering and horror, would I have become a hedonist, trying desperately to bury my pain with pleasure? Would I have become a hardened and angry man, haunted by bloodlust and determined to avenge the honor of my family? Who knows what could have happened? Who would I be today had I been an eyewitness of a real-life horror movie? Could I have been a murderer? Would I have had the resilience to live on with these weights on my own shoulders?

1. How do you best understand the role of empathy?
2. What is the proper relationship between righteous anger and merciful forgiveness?
   

Editor’s Note: This piece is an excerpt from Johnnie Moore’s new book, Honestly: Really Living What We Say We Believe. The image was found here.

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