Alternate Vision

We sat around the gong-fu tea service table in the Pu-erh room on small, low stools watching as he rinsed the utensils on the table itself, which is clearly designed for this elaborate and artful preparation of tea. Indeed, success in gong-fu tea mandates patience, attention to detail and sufficient practice. The liquids flowed through openings in the table into a catcher underneath for later discard. He served us some aged, black Pu-erh tea in miniature clay cups. The more tea we drank, the more tea he brewed for us, and the more I started to feel at home with the eclectic group of people around me, none of whom I knew but all of whom were at this table embracing a common purpose - their passion for tea.

R and I escaped indoors from the relentless storm in search of the elusive 'Empty Boat' tea house, a quaint space on squid-row dedicated to the art of tea. Mind you, it is not your average tea house with cup cakes and laptop studded coffee tables. In fact, laptops aren't permitted in this tea house. In ancient times, Chaikhana's were tea houses along the Silk Road linking China to the Middle East and were intended as a place to rest, shake dust off the road and sip tea as you read poems of divinity in an effort to elevate oneself from the mundane. Such is the vibe that David has artfully fostered at the Empty Boat. The rooms abound in antique Southeast Asian wooden furnishings with exquisite art and wall hangings on display that transport you back in time.

The mystical sounds of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's Qawwali floated through the room just as David went to pick out a book of Sufi poetry from his library. And as the Asian photographer on the neighboring table went about her weekly ritual of sorting through photographs while working on her pot of 2003 Xiauguan Tocha, and the gentleman next to me started sketching feverishly in his little book, David read out loud to us his favorite story of all time "Mojud: The Man with the Inexplicable Life."

So the biographers constructed for Mojud a wonderful and exciting story: because all saints must have their story, and the story must be in accordance with the appetite of the listener, not with the realities of life.

And nobody is allowed to speak of Khidr directly. That is why this story is not true. It is a representation of a life. This is the real life of one of the greatest Sufis.