[Epic - Part I - Chapter 4]
(Lord Noorali Luqmanjee's Revolutionary Left-Wing Gorillas and Other Paramilitary Monkeys)
On the northern side of King Street, east of Yonge street in downtown Toronto, there's a little obscure alley which leads to a small courtyard surrounded and shadowed by tall office buildings. In that courtyard lies one of the most bizarre post-modern sculptures of Western civilization as we know it.
That sculpture, that courtyard and that alley have nothing do with what happened to Lord Noorali Luqmanjee, trapped inside an iron cage, in that freight train in Zambia, during the earlier part of our story.
In fact, upon sensing he was not alone in the cage, Luqmanjee had to light up one of his last remaining matches to get a short glimpse of Rabbi Daniel Levitt Levine smiling at him heartily.
Luqmanjee felt his heart freeze.
"You look like you've just seen a ghost, Nuru." Levine tried to raise his voice amid the cage's skull-penetrating rattle combined with the racket of a train-car built originally to transport organic substances entirely oblivious to the concept of acoustics. "Or have you lost all sense of humour while training an army of carefully selected gorillas, chimpanzees and orang-utans for your Pan-Arabesque socialist revolution?"
"Excuse me while I catch my breath. I never thought I'd see the Butterfly Effect in action during my lifetime, Danny." Luqmanjee composed himself and tried to get a grip of what he'd landed himself onto.
"Indeed. For a nut-wing anarchist, Newtonian purist like yourself, your ironic belief in the predictable universal systems could only be shaken with something as ultimately unsystematic as Chaos Theory." Rabbi Levine said calmly, as though they were having a nice cappuccino over a chess match at a sidewalk cafe on a beautiful summer day in, well, here we can bring in Toronto seamlessly.
"I always maintained that what you call the Guy Upstairs must be a mathematician, though I've had my doubts either ways, you understand." Luqmanjee settled inside the cage, now over his initial shock.
"Hah!" The Rabbi mused and dismissed the thought.
"Besides, for a super-rich rabbi whose daughter turned catholic, you're a long way away from your lawyers' offices in Manhattan." Luqmanjee produced his trademark betelnutchew concoction and offered the Rabbi a go, who pinched it, winced after sniffing it, but nevertheless began enjoying the chew:
"What do you mean? I never cared who she fell for or what flavour supernatural she prefers after dinner. Sarah still inherits everything. I actually sent Abu Boubou a congratulatory note saying I hope he realized what gold he's struck. I even plan to attend the wedding and give her away with full blessings."
"They're finally settling in, eh? But never mind that. Now, can you please explain why do I find you here?" Luqmanjee's mind was done calculating every possible reason and failing to find a pattern which could explain the rabbi's presence.
"The principals are assembling in Jabera." Informed Rabbi Daniel Levitt Levine, the father of Sarah Levine-Moosa-Issa.
And hearing that, Lord Noorali Luqmanjee wished he'd stayed a prisoner of Queen of Euquay after all. The life of an exceptionally normal idiot savant is, for most part, interesting.
Continued...
All Epic chapters posts.