Fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves

The expression “fate gives all of us three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves in our lives” offers Lin a way to interpret relationships whose meaning changes with love, separation, and conflict. Its decisive significance lies in how he applies it to Abdel Khader Khan: the man he still loves as a father becomes, in grief and suspicion, his “beloved enemy.”

The Twelve Disguised Figures

A mujaheddin fighter tells Lin that each person has twelve consequential figures in life: three teachers, three friends, three enemies, and three great loves. Their identities are concealed, the fighter says, and cannot be known until they have been loved, left, or fought. The saying makes recognition retrospective: a relationship’s place in a person’s life may only become clear through what happens to it.

The twelve are not presented as immediately legible roles. The same relationship can resist a simple label, and the maxim’s sequence of loving, leaving, and fighting makes experience—not first impressions—the means by which its hidden meaning emerges.

Lin’s Application to Abdel Khader Khan

Lin recalls the saying during a period of grief and anger after Abdullah’s death. He blames Abdel Khader Khan for failing to protect or save Abdullah, suspects that the Khan has some connection to Sapna and the killings, and feels abandoned when the Khan leaves the city. Although Lin recognizes that this sense of desertion is self-aggrandising and that many of the Khan’s men remain in Bombay, the feeling of betrayal persists.

The maxim gives that conflict a form without resolving it. Lin remains bound to Abdel Khader Khan as a son to a father and still loves him, but can no longer regard him as a flawless hero. He begins to think of the Khan as one of the twelve whose disguise is hardest to see: not simply a friend or enemy, but his “beloved enemy.”

Narrative Significance

The expression holds incompatible feelings together rather than replacing affection with accusation. Lin’s suspicion and anger arise alongside a continuing bond, so the saying’s categories describe relationships that become recognizable through loss and conflict without necessarily becoming simple or settled. In this passage, it articulates the change in Lin’s view of Abdel Khader Khan while preserving the love that makes that change painful.