Keeping his eyes studiously on my father, the man—who was a customs officer—answered in English with perfect composure, “Doctor sahib, we open our border at seven in the morning, and we close it at five o’clock at night. We do this because you are entering a tribal area where we cannot guarantee your safety. You have a wife and small children. I suggest that you check into a hotel for the night.”
Naturally, my mother was mortified. And this, as my father later told me, was the only time he felt his roots dig deep—embarrassed that the unwritten laws of tribal culture had been infringed upon in the presence of a fellow Pashtun to such discourteous effect. But he followed the officer’s advice, and later, he politely told my mother, “I did say it might be better for you not to speak up.” My mother could hardly protest.
I understand now that my lifelong desire to drive through Afghanistan must originate from this encounter. I’ve been through the Khyber Pass twice. It’s a dream and a miracle and a mystery layered upon other mysteries. My parents can no longer remember the name of the town where we were stopped or the hotel where we stayed. We’ve narrowed it down to somewhere between Ghazni and Torkham. So this secret place of family legend, and the name of the polite Pashtun customs officer, must remain unanswered questions. But if I have the chance one day, I will travel this route in hopes of reconnecting with the past and following in the footsteps of my young and adventurous parents. Perhaps I’ll meet the descendant of a customs officer who might recognize a photograph of my father and have his own version of this story to tell.
SPLINTERS OF IRAN
I dream in Mughal diamonds and lost histories I know are mine. Their tapestries are threaded through my books. My parents’ journey took them through Iran—Iran as it was before the Revolution—but the route they took is difficult for them to recall. Strangely and beautifully, I have found myself connected to Iran both through this journey of the past and also through unexpected ways in the present. I traveled the northern route through Iran as a child. I wrote a crime novel centered on Iran’s current political context that digs into the history of the fabulous crown jewels that link Iran to India through the convulsions of Mughal history. And I am currently in the midst of writing a fantasy series that centers on the cities of the Persian empire. My connection to Iran has grown deeper in the past two decades, as I married into an Iranian family and have been immersed in Persian/Iranian culture. My husband is an outspoken critic of the present Iranian regime, which is an obstacle to retracing my parents’ journey through Iran, though my longing to do so is intense.
If I traveled to Iran now, my path would splinter off from my parents’ journey. My desire to see Esfahan, Shiraz, the museum that houses the crown jewels, is woven throughout my stories. But there is one place where past and present journeys intersect.
Some years ago, I studied Arabic in the West Bank as part of a study-abroad program. I lived in a hostel in Ramallah with Palestinian girls, and with other foreign students in the program. The Swedish roommate of a Palestinian friend introduced me to the novels of Amin Maalouf, a French Lebanese writer. She gave me a book called Samarkand, which is a story about the poet-philosopher-mathematician Omar Khayyam, who was born in Nishapur (Neyshabur in present-day Iran) and later journeyed to Samarkand. I was so entranced by the history of Persia encompassed in this novel, and by Maalouf’s description of the fabled cities of Central Asia, that I promised myself I would visit both Samarkand and Nishapur one day. Many years later, I was able to fulfill half of my promise. I traveled to Uzbekistan, visiting Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bukhara. Checking into my hotel in Tashkent, I found myself standing in the Omar Khayyam lobby.
When I mentioned my fascination with Omar Khayyam to my mother, and my sadness that I would never be able to visit Nishapur, she told me to bring her an atlas. Uncertainly, her fingers traced the northern route we had taken from Turkey to Afghanistan on that journey that is not only shrouded in mystery to this day but has become almost mythical in my mind. My mother described our sojourn at the Caspian Sea, where the shore was composed of white seashells as far as the eye could see. The memory of it is one of my few clear memories of this trip. My mother says the memory was real. “We stopped at the shores of the Caspian, where you collected seashells. It may be we stopped at Nishapur as well.”
I assigned this memory to a character in the book I wrote about a journey through Iran. In the same novel, I connected the past to the present by describing the illegal trade in artifacts from the Nishapur/Neyshabur dig. These artifacts included ceramics I had viewed in person at museums in New York and Toronto, slip-painted in white and adorned with the same calligraphy that whispers through my stories.
And because my sense of connection to Iran was so strong, I wasn’t done with the Nishapur I may or may not have visited as a child. As I thought of it, longed for it, it became a place of refuge for the heroes of my fantasy series, who find sanctuary in a place called Nightshaper, the Poet’s Graveyard, where a famous poet’s tomb has been destroyed by marauding forces. Both the heroes of these stories and the forces that have vanquished the cities of the Silk Road are derived from my ethnic heritage as a Pashtun. The place of sanctuary I describe in The Black Khan is the tomb of Omar Khayyam: “He pointed to an odd structure on the other side of the ridge. It resembled the waters of a fountain, if the rising play of water had been etched in cool gray stone. It reached upward, a hyperbolic cone, its many-planed surface intersected by panels of sky. The stone was inlaid with lapis lazuli tile, Nastaliq script smashed by hammers in a furious outpouring of hate.”
Some twenty years ago, my parents decided to visit the place of their birth in India. But when they applied for a visa, they were required to renounce their Pakistani citizenship. My parents’ first reaction was outrage, their second, bewilderment and loss. They refused to give up their Pakistani citizenship, and despite his desire to do so, my father never returned to India. With his declining health, that opportunity no longer exists. And while the Shahjahan period is lost, one day my mother and I may return there, though there will be little she remembers.
If things change in Iran one day, perhaps I’ll be able to make the same journey I made as a child with my parents. I’ve since been fortunate enough to retrace different parts of that journey, brushing against my heritage and history as a Pashtun and as an heir to the beauty of the civilization of Islam. My work as a writer has been infused with both. I know the different paths I’ve taken to arrive at my destination. I also know why the destination matters. But I still long to solve the deeper mystery of my origins.
A TRICK OF THE LIGHT
– Kristen Lepionka –
WHEN I FIRST TOOK POSSESSION OF THE APARTMENT ON Bryden Road, I got three keys: front door, mailbox, and basement. The first two I put on my key ring. The basement key went into my file cabinet, taped to a copy of the lease agreement, because I had no intention of using it. Ever. The basement was what I could only describe as a murder room. A door that locked from the outside, a single bare lightbulb to illuminate the entire space, cranky plumbing, an ancient boiler that groaned and hissed like a person in agony, and an illegible orange spray-paint scrawl on the cold cinder block that ran the length of the stairwell. The day of the open house, I went halfway down the steps, took one look around, and decided that I never needed to go into the basement again. I just had a feeling about it. I was twenty-five and not especially big on intuition—I was busy enough trying to keep my shit reasonably together—but the feeling I got from the basement was almost a physical barrier, a neon sign of the mind that said hell, no. It wasn’t enough to make me not want the apartment, though.
I fell in love with the place from the moment I saw it—original floors, clawfoot bathtub, fireplace, washer and dryer in the unit. The landlord was some kind of local political bigwig who’d outsourced the search for a new tenant to a real estate agency in the neighborhood. The representative watched me with pupils shaped like dollar signs as I drifted through the spacious unit, i
magining what my life would be like when it really, finally started. It was clear to both of us that I was going to take it.
A long hallway ran the length of the unit, starting at the front door and ending at the bathroom, with four doorways in between. Each room was painted a different color: living room (burnt orange), office (dark teal), bedroom (a purple so deep it was almost black), dining room and kitchen (baby blue), bathroom (yellow), a patchwork that mimicked the look of the neighborhood itself, with its colorful mansions next to falling-down duplexes and vacant lots. I told myself that I’d never had a basement in my other apartments, so it wouldn’t be a loss if I decided this basement didn’t exist. You accessed it from the building’s tiny lobby, a door just inside the front door that, the leasing agent assured me, was always kept locked. But that wound up not being true. Sometimes I’d come in and find the basement door propped open to a rectangle of darkness. Who propped open a door but kept the light off? When that happened, I would close the door immediately. It was more of an automatic reaction than a conscious choice, and to be honest, I didn’t spend much time thinking about it.
Not until other things started happening—things that were harder to ignore.
Coincidence. Our language, for all its complex grammar and arbitrary rules, is sometimes woefully inadequate. “Co-,” meaning together, and “incidence,” meaning occurrence. There’s nothing mysterious about that, but we use the word to mean something more. There’s a touch of the mystical involved when we call something a coincidence, a touch of the unexplainable. It goes beyond simply existing at the same time, as the word would have you believe. A phone call from a friend at the exact moment you think of her. Waking up with an obscure song in your head, then hearing that song through the window of a passing car later that day. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything, or does it? One can write these instances off as happenstance, but that gets harder to do when they start to multiply—when the purpose of that call from your friend is to tell you something that you somehow already know; when that obscure song is suddenly everywhere. That’s the stuff that sends a chill creeping through your bones. We still say coincidence to describe it, but I believe it’s so much more than the things occurring together that the definition would have us believe.
I still loved the apartment after I moved in. I loved the grand thoroughfare of Bryden Road, the tall, tall trees, the diversity of the residents in Columbus’s Olde Towne East neighborhood. I loved the way my scrappy young-person furniture looked in my apartment. I loved having so much space to myself. I loved not living in a cookie-cutter complex somewhere, with industrial surplus–colored Berber carpet and matte white walls. There were some things that I didn’t love, though. The occasional voices in the alley directly below my bedroom window to which I would sometimes wake, not entirely sure from where the sound was coming. Or the intermittent far-off pop-pop—was that… no, surely not… a gunshot? The kitchen faucet, which seemed possessed, spraying water everywhere except into the sink. The fact that my cat, who’d lived with me in four other apartments and was no stranger to moving, seemed terrified to leave my sight and sat right outside the bathroom and wailed when I took a shower.
Most of these things seemed beyond my control. The sink, though, wasn’t. Post–lease signing, the political-bigwig landlord outsourced the maintenance of the apartments to his dippy son, Adam, who was terrible. He was nosy and unreliable, had promised to repaint the kitchen for me before I moved in but didn’t, and then ducked my calls for a month. I left him a voice mail about my sink; he left me a plastic bag of washers with a Post-it attached—For the sink!—as if a lack of access to washers was the only thing that had prevented me from repairing it myself.
One afternoon, I happened to get a face full of hot water from the possessed faucet at the exact moment I heard Adam come into the lobby; a coincidence, a sign, surely, that he was supposed to help me that day. I went out, still clutching a damp dish towel, and demanded action.
“HEY, MISS KITTY!” he screamed at my cat when he came in. The cat hid under the couch—who could blame her?—as I tried to usher Adam into the kitchen. He was very chatty and wanted to stop in every room along the long hallway to survey my decorating. He asked for a beer, and when I said I didn’t have any, he had the nerve to inquire about the beer and string cheese he had left in my fridge before I’d taken possession of the apartment—not as in he’d left it as a gift but rather because he had forgotten it while he’d been there doing something other than repainting my kitchen as he had promised.
I had zero patience for Adam.
He finally fixed the sink. But this—this—is where the weirdness truly began. As he was walking back down the hallway towards the front door, he said, “Has that toilet been running a lot?”
I stared at him. The toilet wasn’t running, but it had been. I’d taken to moving the lid and manually lifting the float to get it to stop. In that moment, I felt certain that I should tell him “No.” The word surprised me as it came out of my mouth.
Adam nodded and said, “Let me know if it does. Or if you have any more issues with the plumbing. That’s just our friendly ghost!”
Adam was laughing a little as he said it. So I laughed, too, feebly, and let him leave without asking any follow-up questions.
I told myself that Adam was just a weirdo. There was evidence to support it: the string cheese, the washers, hey, miss kitty! A haunted toilet seemed like the type of thing such a person would joke about. Plus, if you’d asked me at the time if I believed in anything woo-woo, I would have said no. I knew people who’d seen stuff (don’t we all), and I had recently enough escaped from a doom-and-gloom Catholic upbringing full of cloying incense and stations of the cross, but the idea of energy trapped here after death—no, that wasn’t something I subscribed to. Wasn’t any haunting much more likely to be a trick of the light, a story half remembered, a coincidence, nothing more? But the feeling I had was similar to the same flashing neon hell, no my mind’s eye had seen in that basement.
Not too much later, I got a piece of mail. James B. Martin—deceased, the envelope said. It was from the IRS (which should probably know better than to send letters to dead people, if we’re being honest). I’d actually gotten mail for him before, including solicitations to renew his subscription from the Economist, which probably could not be blamed for not knowing better. I threw the solicitations away, as I did the rest of the mail for previous tenants. There was a lot, virtually all of it junk. Except the letter to the friendly ghost.
I ran into my apartment to do a Google search for him.
Martin. James B. Martin, 27, of Bryden Road, Columbus, died Friday afternoon, August 26, 2005.
THERE ARE THINGS THAT ONE SHOULD NOT GOOGLE. EVEN A decade ago, when the Internet had yet to take over our lives, this was true. Unexplained pains in the torso, the crime statistics around your new apartment after you had already moved in, the obituary of your very own friendly ghost. It didn’t say how he had died, or where. But I started to wonder if the basement didn’t merely seem like a murder basement; maybe it was one.
I shamelessly tore into the letter, but it was a boilerplate document about estate closing with no action required of anyone. Then, having committed this small act of mail fraud, I felt guilty and, frankly, a little nuts. Why? Because when the friendly ghost was just an abstract concept, he didn’t really bother me. I could easily write off Adam’s claim as the blathering of an idiot. But now that the friendly ghost possibly had a name, I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Maybe this was a coincidence, too—that my landlord’s annoying son mentioned a ghost and, unrelatedly, a tenant of the same apartment had died a few years ago? That was possible, right?
If I didn’t believe in ghosts, I certainly didn’t believe in manifestation, in calling forth the thing that you think about most often.
IT WAS SUMMER, AND THE OLD BUILDING HAD CENTRAL AC—in the sense that there were vents in the floor and air sometimes came out of them, though the air wasn’t especi
ally cool. There weren’t even vents in the bathroom, but the toilet tank sweat constantly, droplets of water slinking down the porcelain surface and splattering onto the floor.
It must be the water temperature, I assumed. Cold water, hot room.
But despite the hot room, the hexagonal tiles on the floor and the walls of the shower were always cold.
Antique hexagonal tile must not absorb heat at all, I assumed. A miracle substrate!
It all came to a head on a Sunday afternoon in late summer. At this point, I’d been casually ignoring the weird conditions in my bathroom for about four months, keeping myself busy with outdoorsy, young-person plans. In short, I hadn’t spent a lot of time at home. But I’d gotten a sunburn at a festival the previous day—the part in my hair had transformed into an angry red slash across my scalp—and on this afternoon, I was having a low-key day in.
Until two things happened.
First, I couldn’t find my colander. It had been in the sink, and then it was gone. I discovered its absence as I was about to pour my boxed macaroni down the drain. I set the pot back on the stove to consider the situation. The apartment was large, but it had a limited number of places for a plastic colander to hide itself. If it had suddenly become possessed of free will. These were the types of thoughts I was dealing with that summer. But, ultimately, I knew reality from wild speculation. If I didn’t believe in ghosts, I definitely didn’t believe in colander-stealing burglars or sentient kitchen tools.
I looked high and low in case I’d put the colander back in some odd location. Laundry room? Closet? Front porch? I was young and free; who knew what I could’ve gotten up to! Bathroom? Why not! I was laughing to myself as I went in and flipped on the lights. Nothing to see here. Except there it was, the colander, upside down in the sink.
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