Abandon

by Iyer, Pico

  He took an early breakfast—one thing they still did well here—at a hotel Martine had told him about once, scribbled off a card to her, and then returned through the fog, less mysterious now the sun had risen, to catch the early flight to Jaipur. At the other end, pushing his way through the confusion of the small terminal, all the mystery and menace of the thronging crowds gone in the morning light, he found a man, impeccably got up in dark suit and tie, holding up a sign on which “Mr MacMillane” had been written.

  The man led him farther out into the clamor, and opened the door to a grey Mercedes. Hussein was putting him up in a hotel near his house—his way of showing that he knew foreign tastes—and so they drove out into the town: huge billboards with large women spilling out of saris and men dancing around miniskirts, little stalls that looked like they’d been swept forty years ago towards a wastepaper basket they’d never quite reached, the commotion of cows and bicycles and ringing bells made many times worse by the sudden profusion of cars. In such a world, he thought, who wouldn’t want to gather in secret at dead of night and take himself out of all this? The human impulse to escape would never go away: God has to be understood in the context of everything that is not Him.

  As they drew away from the town—the clangor and the big streets quickly fading—the driver put on a tape (another sign of Hussein’s wish to be seen as sophisticated, or else just his habit of directing everything), and the blowing winds and uprising sands of desert music came up as they passed, almost instantly, into open spaces. Already the villages around them were nothing but mud-baked houses, children crowding over fires, the wind outside sending red and orange and green and blue scarves fleeting against their faces in the dust. Dark eyes watched the carriage from their fairy tales move past, beseeching, angry, startled, and soon even they were gone, and there was nothing but brown earth, brown walls, dry stone—an ancient space of almost atavistic emptiness.

  At last they came to a large driveway—he could have been in California, he thought, in Palm Springs or some other garish attempt to fill the empty space—and pulled up to a huge house, crumbling but clearly elegant. Hussein was waiting for him at the door (the driver having called ahead when they were two minutes away), and came out to greet him as if they were oldest friends. Talk, he recalled, was never difficult in India, especially for an Englishman people were eager to impress.

  He was led into an old-fashioned reception room—the stuff of Indian fantasy, he thought—and Hussein circled around the topic at hand, asking him about the flight, offering him a drink, so perfectly slipping into the part he had chosen to play that it became quite impossible to see him. He, too, had become archetypal—the employer’s prerogative—and every last urbanity seemed like another veil thrown up, or a kind of fog. He could no more be identified than the men looming up in the mist the evening before.

  “You must be exhausted,” he said in that Indian way that was more warning than commiseration. “And absolutely famished. Let me get you something to take the edge off your hunger before we have a look at the manuscript.” He was daring him, he realized, to see him as cliché; in India, a man in a house like this would do everything possible to insist on his distance from the role, so as to lure his visitor into an assumption and then leave him at a disadvantage. The first prerogative of power is to do as it chooses and not even look at the rules it is breaking.

  “Of course I don’t expect you to come to any decision right away. In fact, I wouldn’t want you to; haste would be a kind of waste, don’t you think? Besides, this is India.” Every sentence reminding him of where he stood and whom he was seeing. “But I’d like you to take just a peek at it. Before you return to your hotel. So you can think about what you have to work with.”

  They walked into a library—again, it looked like a Sherlock Holmes movie, with a huge spherical globe at the center and nineteenth-century editions covering all the shelves, a scattering of dust—and the man extracted a key and pulled something out from a desk. “Here, don’t be shy,” his host offered, and he came around and found himself looking at a book like none he’d ever seen. A few Arabic characters were printed on the cover, framed by curlicues, and inside were pages upon pages of small script, written as tightly as a Quran. As in an illuminated manuscript from England, some characters were written in red, and gold had been used unsparingly.

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “Isn’t it? One of the few things that didn’t get carted off to the British Museum. In any case, I don’t, as I say, want you to say anything now. Mum’s the word. Just take the image back to the hotel, join me for dinner, and you can look at it properly in the morning.”

  The whole thing was a charade, of course: he recalled Sefadhi’s advice to authenticate nothing, however impressive it looked. His job was only to give the man a little time. “It doesn’t really matter what he has”—the professor’s final words. “These old palaces in India are full of everything. The important thing is that the awareness that he has something does not get out. That we keep it to ourselves.”

  Bearing this in mind, he checked into his hotel and lay out in the sun. Outside the walls, the desert wind blew, and at dusk the lights came on as in a miniature. For all the otherworldliness of the setting, he ran a long bath in his cabana, and thought of her; he called, once it was late enough, but all he could hear—this was still India—was her tentative “Hello? Hello?” and then a startled putting down of the receiver: she must have deemed it an intruder, or someone from her past.

  He dined with his generous host, heard about Mountbatten and the Travellers’ Club, pulled out such pieces of his past—Oxford, Wodehouse—as were part of the local currency, and, in the morning, returned early to spend all day with the text. Whatever it was, it was beautiful—he thought of the dome of the mosque in Damascus, of Persian carpets he had seen, and the Qurans so small they fit inside an earlobe. Not all the script was intelligible to him, but it didn’t matter: he was walking through another world, of cool courtyards and the sound of water, and above everything there was a patterning of gold and peacock blue.

  The book might have been drawn up by some loyal retainer a generation ago; that would take nothing away from its radiance. The centuries collapsed in India, so no one really seemed to care what was new and what was millennia-old, any more than they would worry about whether this copy of Reader’s Digest came from last week or a century before.

  On his last night in the place, after dinner, Hussein asked him if he wanted to see something “absolutely unexpected,” and he followed him up some small, narrow, winding stairs to a rooftop, where his host (ever-surprising) kept a telescope. Lights were intermittent from this vantage point, but the older man fumbled and cursed at the lenses till they could see the planets as clearly as he had seen her, a few days before.

  “You’ve come to some conclusion about my manuscript,” said the man, screwing up a lens.

  “Not at all. All I can tell you is it’s beautiful, which you know already. As you also know, the likelihood of its being original, or worth anything, is next to nothing, I’m afraid.”

  The man held on to his demeanor as if he was remembering what the English said about sangfroid.

  “What I’d recommend is keeping it here, with all your other treasures”—a nice touch—“and enjoying it whenever possible. Whatever you might get for it would not be worthy of it in any way.”

  This had been Sefadhi’s suggestion, and again it seemed to work: the Englishman from across the seas had somehow converted disappointment into something to be cherished.

  “You wouldn’t recommend other appraisers?”

  “Obviously, it wouldn’t be in my interests to do so. But even to be disinterested for the moment”—“Be an Englishman with him,” Sefadhi had said, “that’s all he wants”—“I think too many hands would only injure what is, whatever its provenance, a gesture of love.”

  These were just the right words to use, and the man smiled again, flattered at the quality of the
messenger, if not his message. “Jolly good,” he said, in that engagingly antiquated way the foreigner remembered from his other visit. “Shall we go down and celebrate with a cigar?” The “celebrate” a gesture of thanks to him.

  On the way back to Delhi, he stopped off in Agra, as he’d promised her. “I know it made me almost fall asleep with disappointment when I was a teenager,” he’d said, “but our eyes change. Grow up. Before, I didn’t know that the gardens were a diagram of Paradise, and I couldn’t read the inscription on the dome. I knew nothing about Shah Jahan’s connection with the Sufis—the way his son had had the Upanishads translated into Persian, and his daughter had been so ardent a mystic she would have been a sheikh if she had been a he. I was like a nonbeliever staring at a sacred manuscript. I think I’ll have grown into it, in a way.”

  When he walked through the main gateway this time, he thought of the court chronicler of Akbar, centuries before: “Through order, the world becomes a medium of truth and reality; and that which is but external receives through it a spiritual meaning.” Amidst the dust and the noise and the crowds of the city around, the cab drivers with their whispers, the boys with their carpet shops “close close,” the squiggled commotion of nonlinear India—surely no clearer when Shah Jahan was on the throne—the building made a different kind of sense. In its way, in fact, it seemed a kind of Sufi parable: while the visitors thronged into the main chamber, bright with lapis and carnelian and jade, letting their voices echo around its great dome, the real meaning of the place, Martine had told him, was all underground. “You’ve got to go there at dusk,” she’d said, “after the heat’s gone down, and the crowds have begun to thin out. Just before the gates are closed. If you’re lucky, the small gate will be open. The whole point of the Taj is what you can’t see.”

  He went back to a hotel for lunch, having taken in the details and oriented himself, as meticulous as any spy circling around his prey— every Sufi poem has a face it shows the world, and a secret life that is its own: a Sufi building is a model of the soul. Then, in late afternoon, he went back through the great gates, paying again, just as lights were beginning to come on across the Yamuna, and water buffalo were gathering along the far shore to drink. The crowds of villagers in flaming orange and scarlet and golden saris—antidotes to the deserts where they lived—were just about gone now, subdued into murmurings, and as the sun declined into mist across the polluted river, guards were walking about the benches with torches, making sure no one was hiding in the dark.

  As he hovered around the great entrance, trying to make himself unobtrusive, suddenly, amazed, he saw a faint light—a naked bulb only—shining from the bottom of a flight of stairs plunging down. He descended quickly, so quickly he almost slipped on the recently washed steps, and at the bottom he came out into a strange inner chamber, hushed and small, where two men were pouring water on the floor.

  One of the men—both dark, and dressed in the clothes of the poor, dirty white shirts and grey trousers—shuffled over to one of the great caskets in the room, and placed a lighted stick of incense on it. Then a rose. A few moments later, he took another stick of incense and a rose and put them on the other casket, built like an afterthought on the side, housing the man who dreamed up the palace, now beside his wife. The decorations on his tomb were flowers, on hers verses from the Quran.

  Above them, just faintly coming down the steps, were the last voices of sightseers trying out the echo, amazed to have the great dome talk back to them and no one else. Their voices climbing up towards the rafters, and then reverberating around and around them in circles. But the caskets they were so busily serenading were empty ones, ruses to distract the world from the real spirits buried in this underground place.

  The men said nothing, just went quietly, devotedly, about their task. He was the only other one in the company of the tombs. His feet on the marble floor—Damascus again—were cold. He felt in some way that he didn’t try to explain to himself, or even to make clear, that being here was a large part of what reading his poems, seeing her was about. Under the public exterior, there was always an unvisited deep vault.

  In his hotel room, lit only by oil lamps now that the electricity had failed again, he turned over a postcard of the false tombs and wrote:

  Is it the gods who put this fire in our minds, or is it that each man’s relentless longing becomes a god in him?

  —VIRGIL

  The next day, flying towards England, he tried to imagine how he would begin to tell her of the experience: one in which nothing had happened externally, but certain locks had fallen away. One of which he had no photographs and which he could not explain by way of any postcards or posters of the Taj. One, in fact, that he had been pointed towards by the woman with whom he was in some ambiguous way “taken.”

  “You go into a mosque,” he heard himself telling her in his mind, “and it’s empty space: water and shadow and light. In the desert, water’s worth more than rubies. The smallest glint of color almost blinds you. You walk into a prayer hall and it’s so vast, so empty, for all the people praying and chanting and chatting there, that you get swallowed up. You disappear: become a particle of light, a wisp of smoke.

  “You’re in a place so safe, and yet so rapt, that you lose all sense of you, and become the air.”

  Getting out another postcard, he simply copied out a sentence he’d found in a bookshop at the airport.

  Heart is the name of the house that I restore.

  —MIR DARD

  I missed you more than I can say; more even than my silence could communicate.

  J.

  The next morning, making his excuses to Nigel and Arabella (“I still think you’ve gone bonkers. A little while in California, and you become—I don’t know—Timothy Leary or something”), he took an early train to Oxford and walked through the muddle of dusty red-brick streets, as changeless as the buildings around them, to Mowbray.

  The man was getting on, of course, but he still kept up his full load of teaching, and every afternoon, or even late at night, after a Formal Dinner, he’d get on his bicycle and go along South Parks Road all the way to the flat he shared with his sister, off the Bardwell Road. “Home” was probably putting it too grandly: it was a typical North Oxford encampment, with astrologers in the basement, and the sound of Tibetan chants coming up through the gratings now and then, to mingle with the bicycles, odd language students with pasty faces slipping in and out of doors, a piano teacher whose errant students served instead of Muzak, and a few very dark men who talked about the LSE but seemed in some form affiliated with the university. In the middle of the ragged chaos, Mowbray seemed content in a small second-floor flat, offering “ex officio” advice to anyone who sought it.

  When he walked up the steps to the porridge-grey building and rang the white button three down from the top, a small figure appeared, a few minutes later, looking worried, and Alice Mowbray showed him the way up to the room. In all his years of knowing the scholar, he’d never penetrated the secret sanctuary before.

  “How are you?” said the professor, getting up from his armchair, a little unsteadily.

  “Very well. You?”

  “I survive. You’ve brought something for me, I see.”

  “Nothing much.” It was a book he’d found in the hotel bookshop in Delhi, surely out of print here, and redolent of a time when Mowbray was himself a student. An exploration of St. Thomas’s work in southern India, by one F. W. Pickering Smith, M.A.

  “Thank you, thank you: I knew his son,” his old professor said, not entirely unexpectedly. “And you, how is life in California?”

  It felt absurdly like a le Carré novel, but he told him anyway. “Almost exactly as you’d expect.”

  “A good thing and a bad thing, then?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But it agrees with you? You’re happy?” Ruthless about essays and excuses, he was always disarmingly kind—undefended, almost— when it came to human things. “He pours his st
rength into his scholarship and keeps his vulnerability for his life,” as Parkinson had said once.

  “Enough. Sefadhi’s a brilliant tutor, and the place is beautiful to look at. It’s never lost that Gold Rush feeling, though now all the prospectors are shrewd enough to say it’s ‘spiritual gold’ they’re after. But ever since Pagels, I think, they’re all out for hidden treasure.” He wondered how much he was talking of himself.

  “And you’re off doing heretics?”

  “In a sense. It’s bracing.”

  “I should think it would be,” the old man said, with the ambiguous air that had left generations of students unsure of whether they’d been patted on the shoulder or put in their place (or, more likely, both at once).

  “Thank you, my dear,” he said, as his sister brought in a tray with the tea and milk and sugar and a stack of digestives.

  “I got your letter, of course,” he went on—now that the biscuits were here, the formal session was deemed to have begun—“and would be glad to help if inexpertise is no hindrance.”

  “It’s not at all. I mean, I don’t want to put you on the spot, and I know it’s not your field, but I keep running into hints, all over the place, about so-called secret manuscripts—unpublished things, verses kept in family homes and the like—that came out of Iran in ’79, or soon thereafter. I was wondering if you’d heard anything about that?”