by Paula Guran
Does that excuse what he did? I don’t think so. My mother’s spent all her life trying to put us back together and she’s done okay, but there are pieces of herself she wasn’t able to find. In either me, or Fanny, or in anyone else.
I don’t want that to happen to me. I don’t want to end up like my mother. That’s pretty much it. If you didn’t love me, I’d understand. I’d be hurt, but I could live with it. But living with this uncertainty, never knowing when you might get that wanderlust I’ve seen in your eyes lately, is impossible for me. There’s so much I want to say to you. Things you need to know if we’re to have a future together. But the last thing I want to do is force you.
So I’m leaving. I’m going to stay at Fanny’s. Think things through. It will be good for both of us. It will help me get my head straight and will let you do whatever you want to get your fucking demons out. So fly free. Go to Pakistan. Follow your goddamn heart or whatever. Just remember I won’t wait all my life.
You know where to find me.
Love,
Sara
I put down the letter and stared out the window. Night rain drummed on the glass. I tapped my finger to its tune, fascinated by how difficult it was to keep time with it. A weight had settled on my chest and I couldn’t push it off.
If an asshole weeps in the forest and no one is around to witness, is he still an asshole?
Nobody was there to answer.
For most of the fifteen-hour flight from New York to Lahore I was out. I hadn’t realized how tired I was until I slumped into the economy seat and woke up half-dazed when the flight attendant gently shook my shoulder.
“Lahore, sir.” She smiled when I continued to stare at her. The lipstick smudge on her teeth glistened. “Allama Iqbal International Airport.”
“Yes,” I said, struggling up and out. The plane was empty, the seats gaping. “How’s the weather?”
“Cold. Bit misty. Fog bank’s coming, they said. Early this year.”
That didn’t sound promising. I thanked her and hurried out, my carry-on clattering against the aisle armrests.
I exited the airport into the arms of a mid-November day and the air was fresh but full of teeth. The pale sea-glass sky seemed to wrap around the airport. I hailed a cab and asked for Bhati Gate. As we sped out of the terminal, whiteness seethed on the runway and blanketed the horizon. The flight attendant was right. Fog was on the way.
At a busy traffic signal the cabbie took a right. Past army barracks, the redbrick Aitchison College, and colonial-era Jinnah Gardens we went, until the roads narrowed and we hiccuped through a sea of motorbikes, rickshaws, cars, and pedestrians. TERRORISTS ARE ENEMIES OF PEACE, said a large black placard on a wall that jutted out left of a fifty-foot high stone gate. The looming structure had a massive central arch with eight small arches above it. It had a painting of the Kaaba on the right and Prophet Muhammad’s shrine on the left with vermilion roses embossed in the middle. Another sign hung near it: WELCOME TO OLD LAHORE BY THE GRACE OF ALLAH.
We were at Bhati Gate.
The cab rolled to a stop in front of Kashi Manzil. A tall, narrow historical-home-turned-hotel with a facade made of ochre and azure faience tiles. A wide terrace ran around the second floor and a small black copper pot hung from a nail on the edge of the doorway awning.
I recognized the superstition. Black to ward off black. Protection against the evil eye.
Welcome to Gramps’s world, I thought.
I looked down the street. Roadside bakeries, paan-and-cigarette shops, pirated DVD stalls, a girls’ school with peeling walls, and dust, dust everywhere; but my gaze of course went to Bhati and its double row of arches.
This was the place my grandfather had once gazed at, lived by, walked through. Somewhere around here used to be a tea stall run by a Mughal princess. Someplace close had been a eucalyptus from which a kid had fallen and gashed his head. A secret that had traveled the globe had come here with Gramps and awaited me in some dingy old alcove.
That stupid wanderlust in your eyes.
Sara’s voice in my brain was a gentle rebuke.
Later, I thought fiercely. Later.
The next day I began my search.
I had planned to start with the tea stalls. Places like this have long memories. Old Lahore was more or less the city’s ancient downtown and people here wouldn’t forget much. Least of all a Mughal princess who ran a tea shop. Gramps’s journal didn’t much touch on his life in the walled city. I certainly couldn’t discern any clues about the location of the eucalyptus treasure.
Where did you hide it, old man? Your shack? A friend’s place? Under that fucking tree stump?
If Gramps was correct and the tree had fallen half a century ago, that landmark was probably irretrievable. Gramps’s house seemed the next logical place. Trouble was I didn’t know where Gramps had lived. Before I left, I’d called Baba and asked him. He wasn’t helpful.
“It’s been a long time, son. Fifty years. Don’t tax an old man’s memory. You’ll make me senile.”
When I pressed, he reluctantly gave me the street where they used to live and his childhood friend Habib’s last name.
“I don’t remember our address, but I remember the street. Ask anyone in Hakiman Bazaar for Khajoor Gali. They’ll know it.”
Encircled by a wall raised by Akbar the Great, Old Lahore was bustling and dense. Two hundred thousand people lived in an area less than one square mile. Breezes drunk with the odor of cardamom, grease, and tobacco. The place boggled my mind as I strolled around taking in the niche pharmacies, foundries, rug shops, kite shops, and baked mud eateries.
I talked to everyone I encountered. The tea stall owner who poured Peshawari kahva in my clay cup. The fruit seller who handed me sliced oranges and guavas and frowned when I mentioned the pauper princess. Rug merchants, cigarette vendors, knife sellers. No one had heard of Zeenat Begum. Nobody knew of a young man named Sharif or his father who ran a calligraphy-and-design stall.
“Not around my shop, sahib.” They shook their heads and turned away.
I located Khajoor Gali—a winding narrow alley once dotted by palm trees (or so the locals claimed) now home to dusty ramshackle buildings hunched behind open manholes—and went door to door, asking. No luck. An aged man with henna-dyed hair and a shishamwood cane stared at me when I mentioned Baba’s friend Habib Ataywala, and said, “Habib. Ah, he and his family moved to Karachi several years ago. No one knows where.”
“How about a eucalyptus tree?” I asked. “An ancient eucalyptus that used to stand next to Bhati Gate?”
Nope.
Listlessly I wandered, gazing at the mist lifting off the edges of the streets and billowing toward me. On the third day it was like slicing through a hundred rippling white shrouds. As night fell and fairy lights blinked on the minarets of Lahore’s patron saint Data Sahib’s shrine across the road from Bhati, I felt displaced. Depersonalized. I was a mote drifting in a slat of light surrounded by endless dark. Gramps was correct. Old Lahore had betrayed him. It was as if the city had deliberately rescinded all memory or trace of his family and the princess’s. Sara was right. Coming here was a mistake. My life since Gramps’s death was a mistake. Seeing this world as it was rather than through the fabular lens of Gramps’s stories was fucking enlightening.
In this fog, the city’s fresh anemia, I thought of things I hadn’t thought about in years. The time Gramps taught me to perform the salat. The first time he brought my palms together to form the supplicant’s cup. Be the beggar at Allah’s door, he told me gently. He loves humility. It’s in the mendicant’s bowl that the secrets of Self are revealed. In the tashahuud position Gramps’s index finger would shoot from a clenched fist and flutter up and down.
“This is how we beat the devil on the head,” he said.
But what devil was I trying to beat? I’d been following a ghost and hoping for recognition from the living.
By the fifth day I’d made up my mind. I sat shivering on a wooden
bench and watched my breath flute its way across Khajoor Gali as my finger tapped my cell phone and thousands of miles away Sara’s phone rang.
She picked up almost immediately. Her voice was wary. “Sal?”
“Hey.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
A pause. “You didn’t call before you left.”
“I thought you didn’t want me to.”
“I was worried sick. One call after you landed would’ve been nice.”
I was surprised but pleased. After so much disappointment, her concern was welcome. “Sorry.”
“Jesus. I was . . . ” She trailed off, her breath harsh and rapid in my ear. “Find the magic treasure yet?”
“No.”
“Pity.” She seemed distracted now. In the background water was running. “How long will you stay there?”
“I honest to God don’t know, but I’ll tell you this. I’m fucking exhausted.”
“I’m sorry.” She didn’t sound sorry. I smiled a little.
“Must be around five in the morning there. Why’re you up?” I said.
“I was . . . worried, I guess. Couldn’t sleep. Bad dreams.” She sighed. I imagined her rubbing her neck, her long fingers curling around the muscles, kneading them, and I wanted to touch her.
“I miss you,” I said.
Pause. “Yeah. Me too. It’s a mystery how much I’m used to you being around. And now that . . . ” She stopped and exhaled. “Never mind.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” She grunted. “This damn weather. I think I’m coming down with something. Been headachy all day.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. It’ll go away. Listen, I’m gonna go take a shower. You have fun.”
Was that reproach? “Yeah, you too. Be safe.”
“Sure.” She sounded as if she were pondering. “Hey, I discovered something. Been meaning to tell you, but . . . you know.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Remember what your gramps said in the story. Lightning trees?”
“Yes.”
“Well, lemme text it to you. I mentioned the term to a friend at school and turned out he recognized it too. From a lecture we both attended at MIT years ago about fractal similarities and diffusion-limited aggregation.”
“Fractal what?” My phone beeped. I removed it from my ear and looked at the screen. A high-definition picture of a man with what looked like a tree-shaped henna tattoo on his left shoulder branching all the way down his arm. Pretty.
I put her on speakerphone. “Why’re you sending me pictures of henna tattoos?”
She was quiet, then started laughing. “That didn’t even occur to me, but, yeah, it does look like henna art.”
“It isn’t?”
“Nope. What you’re seeing is a Lichtenberg figure created when branching electrical charges run through insulating material. Glass, resin, human skin—you name it. This man was hit by lightning and survived with this stamped on his flesh.”
“What?”
“Yup. It can be created in any modern lab using nonconducting plates. Called electric treeing. Or lightning trees.”
The lightning trees are dying.
“Holy shit,” I said softly.
“Yup.”
I tapped the touch screen to zoom in for a closer look. “How could Gramps know about this? If he made up the stories, how the fuck would he know something like this?”
“No idea. Maybe he knew someone who had this happen to them.”
“But what does it mean?”
“The heck should I know. Anyways, I gotta go. Figured it might help you with whatever you’re looking for.”
“Thanks.”
She hung up. I stared at the pattern on the man’s arm. It was reddish, fernlike, and quite detailed. The illusion was so perfect I could even see buds and leaves. A breathtaking electric foliage. A map of lightning.
A memory of heaven.
I went to sleep early that night.
At five in the morning the Fajar call to prayer woke me up. I lay in bed watching fog drift through the skylight window, listening to the mullah’s sonorous azaan, and suddenly I jolted upright.
The mosque of Ghulam Rasool, the Master of Cats.
Wasn’t that what Gramps had told me a million years ago? That there was a mosque near Bhati Gate that faced his house?
I hadn’t seen any mosques around.
I slipped on clothes and ran outside.
The morning smelled like burnished metal. The light was soft, the shape of early risers gentle in the mist-draped streets. A rooster crowed in the next alley. It had drizzled the night before and the ground was muddy. I half slipped, half leapt my way toward the mullah’s voice rising and falling like an ocean heard in one’s dream.
Wisps of white drifted around me like twilit angels. The azaan had stopped. I stared at the narrow doorway next to a rug merchant’s shop ten feet away. Its entrance nearly hidden by an apple tree growing in the middle of the sidewalk, the place was tucked well away from traffic. Green light spilled from it. Tiny replicas of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina and Rumi’s shrine in Turkey were painted above the door.
Who would put Rumi here when Data Sahib’s shrine was just across the road?
I took off my shoes and entered the mosque.
A tiny room with a low ceiling set with zero-watt green bulbs. On reed mats the congregation stood shoulder to shoulder in two rows behind a smallish man in shalwar kameez and a turban. The Imam sahib clicked the mute button on the standing microphone in front, touched his earlobes, and Fajar began.
Feeling oddly guilty, I sat down in a corner. Looked around the room. Ninety-nine names of Allah and Muhammad, prayers and Quranic verses belching from the corners, twisting and pirouetting across the walls. Calligrams in the shape of a mynah bird, a charging lion, a man prostrate in sajdah, his hands out before him shaping a beggar’s bowl filled with alphabet vapors. Gorgeous work.
Salat was over. The namazis began to leave. Imam sahib turned. In his hands he held a tally counter for tasbih. Click click! Murmuring prayers, he rose and hobbled toward me.
“Assalam-o-alaikum. May I help you, son?” he said in Urdu.
“Wa Laikum Assalam. Yes,” I said. “Is this Masjid Ghulam Rasool?”
He shook his head. He was in his seventies at least, long noorani beard, white hair sticking out of his ears. His paunch bulged through the striped-flannel kameez flowing past his ankles. “No. That mosque was closed and martyred in the nineties. Sectarian attacks. Left a dozen men dead. Shia mosque, you know. Used to stand in Khajoor Gali, I believe.”
“Oh.” I told myself I’d been expecting this, but my voice was heavy with disappointment. “I’m sorry to bother you then. I’ll leave you to finish up.”
“You’re not local, son. Your salam has an accent,” he said. “Amreekan, I think. You look troubled. How can I help you?” He looked at me, took his turban off. He had a pale scar near his left temple shaped like a climbing vine.
I watched him. His hair was silver. His sharp eyes were blue, submerged in a sea of wrinkles. “I was looking for a house. My late grandfather’s. He lived close to the mosque, next door to a lady named Zeenat Begum. She used to run a tea stall.”
“Zeenat Begum.” His eyes narrowed, the blues receding into shadow. “And your grandfather’s name?” he asked, watching the last of the worshippers rise to his feet.
“Sharif. Muhammad Sharif.”
The oddest feeling, a sort of déjà vu, came over me. Something had changed in the air of the room. Even the last namazi felt it and glanced over his shoulder on his way out.
“Who did you say you were again?” Imam sahib said quietly.
“Salman Ali Zaidi.”
“I see. Yes, I do believe I can help you out. This way.”
He turned around, limping, and beckoned me to follow. We exited the mosque. He padlocked it, parted the bead curtain in the doorway of the rug shop n
ext door, stepped in.
When I hesitated, he paused, the tasbih counter clicking in his hands. “Come in, son. My place is your place.”
I studied the rug shop. It was located between the mosque and a souvenir stall. The awning above the arched doorway was grey, the brick voussoirs and keystone of the arch faded and peeling. The plaque by the entrance said Karavan Kilim.
Kilim is a kind of Turkish carpet. What was a kilim shop doing in Old Lahore?
He led me through a narrow well-lit corridor into a hardwood-floored showroom. Mounds of neatly folded rugs sat next to walls covered in rectangles of rich tapestries, carpets, and pottery-filled shelves. Stunning illustrations and calligraphy swirled across the high wooden ceiling. Here an entranced dervish whirled in blue, one palm toward the sky and one to the ground. There a crowd haloed with golden light held out dozens of drinking goblets, an Urdu inscription spiraling into a vast cloud above their heads: They hear his hidden hand pour truth in the heavens.
A bald middle-aged man dressed in a checkered brown half-sleeve shirt sat behind a desk. Imam Sahib nodded at him. “My nephew Khalid.”
Khalid and I exchanged pleasantries. Imam sahib placed the tasbih counter and his turban on the desk. I gazed around me. “Imam sahib,” I said. “This is a Turkish carpet shop. You run an imported rug business in your spare time?”
“Turkish design, yes, but not imported. My apprentices make them right here in the walled city.” Without looking back, he began walking. “You can call me Bashir.”
We went to the back of the shop, weaving our way through rug piles into a storeroom lit by sunlight from a narrow window. Filled to the ceiling with mountains of fabric rolls and broken looms, the room smelled of damp, rotten wood, and tobacco. In a corner was a large box covered with a bedsheet. Bashir yanked the sheet away and a puff of dust bloomed and clouded the air.
“Sharif,” said the merchant Imam. “He’s dead, huh?”
“You knew him?”
“Of course. He was friends with the Mughal princess. The lady who used to give us tea.”
“How do you know that?” I stared at him. “Who are you?”