Each spring we all pile back onto the estate, of course, to help with pollination. Tinkerers all. We experiment sometimes with boxes of mechanical bees, imported at swingeing cost from Shenzen or Macao. But nothing works as well as a chicken feather wielded by a practised hand. This is how Dan, the scion of our line, came to plummet from the topmost rung of his ladder. The sons he had been teaching screamed, and from where I sat, stirring drying pots on the kitchen table, the first thing that struck me was how they sounded just like girls.
DAD LEADS ME in. Much fuss is made of me. The boys vie with each other to tell their little brothers about the day, the airfield, the mayor. While Dad’s women are cooing over them, I go through to the yard.
Dan is sitting where he usually sits, on sunny days like these, in the shelter of the main greenhouse, with a view of our plum trees. They, more than any other crop, have made our family rich, and it occurs to me with a lurch, seeing my brother slumped there in his chair under rugs, that it is not the sight of their fruit that has him enthralled. He is watching the walls. He is watching the gate. He is guarding our trees. There’s a gun by his side. A shotgun. We only ever fill the cartridges with rock salt. But still.
Dan sees me and smiles and beckons me to the bench beside him. “It’s time,” he says.
I knew this was coming.
“I can’t pretend I can do this any more. Look at me. Look.”
I say what you have to say in these situations. Deep down, though, I can only assent. There’s a lump in my throat. “I haven’t earned this.”
But Dan and I, we have always been close, and who else should he turn to, in his pain and disability and growing weakness? Who else should he hand the business to?
The farm will be mine. Melissa. The boys. All of it mine. Everything I ever wanted, though it has never been my place to take a single pip. It is being given to me freely, now. A life. A family. As if I deserved it!
“Think of the line,” says Dan, against my words of protest. “The sons I’ll never have.”
We need sons, heaven knows. Young guns to hold our beachheads against the naughty French. Keepers to protect our crop from night-stealing London boys. Swords to fight the feuds that, quite as much a marriage pacts, shape our living in this hungry world.
It is no use. I have no head for politics. Try as I might, I cannot think of sons, but only of their making. Celia Johnson with a speck of grit in her eye. Underwear and a bed of dreams. May God forgive me, I am that depraved, my every thought is sex.
Dan laughs. He knows, and has always known, of my weakness. My interest in women. It is, for all the changes our world’s been through, still not an easy thing, for men to turn their backs on all the prospects a wife affords.
“Pick me a plum,” my brother says. So I go pick a plum. Men have been shot for less. With rock salt, yes. But still.
I remember the night we chose, Dan and I, not to raid the larder of the poor, confused old woman who had burst into my room. Perhaps it was simply the strangeness of the day that stopped us. (We stole one jar and left the rest alone.) I would like to think, though, that our forbearance sprang from some simple, instinct of our own. Call it decency.
It is hard, in such revolutionary times, always to feel good about oneself.
“Here,” I say, returning to my crippled benefactor, the plum nursed in my hands.
Dan’s look, as he pushes the fruit into his mouth, is the same look he gave me the night we tasted, ate, and finished entirely, that jar of priceless, finite honey. Pleasure. Mischief. God help us alclass="underline" youth.
Ten, twelve years on, Dan’s enjoying another one-time treat: he chews a plum. A fruit that might have decked the table of the mayor himself, and earned our boys a month of crusts. He spits the stone into the dust. Among our parsimonious lot, this amounts to a desperate display of power: Dan knows that he is dying.
I wonder how it tastes, that plum – and Dan, being Dan, sees and knows it alclass="underline" my shamefaced ambition. My inexcusable excitement. To know so much is to excuse so much, I guess, because he beckons me, my brother and my friend, and once I’m knelt before him, spits that heavy, sweet paste straight into my mouth. And makes me king.
THE PAUPER PRINCE AND THE EUCALYPTUS JINN
Usman T. Malik
USMAN T. MALIK (www.usmanmalik.org) is a Pakistani writer resident in Florida. He reads Sufi poetry, likes long walks, and occasionally strums naats on the guitar. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Black Static, Daily Science Fiction, Exigencies, and Qualia Nous, among other places. He is a graduate of Clarion West.
When the Spirit World appears in a sensory Form, the Human Eye confines it. The Spiritual Entity cannot abandon that Form as long as Man continues to look at it in this special way. To escape, the Spiritual Entity manifests an Image it adopts for him, like a veil. It pretends the Image is moving in a certain direction so the Eye will follow it. At which point the Spiritual Entity escapes its confinement and disappears.
Whoever knows this and wishes to maintain perception of the Spiritual, must not let his Eye follow this illusion.
This is one of the Divine Secrets.
FOR FIFTEEN YEARS my grandfather lived next door to the Mughal princess Zeenat Begum. The princess ran a tea stall outside the walled city of Old Lahore in the shade of an ancient eucalyptus. Dozens of children from Bhati Model School rushed screaming down muddy lanes to gather at her shop, which was really just a roadside counter with a tin roof and a smattering of chairs and a table. On winter afternoons it was her steaming cardamomand-honey tea the kids wanted; in summer it was the chilled Rooh Afza.
As Gramps talked, he smacked his lips and licked his fingers, remembering the sweet rosewater sharbat. He told me that the princess was so poor she had to recycle tea leaves and sharbat residue. Not from customers, of course, but from her own boiling pans – although who really knew, he said, and winked.
I didn’t believe a word of it.
“Where was her kingdom?” I said.
“Gone. Lost. Fallen to the British a hundred years ago,” Gramps said.
“She never begged, though. Never asked anyone’s help, see?”
I was ten. We were sitting on the steps of our mobile home in Florida. It was a wet summer afternoon and rain hissed like diamondbacks in the grass and crackled in the gutters of the trailer park.
“And her family?”
“Dead. Her great-great-great grandfather, the exiled King Bahadur Shah Zafar, died in Rangoon and is buried there. Burmese Muslims make pilgrimages to his shrine and honor him as a saint.”
“Why was he buried there? Why couldn’t he go home?”
“He had no home anymore.”
For a while I stared, then surprised both him and myself by bursting into tears. Bewildered, Gramps took me in his arms and whispered comforting things, and gradually I quieted, letting his voice and the rain sounds lull me to sleep, the loamy smell of him and grass and damp earth becoming one in my sniffling nostrils.
I remember the night Gramps told me the rest of the story. I was twelve or thirteen. We were at this desi party in Windermere thrown by Baba’s friend Hanif Uncle, a posh affair with Italian leather sofas, crystal cutlery, and marbletopped tables. Someone broached a discussion about the pauper princess. Another person guffawed. The Mughal princess was an urban legend, this aunty said. Yes, yes, she too had heard stories about this so-called princess, but they were a hoax. The descendants of the Mughals left India and Pakistan decades ago. They are settled in London and Paris and Manhattan now, living postcolonial, extravagant lives after selling their estates in their native land.