Sara’s face was unreadable when I opened my eyes. “Quite a story, eh?” I said uneasily.
She scratched the groove above her lips with a pink fingernail. “So he digs up whatever was under the tree and it decides him. He leaves everything and goes off to marry a stranger. This is romantic bullshit. You know that, right?”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Left everything,” she repeated. Her mouth was parted with wonder. “You think whatever he found under the stump survived the fire?”
“Presumably. But where he took it – who can say? Eventually, though, they returned home. To Lahore, when Gramps had recovered enough sanity, I guess. Where his father, now old, had closed shop. Gramps helped him reopen. Together they ran that design stall for years.”
It must have been a strange time for Gramps, I thought. He loved his parents, but he hated Bhati. Even as he dipped his pen in ink and drew spirals and curlicues, his thoughts drew phantom pictures of those he had lost. Over the years, he came to loathe this art that unlocked so many memories inside him. And after his parents died he had neither heart nor imperative to keep going.
“He was done with the place, the shop, and Lahore. So when a friend offered to help him and his teenage son move to the States, Gramps agreed.”
I turned my head and burrowed into Sara’s lap. Her smell filled my brain: apple blossom, lipstick, and Sara.
She nuzzled my neck. The tip of her nose was cold. “He never talked to you about it? Never said what happened?”
“No.”
“And you and your family had no idea about this artistic side of him? How’s that possible?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “He worked at a 7-Eleven in Houston when he and Baba first came here. Never did any painting or calligraphy, commissioned or otherwise. Maybe he just left all his talent, all his dreams in his hometown. Here, look at this.”
I showed her the phrase that spiraled across the edges of a couple dozen pages: My killer, my deceiver, the Courtesan of the Mughals. “It’s Lahore. He’s talking about the city betraying him.”
“How’s that?”
I shrugged.
“How weird,” Sara said. “Interesting how broken up his story is. As if he’s trying to piece together his own life.”
“Maybe that’s what he was doing. Maybe he forced himself to forget the most painful parts.”
“Lightning trees. Odd thing to say.” She looked at me thoughtfully and put the journal away. “So, you’re the last of the Mughals, huh?” She smiled to show she wasn’t laughing.
I chortled for her. “Seems like it. The Pauper Prince of New England.”
“Wow. You come with a certificate of authenticity?” She nudged her foot at the book tower. “Is it in there somewhere?”
It was getting late. Sara tugged at my shirt, and I got up and carried her to bed, where we celebrated my return with zest. Her face was beautiful in the snow shadows that crept in through the window.
“I love you, I love you,” we murmured, enchanted with each other, drunk with belief in some form of eternity. The dark lay quietly beside us, and, smoldering in its heart, a rotating image.
A dim idea of what was to come.
I WENT THROUGH Gramps’s notes. Many were in old Urdu, raikhta, which I wasn’t proficient in. But I got the gist: discourses and rumination on the otherworldly.
Gramps was especially obsessed with Ibn Arabi’s treatise on jinns in The Meccan Revelations. The Lofty Master Arabi says, wrote Gramps, that the meaning of the lexical root J-N-N in Arabic is ‘concealed.’ Jinn isn’t just another created being ontologically placed between man and angel; it is the entirety of the hidden world.
“Isn’t that fucking crazy?” I said to Sara. We were watching a rerun of Finding Neverland, my knuckles caked with butter and flakes of popcorn. On the screen J. M. Barrie’s wife was beginning to be upset by the attention he lavished upon the children’s mother, Sylvia. “It kills the traditional narrative of jinns in A Thousand and One Nights. If one were to pursue this train of thought, it would mean relearning the symbolism in this text and virtually all others.”
Sara nodded, her gaze fixed on the TV. “Uh huh.”
“Consider this passage: ‘A thousand years before Darwin, Sufis described the evolution of man as rising from the inorganic state through plant and animal to human. But the mineral consciousness of man, that dim memory of being buried in the great stone mother, lives on.’”
Sara popped a handful of popcorn into her mouth. Munched.
I rubbed my hands together. “‘Jinns are carriers of that concealed memory, much like a firefly carries a memory of the primordial fire.’ It’s the oddest interpretation of jinns I’ve seen.”
“Yeah, it’s great.” Sara shifted on the couch. “But can we please watch the movie?”
“Uh-huh.”
I stared at the TV. Gramps thought jinns weren’t devil-horned creatures bound to a lamp or, for that matter, a tree.
They were flickers of cosmic consciousness.
I couldn’t get that image out of my head. Why was Gramps obsessed with this? How was this related to his life in Lahore? Something to do with the eucalyptus secret?
The next morning I went to Widener Library and dug up all I could about Arabi’s and Ibn Taymeeyah’s treatment of jinns. I read and pondered, went back to Gramps’s notebooks, underlined passages in The Meccan Revelations, and walked the campus with my hands in my pockets and my heart in a world long dissipated.
“Arabi’s cosmovision is staggering,” I told Sara. We were sitting in a coffee shop downtown during lunch break. It was drizzling, just a gentle stutter of gray upon gray outside the window, but it made the brick buildings blush.
Sara sipped her mocha and glanced at her watch. She had to leave soon for her class.
“Consider life as a spark of consciousness. In Islamic cosmology the jinn’s intrinsic nature is that of wind and fire. Adam’s – read, man’s – nature is water and clay, which are more resistant than fire to cold and dryness. As the universe changes, so do the requirements for life’s vehicle. Now it needs creatures more resistant and better adapted. Therefore, from the needs of sentient matter rose the invention that is us.”
I clenched my hand into a fist. “This interpretation is pretty fucking genius. I mean, is it possible Gramps was doing real academic work? For example, had he discovered something in those textbooks that could potentially produce a whole new ideology of creation? Why, it could be the scholarly discovery of the century.”
“Yes, it’s great.” She rapped her spoon against the edge of the table. Glanced at me, looked away.
“What?”
“Nothing. Listen, I gotta run, okay?” She gave me a quick peck on the cheek and slid out of her seat. At the door she hesitated, turned, and stood tapping her shoes, a waiting look in her eyes.
I dabbed pastry crumbs off my lips with a napkin. “Are you okay?”
Annoyance flashed in her face and vanished. “Never better.” She pulled her jacket’s hood over her head, yanked the door open, and strode out into the rain.
It wasn’t until later that evening, when I was finalizing the spring calendar for my freshman class, that I realized I had forgotten our first-date anniversary.
Sara hadn’t. There was a heart-shaped box with a pink bow sitting on the bed when I returned home. Inside was a note laying atop a box of Godiva Chocolates: