“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 It was as if the city had deliberately rescinded all memory or trace of his family and the princess’s. Sara was right.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.