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 stripedflannel 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 next 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 gray, 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?”
His eyes hung like sapphires in the dimness, gaze fixed on me, one hand resting atop the embossed six-foot-long metal trunk that had emerged. He tilted his head so the feeble light fell on his left temple. The twisted pale scar gleamed.
“The boy who fell from the eucalyptus tree,” I whispered. “He gashed his head and the princess bandaged it for him. You’re him.”
The old man smiled. “Who I am is not important, son. What’s important is this room where your grandfather worked for years.”
Speechless, I gaped at him. After days of frustration and disappointment, I was standing in the room Gramps had occupied decades ago, this dingy store with its decaying inhabitants. I looked around as if at any moment Gramps might step out from the shadows.
“He was the best teacher I ever had,” Bashir said. “We used to call him the Calligrapher Prince.”
He flashed a smile. It brightened Bashir the merchant’s tired, old face like a flame.
I watched this man with his wispy moonlight hair and that coiled scar who had kept my grandfather’s secret for half a century. We sat around a low circular table, dipping cake rusk into mugs of milk chai sweetened with brown sugar. It was eight in the morning.
Bashir gripped his cup with both hands and frowned into it.
“My father was an electrician,” he said. “By the time he was fifty he’d saved enough to buy a carpet shop. With lots of construction going on, he was able to get this shop dirt cheap.
“Rugs were an easy trade back in the seventies. You hired weavers, most of ’em immigrants from up north, and managed the product. We didn’t have good relations with neighboring countries, so high demand existed for local rugs and tapestries without us worrying about competition. After the dictator Zia came, all that changed. Our shop didn’t do well, what with rugs being imported cheap from the Middle East and Afghanistan. We began to get desperate.
“Right about then a stranger came to us.”
It began, Bashir said, the evening someone knocked on their door with a rosy-cheeked child by his side and told Bashir’s father he was looking for work. Bashir, then in his late teens, stood behind his baba, watching the visitor. Wary, the rug merchant asked where they hailed from. The man lifted his head and his face shone with the strangest light Bashir had seen on a human countenance.
“It swept across his cheeks, it flared in his eyes, it illuminated the cuts and angles of his bones,” said Bashir, mesmerized by memory. “It was as if he had been touched by an angel or a demon. I’ll never forget it.”
“From thousands of miles away,” said the man quietly. “From many years away.”
It was Gramps, of course.
Bashir’s father didn’t recognize him, but he knew the man’s family. Their only son, Muhammad Sharif, had been abroad for years, he’d heard. Lived in Iran, Turkey, Allah knew where else. Sharif’s aged father still lived on Khajoor Gali in Old Lahore, but he’d shut down his design stall in the Niche of Calligraphers years ago.
“Sharif had been back for a few months and he and his son were living with his father. Now they needed money to reopen their shop.” Bashir smiled. “Turned out your grandfather was an expert rug weaver. He said he learned it in Turkey near Maulana Rumi’s shrine. My father offered him a job and he accepted. He worked with us for three years while he taught kilim weaving to our apprentices.
“He was young, hardly a few years older than I, but when he showed me his notebook, I knew he was no ordinary artist. He had drawn mystical poetry in animal shapes. Taken the quill and created dazzling worlds. Later, when my father put him before the loom, Sharif produced wonders such as we’d never seen.”