Last, a special key was prepared. This part took some sorting out – he had to fetch certain particles farther along in time – but he succeeded; and finally he had the key. It was designed to talk to the blood-light in one person only, one descended from Sharif’s line and the Mughal princess’s.
Me.
INCREDULOUS, I GAZED at my dead grandfather as he told me his last story.
His cheeks glowed with youth, his eyes sharp and filled with truth. His hair was black, parted on the left. Maybe the glass shone, or his eyes, but the effect was the same: an incredible halo of light, near holy in its alienness, surrounded him. When he shook his head, the halo wobbled. When he spoke, the carpet’s fringe threads stirred as if a breeze moved them, but the voice was sourceless and everywhere.
“Today is the sixteenth of November, 2013,” he had said before launching into narration like a machine. “You’re twenty-eight. The woman you love will be twenty-five in three months. As for me” – he smiled – “I’m dead.”
He was telling me the future. Prescience, it seemed, had been his forte. And now I knew how. The Cup of Heaven.
“Is it really you?” I said when he was done, my voice full of awe. Gramps nodded. “More a portion of my punishment than me.”
“What does that mean? What other secrets were in the cup? Tell me everything, Gramps,” I said, “before I go crazy.”
“All good stories leave questions. Isn’t that what I will say?” He watched me, serious. “You should understand that I’m sorry. For bringing you here.
For passing this on to you. I wish I’d never dug under that tree. But it is the way it is. I was handed a responsibility. I suppose we all get our burdens.” The air in the room was thick and musty. Our eyes were locked together.
He lured me here, I thought. My hands were shaking and this time it was with anger. Rage at being manipulated. All those stories of princesses and paupers, those lies he told for years while all the time he knew exactly what he was doing and how he was preparing me for this burden, whatever it was. Gramps’s spirit, or whoever he was in this current state, watched me with eyes that had no room for empathy or guilt. Didn’t he care at all? “I do, son,” he said gently. He was reading my mind or already knew it – I wasn’t clear which – and that angered me more. “I haven’t gotten to the most important part of the story.”
“I don’t care,” I said in a low voice. “Just tell me what was in the cup.”
“You need to know this.” His tone was mechanical, not my gramps’s voice. The person I knew and loved was not here. “The Jaam gave me much.
Visions, power, perfect knowledge, but it cost me too. Quite a bit. You can’t stare into the heart of the Unseen and not have it stare back at you.” He swept a hand around himself. For the first time I noticed the halo wasn’t just hovering behind his head; it was a luminescent ring blooming from his shoulders, encircling his neck, wrapping around his body. “It wasn’t for me to decide the cup’s fate, so I hid it away. But because the Unseen’s presence ran like a torrent from it I paid more than a man should ever have to pay for a mistake. I was told to dig up the secret and hide it, not to gaze at its wonders or partake of its mysteries. My punishment hence was remembering the future and being powerless to prevent it. I would lose everything I remembered about the love of my life. Starting from the moment I dug under the eucalyptus, I would forget ever having been with your grandmother. My lovely, luckless Zeenat.
“Once the task was complete and I handed over the trunk to Bashir, my memories began to go. With time, my mind confabulated details to fill in the gaps and I told myself and everyone who’d ask that I had married a woman who died during childbirth. By the time we moved to America, all I remembered was this nostalgia and longing to discover a secret I thought I’d never pursued: the pauper princess and her magical jinn.”
When he stopped, the outline of his face wavered. It was the halo blazing.
“What you see before you” – with a manicured finger Gramps made a circle around his face – “is an impression of those lost years. My love’s memory wrenched from me.”
He closed his eyes, letting me study the absence of age on his face. If he were telling the truth, he was a figment of his own imagination, and I... I was crazy to believe any of this. This room was a delusion and I was complicit in it, solidifying it.
Maybe that was why he forgot. Maybe the human mind couldn’t marry such unrealities and live with them.
“What about the journal? If you forgot everything, how could you draw?
How could you write down details of your life?”
Gramps, his apparition, opened his eyes. “Senility. When my organic memory dissolved, fragments of my other life came seeping back in dreams.” So he wrote the journal entries like someone else’s story. He had visions and dreams, but didn’t know whose life was flooding his head, filling it with devastating images, maybe even ushering in his death earlier than it otherwise might have come.
I leaned back and watched the threads of the carpet twist. The woven tower shot into the sky with hundreds of creatures gathered around it, looking at its top disappear into the heavens.
“I want to see the cup.” My voice rose like a razor in the dark, cutting through the awkwardness between us. “I want to see the contents.”
“I know.” He nodded. “Even such a warning as you see before you wouldn’t deter you.”
“If the cup’s real, I will take it with me to the States, where historians and mythologists will validate its authenticity and...”
And what? Truly believe it was a magical cup and place it in the Smithsonian? The cup’s secret isn’t for human eyes, Gramps had said. But what else are secrets for if not discovery? That is their nature. Only time stands between a mystery and its rightful master.
Gramps’s fingers played with the halo, twisting strands of luminosity like hair between his fingers. “You will have the secret, but before you drink from it, I want you to do something for me.”
He snapped his fingers and threads of light sprang from the halo, brightening as they came apart. Quickly he noosed them until he had a complicated knot with a glowing center and a string dangling at the end.
He offered it to me. “Pull.”
Warily, I looked at the phosphorescent string. “Why?”
“Before you gaze inside the cup, you will have a taste of my memories.
After that you decide your own demons.”
I reached out a hand to the glass shard, withdrew, extended it again. When my fingers touched it, I flinched. It was warm. Slowly, I pushed my hand into the glass. It was like forcing it through tangles of leaves hot from the sun. The string reddened. Its end whipped back and forth. I pinched it, pulled, and the light string rocketed toward me, the brilliant corpuscle at its center thrashing and unraveling into reality.
I gasped. A fat worm of peacock colors was climbing my hand, wrapping itself around my wrist.
“Gramps! What is this?” I shouted, twisting my arm, but the creature was already squirming its way up my arm, its grooves hot against my flesh, leaving shadows of crimson, mauve, azure, muddy green, and yellow on my skin. I could smell its colors. Farm odors. Damp foliage. Herbal teas. Baba’s truck with its ancient vomit-stained upholstery and greasy wheel covers. My mother’s hair. Sara’s embrace.
I shuddered. The worm’s body was taut across the bridge of my nose, its two ends poised like metal filings in front of my eyes.
“These,” Gramps said, “are the stingers of memory.”
The worm’s barbs were like boulders in my vision. As I watched them, terrified, they vibrated once.