Arden's Quadberry

Rana walked in the afternoon heat down to the street corner. He watched his feet pass over the black surface, dusted with the mustard yellow of oak pollen. There was something rich and fine about the dust – a fine gold to the modest neighborhood in which he walked.

He stepped up into the shade of a looming elm tree, its teardrop leaves all round him, and greeted the dark man already waiting in the shade. The man was dressed in black jeans and a red shirt, with another black shirt slung over his shoulder; he kept peeling the red shirt off of his chest to cool himself. When Rana asked him the time, the man ignored the large watch face on his wrist and flipped open the tiny phone in his hand.

“4:49,” said the man.

“Thank you,” said Rana. “Which of the two buses are you taking?”

“Whichever comes first,” peeling the red shirt again.

The two of them stood on silently in the cooling shade. Rana noted the electric blue cars on the busy road to the east, watched one bus pass and then another take his shade companion away. Across the elm yard, a shaggy blond poodle was stretched out in weedy grass. Seated in a lawn chair beside the dog was a frail old woman with dark purple sunglasses on. The dog stretched and rolled over indolently; one leg stayed straight up in the air. The woman toed a bowl of water the dog’s way. Neither leg nor dog moved any further. Rana was about to wish for a life so still, but then noted that he, and not the dog, had the shade. When he looked again, the woman was standing and slowly guiding the dog through the front door. She then sat back down in the sun.

“Eyes are shot,” said the woman to an audience that could only have been Rana. She’d thrown the remark forty feet to reach him. He reluctantly walked out of the shade, her shade.

“I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do for you?”

She hiccupped a laugh. “Oh, not me; it’s Dime. Couldn’t see a dimwitted grasshopper if it peed on her.”

He walked a few feet more into the sun. “Dime is your dog, then.”

“Dime is my bosom pal, my young friend, and Dime is dyin’.”

“I’m sorry —”

“Bloody cancer in that leg she likes to stick up. Guess she likes the sun on it. I’d buy her the damn sun, if I could.”

“Something for the pain, perhaps?”

“Only thing for this pain is pure D death. Till then she can stink up my sheets all she wants. Poor thing’s hardly got a bladder left to speak of – leaky as an old bucket, little darlin’.”

Three blocks away, Rana saw his bus stopped at the intersection. He nodded his head to walk toward the street —

"Why don’t you set a spell? Care for some tea?

The number 8 bus blew by his stop as he was formulating his polite regrets.

“Why don’t I prepare a cup for you?”

“Nonsense. Got a jug right here.” She leaned down to retrieve a two gallon jar from its perch in the tall grass in front of her. A white top was screwed down tight and several tea bags floated in the tea water.

She nudged her sunglasses back atop her skull and took a good look at Rana. “You’ll be wanting sugar in yours, I expect.”

“Yes, please.”

“Well, sorry. Not gonna. Orwell may not agree with me about cooking in the sun, but I completely agree about no sweets. That ain’t tea – it’s candy.”

“Orwell is your husband?”

“Don’t I wish. Actually, I don’t. Consumption bit that boy good. Looked worse than me when he died, and only 47 at that. Helluva thing.”

“Orwell was a friend, then.”

The old woman was incredulous now: she gave Rana’s madrona-colored skin and shalwar-kameez no slack. “Orwell, my good man – George Orwell – wrote the last century’s biggest nightmare, a nightmare we still haven’t figured out the half of. The nightmare wasn’t dictators far off in the wild blue yonder; the nightmare was them’s right under our own damn noses.”

Rana was no fool; he’d just not known George bloody Orwell to be as opinionated about tea as he was about farm animals.

“I don’t know about biggest nightmare, ma’am. I believe General Zia wrote a fair masterpiece himself, only his wasn’t in a Garamond font.”

The old woman wrinkled her nose up at him in a way he imagined she used to sixty years ago, to enchant a younger generation of tea-drinkers. “General Zia? Touché.” Her smile turned grim. “My apologies.”

“Please. No need. It is water under the bridge.”

“It is never that, my friend. Never that. Blood, maybe, but never water. Come help me with this jug, if you would.”

Rana followed through the front door with the warm jug of tea, its color a fair match for the color of his forearm. For some reason, given the weedy state of the front lawn, he’d expected an inner version of the same. Not the immaculate white carpet and furniture, set off by French doors in the back leading into an overflowing English-style garden wrapped round a lovely old brick fountain.

“I leave the front ragged on purpose. I find it works better than burglar bars.” A bright male cardinal flew to a perch just outside the back door. Rana felt that he and the woman had been blessed.

She took the jar from him and walked to the open kitchen, left of the back doors. “Yard temp, right? Please, take a seat.”

He was sure any resistance to tea plans was futile, so he walked to an overstuffed chair that looked inviting. Behind it was the door to an immaculately white bedroom. On the bed, to the right of a rotary fan, Dime was sleeping soundly. Until he saw the faintest rise of the dog’s chest, he wondered if it was the final sleep.

The woman was back beside him. “Here you go, Mr. —”

“Rana. Rana.”

“Here you go, Mr. Rana.”

“No. Please. Just Rana. My first name.”

“Yes. Well, then. Rana – I like that. And I am Margaret. From your Zia comment, I take it you are not from round here?”

“Lahore.” It was a delight to finally not have to draw a map. Who would have thought it, in this shabby little village of San Antonio?

“You’ve read Naipaul?” – reaching behind her to an overstuffed bookcase. She pulled out the familiar grey book.

He smiled. “I have read him. And I have traveled with him.”

“Have you? And how is —”

“Forgive me. I should say that I have traveled with him here,” pointing to his heart.

“I understand.” She set the book down beside her on the couch. Her hand smoothed out the white cushion. “Done a bit of that myself.” She picked the book back up. “This book —”

“Yes. All of it. All of it. Or, all of my country. I cannot speak for the others. But I can imagine.”

“Zia…Zia was a very wicked man.”

“General Zia was a very religious man, Margaret.”

“But —”

“Please. I will not offend you. In your West, it is so easy to call someone wicked, or like your President, evil. That misses the point, it lops off too much understanding. If you start with the crucial point of General Zia’s fervor, you begin to understand the truth of all righteousness – be it Islam or Christian: religion kills. And it kills back. Mrs. Herring – I believe, had she been there – could have just as easily hung Mr. Bhutto.”

“You know of her.”

“I’ve been to Houston’s libraries, too. I walked Westheimer, wandered the streets of River Oaks. Often enough was asked to help carry out the garbage, even in my shalwar-kameez. Does this look like the uniform of a slag heap?”

He had not expected so much emotion to rise. He’d thought it was all tightly wrapped in his silent conversations with Naipaul. Now, here, in this white shrine of a living room, he felt thirty years of bile spilling out onto Margaret’s immaculate floor.

“Margaret. I am very sorry.” He set his glass of tea on the table beside him and rose to go.

“No. Rana. Please stay.” She walked over to him, and gently pushed him back into the chair. There was no force: a cool, gentle touch.

“We will finish this,” she said.

Lunched in downtown Tres Leches with the Nome King and his guest, the lovely KDM. We sat midst the ghosts of Studebakers, baby nomes, and rolling thunder. We were, he said, at the center of creative civilization, dreaming the dream of dreamers. It may have just been the carrot cake talking. That and the IBC.

Up walks the Emperor Nome, vouches for his vassal – as if he needed vouching. Two more sprung from the Granada epi-center.

From the CofCC, I wandered outriver to the Enchilada: Rumer Godden is calling, scrambling the signals of Vidiadhar. Will the Dark Horse win, or will we stay with Rana in Pakistan? On the 14 down, I imagined Rana in Tres Leches: Yemaya’s darker sister was on the bus, as was a silver ankle bracelet listening to England talking. She was in love, charmingly bucktoothed, goldenstout: black tee said the Queen is Dead. Did England know? I didn’t.

MauMauChaplain riddims. 96 tears, you’re gonna cry, cry cry cry now. The mind waffles, crinkles, we are one: ?, Moe, Zimm, and sister Joni.

From the enchilada, north: 8-ward to Thomas Pynchon Elementary. Benny Profane, disciplinarian; Tyrone Slothrop, Implementarian. Mi-Q is sad on the baking tundra: his times did not suit the Speedy Gonzalez of the Playground Set. Crystal’s encouragement was to no avail: only ice cream could cure this heartbreak, so we 8 our way to the D-Sham: push-up and Barq’s elixir. We crossed the Baby Faux Silicon Byway and 14ed our way to Seven Oaks and home.

Along the way, natch, 4 rounds of Wilbert or Mi-Q: kicking rocks into storm sewers: you miss the last, you are Wilbert for life. I assure Q that I couldn’t possibly live with a Wilbert son in the house: he would have to sleep in the back yard. Sez he: “but, there would be wolves.” I did not know that wolves were still roaming the outskirts of Tres Leches. He assures me they are. Thankfully, his accuracy saves me from a Wilbert-son and him from the wolves.

Last night at Hole Fooms, ever the nose-Q isolating yet another offending effluvia: “That smells like burning brontosaurus burger.”

Rana: Welcome to Tres Leches.

ARTEMIS

Virtue rescinded
I would see what essence is
At the brink
Of an eye
The blue gate,
A sand wall and 30
Bodies: compost for the chenars
Between here and Sangrama
They had said
“Come here for the beauty
And the chinar trees”
But come too for a taste.

I must note that I cannot recall
And then again I do not know—
Four big chinar trees standing
In the middle of the lake
Blue under the shade of centuries,
Lapis for the eye and throat.

In the midst of the saffron fields
The place where Zoon was singing
Sona lank and Rupa lank
Which of the four will she cut, who
If any will she spare,
Paydar dreams the lake
Out of the dream of revolutionary dust
His mother a different blue than
Krishna’s veil at the lying gate.

The next day, 40 feed
The roots that will not wander
The blind eye at the Azadi Hotel


Blinks.

[At the Evin Crossroads: again from Naipaul: 05.12.05]



“…Now I thought especially of my mother and what she had done without being aware of these ideologies. For me she was the symbol of the real human being. She was loved by everyone. Anyone who knew her loved her. It was something very strange…All the time she was busy with them, helping them, although she was ill.

“I thought that ideologies are only a small part of our intellect which can help in life. The main source lies in our cultural way of thinking. And natural behavior of people like my mother. The revolution I worked for didn’t understand me as an intellectual or my mother as a person.”

Paydar, in Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul's Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples


KHALKALLI

He drools
His bib a sign of sooner days
Calling from under heaven’s gate

Plunder his belly for dried fruit
The ache of violence in pursuit
Of justice—a bearded dream

Laughing with the Imam
Insulting the gods of the inner root
His throne a lawn chair
Ratted nesting, nested to a pair
Of slippers.

Hangman
A child’s game
In the company of men
In the shade of the blue chenar trees
In the quiet of the serrated knife
At the Evin Crossroads—

Qom with me
Would you like cheese?
Fruit? Will you sit with me
And slice the nerve between
Head and root?

The old man shuffles
Party boy, glow worm
On the floor,
Devouring the flame,
Nursing the ayatollahs.

Send the babies to the front
Kiss them beneath Allah’s book
Water their footsteps
Knit your brows with the Imam.

Drool in your pants, old man
Sit in your lawn chair
Air to the throne
Under a dome that withers meat—

Winter at the blue Evin gate.

[AND THE REST: 05.12.05]

To wit, even as we speak:


Mullahs of Iran: "We don't stone to death, only hanging" [italics, Quad's]
Jan 11, 2005

Khalkhali, Hanging Mullah Judge

Iran's mullahs issued a fierce denial on Tuesday that it was executing criminals under the age of 18 or stoning people to death, dismissing as foreign propaganda reports that such punishments were continuing.

"In the Islamic republic, we do not see such things being carried out," judiciary spokesperson Jamal Karimi-Rad told reporters. [Quad: we do not see...]

"Bringing up the issues of stoning and the execution of under-18s comes from outside the country and is aimed at distorting the image of the Islamic republic," he said.

The spokesperson, however, did not rule out the possibility that such sentences were being issued by certain courts. However he said they were invariably quashed on appeal or by the Supreme Court - which has to approve all executions - and stressed "no such verdicts have been carried out."

No sentence of stoning has been carried out in Iran for more than a year, with the practice seeming to have been suspended since the end of 2002 following a direct order by the judiciary's head, and under pressure from the European Union. The EU has made human rights a part of its ongoing effort to engage Iran and negotiate closer trade ties.

In a recent case, the stoning verdict for an Iranian woman, identified as Hajieh Esmailvand, was stayed pending a decision by the pardons commission. The woman had been convicted of murdering her husband.

Human rights activists and diplomats have said that while Iran appears to have respected a moratorium on stoning, there have been cases of minors being executed.

Murder, armed robbery, rape, apostasy and serious drug trafficking are also punishable by hanging in Iran.

© Iranian.ws