Friday, May 20, 2005
SHAMOZAI
Rana stepped off the Voyage of the Damned, saw the desolation, a sign that said Seven Oaks, and another that said No Trespassing. Stranger in a strange land, he gave it wide berth, walking its boundary behind the gargantuan shopping center. The boundary tracked from steel cable line to full blown cyclone fence. His eye went no further than wonder and stayed upon the rocks he was kicking into the storm sewers along his way.
A small patch of green grass inclined up a steep hill: at the top was a green gate – open. Rana remembered the sign at the highway of the damned, thought to go on, but what harm in climbing? He climbed, stood at the entrance: at his feet were shards of a broken mirror; to his right and left, swaths of mown grass, forbidden for whom? The grass carpet fairly called to him. Why, at the top of a hill, open? Desolation on the highway gave way, back here, to birdcall, a rolling crop of sweet flowers, yellow and white, towering oaks, some lightning-split, and in the distance, staggeringly tall palm trees. Between the here and there of the palms was strewn a wasteland’s gaping maw of rubble.
One hundred feet to his left, the property faded into a neighborhood of small cottages. Rana turned this way, hoping to minimize his intrusion. He quickly came to a well-groomed silver green hedge with tiny purple flowers; beyond, a path that tracked the boundaries of the cottages. Here again, an opening – a welcome opening. Rana, for not the first time in this America, was perplexed. He quickly turned to go back into the property. It had the ghostly feel of ancient palaces in the land of his black suit, condemned by an Islam that demanded fealty to a land not seen, his own country, its own treasures, encouraged to die, helped to die, by a fervor of licensed demolition. Was there, in America, a Mecca of its own that made surreal the outlines of one’s own childhood? In which direction did one kneel and bow?
Birdcall from one of the towering oaks called to him: he followed, came upon large black iridescent birds gossiping in cool shade. Clearly a living room for someone: tall blue beer cans, a smashed farmer’s cap, weather-beaten socks, a pair of brown trousers all lay about a carpet of greener grass, in front of a long couch-length section of the giant oak. Just behind him, not another one hundred feet away, on the other side of the fence, was the enormous shopping center spread out upon its own imperial hill, but from his side of the fence, it was as if Rana had finally slipped out of the grip of the morning’s perdition and back into something like sanctuary. The store, a dinosaur gripped in its own eternity of dreaming, slept on. Rana, welcomed by the – he remembered now – throat-searing grackles, sat in the shade upon the limb of couch and tried dreaming himself back to before the wrong turn his morning had taken.
It began auspiciously enough. Clad again in his princely togs, he stood casually at a street corner in a quiet neighborhood, hidden, he foolishly hoped, behind his dark black sunglasses. The white car that pulled up beside him he thought was turning. It took a second calling of “Can we give you a ride?” from the boy in the back seat for Rana to realize that the question was meant for him. What struck him next, in this village of America, was recognition: the boy speaking was the boy in immaculate white from the bus two days before.
Leaning across the front seat, the driver opened the passenger door: the driver was not the father from the other day, the day of raspas stand, but the mother – the woman who had given the beautiful boy his flavors. Rana accepted the offer, took off his dark glasses, and sat beside the woman.
He looked straight ahead, but out of the corner of his eye, he could see that the woman was smiling – nothing predatory as that of the blond women whose questions and smiles he had endured: their imperial smiles, he had come to call them. This woman’s smile was simply warm acknowledgement – this day is blue, God is good, you are welcome – and in the simplicity of her welcome, he confirmed again to himself that there had to be something of the spice of curry in her veins, something from the there of his buried black suit.
“My son remembers you from —”
“Yes.”
“I’m not sure where you are going, but I can —”
“Yes. That would be fine. Yes.”
And so began the morning, two more children of the dust, bright pearls of mother-son conversation strung between them as Rana rode on in a silence they were happy to leave him to. When they stopped in front of two-story schoolhouse of blond bricks, he climbed out of the car himself, and bowed to the beautiful woman and boy. He was halfway down the block when the boy called to him, “Wait!”
Rana turned and kneeled down to the boy, running with his large turtle shell of a pack bouncing upon his back.
“Here,” the boy said, holding out his hand. Rana held out his open palm, into which the boy placed a solitary purple bead.
“Thank you. Salaam.”
“Salaam to you,” said the boy, laughing, and now running back to his mother, who waved to Rana’s last bow.
The school sat within a hodge-podge of shops, small industrial sites, derelict art studios, and down its side streets, leaning cottages dwarfed by the ancient cars and shiny new trucks parked at the curbs or, often enough, on the cottage lawns themselves. Rana kept his sunglasses off, seeking the eyes of those he passed, warmed by the joy of the mother and her son. The first man he passed and greeted looked straight ahead without comment. Unperturbed at this point, Rana said a brief prayer for the man and continued on.
Within minutes, the neighborhood passed into the outskirts of downtown: still the mix of homes and businesses, but the office buildings were shinier, even if the now larger houses were still struggling to stand. Walking under a highway overpass, Rana turned right toward the terra cotta of the library in the distance. Broken sidewalks gave on to shaded parks, alive to morning sprinklers and the quiet activity of more children of the dust thrown out onto the streets from their nightly bunks. Each park bench and table was occupied by readers with their belongings in bags, a cup of coffee beside them, and more often than not, a long cigarette hanging from their lips.
The library was still closed when Rana walked up. Remembering the coffees in the park, he walked down to the limestone paths along the downtown river in search of his own cup. Ten minutes later, out of cool cypress shade, he stumbled upon the café of the infidels, and settled into a chair on the verandah overlooking the jade water outside. Tourist boats motored by on the green channel, and a mix of strangers and downtown employees wandered in and out of the coffeeshop. Here, beneath feathered cypress and cool-quiet buildings, Rana thought to rest.
But, it was not to be. The man at the table to his left, at first quietly tapping away at his portable computer keyboard, called to a woman he knew who passed for her own morning cup of comfort. She returned moments later, the man lightly commenting upon her odd combination of infidel coffee and local barbecue.
“Comfort food,” she said. “It’s Friday, and I’m training. This keeps me sane.”
“I have gallons of comfort food,” said the man, indicating the ice cream shop behind him. He was the shop’s owner.
All well and good. Why, then, was Rana so irritated?
From comfort food, the conversation turned to space movies. Both man and woman professed – at length – a lack of enthusiasm for the current crop of them; the woman even professed a lack of enthusiasm for the old crop, a sentiment the man found difficult to let pass. To Rana’s growing consternation, the man opined at length about the which and the whys and the hows of what “you must see.” Rana was just making to go when the woman finally departed herself and life in the little corner of the downtown shop-village returned to a blissful quiet.
For approximately three minutes, at which point the Emperor of Ice Cream found yet another audience. This time Rana made to – and did – go, back up the long canal to the library.
From beneath the shade of his forbidden oak tree, he thought: “Perhaps that was the bend in the river.” And then: “Ghosts. It’s all about ghosts.” This last he said aloud to the stirring grackles.
Reader without a card, Rana had taken to visiting the same book on his many trips to the cool expanse of the downtown library – a book about a man traveling in his own part of the black-suited world, into its cities, its villages, deserts, into the crumbling remains of modern dreams shattering at the feet of the triumphant mullahs. The man had started his travels in Indonesia, then on to Iran in the days since the departure of Khomeini, and was now mired – there was no other word that Rana could think of – mired in his own black-suited world of Pakistan.
Feudal, the man said – kept saying. Again and again: feudal. Islam at its most debased, its most brutal, a genocide of bodies and spirit. In each of the countries in which he traveled, the man kept looking for a sacred place, some pathway back long before the juggernaut of Islam annihilated all claims of these countries to a past free of the Prophet’s swarming imperial children and their minions. In the uplands of Sumatra, he found the hot springs of Pariyangan, where the Minangkabau were said to have come out of the earth; in Java, he found the volcanic ground at the foot of Mount Merapi; in Iran’s deserts, by contrast, he seemed to find sacred ground in the hearts of some of its people as they valiantly sought to resist their own spiritual annihilation. But, in his own black-suited homeland, a land which Rana himself had left for utter lack of sustenance, the man seemed completely baffled by his search for anything one might still call sacred, free of the hammer of not just Islam, but feudal Islam.
And, as Rana wept bitter tears in a plush purple chair on the sixth floor of that cool expanse, bitter tears for the staggering roll call of brutality towards women, children, and men who stood in the way of Islam’s crushing blitz, finally – finally – the man found a whisper: Shamozai.
“Shamozai was spectacular,” wrote the traveling man. “It was surrounded on three sides by rocky, abrupt, sharp-edged mountains which were part of a mountain range. In the foothills of this range the settlement lay: from a distance, flat-roofed, flat-walled, a pattern of rock and wall and sun and shadow, cubist in appearance. The house [R—’s] father had been born in 1918 was high up. A narrow lane wound down the steep hill; near the bottom, next to the mosque, was the house [R—’s] father had established as his own. Not far away was the circular stone-stepped pool or tank fed by the spring that ran down the mountain…There would always have been a settlement at Shamozai; below the surface here, too, would be ruins that would take the human story back and back.”
But, just two paragraphs prior to the man’s song of praise, this:
“Just outside [R—’s] gate a young girl was playing in the dust: the first girl, the first female, I had seen since I had arrived. Purdah was soon going to fall on her; the rest of her life was going to be spent in that void where time was without meaning.”
Rana knew Shamozai: he knew that very lane down to the cool stones beneath his feet. He had known, too, many children of the dust – girlchilds – who had played with him and then disappeared beneath the Prophet’s veil. Lost. Missing. As good as dead to the boy he had been, staunchly, defiantly rejecting the words of his elders.
Let loose in America, the ghosts of his playmates had come home to roost.
Shamozai. It, too, crumbled beneath the veil.
Travel one long day’s time of travel from the shade of an oak tree to the Eden of Shamozai, and the tiny cup of joy dispensed this morning by a curry sister and her beautiful boy would, in that “spectacular” place, have been punishable by death.
Out of this inner desolation, a voice:
“What’s up, brother?”
The voice came from behind. Rana turned: in the far edges of the oak’s dappled shade sat a grizzled man in a lawn chair. Farmer’s cap – not unlike the one at Rana’s feet – on the man’s head, clothes a little less weathered than those strewn on the grassy floor.
Rana stood to go. “I’m sorry to have—”
“Intruded? Brother, I believe we’re both the other side of that misdemeanor. I’m sure you’ve seen the signs.”
“Yes.”
“Thing I can’t figure – aside from where’s the seven oaks, by my count there’s at least two dozen – anyway, the thing I can’t figure is, what’s the harm?”
“Harm in what, sir?”
“Harm in us sitting our coosters under these gorgeous trees and drinking a cold root beer if the spirit so moves us. Owners of this wasteland damn near burned down the whole neighborhood, and they have the gall to run is out? A might feudal, don’t you think, my brother?”
At mention of the word, the first of Rana’s many ghosts began to leave his body. He felt a cool breeze cross his face.
“I’ve got another of these Wal-Mart chairs, if you’re not boycotting.”
“Why would I be boycotting? The beast is everywhere,” said Rana, smiling.
“Some folks is a might concerned the Mighty Dragon of Mr. Walton is getting just a little too big for its britches. Boycott-schmoycott, I say. What’s wrong with a little old-fashioned theft? Purest kind of revenge, in my book.”
“Indeed,” said Rana, as he took the chair. The shade was even cooler where the old man sat.
“I’ve got two kinds of beer,” said the man, reaching into an ice chest, “real and root. What’ll you have?”
Rana fancied neither, but he did not want to appear ungrateful. “Actually, sir, a piece of ice would do.”
“Glad to, if you’ll dispense with that sir stuff.”
Rana knew it would be hard, but inclined his head. He rubbed the cube on both his wrists before he placed it in his mouth.
“Bud, if it will help.”
“Sir?” Blushing.
“Name’s Bud. You can use that instead of the sir. What’s yours?”
“Rana, Bud. I am Rana.”
“Whereabouts you from Rana?”
Rana smiled, looking off through the fence at Mr. Walton’s sleeping dragon. A big electric blue truck passed down the hill between them and the big mart. Rana crunched into the cube of ice and kept on looking, way out past the dragon into the distance. Look far enough out, and the view was spectacular.
“A very good question, Bud. I’d say, right about here.”
