It was only after his father died that Shaheen Badoor Khan understood how much he hated the house by the river. It is not that the haveli is ugly or overbearing—it is the contrary of all of those things. But its airy cloisters and verandahs and spacious, high-ceilinged white rooms are heavy with history, generation, duty. Shaheen Badoor Khan cannot go up the steps and pass under the great brass lantern in the porch and enter the hall with its twin spiralling staircases, the men’s and the women’s, without remembering himself as a boy, hiding behind a pillar as his grandfather Sayid Raiz Khan was carried out to the burying ground by the old hunting lodge in the marshes, and again, walking behind his own father as he made that same, swift journey through the teak doors. He will make that journey himself, through his fine teak double doors. His own sons and grandsons will bear him through. The haveli is crowded with lives. There is no cranny away from relatives and friends and servants. Every word, deed, intention is visible, transparent. The concept of place apart is one he remembers with tight pleasure from Harvard. The concept of privacy, the New England reserve: reserve, a thing set aside, for another use.
He crosses the mezzanine to the women’s half of the house; as always, he hesitates at the door of the zenana. Purdah had been abolished in haveli Khan in his grandfather’s time but Shaheen Badoor Khan had always felt a sense of shame of the women’s apartments; things here, stories in the walls, ways of living that had nothing to do with him. A house divided, like the hemispheres of the brain.
“Bilquis.” His wife has set up her office in the screened balcony with its view over the teeming, tumultuous ghats and the still river. Here she writes her articles and radio speeches and essays. In the bird garden beneath she entertains her clever, disenfranchised friends as they drink coffee and make whatever plans clever, disenfranchised women make.
We are a deformed society, the music-loving civil servant had said as Mumtaz Huq took the stage.
“Bilquis.”
Footsteps. The door opens, the face of a servant—Shaheen Badoor Khan cannot remember which one—peeps out.
“The Begum is not here, sahb.”
Shaheen Badoor Khan slumps against the sturdy doorframe. The one time he would cherish a few sentences snatched between busy lives. A word. A touch. For he is tired. Tired of the relentlessness. Tired of the appalling truth that even if he sat down and did nothing like the sadhu on a street comer, events he has set in motion will swell behind him, one feeding the other, into a drown-wave. He must always run those few steps ahead. Tired of the mask, the face, the lie. Tell her. She will know what to do.
“Always out, yes.”
“Mr. Khan?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
The door closes on the sliver of face. For the first time in memory, Shaheen Badoor Khan is lost in his own house. He cannot recognise the doors, the walls, the hallways. He is in a bright room now, overlooking the river, a white room with the mosquito nets tied up in big, soft knots, a room filled with slants of light and dust and a smell that calls him back to himself. Smell is the key of memory. He knows this room, he loved this room. It is the old nursery; his boys’ room. His room, high over the water. Here he would wake every morning to the salutations of the Brahmins to the great river. The room is clean and pale and bare. He must have ordered it cleared after the boys left the house for university but he cannot remember instructing it so. Ayah Gul died ten years ago but in the wooden slats, the draped curtains he can smell the perfume of her breast, the spice of her clothing though Shaheen Badoor Khan realises with a start that it is decades since he entered this room. He squints up into the light. God is the light of the Heavens and of the Earth… It is light upon light. God guideth whom He will to His light, and God seteth forth parables to men, for God knoweth all things. The sura curls like smoke in Shaheen Badoor Khan’s memory.
It is only because, for the first time in long memory, he feels there are no eyes watching, that Shaheen Badoor Khan can do what he does now. He reaches his arms out at his side and starts to spin, slowly at first, feet feeling fot balance. The Sufi spinning dance, that whirled the dervishes into the God-consciousness within. The dhikr, the sacred name of God, forms on his tongue. A bright flash of child-memory, his grandfather holding perfectly in place on the geometric tiled floor of the iwan as the qawwals play. A Mevlevi had come from Ankara to teach Indian men the sema, the great dance of God.
Spin me out of this world, God-within.
The soft mat rucks beneath Shaheen Badoor Khan’s feet. The concentration is intense, every thought on the motion of the feet, the turning of the hands, down to bless, up to receive. He spins back through his memories.
That crazy New England summer when high pressure moored over Puritan Cambridge and the temperature climbed and stuck and everyone opened their doors and windows and went out into the streets and parks and greens or just sat in their doorways and balconies, when Shaheen Badoor Khan, in his sophomore year, forgot what it was to be cold and restrained. Out with friends, coming back late from a music festival in Boston. Then it came, out of the soft, velvet, scented night and Shaheen Badoor Khan was paralysed, fixed like a northern star as he was to be a quarter of a century later in Dhaka airport by a vision of the unearthly, the alien, the unobtainable beauty. The nute frowned at the rush of noisy undergraduates as it tried to sidestep. It was the first Shaheen Badoor Khan had ever seen. He had read, seen pictures, been intrigued, tantalised, tormented by this dream of his childhood incarnate. But this was flesh: real, no legendary beast. He had fallen in love on that Harvard green. He had never fallen out again. Twenty-five years, carrying a thorn in the heart.
Feet move, hands weave, lips shape the mantra of the dhikr. Spinning back.
The wrapping was perfect, simple, elegant. Red, black, and white koi patterned paper, a single strand of cellophane raffia, gold. Minimal. Indians would have prettied it, gaudified it, put hearts and bows and Ganeshas, had it play tunes and spring out confetti blessings when opened. At the age of thirteen, Shaheen Badoor Khan knew when he saw the parcel from Japan that his would never be a true Indian spirit. His father had brought gifts for all the family back from the trade trip to Tokyo. For his younger brothers, Boys Day Carp Kites—proudly flown from the balconies of Haveli Khan ever after. For oldest son, Nihon in a box. Shaheen had goggled at the squeeze tubes of Action Drink, the Boat In the Mist chocolate, the trading cards and Waving Kitty robotpet, the mood-colour scarves and the disks of Nippon-pop. What transformed his life, like a motorbike that turns into an avenging battle-bot, was the manga. At first he had not liked their easy mix of violence and sex and high-school anxiety. Cheap and alien. But what seduced him were the characters; the elongated, sexless teens with their deer eyes and their snub noses and their ever-open mouths. Saving the world, having parent problems, wearing fabulous costumes, sporting fantastic hairstyles and footwear, worrying about their boy-girl-friends as the destroying angel-robots bore down on Tokyo but mostly being independent and cool and fabulous and long-legged and androgynous. He wanted their thrilling, passionate lives so badly he had cried. He envied their beauty and sexy sexlessness and that everyone knew and loved and admired them. He wanted to be them in life and death. In his bed in the loud Varanasi dark, Shaheen Badoor Khan would invent on-stories for them; what happened after they defeated the angels streaming through the crack between the heavens, how they loved and played together in their fur-lined battle-dome. Then they pulled him down into the pink fur-lined bulb of the battle-nest and they rubbed together, indeterminate but passionate, for ever and ever and ever. On those nights when he was made a Mage-rider of a Grassen Elementoi, Shaheen Badoor Khan would wake in the suffocating morning with the front of his pyjama pants stiff.