by Iyer, Pico
The older man broke a biscuit in his hands, and dipped it in his tea. His pride was evident in his terror of making even the smallest mistake in a scholarly attribution, and the visitor was reminded that, for all their affected vagueness, English academics are as much double agents as any of their colleagues, knowing how to hide their intelligence behind practiced masks of ignorance.
“It isn’t my field, as you say: I’ve never been drawn to it myself. I think it would be foolish of me to say anything.”
He sat back, as if waiting to be prompted.
“Anything would be a help, really.”
“I think the only thing I can give you that might be any use would be this, which fell into my hands quite recently. I know nothing about its origins, or its author, but, whatever the reality of either, it’ll be of more help to you than I could be.” He picked up an offprint that was lying on top of the books on his table, beside the chair, and handed it over. Clearly—characteristically—he’d hunted it down and set it aside in anticipation of this meeting.
“Otherwise, I can profess only uselessness. All my students these days seem more keen on the Reverend Moon and the swami on all the television shows.” Oxford still appointed its Regius Professors of Divinity by means of official letters from the Palace and trips to 10 Downing Street, but religion was held to be such a part of life that it was not always recognized as a subject. Those who studied it, like Mowbray, had to pretend to be anthropologists.
“Well, I shouldn’t take up any more of your time,” he said, feeling that he’d given his old professor a taste of California to share with his colleagues and sister, and the old man had given him something in return. “I expect you have loads of essays on Hare Krishna to read by tomorrow. It’s very good to see you again, and I’ll profit, I’m sure, from the article.” The benediction had been given; his job now was to make himself scarce.
When he got back to the house near the river—Nigel did everything he could, through the carpets on his wall, his trips to Yemen, even his fencing lessons on Wednesdays, to show the world (and himself) he hadn’t become the person he used to mock—he took himself off to his room, and went slowly through the article his old professor had given him. He’d actually taken it out of his briefcase in the train, and then, for some obscure reason (the field must be getting to him), put it back in, lest anyone see what he was reading. Not that an offprint from an issue of the Journal of Asiatic Studies from two years before was likely to set many alarms ringing on the 17:23 to Paddington.
The title of the paper was “Missing in Action: Sufi Manuscripts and the Second Revolution,” and the first few pages, as was the convention, were devoted to saying how little the author knew, and how much was still unknown, and how indebted he was to fellow scholars, even while offering himself as a sovereign authority. Sufi, Bahai, and Zoroastrian scholarship had all been thrown into disarray when the Second Revolution (as the paper always referred to it) came into being; great buildings had been renamed, memories of the old regime had been purged, and history had been subjected to an instant “retrofit” (the French author clearly eager to show himself conversant not just with École Normale Supérieure English, but with all the nuances of Santa Monica).
Overnight, history and literature had been sent out of the country, like a second Holy Family: forced to hide out, affect modern clothing, even go to enemy countries until the storm subsided. Treasures had been hidden in secret compartments in suitcases; hundreds of trunks, firmly sealed, had passed through the hands of dockworkers in Bandar-e-Abbas. The scene had been as “unruly,” the article said, in its slightly precious way, “as when an earthquake shakes a house, and its inhabitants run into the cold, taking what treasures they can carry.
“The age of late capitalism,” it went on—and here he began to pay more attention—
is the age of global scattering: heirlooms, secrets, flying across the planets as when a vase is shattered. Myriad pasts find their way into every present. A Dzogchen sutra is as likely to be found in Santa Fe as in Paris; to see Khmer Buddhas, you are best advised to proceed to the fourth story of the River City Mall in Bangkok; most of the great treasures of the Song Dynasty are said to be in a home in Palo Alto. The very bricks and mortar of the civilizations that made us up are now up for offer, in real time, at sothebys.com.
What this means, hermeneutically, is that texts have shed their authors, as much as they’ve lost their readers. They float, without names, without addresses, like refugees with only transit papers moving from airport to airport. Words, poems, spells, are just part now of the postmodern diaspora. In our own field, we follow the Sufi path by going to places that have never heard the name “Hafez” and committed none of Maulana’s verses to memory.
Yet the history of any tradition, the way it has lived and colored minds, is to be found not in the Sheldonian, nor behind some mock-Tudor mansion in Bel Air. And the poems of the great Sufis will disappear not because they are erased from the earth, nor even because they are uprooted, and can now be uploaded in an instant. Rather, they will fade from view only if those who have eyes to see them fade. If they get translated into languages that have no word for “fire” of the Sufi kind. If they get paraded before the ignorant as once women from Egypt, or Chinese men, were paraded before the laughing crowds of Europe. If those who have keys to their secret doors disappear, the poems will shrink into love songs, or cries to drunkenness and dissipation. When the eyes that understood the Nabytean rites of Palmyra, when the priests who were aware of the hidden codes of Karnak disappeared, then, and only then, did their cultures lose their meaning and their power. Sufi manuscripts are everywhere, we know; but do we have eyes with which to read them? The meanings never change, only the people who seek for them.
It was a typical piece of evasion, clotted and muffled and oblique, with a tremulous current of outrage running just below its carefully maintained tone of academic neutrality. True to his thesis, his assumptions, the author gave away nothing about his own background or interest; it was only the name and the address in Paris that suggested a male Frenchman. In many ways, he seemed more interested in the “postmodern postmortem” he claimed to find—“where Ronald McDonald is knocking at the gates of Qom, and the people of America are hungering for Kabir”—than in what the poems contained.
But in a curious way, the paper gave him hope. It spoke on behalf of underground manuscripts, he felt, and its message, unexpectedly, was the same as hers, reiterated so often: “Don’t give up on me, please. Please don’t give up on me yet.”
When he came out from the Customs area, into the bright winter light, she was, as before, nowhere to be seen. Girls in halter tops and miniskirts, going this way, going that, girls with fair hair not their own, frightened women stepping into new lives and looking for the loved ones who ought to have been waiting for them but were not: everyone except a girl who’d seemed closest to him when he was far away.
He trudged over to the nearest telephone, under a fast-rising escalator—could feel himself lifting up a weight again, as seemed to happen so often with her—and then, suddenly, he felt a tap on the back, and turned to see her standing there, as if she’d been waiting there for weeks. It was part of the perverse hopefulness of the place, he thought, kissing her, and smelling the shampoo in her freshly washed hair: the fact she bore no sign now of the haunted woman who’d left him less than two weeks before. The virtue of living in the moment is that old moments can be erased, in an instant; she looked at him as if she’d never heard of someone frightened by a nightmare.
They walked into the multilevel parking structure—her car, encrusted in new dirt, straddling the space next to it—and then he brushed the hair off her face, and kissed her with a new directness. She softened into him, for a moment, as if something had been released in her in his absence, the way, sometimes, one goes to sleep with a question and awakens, mysteriously, with the answer. Around them, people walked past, just released from Mexico, Armenia, Iran, and put all the
hopes they’d packed into the backs of cars they’d never seen before, and drove off towards new lives.
Climbing up at last into her cockpit, he leaned over, as she put the key in the ignition, and kissed the space behind her ear, her neck. Something had come free in him, too, and he felt that if he didn’t press the moment it might never come again. Her shoulder blades, partly exposed by the black dress she wore; the top of her chest, flushed with color. Around her throat now, the silver necklace he’d brought back from Jaipur.
“You seem better somehow,” he said. “As if you’ve come to some decision.”
“You’re back,” she said, unanswerable as ever.
“You didn’t have bad dreams?”
“I don’t have to now. You’re back.”
By the time they reached Malibu, night had fallen. It was still blustery and cold, the sea squalling and throwing tantrums, and when it began to rain, fogging up the already dirty windshield, he made things worse by circling and circling, with his finger, the cool parts of her skin, where the sleeves began, taking a finger of her nondriving hand and putting its tip between his lips. He wasn’t sure who it was who had come off the plane, who it was who had met him, but there was a feeling of momentum, as if they’d been freed somehow by displacement.
“We’ve got to stop,” she said, and he couldn’t tell if she was referring to the vanished visibility of the road, or the suddenly visible, palpable presence by her side. She was going too fast, she might have been saying; she needed to slow down.
She pulled the car into a parking lot beside a bikers’ bar in Trancas, and the wind howled and screamed as they ran into the warmth. Inside, under colored lamps the shape of mushrooms in the Disney movies, a few tall men in ponytails were playing pool in one room, reggae drawling, drifting through the ancient system, while a handful of others—Harley jackets and baseball caps—were sitting at the bar. They sat apart from the regular customers, high chairs around a small round table, and when the drinks arrived, the new him, more decisive, put a finger in his rum and drew it slowly down her throat.
The rain was coming down so hard now that the wooden rooftop of the bar began shaking and the music was almost impossible to make out. Every time the door opened, a great gust of cold damp came in, and it felt as if the whole structure would creak and split and give out. When they had finished eating—he’d told her only about the Taj, the lights burning under the romantic cover—they went out again, through the pelting rain, and sat in the car, breath lost, as if they’d run for miles along the ocean. The windows were fogged up, and the heater gagged and protested when she pushed a button, so they knew it would not cooperate. The space in the front seat was hardly bigger than a confessional.
“You’re sweet,” she said, as if to keep him at a distance; the word put a pleasant cage around the feelings. Outside, brown bags and paper cups blew and skittered across the parking lot. Branches beat against the windows—she’d parked under a tree in the hope of staying dry—and the wind howled and whooshed as if crying to be let in.
“A long way from Jaipur,” he said, as if to acknowledge that some distances remained.
She started the car up and they drove very slowly along the nearly abandoned road, hugging the side and crawling through the short distances that were all they could see in front of them. At the great curves before Point Mugu, boulders lay strewn across the asphalt, and when a car came round the turn towards them, very fast, she swerved and almost lost control. The rain was unrelenting, and he placed a finger on her legs, her thighs, and she held it there as if to say, “Yes. But no more now.”
“Do you know where we can go?”
“Anywhere it’s dry.”
“Big Sur is too far away.”
“Your house is too full up.”
He knew what she meant, and he let her take control. When they got to Santa Barbara, she drove all the way through town, and then up, towards the mountains, as if she knew where she was taking him. The car labored and resisted as they arrived at the steep road, and the way itself was blocked with thick branches here and there, dust and debris fallen down from the slopes. He took a guess at where she was taking him, and why; there were no lights there, and they were edging through the dark.
She felt her way around the curves, tense, alert, he wide awake in his different universe (the sun above the desert in Rajasthan), and then, at last, they saw the grey mailbox by the road, the sudden private road up to the ridge.
When she stopped, he handed her his jacket and she ran, through puddles and dust and branches, to the door they always used. He came after, and within seconds they were in the dry and dark. Silence everywhere around them.
“The one time we need a flashlight . . .” he said.
“No need,” she said, and led him out into the corridor.
They fumbled upstairs, moving slowly in the dark, and then came out into the great open space of the main room. The wind shook the windows and the doors, and the storm was so intense they couldn’t see the lights below, the stars.
“It’s like a place outside the city walls.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I chose it.”
She sat down against the wall, where they’d sat before, and he sat down beside her, the jacket placed beneath them.
“I made a New Year’s resolution,” she murmured, in the dark, not choosing to light a candle as she’d done before.
“What was that?”
She leaned over and kissed him as if every reservation was forgotten. No words, no hesitations.
“You’re sure you want to?”
“This isn’t going to be ours forever.”
She lay down on the jacket, and, in the dark—the rain beating on the roof, the wind sounding like it was throwing over the world—she unbuttoned her dress, and he kissed her throat, down the sides of her, to where the last buttons eased away. A warmth spread through her body, what felt like weeping down below, and when he met her there, she let out a great cry, and then began sobbing, holding him close with her muscles and wrapping him up in her as if he were her winding cloth. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said, the sound of something terrible, like fear or loneliness, discharged from her at last. “Thank you, please, yes, thank goodness.” And the cry in her throat so naked, it brought tears to his eyes, too.
They slept. For a long time, so that when he stirred—or knew that he was stirring—he could see that the blackness all around had been replaced by greyness all around. A damp and sogging nothingness, so thick he couldn’t see a tree, a house, the road below. “They’ll be coming soon.” He turned, to where she slept. “We should move.”
“It’s Sunday, remember? We can stay.”
He lay back beside her on the floor, a traveler deposited in a new place he couldn’t quite put words to yet. The old expectations, the way they’d kept themselves going forward for so long, gone now, and asking them what they’d be replaced by.
“So how was the manuscript?” she said at last, as if she saw what he was thinking, and wanted to help him free of it. “What did you find?”
“I found that people put a lot of hope on these things. Stake their lives on things they can’t understand.”
“Like you.”
“Perhaps.”
He drew a hand around her waist, slipped off the blanket she’d unearthed.
“Was it beautiful?”
“Very. Which doesn’t make it old, or authentic, or valuable. But it’s a beautiful thing to have. He seemed a kind man, the right man to have it.”
“And your own manuscripts?”
“The ones I’ve never found, you mean?”
She nodded.
“The same as ever. Incredibly potent because I don’t know what they are. They could contain the secret of the universe.”
When your mind is intent, possessed—when something below your mind is more than intent, possessed—everything you say voices the same theme: anything he said about the poems now, he was saying about
her, or them, or whatever it was they’d entered.
“Will you be happy if you find a manuscript that no one’s ever seen before?”
“Probably happier thinking about it. Alex thinks it’s just a device I’ve come up with to keep myself interested.”
“And you—what do you think?”
“I think that these old men, all that time ago, were on to something. The only way we can see God, feel what it means to be beyond thought, protected, loved for what we are—”
“Is right here.”
He nodded, glad that she’d completed the dangerous thought for him.
She sat up, explored the house in the pale light—they’d never really been here in the daytime, and even though the day was all fogged over, they could for the first time see the outline of what it would be, and make out the shapes the rooms would take. For the first time, in the grey new year, the rain dripping from the eaves, puddles on the bricks outside, the few growing things nearby green, green, they could walk through the mind of the man who had designed it.
“Let’s try here,” she said, finding another room, empty, with windows on two sides, closer to the mountains (on a clear day, you could see the ocean from here).
“You think we can stay here all day?”
“Why not? It’s ours, for now. No one can find us here. It’s the space outside all space.”
She loved her games with words, ways to remake the world and give it a different meaning, ways mostly to run away from it, into another universe, where things had symmetry, made sense.
They sat now against what would one day be closets and bookshelves; not the most comfortable place for tired arms and backs, but enticing, somehow, in the thick fog, with the sense of animals— gophers or whatever else lived in these hills—beginning to prepare to come out again.
“I like it when you can’t see the horizon,” she said. “You can’t see to the end of things. It feels safe.”
