The Geometry of God, page 33
Flocks of birds with emerald green wings crossed by a line of salmon pink fly in a circle above our heads and end up perching on matching pinkish-green rocks. They have a long, delicate bill and a fine tail that they line up beautifully.
The steep ledge flying above us is also pink and green, and as we ascend, rather than exhausted, I feel euphoric. My back doesn't hurt. The arms respond with agility. I don't need to use both hands to climb. Beside me, Mike strikes the hammer with almost charming violence. We cut a hole in the rock just a few inches above my head, then a little higher than his head, in an area where I cannot reach.
"Hey!" Did you hear that? He says, stopping suddenly.
I look up at the top of the hill. A memory suddenly comes to mind: I should climb there.
Mike brandishes the hammer again, louder even. This time I hear it too. We hurry down a less steep incline and stop there. The rocks are a darker pink, with some orange patches, rough and uneven ocean rocks, sculpted by layers and layers of oyster beds. When Henry and Malik Sahib pass us, Mike yells at them:
"Here's something!"
They go in search of some shovels and return to us.
"These rocks are younger than the ones where we found Pakicetus," Henry says.
"So maybe he could swim?" Mike asks.
Doubtingly, Malik Sahib cranes his neck to look across the top of the hill. I also look out to see better. Below me I see a protruding piece of bone, embedded in the vertical face of the cliff. We began to cut the edge little by little, being very careful not to slip. We hit more bones.
We found a tooth. A huge coiled tooth attached to an upper jaw. During the next three days we did not stop finding fragments related to this strange horn. The roots of the plants have split the lower jaw, but we found enough pieces to visually reconstruct a huge snout that possibly had a horn four times as long. The animal lies buried diagonally on the right side, with the hind limbs buried in the deepest layer.
Abdul: "This may be the front leg of a reptile."
-What is this? I blurt out suddenly.
-What the hell is this? Henry says. If it had fins, I would have said it was some kind of manatee. But with this horn! Very interesting…
"It looks like something from the future instead of the past!" Says Mike.
Next to the huge spiral tooth we find two small, smooth teeth. Henry and Malik Sahib examine them and get so excited that they almost fall off the cliff.
"We have to find an ear!" They exclaim.
The last day we found him. It's the left one and it's buried deep behind the jawbone. And there it is, what we were all waiting for but did not dare to name out loud: the hidden S. The tympanic bone that houses the middle ear and that is shaped like that for one reason only. We have unearthed another type of whale. A totally different guy. It walked like a crocodile, swam like a fish, lunged like a rhino, and poked like a manatee. He could do very little else with just two small canines. The only living horned whale we know of today is the narwhal (that creature that has a tooth as long as Mehwish's imagination) and lives in the Arctic. What was this one doing, so long ago, in the tropical sea of Thetis?
It's our last night and nobody wants to sleep. With great care we have covered with plaster and wrapped in silver foil the pieces of the Cornucetus, the horned whale. Much remains to be unearthed. We wonder when we will.
Nana told me to bring her something to cheer her up. I draw a picture for him and Mehwish:
I draw just as badly as when I was a child. I hide the drawing so that others cannot see it.
Kazuo and Abdul get their sleeping bags out of the tent. Ghafoor and Dawood meet to build a fire. The stars shine and are more numerous than the grains of sand in the dead sea that surrounds us. Mars shines in the sky. I think I've also located Jupiter. We've been so giddy all day from the barrage of ideas that this shared silence is comforting. I look at our group and wonder if, like the Cornucetus, we are nothing more than an appendage of Nature or God or something that continues to expand like a kinematic vocal cord. I have no answer, I just enjoy this last clear and cold night.
Ghafoor lights a fire that immediately ignites in high, intense flames. At the moment, there is no need to dig up any more silent letters. It is enough that we are here, in this magical place, where the remains of the strange protoballena that lies wrapped before us could well form one of the constellations in the sky.
All my life I wanted to be just a humble voice that was part of an impressive choir. I just wanted to be a small flame that was part of a huge fire. Tonight, I am.
I cover my shoulders with the sleeping bag. The jackals sniff the burning wood and howl closer and closer. A shooting star crosses the twinkling night.
When I return they are washing his body.
Omar wraps me in our gray shawl.
"We called the university and they told us you were already on your way home."
"But we're not done yet."
"He died this morning."
-I will be back! But first I have to show him what we have found! I rummage in my bag for the drawing. Omar kisses me. A lot of people give me kisses. I push them away. Leave me!
Omar leads me into the living room.
"Mehwish is in our apartment," he tells me. Ami is with her. Zara promised to go there too.
"Zara and your mother together?" Are you crazy?
He tells me to shut up and tries to calm me down as if I were the one who was crazy.
Noman is here. Say something. Aba and Uncle Bilal and some other men carry Nana's body on their shoulders. Aba is crying. He always hated that Nana made him feel inferior, but now he cries and moans like a son. My head feels as cold and clear as the air of the night before. When Junayd died I felt enormous pain, but now I look at that small body of a man who was so tall and with such long legs, there, in the middle of the room, covered by a white shroud and surrounded by roses and jasmine, and I know that he and I are not done. I repeat it again:
"I've brought you something to teach you, just as I promised."
Then I hear a voice that answers me:
"What does it matter if you come from the water or the dust when you can't even decide which of the two you will become?"
It's Uncle Bilal. He rests his hand on my cheek and smiles at me affectionately.
I stare at the man I first saw in a photograph at the Samarkand observatory, in Nana and Junayd's happiest time.
"Even if your professional projects were frustrated," he told me, still smiling, "and despite the loss of Junayd and, of course, his son, I believe your grandfather has died peacefully."
That surprised me, and I replied sharply:
"I thought I knew my grandfather better!"
"What I mean is that he died as he needed to, without saying who he was, because he is Zahoor." The one that evolves. If you are tracing visible paths, people at first point them out, then they appropriate them and then they end up enclosing you within four walls. That puts an unbearable burden on your poor spirit. But a soul that has not been subdued by the rest of the mortals can roam freely. We will always remember your grandfather in multiple and countless ways.
His voice does not denote grief or pain. Just a sincere affection. Sometimes those you least expect are the ones who tell you what you need to hear, or at least the way you need to hear it. I highly doubt that I will see him again. Maybe I'll go back to Samarkand. Perhaps you fall asleep in a dark stairwell deep under the earth and no one wants to disturb you.
Nana's hands are entwined under the cotton shroud. I pick it up. I touch the cool palm of his hand, lined with lines like salt marks on the dry bed of an ocean. Inside hers, my hand is still very small.
Noman
Carrying a bullet between the ribs has made me an optimistic man. I am alive. The same didn't happen to me as poor Junayd, thanks to all those technical details Amal needs to know so well. Hard bullets, soft bullets, the terrible bullets that explode inside you and the most bastards that explode like shards of glass destroying your veins. I am not interested in that. When you've been this close to death, you don't care about cause or effect. I am alive. And so is Mehwish. We survived the same bullet. It went through both of us and we were saved. A miracle, God exists.
The only recently discovered blemish on my faith is Zahoor, who was, and always will be, the voice of my conscience. Since the bombing at Amal's wedding two years ago, every day I spent with Zahoor was like a constant reminder of my selfishness. Every time he mourned the death of Junayd and even that of his horrible son, I would have liked him, even once, to also make some mention of my injuries and the weeks I spent in hospital, my immobility, the gout. gout, breathing difficulties and pain. He never did. I also wish he had returned to his home in Islamabad. Again, for selfish reasons. It was the only place where he saw Mehwish.
I've thought a lot about Amal's wedding, in that second when Mehwish leaned in to touch me (just before the silent bullet went through her arm and lodged in me) and I thought she wanted to stick her finger between my fingers. teeth and say something, anything, just to me, as was his custom. He never did. Zahoor's family sold the house in Islamabad and brought him here to live with them. Every day that I spent with Zahoor I wish I had spent it with Mehwish.
But she and I were never alone. She wanted me to be alone with Zahoor, as if she knew that he would say things to me that he couldn't say to her. He was right. When his family was present he was always strong and tried to sit upright in bed, but when we were alone he did not hide the intensity of his pain. Perhaps he wanted to believe that he had finally made me a man.
It was not only the operations, the infections, the boils, the fever and the constant pain that brought down this man who needed to walk constantly (he needed to drink the mountain air, feel the sunlight on his skin, breathe in the scent of the gray shadows and walking to China just to see a few different sheep, God bless!). Above all, he was overwhelmed by the loss of his best friend, Junayd. Together with him he lost the conversations they used to have. Along with him died a way of seeing the world. It was what he said to me.
"A holistic way, you understand?" A time when we needed to savor life, day by day. ”He couldn't speak out loud, but even his whisper was defiant. But this… ”He coughs for a moment,“ this is a time when the only thing that matters is the categories. Space and time have been tamed like a caged lion. Very few sacred dimensions remain. Few places where to adore the infinity that contains a flea. Why are we limiting ourselves?
On another occasion, shortly after the United States bombed Sudan and Afghanistan, he commented:
"Listen to people all over the world." Categories. If you buy their weapons you are developed. If you make your own weapons you are a savage. And what about the weapons they shot at us? Wasn't one from one place and the other from the other? The one from the developed country didn't work, but I kept nodding and he kept talking. At my age you realize that people only believe in God as long as he created them before others, ”he said. Then Mehwish and his mother came into the room and Zahoor had to pretend that he was feeling better.
He did not know about the American missile that crossed the border and fell on the Pakistani side, hitting one of our towns. Shortly after, I saw some foreign journalists hanging around the boulevard of the Mall trying to find out how "we were taking it." I tried to convince a journalist that we didn't care about bombs.
"Look around you." You will see almost no protest for it.
"Are you a Muslim?" -I wonder. She didn't seem convinced by my statement.
I wish I had asked Zahoor that question. I never thought that I would have to confess what my creed was. Say what you are! Say you're against us! Say it! Say it! I smiled at the camera and asked the journalist if she worked for the Creation Party.
"I don't have much time." Are you a real Muslim?
"No, I'm an imitation."
She stormed off.
A few days before she died, when Amal was out of town, on her excavations, Zahoor seemed to be addressing not me but her accusers when she murmured:
"Have you ever turned a stone or caressed the wings of a butterfly?" I do not believe it. What would you do with your hands if they denied you the power to stamp your signature on top of my life?
Yes, those are the words that will haunt me the most.
Now they are taking Zahoor's body. This is not only what they take away, but also what their presence provoked in me. I hear how Bilal comforts Amal: Zahoor's soul will be eternally free; meat is a transitory illusion; his spirit lives on, unclassifiable, indomitable. Amal looks… like she still doesn't believe it. She is too tired from the trip and will have an unpleasant reaction later.
Me too? It is as if the bullet that waits so politely next to my artery slides inside me.
I celebrate the beginning of the 21st century by becoming a monk. Not a religious monk but a moody one. I treat my students badly. They are getting fatter from watching so much cable TV and being all the time in front of those stupid little gadgets that they carry with them and that I always confiscate from them. My monk likes speed. I buy a motorcycle to race with other motorcycles in which women sit on their side, balancing a sandal on their big toe. How do they do that? They even swing the kids on their laps, still showing off that four-inch heel. The secret of the balance of a motorcycle (a fat man; a fat woman; between three and eight children) lies in that toe. One day a golden stiletto shoe fell off the big toe on which it was balancing and the motorcycle skidded alongside an elite Punjabi police van. I'm not lying. And I don't race motorcycles that carry children.
I am looking for a place between two fig trees, behind a stall selling our traditional soft drink, lassi, where I can sit quietly and not have to talk to anyone except the lassi vendor named Hamid. His eccentric clients are almost as entertaining to me as my old excursions to the Anarkali bazaar with Petrov, who seems to have vanished with his jewels to some glacier in Baltistan. Hamid's clients gather at his bar to vent their bad mood like chimneys. We have given them all a nickname: Khala Chimney, which always tells you when the last glass of lassi has been had;
Chimney Chacha, who looks like she is from Waziristan and always manages to get served a little longer than usual; Chimney Chapet, who greets Hamid by slapping him as if he were his best friend and trying his best not to pay. Sometimes they talk about the New-President-General. Some mention Afghanistan. Are the Taliban doing what the United States promised but failed to do by returning us to an Islam that is rich and pure or is their Jihad nothing more than a war between bloody gangs? Both sides meet at the lassi stall, causing a cloud of smoke that almost suffocates my grief, my guilt, my unbearable self-pity.
What would you do with your hands ...?
Zahoor never read "The Pen," my eloquent farewell to Akhlaq. Aba did read it. He told me that I would never be welcomed into his home again. I never was.
I sit among the fig trees and listen to people or read. I have read the eight hundred page book The Transcendence of the Mutazilites three times, cover to cover, but this year I am beginning to read it for the fourth time. There are small details that concern me. What did Avicenna prefer to eat when he wasn't drinking himself out of his mind? Was it sunny or raining the day Al-Kindi was accused of being a heretic and his head smashed with the huge book he wrote? What was the first flash of revelation that led Averroes to Aristotle? When the Christians "reconquered" Spain, what they found was the Arabic translations of Aristotle. Now Aristotle is Arastoo and Plato is Aflatoon. If Arastoo went from Greek to Arabic, Spanish, Latin, English and Urdu, what has remained of him?
Hamid doesn't have time to listen to my ramblings, but he does have time for his own.
"Aflatooni love is the only true love," she said. It is special, typical of an authentic Pakistan.
"You mean my love for Mehwish can only be platonic?"
He nods his head.
"It would be for the best, wouldn't it?" He says next.
-No. It would not be.
"If she's as adorable as you say," he adds, shrugging, "then you shouldn't spoil her."
"But why should earthly passion spoil true love?"
-That is the dilemma! It is the will of God. Maybe she belongs to Him and not to you.
-No. She loves me, purely and passionately. And when his grandfather lived, he… helped us to be together. Now that he is gone, I don't know how to see her.
"Do you need an excuse?"
-Yes!
"You clearly won't find her," he says, shaking his head.
Back to the philosophers, who could teach this cynic more than one thing.
Plato loved this world, but he loved even more that which he could only imagine. Aristotle totally loved this world. He believed that happiness was possible within his physical limits. I want to feel that same.
"Didn't Arastoo believe in paradise?"
"Only in paradise on earth."
"I agree with Aflatoon."
"According to Mehwish's grandfather, she is too." He used to say that she was a dreaming Plato while her sister was a purely earthly Aristotle. Isn't that the funniest thing you've ever heard? Instead of laughing, I sprinkle a little more salt in my soda because it's a very hot day.
I knock on Amal's door. Omar and she are never home. I leave messages for them and they never reply. Should I go see her at the lab? She will have taken more refuge in her work since Zahoor's death and she won't want to be disturbed. Perhaps now that our quartet is no longer one, it can never become a triplet. That seems to be the message Amal is trying to convey to me.
It is her quirky friend Zara who helps me find her. Zara has opened a cafe in a trendy area where new restaurants are growing like mushrooms every day. Try to be a vegetarian cafe, but this is Punjab. Vegetarian means lettuce… and chicken. It means spinach ... and chicken. Cheese… and chicken. I go to the cafe with Faisal and who is sitting at one of the tables? Amal.
