Hamza and Samir were leaning on the central pillar by the fountain, speaking in hushed tones in the square when Adnan found them. They were not difficult to find: the square was deserted. The silence of the bazaar reverberated around them.
The same streets he had roamed with his friends were now haunted.
Hamza and Samir watched Adnan’s face as he approached them, poised as if to recoil from the unpredictable wrath of an animal.
“Why are you eying me like that?” Adnan asked.
The two of them looked at each other. “We just — Adnan, you have been acting very strange, bhai,” Samir said.
“We know they are heralding your mother’s name,” Hamza said.
“Why does it matter? My mother is dead.” Adnan kicked a stone, and it went flying towards the empty bazaar. “What does any of it matter.”
“They are saying that Salman doesn’t like all of this…praising of Sakina’s son.”
Adnan said nothing. He was watching the birds in the distant skies, fluttering together in a formation, then dispersing abruptly.
Even in death, his mother was a threat to the Emir. Even in death, she was still here - twisted and deformed, taken apart and put back together, over and over again.
On the way home, Adnan kept his face low, tied his scarf over his head and his mouth, so that no one would recognize him. But some still did, nodding to him, smiling, murmuring salaams, walking alongside him to tell him of their troubles, of sons taken, of mothers ill. He nodded his head and listened until he reached his house and shut the door behind him.
Out in the streets, there was a thickening in the air, they could feel it gathering like dark clouds. It was rising in the air with the Ifsharan dust, cramming into the crevices of the balconies from which people watched the beatings in the streets and the clashes; and the alleys where the forgotten children of the city eyed the corners. They, too had felt something changing in the air. They had built another sense for these things, these children. For the changes in the air, in the unseen, the invisible, was crucial for their survival.
Ifsharanis were growing audacious by the day: spitting at Shayfahan soldiers, only to meld back into the streets or run off into an alley or a house before the soldiers could find them. If they could not find the culprit, the soldiers took anyone who was in the path of the direction from which it came, anyone upon whom to hurl their rage.
Adnan kept thinking of Imraan al-Hunayn, back at his parents’ grave. Imraan had placed the amaranth flowers on Aliya’s grave, and then on Harun’s. “How did you know of my father’s death?” Adnan had asked him.
“The word spread, you know. Not to many, but I know those close to him.”
“Why have I never met you before? All these years…where have you been?” Adnan’s voice lashed out for reasons he did not know. Why had this man, who must have been important enough for his father to mention him before his death, who was supposedly his closest friend, never shown his face before now?
“I have been busy,” Imraan said. “You met me a few times, in fact, when you were very little, just a boy.”
Adnan’s eyes roved over the flowers on the ground. “My father told me, before he died, to find you.”
Imraan raised an eyebrow, his voice sounding hoarse: “Did he now?”
Adnan looked the man in the eyes — this man who may have known his parents better than he himself ever did. “Why would he want me to find you?”
Imraan sighed. “I am surprised by that myself. You may not like what you hear of me, Adnan. Who I am…now.”
“Who are you now?” And only when Adnan spoke the words out loud did the answer dawn on him: Imraan the Traitor. “You can’t be…”
Adnan backed away, because it did not make sense. He’d thought his father must have been mad when he’d uttered Imraan’s name — nothing more than the raving words of a dying man. It was the only conclusion that made sense.
After all, if it was this same Imraan whom his father wanted him to find, why had Harun never invited him over to their house, had not kept in touch with him?
Over the years, Adnan repeated this to himself — my father’s last words must have been the raving words of a dying man.
And yet, he could not erase from his mind the image of Imraan standing there with the amaranth flowers.
Adnan began preparing the solutions. He used to watch his mother measuring the liquids into the glass tubes, dripping slowly like sand in an hourglass — he could measure time with it; but time did not matter in those days. It was not something he tracked when was a child, it was not something that dictated his body then.
Nanu Mihreen sat on her crooked stool at the other end of the table, pounding resslt leaves in a mortar. She was a thin, frail-looking woman, and yet Adnan and the rest of Ifsharan knew she was far from it. It was she, after all, who had taught Aliya Ilmen before she went off to the university to study surgery. It was she who bore and fed Aliya’s passion for the apothecary, for her experiments in the workshop.
Nanu Mihreen’s arms moved furiously, and the pestle pounded loudly. She did not look at Adnan.
“Nanu?” Adnan asked.
“What?” She stirred and stirred.
“Is something wrong?”
When she finally looked up, it was one of her piercing gazes which Adnan shied away from. “Is something wrong?” she repeated slowly. “All those years you resented your father for abandoning you so many nights. For disappearing. And yet here you are, Adnan. You’ve become him. I never know where you are. Your brother never even sees you around.”
“I thought sons were meant to become their fathers,” he muttered. Nanu Mihreen glared at him, then sighed, turning back to her work.
Adnan returned to mixing his solution, swirling the contents of the tube. In the distance outside, a swarm of shouts were rising like bees, growing every second.
Nanu Mihreen glanced up from her work. “What is that?” Adnan put down the mixture and went to the window. The shouts on the streets grew louder until they were right in front of their house.
Along the cobblestoned streets, a horde of men and women marched. They chanted something, words he could not make out. Shopkeepers shut their doors. Across the street from theirs, the perfume-seller Khandaker’s sons Abdul and Omar, near to Adnan’s own age, emerged from their house and joined the crowd. Others leaned out from balconies or peered out from behind latticed windows to watch the commotion.
In the crowd, a man carried a small boy on his shoulders as he screamed with the rest, and the boy raised his hands in the air as if he too, was shouting for freedom to the skies.
Someone had brought Jubbi the monkey. It clambered over the shoulders of the marchers, from one to another, an orange strip of fabric around his neck. He was Khandaker the perfume-seller’s monkey: at the stall in the bazaar, he would perch on Khandaker’s shoulder, eating bananas. Now, Jubbi screeched along with the people.
Slowly, Adnan could make out one word: they were chanting his mother’s name. But he knew it was not for her they chanted, but because it had become synonymous with their freedom. They had turned her into a saint for themselves.
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A young man with a strip of cloth tied around his forehead tore off the fabric from his head and whipped it into the skies, a banner of white, shouting, “Down with Salman!” Others took up his declaration. Soon there were chants from above balconies, windows, and on the streets rooting for Imraan the Traitor.
Among it all, a sound suddenly reverberated in their bones: louder than the marchers. It carried across the crowds, who looked around, searching for the source of the sound. Across the streets of Ifsharan, it wound through into hidden alleys where the unseen lived, who emerged to watch.
It was a longhorn — the sound of the Shayfahan army. Abruptly, it stopped – and a silence reverberated through the streets.
Adnan could see the soldiers now, led by a tall figure in a shimmering white mask. The White Rider. The damned White Rider, what was he doing here?
A man riding beside him announced, “The White Rider declares that this gathering is treasonous against all of Khardin. Anyone associated with the traitors Sakina or the rebel Imraan will be arrested. Disperse now, by the law of the Emir, or face the consequences.”
There was a silence; then a clamor, as people began pushing others to get out of the way. But some held their ground, striking their banners against the sky towards the soldiers and shouting.
The soldiers in the front began to strike, running their horses through the crowd. People screamed, pushing each other out of the way.
A soldier trampled over an elderly man in a roughen robe who had been screaming up at them shaking his fists. The next moment, he was on the ground, his face trampled, and the soldiers left behind nothing but a bloody mess. The soldiers kept going.
Adnan watched the horror from the window with Nanu Mihreen next to him. Behind them, Hasan was calling from the top of the stairs, “What is happening? What are they doing?”
A flash of orange struck a soldier in the face. It was Jubbi the monkey. The soldier, taken aback at finding a monkey in the riot, slashed at Jubbi haphazardly. The monkey screeched in pain, tackling the soldier’s face. With another slash, the soldier threw the monkey; Jubbi, injured, scampered off screeching.
Adnan pulled away from the window, leaning his back against the wall. “If they are declaring anyone supporting my mother treasonous, what do they consider her own family?”
“They had targeted us long ago,” Nanu said in a stiff voice. “Adnan,” she wrapped a shawl quickly over her head and opened the door. “We need to bring in the injured.”
Adnan and Nanu Mihreen stepped out into the chaos, making their way through hurling bodies, and began to carry in the wounded.
***
The murmurings hypnotized him. Beneath tongues and lips reciting the holy Qitab, ran something quiet that moved from one face to another. The unison of prayer was followed by severance: each found their own corners of solace, whispering duaas under their breaths.
But Adnan had not moved from his position. He sat in the same spot as when he had arrived, and in the whispered murmurings from the scattered worshippers along the hall, he watched the shadow of the geometric inlays from the window as the light reflected it on the rug. It ran along the hall, widening at the end. Clearer at the window, its lights and its darks melded together at the far distance, particles scattered the further away from the source of its shadow.
He could not remember the last time he came to pray in the mosque. But he had to come here, because he had to know that there was still something holy out there, after his eyes witnessed in the streets what could never be holy. He needed to see, to be in the presence of something that wrapped him in the sublime, something outside of himself, something that had to make sense.
He wanted to erase from his mind what his eyes had seen; the blood his fingers had touched as he and Nanu Mihreen brought in the surviving bodies from the streets. Yet by the next day, all the blood had been washed off the streets. No limbs, no heads, no stench of death. It lay pristine, the cobblestoned streets glinting in the light of the sun.
He needed to be here, to remember that something still mattered, didn’t it?
But he wanted to go far away from that road, far away from Ifsharan, so he had trekked through the valleys towards his parents’ graves. At the borders of Ifsharan in a small village, he had found the mosque.
The last time he must have been here — was before his father’s murder; for he could not remember a time when he did not come here and wonder why his father was not there with him, the way the other sons sat with their fathers.
He watched the children, small boys of six, eight, mimicking the positions of their fathers. A man in a greying beard folded his hands together, finished with his prayers, and murmured incantations under his breath. Next to him, a boy followed his movements. When the prayer finished, he stared off, rocking back and forth on his knees; soon he was distracted by a white cat that sauntered over near the edge of the walls.
The boy whispered to it: “Come here, billi, come,” he patted the worn red carpet beneath him, but the cat glanced at him and looked away, heading towards the direction of a crucial mission. The boy slowly made to move for the cat; but as soon as he reached it, it scampered away, disappearing behind a shelf of books.
The boy, disappointed but adamant, chased after it. The white face peered from behind the case before running off.
“Brothers,” the imam’s voice rose from the front of the mihrab. “I would like to speak today of — patience. Hm, yes, patience is a sign of the believer indeed. Allah tells us of…” A stout man in a greying beard with gentle glowing brown eyes, the imam’s voice carried loudly in the hall, a voice loud for a man his age.
Another man sat next to him, a man Adnan had never seen before, whom he was certain must be a stranger. He wore traveling robes, with a golden band around his upper arm, sewn into the fabric of his rich robes. No one he knew in Ifsharan wore such robes, not even the imam himself. A velvety sheen of midnight blue, speckled with threaded zardi work around the borders. A similar velvety cream wrap covered his head, marking an eminence rarely seen outside of the boundaries of the court. He sat, his knees folded, listening as the imam spoke. “We must remember, brothers, that when the —”
After a while, the man sitting next to the imam cleared his throat.
“Ah,” Imam Abdullah said. “Yes, let me end my thoughts here.” But he appeared annoyed, his brows furrowing, frustrated at being unable to conclude his sermon in his usual elegant manner. He cleared his throat. “Yes, we have a more important figure here today, of course.”
He motioned to the zardi-robed man. “Let me introduce our guest. We are in the presence of a Royal Minstrel himself. Minstrel Nasrim ibn Byuad.” He motioned his head to the man, who rose. His velvet robes fluttered out behind him. Adnan understood now what the golden band around his arms were — they signified the royal traveling minstrels around the realm spreading news from the Shayfahan.
Adnan tensed, leaning forward, his senses suddenly growing sharp as if he had been caught unawares. He watched the man carefully, studied his movements, the flick of his hands as he rose, the way he folded his hands over his chest across the zard-work.
Behind them, the boy scampered around the carpet after the cat, whispering “Billi!”
The clicking of prayer beads came from the man ahead of Adnan, his fingers moving rapidly upon them as his eyes focused on the front of the mihrab, his tongue muttering softly the names of God.
Nasrim ibn Buayd glanced at him. “Would you halt that counting for a moment, good uncle,” he said with a smile. The man’s fingers hesitated upon the beads. He put it aside.
“You have a modestly beautiful mosque here, your town is blessed, Imam brother,” the minstrel said.
Imam Abdullah bowed his head.
The Minstrel continued. “I come to you all about a filthy news is spreading. You, too, may have heard of these rumors. You may have heard from some unreliable sources that the Emir’s Shayfahan massacred people on Shayzar Road in Ifsharan on the jummah day of Rabi-ul-Awwal.”
Behind them, the cat yowled as the boy caught it, struggling for its freedom. The boy pet its head; but, refusing to be imprisoned so, with a swipe at his arm that caused the boy to let go, the cat ran free.
Adnan breathed in sharply. Unreliable sources…rumors…he could not truly be hearing this.
“This is a lie,” continued Minstrel Nasrim, “spread by the enemies of our realm who seek to divide us, to create disturbance and chaos, who thrive on your fear. They love to create fear. Do not fall for their lies. Do not fall for the lies of Imraan the Traitor.”
Something was coming up through Adnan’s chest, choking him. He saw before his eyes the face of the old man, crushed by the mounts of Shayfahan soldiers.
“It is best to not heed such fearful rumors, lest they give way to unruly chaos in your own town. Be careful and keep a watch for traitors in Yazid, this is the true lesson we have derived from this recent mess.”
The Imam nodded. “May the Almighty keep us safe from such falsehood.”
“Ameen!” the men echoed.
The Minstrel smiled. “Ameen,” he said. “I thank you, Imam Abdullah, for allowing me today —”
Adnan stood up. “You are a liar,” he said. His words carried out over the prayer hall, echoing in its walls, in the silence that settled. The man with the prayer beads looked around at him, eyes accusing.
The smile from Nasrim ibn Buayd’s face evaporated, his gaze on Adnan. “What did you say, son?”
“You are a liar,” Adnan repeated, louder. “I saw the massacre with my own eyes. It happened in front of me.”
“Who are you, child?” Imam Abdullah asked. “It is disrespectful to speak against a royal minstrel so —”
“I brought in the injured with my Nanu! I felt their blood on my hands!” Adnan shouted.
“Who has fed you these lies, son?” Minstrel Abdul said. “You must be careful of heeding their words. This person, whoever they are, are attempting to sow fear in you. Our gracious Salman could never commit such an atrocity.”
It was then that the gaze in the Minstrel’s eyes struck Adnan — there was a part of the man, he realized, that believed his own words. Did he deny the truth despite knowing it, intentionally hiding it, burying it like an ocean wiping away the shore? Or did he believe his own lies because he wanted to believe it? Adnan could not tell whether it was deceptive malice or naive delusion which lay behind the man’s gaze.
“I —” Adnan started, but suddenly, all he could see were the men around him peering out from the floor of the mosque. For a moment, he thought their eyeballs floated of their own accord, existing in and of themselves, directed at him. From the corner of the mosque, even the boy who had relented in his efforts to chase the cat, looked at him.
“So? Who has told you this, son?” the Minstrel’s voice said.
Adnan cleared his throat. “No one,” he whispered. “I must be mistaken.”
“Hm,” the Minstrel said. “Yes. You must be.”