Rahena

Ifsharan was dark when we reached.

It would be best to arrive in the cover of night, Kutulun had warned.

Arriving from the south and avoiding the scattered villages, we made our way through the forests until we reached the hill leading up to Cypress House.

From this side, it was a stretch of open hill until the house.

When we reached, it felt as if I was home. And I did not understand why — I had only spent one night here before. But I wanted to collapse here, settle the tiredness of my bones. I wanted to see, even, the children Maryam and Omar, hear their laughter running through the halls. I could already imagine the scent of the cloves and thyme as we neared. I realized I wanted to see the old physician again, Al-Ghazan’s lion-like gold mane and his calming smile.

But when we left the horses outside and went through the gates, Imraan said, “Something is wrong.”

Our footsteps padded along the cobbled stones leading up to the path. Imraan knocked on the door, and no sound came.

“They must all be sleeping,” I said.

“But its not that, I — Zahir would answer the door no matter how late it is.” Imraan’s voice came rushed. Flustered, he looked around towards the sides of the house for something, anyone. “I — what if they came for them? What if they’ve already —.” He didn’t finish the sentence.

Imraan banged on the door, calling, “Its me, Imraan, open the door, Zahir!”

Nothing.

Then, after what seemed a long moment later, the door creaked open. Zahir’s anxious eyes watched us. He opened the door wider. “It is you, sir Imraan!” He sighed.

“Who else would it be!” Imraan said. He pushed through past Zahir. Al-Ghazan was there standing in the dark with a candle. “Imraan!” he called, pulling Imraan into an embrace. “We weren’t sure — The times are too dangerous to be opening your door to anyone this late at night.”

Small footsteps tapped down the stairs. Maryam and Omar came yawning and bleary-eyed. “You all woke us up!” Maryam yawned. “What’s going on at this hour of the night?”

But Imraan ran to her and the boy. He knelt down and pulled them both close into an embrace. He felt their faces as if to make sure they were real. “You’re alright,” he whispered. “You’re alright, my loves.”

Maryam frowned, “Well, why wouldn’t we be, Uncle Imraan?”

Imraan only pulled her small frame tightly into a hug again. The girl looked at Al-Ghazan. “Why is he acting so strange, Uncle Al-Ghazan?” she asked.

Imraan finally let her go.

Al-Ghazan said, “He’s a fool, that’s why. Where else did you expect us to go?”

Imraan laughed.

A warm meal of spiced mutton with onions sank into our bones.

Al-Ghazan sat in front of the fire, watching us as Imraan and I ate. “I was at the Shayfahan all week, listening to the Emir rage about treasonous Arassans.” He shook his head. “What happened?” Al-Ghazan asked them.

Imraan chewed slowly. “They tried to kill Irfan, and — it was a bloody massacre. But Irfan is safe now. We are devising a new plan. I am sending Waqar to train armies there. Asfan and Irfan will help lead them. We have to prepare for whatever is coming.”

“They are saying you committed the massacre,” Al-Ghazan said, watching Imraan.

“I know,” said Imraan.

Maryam and Omar crept up to us in the sitting room.

“You two are supposed to be sleeping!” Al-Ghazan said.

“But we want to know,” Maryam said, “What did you get us from your journey, Uncle Imraan?”

“Yes, yes, what did you get, Uncle Imraan?” Omar echoed.

“That’s all you care about? I shouldn’t get you a thing next time I go!” Imraan laughed.

Maryam and Omar cackled among themselves. “We’re joking, we’re joking! We swear, we missed you.”

Imraan furrowed his eyebrows at them and harrumphed, which caused the two siblings to crack up in louder fits of laughter. Imraan took out a crumpled parcel, unwrapping it. The children shouted with joy: “Bellflower cookies!” They pounced on the parcel.

Omar chewed with his eyes closed, his face held up with exaggerated delight. “It feels like Feast Day already,” he murmured.

Imraan broke off more pieces and passed them out to everyone else.

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I bit into one and my mouth filled with the subtle flavor of the bellflowers, almost like oranges, and bits of figs. “I have never tasted anything like this,” I said.

“You have never had bellflower cookies?” Omar gasped, pausing in his own chewing. “Oh, there is so much we must teach you, Rahena ji!” Omar said, shaking his head and patting my arm with small chubby fists.

For a moment, I forgot about the soil-stone in my pockets, and the weight of bloodshed and the exhaustion.

I savored the taste of the figs in my mouth, and the reverberating laughter in the room against the glow of the night.

Everything else could wait, for now.

***

Rashid

Rashid had forgotten his bags at home to carry the vegetables he was going to buy from the bazaar at Na’zain.

He had been forgetting quite a lot lately. Words, faces, dates, times, and places, tasks to do, and ayahs he had always known by heart - they slipped from his mind now like pebbles being carried over the edge of a cliff, one by one; by the roaring, rushing, force of a waterfall. Like the erosion of riverbeds, his mind was.

In the beginning, he had tried desperately to hold on to it. He had begun to write down everything he could, carefully etching the words onto pages, rewriting Verses close to his heart until the ligaments of his wrist hurt.

But then a slow despair had settled in. He realized it was futile; because he could not capture in writing the precise way that the corners of his wife’s lips would tilt to the left when she tried to suppress a laugh from him but failed to; how her eyes would drink in the sunlight. Nor could he write down how it felt to walk the streets of his childhood home in old Ifsharan. He could describe it: the scent of pistachios always seeping into everything, into wood, into fabric, into his skin and into Farhana’s hair. He could scribble into his pages the amalgamation of sounds, of seagulls by the Zeyandeh river mixed with the shouts of merchants selling ripe pomegranates and children playing cross-hop in the alleys. But he was terrified that even if he could read it later and imagine it, it would be as if he was reading someone else’s memory — it would no longer be his.

So he had ceased to write. His efforts had eluded even himself. And so, he had simply given in.

But at times like these – when he had to turn back yet again to retrieve what he’d forgotten, and then stopped in the middle of the road because he’d forgotten where he was even going and people looked at him with pity asking if he needed help – it was getting to be quite bothersome. He knew how they saw him, of course: an old man losing his mind. He told them no, he did not need help.

Thankfully, he had not gotten very far. He walked back around the road again to his house. The return itself was tiring him out already. He climbed up the stairs to his door and got the knapsack hanging on a hook just inside. Then, once again, he turned to start his trek.

Rashid, the Last Keeper of the Qitab Holders, losing his memory so. How ill-befitting. He would have laughed at the irony if people around him weren’t bound to give him funny looks as if he had gone senile. Sometimes, when there were no other distractions to keep the haunted thoughts from behind the recesses of his brain from emerging anymore, he would wonder what would happen then to the Qitab Holders. What would happen to the Words?

He had no more apprentices.

Rashid walked through the cobblestoned roads of Na’zain, determined to not think about that now. He had one mission today, and it was simply to get his groceries.

The autumn this year meant that the Month of Fasting was nearby. It would be a relief from the summer days of fasting. The upper streets above them were connected with arched bridges that resembled the long-forgotten multifoil arches of Al-Andalus and the Umayyad Caliphates. Merchants above the bridges sold carts of dates and figs and other traditional fruits to break the coming fasts with. Carts overflowing with figs, elderberries, squash, spices and other kinds of vegetables and fruits littered the road.

In his shabby robes and thin shawl with so many worn-out holes that it looked as if it had once served as grub for mice, he passed by Light scholars in robes edged with silver threads. He would glance away from them quickly when he passed by them in the streets, so that they did not look at him — for he was always afraid that they would know. They would know that once long ago, he had been one of them; that he had betrayed them.

In one corner of the bazaar, a crowd had gathered around a man who stood on top of a crate. “…Sakina Ilman was killed for trying to save Khardin. That man in his throne cannot distort the lie — we have been robbed, bombarded, harassed, arrested, day after day. But the Creator has granted Adnan son of Sakina great power, great strength. There is hope, my brothers and sisters.”

Rashid had heard of this boy that people talked of, this boy who had fought four Shayfahan soldiers, who was the son of the great Sakina.

Hands gripped Rashid’s leg, and a raspy whisper came from below on the ground by his feet: “My sins, my sins. Will Allah forgive me, uncle?”

Rashid held his bag of onions in one hand and looked down to find a man with shaggy matted hair looking up at him.

“Forgive you for what, my son?”

“My sins, my sins, I have done — an unspeakable thing.”

A link of chain hung from around the man’s neck. Rashid asked, “Why did you do it?”

“I didn’t mean to, I didn’t, I swear to the Creator, I —”

“It is not for me to intercede between you and the Lord, my son. I am no one. It is between you and the Creator.”

Rashid turned to go, pulling himself away from the beggar’s leg. The man’s eyes looked at him as if Rashid had condemned him to damnation.

Rashid turned back to him. He knelt in the middle of the street in front of the man, his knees aching, the city rushing around them. “Do you know what Allah has said?” Rashid asked. Birds called in the skies, and the adhaan for the asr prayer rose in the air. “‘Were your sins to reach the clouds of the sky and were you then to ask forgiveness of me, o Son of Adam, I would forgive you.’” The last note of the adhaan echoed in the air. “‘Were you to come to me with sins nearly as great as the earth, and were you then to face me, I would bring you forgiveness nearly as great as it.’”

The man stared back at Rashid with uncertain eyes, eyes unable to believe, unable to accept, as tears welled up in him. Rashid saw something in the man, something that reminded him of — himself, many years ago; when he had been a fool. And he did not really understand the mercy of God.

Carrying his bag over his shoulder, Rashid began the walk back to Na'zain. He climbed up the steps to his own abode and put down the groceries on a table. He could make onion stew tonight, he thought. He would save the potatoes for another day.

His knees creaking, Rashid climbed the stairs to the upper floor, where his quarters lay at the end of the hall, past the other rooms filled with ancient tomes. The madrasa rooms where his scholars had once studied or his students had come to learn were now empty; the intricate wooden slats that would hold the Qitab were still lined up, yet no one was there to read from them. He had not had students in years now. No one any longer wanted to risk coming to learn from a establishment banned by the Shayfahan.

But what then was the point, he wondered, to learn from those who taught a deformed version for whatever served their purposes?

But who was he, really, to declare what was Truth? He was a dying man. The edges of it all were blurred, and he was becoming a blur with it.

How we’ve fallen, he thought: The final Tower of the Al-Nurayn, falling into a decaying, crumbling, forgotten ruin.