Pariah - excerpts, pt. 1

My last book was awful. Pretentious, frivolous, wordy, turgid, and horrible. It has been 7 years since its publication. I still hate it. I used to think big words would lead me to literary fame - land me amongst the literati. Instead, it has led to 7 years of refusing to put ink to paper, afraid that I’ll create another ugly collection of uncomfortable sentences. I couldn’t refuse my controversial ideas though, that’s why I write my secret story from time to time. There are few pleasures greater than spreading controversy you don’t believe in. Still, when I was writing my book, I could hear a lady, unsatisfied with life, announcing my name, Shiraz Kumar, as the recipient of a useless award. ‘Best new book’, ‘best new writer’, or maybe ‘best new author’. I imagined an arbitrary adjective in the title to mark my youth, so that wiser writers and readers would tread lightly over the potholes of my plot. At the same time, I needed to hear the word ‘best’ ahead of my name (I’d have requested the lady to abbreviate my name to Shiraz K; Caucasians pronounced the Kumar like cumin). I needed validation; just my mother’s was not enough. If the award was named after a long-gone poet in their honor, even better – I would be part of a legacy then, something I could not impress on my own. Through it all, I could feel the thin purply skin of old men shaking my hand, I could smell the abandoned ballroom and dirty velvet, I saw myself sitting alone in the corners of bookstores, accosted for signatures by nobody on my miserable press tour. It would’ve all made me so happy.

Such was the motivation behind my fifty-thousand meaningless words. There was a time when I would casually say ‘circumlocution’ and ‘apotheosis’; now I disdain to hear somebody say ‘superior’ or ‘stoic’. My bowed lips are gnarled having written that.

The seventeen people, however, that read the book told me they found it to be a thought-provoking, personal meditation on loneliness. This surprised me. I did not intend to chronicle loneliness.

…

It’s a bright and empty day in Los Angeles.

Sitting in his tiny office in the Literature Department, Shiraz K. continues scribbling his memoir on the backs of his students’ exam answer sheets. He decides to walk through nostalgic back-alleys, filled with spice, sewage, and open wires.

I am a professor at the Chavez Institute of Humanities, specializing in transcultural literary enterprise. I specialize in Chicano and Persian cultures; I detest my own. I’ve dabbled in the ancient classics, but the constant massacring and incest eventually annoyed me. Medieval texts were too dense and god-loving. As for the modernists, I could never swallow their oddly shaped prose and pick-me poetry. Unfulfilled, I turned away from the Western Canon. I trust that Bloom’s wattles are quivering six feet underneath dirt and pastiche.

I can only hope that my haughtiness is tamed by the pessimism for my own work. Sometimes I wonder if this is my idea of overcompensation. I am not old, yet whatever aging has come upon me made me a simpler man. Past tendencies are artifacts to scrutinize upon, like a stupid Greek skeptic, or an archaeologist from the movies.

The only culture I liked in my hometown of Delhi belonged to her invaders, not her later colonizers. I didn’t like my grandfather because he never spoke to his only daughter, but something in his silence spoke to the mystery of the Mughals. It would spark my intrigue for the desert orient. Every Sunday he’d bring stews, flatbread, and fried fish from a restaurant in Old Delhi, the parts of the old capital. We would frequent the same restaurant in the bitter winters. The place was in a market near Lal Quila; the fort hung over the night like a sleeping giant, yet her towers were forever vigil for the barbarians. There were cages filled with live chickens, stacked by the dozen, outside the stores and eateries that lined the filthy gullies of Jama Masjid. I remember the chickens’ dead eyes seeing all the cousins they never knew tossed into cauldrons of frying oil, then hacked to pieces by a hunchback, his foot on the greasy cutting board. I don’t know if chickens remember things that way though.

My grandmother was an amazing cook. Her paaya, the braised trotters were my favorite, only she could make that. Her spice mellowed into the palate, it didn’t sting. She said the fat and tendons in the feet made the stew gelatinous. It would stick to your fingers and wasn’t meant for the summer. My grandfather took credit for bringing the bones. At times, you could see the silent expression of regret, of an unfulfilled life pass over his face. Apparently, he had had another daughter with one of his patients during his time as a doctor in Libya; once in a while I think about my forgotten aunt. Cousins I never knew.

There’s a joke in my family that my mother was in Gaddafi’s harem. She found him good looking. It couldn’t have been in his features though, something in his dictatorial disposition I suppose. It was a strange joke. We were a strange family. I couldn’t imagine what she had made of her rumored sibling; how disturbing it must be.

The centerpiece of our living room was a triple-edged scimitar with a camel bone handle. It used to waive evil spirits away from our bungalow. We bought it at an antique store three hours east of Marrakech. I remember the night markets of Casablanca. The pickled lemon in steaming tajins. The lonely minarets. The Bedouins guided us through the entrails of the Sahara. On humpback. I saw a mirage once. She danced to the drone of the sun. To my eyes, the stars suffocate from earthly heat while we sip mint tea. The hotel in Amman. The pretty horses that took us to Petra. The rosy smoke of narguile, its curlicues cascade up. The arabesques on our maroon Kashmiri carpets, the ones we marooned when we left. I heard the call of the muezzin in the mosques of Cairo, in the Old citadel. The trust of a zabiba did not suit our cunning tour guide; his name was Khalid. I wanted to be more than a tourist; filch my pockets but let me learn more. The women – redolent of oud and white flowers - held the tragedy of religion in their eyes. If I ever had a daughter, I’d name her Nur.

I remember Humayun’s Tomb. We went to the library where he died when I was a child. I heard him tumbling down the marble steps and his neck snapping.

Shiraz pauses writing, wondering how his students will be puzzled by the mysterious writings on their graded papers. He wonders which student will receive his deepest confession. He is a good grader but a bad teacher, too consumed by theory and devices. He continues.

To me, the promise of literary fame meant I would have to partake in interviews. And there’s nothing that would delight the self-obsessed writer more than to talk about himself, to be probed, to have his mind explored. In preparation, I’d ask myself questions and respond. In the lonely minutes of the day, I’d talk to myself. Eventually I went insane. I never considered my eating disorder a disorder, which is possibly why it was a disorder. At the age of seventeen, I decided I wanted to eat until I felt sick, and intumesced. My grandfather never looked at me the same and stopped bringing Sunday stews. I never considered my depression to be depression, which is possibly why I remained in the gloom and never got better.

…

I’ll be in two minds forever. Michael threatened to report Shiraz to the dean for plagiarizing his final thesis. His thesis concerned interpretations of gender in Naguib Mahfouz’s oeuvre, focusing on the Cairo trilogy.

I seek rare books.

It began out of bibliophilic desire. I wanted to build a library that would become my life, take over my life, and hopefully ruin my life, like in Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé perhaps. This one wouldn’t be dedicated to sinology though, it would concern Sufism, the mystics, the desert orient, my dear Delhi.

I sought out the translator. The man was a pariah, with no ears and grey eyes; his skin had pruned under the sun, he had no hair. Terracotta teeth and a breath of tobacco belied the words of wisdom he would never speak. He sat with his legs crossed over, his limbs were becoming one.

I did everything late in life.

He did everything late in life.

He always said the things that people wanted to hear. In doing so, he lost himself.

In a past life I was a eunuch. A eunuch to the court of Jahangir’s wives, to Mehrunissa’s zenana, I guarded the odalisques. The pompous king never mentioned me in his nama. In the life before, I was a Sufi mystic. What I teach in school today is what I wrote hundreds of years ago, about the Koran and my cosmological findings, what I learned praying in Kabul and Kandahar through a haze of opium.

 A zealot.

He found love in strange ways.

…

That everything he writes is somewhat autobiographical just seems to be the ineluctable fate of a writer. To impute a part of themselves into every sentence. It gets banal after a point. Yet, he can’t say ‘banal’ without feeling stupid. You can’t be proud from simply describing the nature of things. Shiraz believes it boring to call out how boring something is because everything is boring really. Nothing is exciting, it’s all been done to death. That’s a useless conclusion, though, like two mirrors reflecting each other forever, an equation to null. He supposes in the pages of 20th century literary studies, there was some old Frenchman, who, depending on the time of day, was either a poststructuralist or a pederast, to blame for his crisis of word and meaning. His made up Frenchman, Jacques, Jacques something, something scandalous but academic, a name incriminating but telling of the charm he’d exude at the cocktail parties in Paris, the luncheons, the lectures, the conferences, the cafes, the St. Germain salons, the secret trysts in the catacombs, talking of idealogues and ideological orgy, eyeing pupils, preying upon the pupils of his pupils, saying Everything is meaningless!, saying Put your mouth on it Pierre! troubled him.