She was just avoiding a particularly importunate bazaari when she turned a corner and saw Ismail Raza Ali on his mat. He was telling a story to a small group of men and boys sitting or standing around him. The public storyteller had almost disappeared from Lahore’s markets in those days, drowned out by recorded music, unmuffled scooters, motor tricycles and trucks and unable to compete with the attractions of film and TV. She was surprised to see even one survivor, so she stopped and listened.
He was telling the story of the fisherman and the demon, and the magical fish the demon taught him how to catch, in colors red, blue, green, and yellow, and what happened when these fish were brought to the king and fried: the mysterious woman who appeared though a wall in the palace kitchen and asked, “O fish, have you kept the pledge?”
Like all stories from the Thousand Nights and a Night, this one has no end but blends into another one, and another. The storyteller stopped his tale at the point when the king journeys from the enchanted lake where the colored fish are caught and finds the palace with the unfortunate prince inside it, half man and half black stone.
A sprinkle of small coins and crumpled rupee notes fell into the man’s profferred brass bowl and the little crowd dispersed. But Sonia stayed.
The storyteller placed his takings in a leather purse and, leaning on his staff, stood and wrapped a patched gray cloak over his shoulders. Sonia saw he was only as tall as she herself and just as wiry, his face the color of an old saddle and curiously saddle-tight and smooth over the high cheekbones. His eyes had the Asiatic fold in them, she noticed, when he turned them on her, and they had in them a look that combined amusement and penetration. He said to her, “That is thirsty work. How about a cup of tea down the road?”
She followed him to a tiny stall, where he was known and salaamed amid smiles by the host, who served them sweet milky tea and small cakes twice as sweet as the tea.
Sonia was a little shocked because the man had addressed her in English. In Pashto she asked him why he had spoken thus to a Pashtun boy. He said, laughing, “Because you are not a Pashtun boy but an English girl.”
“American,” she said. “How did you know?”
“Wrists. The line of your neck. The way you listened, which is the way a Westerner listens and not the way a Pashtun boy would listen.” Here he produced on his face an expression of dull amazement and laughed when she did. She introduced herself as Sonia Laghari, and he wished her peace and announced himself as Ismail Raza Ali.
She pointed to his cloak and asked, “And are you really a Sufi sage or are you as fraudulent as I?”
He answered, “Indeed I am fraudulent or I would long since have overcome my nafs, what you call the ego, and would be conversing with angels instead of fake Pashtun boys. But I am also a sincere Sufi, of the Sufi order Naqshbandiyya. I have been in the south, in Sindh, where the shrines of our saints are thick on the ground and where the Sufi pirs are even more fraudulent than I, being very rich and driving around in limousines while the peasants starve. So I am going north. There are shrines and tombs I must visit, and I especially want to visit the shrine of Hazrat Shah Azar Basmali again. It was there many years ago that God spoke to me and set me on this path I am now upon.”
“North,” she said. “As far as Pindi?”
“Farther.”
“Peshawar?”
“Farther.”
“Beyond the passes? Afghanistan?”
“Beyond Afghanistan.”
“But there is no going beyond Afghanistan,” she said. “It’s the Iron Curtain.”
He smiled. “It’s rusty nowadays. People do pass. The guards are ill-paid and lazy. They like tapes and tape players as much as anyone, you know, and the eyes of Moscow are far away. Also, I am a very obscure person, no one notices me. I leave one week from now.”
She said without thinking, reflexively, like a knee jerk, “Take me with you!”
Another, thinner smile. “And why would you want that, ‘boy’?”
She said, “Because the life of a little begum does not suit me. My husband is a fine man whom I do not love. My baby is cared for by many hands, all more skillful than my own. My mother was eaten by a lion. I wish to find God and ask him why. If I don’t get away, I will kill someone, or disgrace myself in some hideous way, which I don’t wish to do, for it would harm people who have been nothing but kind to me. Yet kindness is not enough.”
“No, it is not. But unfortunately, you would attract notice, even as a boy. Perhaps even more as a boy. You know the Pashtun song that goes, ‘I know a boy with a bottom like a fresh peach, but he is across the river’?”
“They would not notice me if I was your murid. I would wear my sleeves long and a Pashtun scarf around my neck. And I would make sores on my face with flour paste and rouge. Although I will be ugly and contemptible, I will still be of use, for you must have a disciple like other Sufis do. What if you got sick or hurt? Who would care for you?”
“And how would you care for me? How would you earn bread? Would you tell stories in languages you cannot speak?”
“No, I will be mute. But I can do this.” So saying, she tossed some small coins into her empty teacup, covered them with the saucer, shook them to a rattle, and then upended the cup on the saucer. She lifted the cup with a flourish. The coins were gone.
“A useful trick,” he said, after a short pause. “Although it is more useful to make money out of nothing than to make it vanish, which I can do all too well by myself. But you are right in that it is traditional for someone like me to have a disciple, and I have none. Regrettably, I do not attract the more devout youth, ah… what shall I call you? Not Sonia; but Sahar is a good Pashtun name; we met in the morning, after all, and that name means morning in Pashto. So, Sahar, I have no murid because I am not very holy. I drink, I run my fingers under the buttocks of devout youth, I eat the food of unbelievers-well, many Sufi do that-but I also say disturbing things about Islam.”
Ismail shoved his stick in the path of a genuine street boy.
“Ho, you, boy! Stop!”
The boy paused, wary as a fox.
“Here is ten rupees,” said Ismail. “Take a message for me to the house of Amu the goldsmith on the street of the jewelers, and you will get another ten. Here is the paper. Go!”
The boy ran off through the crowd.
“That is a messenger,” said Ismail. “He carries a message to my friend Amu; Amu reads it and carries out my instructions. What he does not do is to treat that ragged, ignorant boy as if he were me, filled with however little wisdom and sagacity I have been able to gather in a long life. Amu would be a fool to do that. Yet the Muslims treat God’s messenger as if he were God Himself; every remark someone heard fall from his lips is sacred, as if it were Qur’an itself. As for the noble Qur’an-I was not there when it was written down, nor was the Prophet, peace be upon him. Who can tell what was slipped in or revised or mistranslated? Arabic is in any case a slippery, allusive tongue. They say, you know, that any word in Arabic can be made to stand for camel. So I believe that God wants us to pray and fast and give to the poor and help those in need and be compassionate, yes? But what interest can the Lord of the Day of Judgment possibly have in eating pork or drinking wine? And did He who created women with the same hand really want their witness to be worth half that of a man? When anyone with eyes can see that the world is full of women more truthful and penetrating than the mass of men? But the Muslims don’t want to hear this, for they much prefer their religion to God. In this, all men are the same: Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Christian; they say, Lord, Lord, here is this little ritual, be content. O God, do not love me out of existence! God, however, is not religious. God is the flame of love. He desires us to love Him as He loves us, but all human things, including Islam itself, stand in the way of this love, for all human things strengthen the nafs. Even fighting to supress the nafs strengthens the nafs. And piety strengthens the nafs more than anything else. I am good, they cry, so God must love me. But there is no ‘because’ with God’s love.”