She stuffed the letter I gave her into her shalwar pants with an adept and mysterious gesture, as if the whole market were spying upon us. She told me that Shekure was thinking of me. She took her baksheesh and when I said, “Please, make haste and deliver it straightaway,” she indicated that she still had quite a lot of work to do by gesturing toward her bundle and said that she only could deliver the letter to Shekure toward midday. I asked her to tell Shekure that I’d gone to pay visits to the three young and renowned master miniaturists.

The midday prayers had yet to be called. A knock at the door: I opened it to find Black Effendi, who was among us for a while during our apprenticeships. We embraced and kissed on the cheeks. I was wondering whether he’d brought some word from his Enishte, when he said that he wanted to look at the pages I’d been illustrating and at my paintings, that he’d called in friendship, and was going to direct a question to me in the name of Our Sultan. “Very well,” I said, “what’s the question I’m to answer?”

He told me. Very well, then!

“As long as the number of worthless artists motivated by money and fame instead of the pleasure of seeing and a belief in their craft increases,” I said, “we will continue to witness much more vulgarity and greed akin to this preoccupation with ”style“ and ”signature.“” I made this introduction because this was the way it is done, not because I believed what I said. True ability and talent couldn’t be corrupted even by the love of gold or fame. Furthermore, if truth be told, money and fame are the inalienable rights of the talented, as in my case, and only inspire us to greater feats. But if I were to say this openly, the mediocre illustrators in the miniaturists’ division, rabid with envy, would pounce upon me, so, to prove that I love this work more than they themselves do, I’ll paint the picture of a tree on a grain of rice. I’m well aware that this lust for “style,” “signature‘ and ”character“ has come to us all the way from the East by way of certain unfortunate Chinese masters who’ve been led astray under the influence of the Europeans, by pictures brought there from the West by Jesuit priests. Nevertheless, let me tell you three parables that comprise a recital on this topic.”

Once upon a time, to the North of Herat, in a mountain castle, there lived a young Khan who was fascinated with illuminating and painting. This Khan loved only one of the women in his harem, and this striking Tatar woman, whom he loved madly, loved him in return. They engaged in such bouts of lovemaking, sweating until morning, and lived in such ecstasy that their only wish was to live eternally. They soon discovered the best way to realize their wish was by opening books and gazing, for hours and hours and days on end, upon the astounding and flawless pictures of the old masters. As they stared at these perfect renderings, unfalteringly reproduced, they felt as though time would stop and their own felicity would mingle with the bliss of the golden age revealed in the stories. In the royal bookmaker’s workshop, there was a miniaturist, a master of masters, who made the same flawless pieces over and over for the same pages of the same books. As was his custom, the master depicted the anguish of Ferhad’s love for Shirin, or the loving and desirous glances between Leyla and Mejnun, or the duplicitous, suggestive looks Hüsrev and Shirin exchanged in that fabled heavenly garden-with one slight alteration however: In place of these legendary lovers, the artist would paint the Khan and his Tatar beauty. Beholding these pages, the Khan and his beloved were thoroughly convinced that their rapture would never end, and they showered the master miniaturist with praises and gold. Eventually, however, this adulation caused the miniaturist to stray from good sense; incited by the Devil, he dismissed the fact that he was beholden to the old masters for the perfection of his pictures, and haughtily assumed that a touch of his own genius would make his work even more appealing. The Khan and his beloved, considering these innovations-the personal stylistic touches of the master miniaturist-nothing but imperfections, were deeply disturbed by them. In the paintings, which the Khan observed at length, he felt that his former bliss had been disrupted in numerous ways, and he grew increasingly jealous of his Tatar beauty who was depicted with the individual touch of the painter. So, with the intention of making his pretty Tatar jealous, he made love with another concubine. His beloved was so bereft upon learning of this betrayal from the harem gossips that she silently hanged herself from a cedar tree in the harem courtyard. The Khan, understanding the mistake he’d made and realizing that the miniaturist’s own fascination with style lay behind this terrible incident, immediately blinded this master artist whom the Devil had tempted.

Once upon a time in a country in the East there was an elderly Sultan, a lover of illustrations, illuminations and miniatures, who lived happily with his Chinese wife of unsurpassed beauty. Alas, it soon happened that the Sultan’s handsome son from a previous marriage and the Sultan’s young wife had become enamored of each other. The son, who lived in terror of his treachery against his father, and ashamed of his forbidden love, sequestered himself in the bookmaker’s workshop and gave himself over to painting. Since he painted out of the sorrow and strength of his love, each of his paintings was so magnificent that admirers couldn’t distinguish them from the work of the old masters. The Sultan took great pride in his son, and his young Chinese wife would say, “Yes, magnificent!” as she looked upon the paintings. “Yet, time will surely pass, and if he doesn’t sign his work, no one will know that he was the one responsible for this majesty.” The Sultan responded, “If my son signs his paintings, won’t he be unjustly taking credit for the techniques and styles of the old masters, which he has imitated? Moreover, if he signs his work, won’t he be saying ”My paintings bear my imperfections“?” The Chinese wife, seeing that she wouldn’t be able to convince her elderly husband on this issue of signature, was, however, eventually successful in persuading his young son, confined, as always, in the bookmaker’s workshop. Humiliated at having to conceal his love, persuaded by his pretty young stepmother’s ideas and with the Devil’s coercion, the son signed his name in a corner of a painting, between wall and grass, in a spot he assumed was beyond notice. This, the first picture he signed, was a scene from Hüsrev and Shirin. You know the one: After Hüsrev and Shirin are wed, Shiruye, Hüsrev’s son from his first marriage, falls in love with Shirin. One night, entering their bedchamber through the window, Shiruye swiftly sinks his dagger into his father’s chest. When the Sultan saw his son’s depiction of this scene, he was overcome with the sense that the painting embodied some flaw; he’d seen the signature, but wasn’t consciously aware of it, and he simply reacted to the picture with the thought, “This painting bears a flaw.” And since one would never expect any such thing from the old masters, the Sultan was seized by a kind of panic, suspecting that this volume he was reading recounted not a story or a legend, but what was most unbefitting a book: reality itself. When the elderly man sensed this, he was overcome with terror. His illustrator son had entered through the window, as in the painting, and without even looking twice at his father’s bulging eyes, swiftly drove his dagger-as large as the one in the painting-into his father’s chest.