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By Root 20091 0

” Illiteracy, dismissed with a flourish; literature crumbled beneath the rage of his sweeping hand. Which sweeps again to chugha-pocket, to brandy bottle, to lips chapped with cold. Tai always had woman’s lips. “Nakkoo, listen, listen. I have seen plenty. Yara, you should’ve seen that Isa when he came, beard down to his balls, bald as an egg on his head. He was old and fagged-out but he knew his manners. ‘You first, Taiji,’ he’d say, and ‘Please to sit’; always a respectful tongue, he never called me crackpot, never called me tu either. Always aap. Polite, see? And what an appetite! Such a hunger, I would catch my ears in fright. Saint or devil, I swear he could eat a whole kid in one go. And so what? I told him, eat, fill your hole, a man comes to Kashmir to enjoy life, or to end it, or both. His work was finished. He just came up here to live it up a little.” Mesmerized by this brandied portrait of a bald, gluttonous Christ, Aziz listened, later repeating every word to the consternation of his parents, who dealt in stones and had no time for “gas.”

“Oh, you don’t believe?”—licking his sore lips with a grin, knowing it to be the reverse of the truth; “Your attention is wandering?”—again, he knew how furiously Aziz was hanging on his words. “Maybe the straw is pricking your behind, hey? Oh, I’m so sorry, babaji, not to provide for you silk cushions with gold brocade-work—cushions such as the Emperor Jehangir sat upon! You think of the Emperor Jehangir as a gardener only, no doubt,” Tai accused my grandfather, “because he built Shalimar. Stupid! What do you know? His name meant Encompasser of the Earth. Is that a gardener’s name? God knows what they teach you boys these days. Whereas I” … puffing up a little here … “I knew his precise weight, to the tola! Ask me how many maunds, how many seers! When he was happy he got heavier and in Kashmir he was heaviest of all. I used to carry his litter … no, no, look, you don’t believe again, that big cucumber in your face is waggling like the little one in your pajamas! So, come on, come on, ask me questions! Give examination! Ask how many times the leather thongs wound round the handles of the litter—the answer is thirty-one. Ask me what was the Emperor’s dying word—I tell you it was ‘Kashmir.’ He had bad breath and a good heart. Who do you think I am? Some common ignorant lying pie-dog? Go, get out of the boat now, your nose makes it too heavy to row; also your father is waiting to beat my gas out of you, and your mother to boil off your skin.”

In the brandy bottle of the boatman Tai I see, foretold, my own father’s possession by djinns … and there will be another bald foreigner … and Tai’s gas prophesies another kind, which was the consolation of my grandmother’s old age, and taught her stories, too … and pie-dogs aren’t far away … Enough. I’m frightening myself.

Despite beating and boiling, Aadam Aziz floated with Tai in his shikara, again and again, amid goats hay flowers furniture lotus-roots, though never with the English sahibs, and heard again and again the miraculous answers to that single terrifying question: “But Taiji, how old are you, honestly?”

From Tai, Aadam learned the secrets of the lake—where you could swim without being pulled down by weeds; the eleven varieties of water-snake; where the frogs spawned; how to cook a lotus-root; and where the three English women had drowned a few years back. “There is a tribe of feringhee women who come to this water to drown,” Tai said. “Sometimes they know it, sometimes they don’t, but I know the minute I smell them. They hide under the water from God knows what or who—but they can’t hide from me, baba!” Tai’s laugh, emerging to infect Aadam—a huge, booming laugh that seemed macabre when it crashed out of that old, withered body, but which was so natural in my giant grandfather that nobody knew, in later times, that it wasn’t really his (my uncle Hanif inherited this laugh; so until he died, a piece of Tai lived in Bombay). And, also from Tai, my grandfather heard about noses.

Tai tapped his left nostril. “You know what this is, nakkoo? It