I was afraid that the mountain wouldn’t survive. Now, after so many years, I can see that the mountain has recovered. Bushes and flowers have sprung up on the slopes and covered up the scars. Mountain goats graze between the rails and the baby goats leap from one railway sleeper to another. The mountain has accepted the railway and assimilated it. You can hardly see the traces.
“The train will be here soon. It doesn’t make much noise, and that’s good. Our ancient Saffron Mountain has acquired something new, something modern. A train with little red cars that chug up the mountain. Life is like that, my boy. That’s just the way things are.”
A Wife
We suspect that Aga Akbar wrote
about his friends in this section.
And about his wife.
All the birds had started making their nests, all except Aga Akbar. He had no mate. No wife.
By then the other strong men, who had also built stone houses, already had children. Aga Akbar’s house, however, was still empty.
In those days he came into frequent contact with prostitutes. That was because of his work: he called on customers and mended their carpets.
Back when Aga Akbar was twelve, Kazem Khan had taken him to see an old friend in another village. Uwsa Gholam had a small business up in the mountains. He made natural dyes out of the roots and flowers of plants that grew on Saffron Mountain. People came to him from all over the country to match the original colours in their carpets.
In fact, Uwsa Gholam made a living out of mending carpets. Old and expensive carpets were always getting damaged. If the hole or tear wasn’t mended, the rest of the weave would gradually come unravelled, too. Not everyone, though, can mend a carpet. In unskilled hands, a mend will forever be a fresh wound in the old weave. Uwsa Gholam was one of the best carpet-menders in the country, but he was getting old. His eyes weren’t as good as they used to be. He could no longer do his work.
Kazem Khan knew that Aga Akbar would make a poor farmer. He wasn’t suited to a life of ploughing fields or tending sheep. He needed to do work that required him to use both his hands and his head. That’s why Kazem Khan had brought him to Uwsa Gholam.
“Salaam aleikum, Uwsa! Here’s the boy I’ve been telling you about. Akbar, shake Uwsa’s hand.”
The old man reached into his pocket and pulled out a single purple thread from an old carpet. “Akbar, go find some flowers that match the colour of this thread!”
This is how Aga Akbar got started in his career, in the work that he continued to do until the day he died.
For three years he went to Uwsa’s early every morning and rode home again at dusk. Then Uwsa died, but by that time Akbar had learned enough to mend carpets and produce natural dyes on his own.
Though no one could take Uwsa’s place, Akbar had already made a name for himself in the region. The villagers liked him. They trusted him and would rather have him than a stranger in their homes. And so he rode his horse from one village to another. It was during this period that he came into contact with prostitutes.
• • •
Kazem Khan was very choosy when it came to finding a wife for Aga Akbar. He didn’t want a woman with only one eye, or a farm girl who wove carpets. No, he wanted a strong woman with a good head on her shoulders, a woman who could organise things, a woman who understood the man whose children she would bear.
“No, not just any woman,” he used to say. “I’ll wait, I want him to have just the right one. He can hold out for a few more years. It won’t kill him.”
But the other men in the family said to him, “You shouldn’t compare him to yourself, Kazem Khan. You have women all over Saffron Mountain, but that boy doesn’t. If you don’t let him marry, he’s bound to go astray.”
“He can get married tomorrow if he likes, but not to a woman who’s deaf, lame or blind.”
Unfortunately, there were no strong, healthy, intelligent women on Saffron Mountain who would agree to marry Akbar.
So he turned to prostitutes for warmth and they provided it willingly. “Hello, Aga Akbar, come in. Take a look at my carpet. Do you think you can mend it? Come sit by me. You’re tired, your arms ache, your back aches. Here, have a cup of tea. There’s no need to stare, I’ll come sit beside you. Let me hold your hand. Now doesn’t that feel nice?”
If you want to hear the story of Aga Akbar’s relationships with prostitutes, you should ask his childhood friend Sayyid Shoja.
Shoja was blind. He’d been blind from birth, yet he was famous for his keen sense of hearing—he could hear as well as a dog. He had a sharp tongue, which he didn’t hesitate to use. The men tried to stay out of his way, since they knew he heard everything they said.
Sayyid Shoja knew all of the prostitutes on Saffron Mountain and called them by their first names. He also knew which men went to see them. He recognised them instantly by their footsteps. “Hey, little man, you’re tiptoeing past. Are you trying to avoid me? What for? Have you been doing naughty things again with that poker in your trousers? Come on, shake my hand, say hello, you don’t need to be afraid. Your secret is safe with me.”
As evening fell, he used to sit by the side of the road and lean against the old tree. The girls came back from the spring with their jugs of water, and he always recognised the footsteps of the girl he loved. “Salaam aleikum, my little moon. Let me carry your bucket for you.”
The girls laughed at him and he teased them.
“You there,” he’d say. “Yes, you with the big butt. Don’t sit on the ground, you’ll leave a hole in the dirt!”
He didn’t have any money, but he didn’t need any, because Aga Akbar paid his bills.
The men who didn’t like him and feared his sharp tongue sometimes chided him: “You’re a leech, Shoja, sucking Akbar dry.”
The sayyid was too high-minded to worry about such unimportant things.
There was another man who shared his secrets with Akbar and Shoja: Jafar the Spider.
Jafar was crippled. He couldn’t walk or stand upright. He was skinny and had a tiny head. The way he scuttled over the ground with his muscular arms and legs made you think of a spider. Yet he owed his nickname not so much to his spidery crawl, but to the fact that he climbed trees like a real spider. People would see him in places a normal person couldn’t go. Suddenly he’d be hanging from a branch or crawling up the dome of a mosque. One of his favourite pastimes was peeking through the window of the bathhouse and spying on the naked women.
Jafar saw what the blind Shoja couldn’t see.
And since Jafar was Shoja’s friend, he was Aga Akbar’s friend, too. They formed a tight-knit threesome, and they could do many things together that they were unable to do alone.
They even went to the prostitutes together. That was the agreement. Jafar would crawl onto the back
