with time, the music seemed to draw itself in the sky, to stride across the constellations and fill people’s hearts with an elation they had imagined but never felt. Crowds would come to listen outside the tower where she played; they would sit in silence in the street and feel that they were experiencing 6.02 ness as they never had before.
Sapna’s father visited her every evening. Every day she would have discovered new things through her reading or from the television that she wanted to discuss with him. He loved her more and more; and as his wife’s pregnancy advanced and she gave birth to a healthy and perfect baby boy, he also felt himself to be in her debt. ‘It is Sapna who restored my fertility to me, even at this late stage in my life,’ he thought. ‘She it is who has finally brought me the son I requested from Dr Hall, so many years ago.’ The fact that his wife had turned her back on Sapna and decided that the whole business of her first pregnancy–illegitimately obtained, she now felt–was a curse she should have nothing more to do with; the fact that Rajiv’s new and otherwise ideal son hated the idea of Sapna from the moment he became conscious of her, would fly into a fury whenever his father unheedingly referred to her as his ‘sister’, and despised him for the care and time he lavished upon the ‘freak in the tower’–all this only increased for Rajiv the poignancy of his daughter’s situation. He never ceased to feel the pain of her incarceration. ‘She deserves so much more.’ It broke his heart every evening to leave her there, and lock the door. Every night he stayed slightly longer, listening to her music or discussing literature or history.
One thing she never discussed with him was the fact that she had fallen in love with a television star. A television star with a bull-shaped head.
The shrunken baby Imran had grown up under the loving care of his parents who lived in the ramshackle bookshop his father ran in a backstreet near to where the tides of the Arabian Sea are broken by the minareted island of Haji Ali’s tomb. The tiny shop had everything: not only guidebooks, innumerable editions of the Koran and stacks of poetry in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu, but also perfumes, potions, and pendants with prayers engraved upon them. Pilgrims from small towns would come for souvenirs: plastic wall clocks that showed, behind the inconstant wavering hands, the steadfastness of the marble tomb whose domes were topped with flashing red and yellow lights for effect (‘Keeps perfect time! Will last for years.’); calendars that showed the Ka’aba surrounded by majestic whizzing planets and crescent moons in magentas and emerald greens; novelty prayer mats on which the arch of a mihrab framed a spectacular paradise of golden domes and minarets and silver palm trees. Sleeping on the shop counter, baby Imran would stay awake watching the Turkic elegance of the Muslim wonders waxing and waning in the night sky by the intermittent illumination of hundreds of gaily-coloured LEDs.
He grew slowly and unevenly. His shoulders became broad and sinewy while his legs remained thin and short. His arms were too long for his dwarfish body and from an early age he walked with a simian gait that inspired scorn and hatred among his classmates. They taunted him above all for the size and shape of his enormous head that became more and more solid with the years and whose protruding nose and jaw gave it an undeniable taurine air. Neighbourhood graffiti speculated gleefully about the various kinds of unnatural coupling that could have given rise to such a strange creature: monkeys took their cackling pleasure at the backsides of oblivious-seeming sheep, and bulls threatened to split open the bulbous behinds of curvaceous maidens. One cartoon, hastily erased by the authorities, showed an entire narrative in which a woman, anxious for a child, ate the raw testes of a bull, a meal that resulted not in her own pregnancy but that of her cow. It was an artist of some skill who had drawn the final scene in which the woman stole out by night to seize the bloody baby from the vulva of the cow and put it carefully into bed between her husband and herself. The entire story was narrated by a pointing, moralizing goat.
Imran’s parents were naturally upset by the indignities suffered by their son, and eventually gave in to his insistence that he should not attend school. He spent his days in the bookshop instead, and consumed volumes of poetry that he would recite aloud for the entertainment of customers. In time, word of his remarkable performances spread, and the bookshop would be surrounded during the day by crowds of eager listeners who could not find room inside. The very oddness of his body seemed to lend an expressivity to his interpretations that captivated everyone who heard him, and his outsized chest and neck produced a voice that gave the impression of being drawn from a vast well of emotion. Through him, his audience was able to bypass the difficulties of the Farsi or the archaisms of the Urdu and understand the true meaning of the poet. ‘It is amazing’, one said, ‘that such a young boy should be able to overpower us with his expression of such adult emotions: the yearnings of a lover for his beloved, and of a believer for the Almighty. We have yearned for many things, but never have we seen such yearning as this.’ Another replied, ‘When he talks about the pain of being trapped in time while longing for the eternal we can all finally understand how truly burdensome it is to be temporal creatures, and how glorious eternity must be!’ Imran’s body, its hulking shoulders and massive head supported by a withered frame, seemed to symbolize in flesh the poets’ theme of manly, religious passion trapped in woefully insignificant human form, and no one who heard him could again imagine those poems except on his lips.
When not in his father’s shop, Imran wandered. Since his appearance provoked fear and dismay among the city’s clean and well-to-do, he gravitated towards out-of-the-way places where people were less easily repulsed. He learned the art of appearing utterly insignificant, and thus of passing unnoticed through public places; he slipped completely unseen through the bustling centres of the city only to reappear suddenly at a dhaba or a paan shop where he would exchange handshakes and quiet greetings with five different people. His friendships were forged with marginal characters who made their money from small-time illegal businesses, and they all loved him: for he told jokes with extravagant grimaces that made them roar with laughter, and he always knew ten people who could solve any problem. They came to him with questions: where the best tea could be found, who sold car parts the most cheaply, where you could find a safe abortion, who would be able to get rid of five hundred mobile phones quickly.
One afternoon he found himself in a tiny bar in Juhu where his friends often congregated to play cards and talk business. There was no illumination except for the strips of pure light around the blinds, and the hubbub of heat and taxis and street sellers outside was reduced to a distant murmur. As they drank under the languorous fans, one of them announced:
‘Now Imran will recite us a poem!’
Imran declined, but there was much clapping and encouragement, an empty beer glass was banged rousingly on the table, the bartender came over and made his insistences–and finally he assented. He began to recite a ballad, beginning in such a low voice that they all had to lean towards him to hear.
His ballad told of a princess, long ago, who had been the pride and joy of the king and queen and her brother the prince. She was beautiful and could sing songs that made all of nature sit down and listen. And she had hair of pure gold.
One day the princess was carried off by an ugly monster who was shrunken and evil looking and coveted the gold from her head. He shaved off all her hair and made himself rich, and imprisoned her in a tall tower to wait for the hair to grow back. But it grew back so slowly he realized he would have to wait years before there would be such a quantity again. He devoted himself to devising potions to make her hair grow more quickly. Imran’s voice rose: how evil was this monster! and how absolutely comic at the same time! As he told the story, the creature became real for them all; they listened in fascination, they cried with laughter as Imran screwed up his face and recited lists of foul extracts and hideous amputations that the monster would rub into the princess’s delicate scalp or mix with her tea.
Her brother was grief-stricken at her disappearance and left the palace to go and find her. He wandered endlessly; his body became scratched by thorns and eaten by fleas, but still he did not give up. Eventually he heard a wonderful voice singing in the distance, and as he came closer he recognized it as his sister’s; yes indeed, he
