Excerpt
The Geometry of God
by Uzma Aslam Khan
AmalLove makes me lazy, as if I always have a full stomach. Our foreplay—or bo’s-o-kanar, as Omar lovingly calls it, shedding his manly Punjabi pride to ladylike Urdu—is lavish and fat. Pretending to be at our own private court, we massage each other like Mughals. (The King’s Hammam, now in ruins, is just around the corner.) The oil has a rich, woody scent. I take my time around his neck, watching those clitoral nipples stiffen. Even stroking the soles of his feet won’t get such joyous results. He giggles and protests and feeds me falsa berries, strawberries, lychees.
I learn to taste. Item by item, the way I watched Mehwish’s baby spit flower under a lens. (If the wonder of our childhood has helped make me a more attentive lover, Mehwish will love well. I learn to taste and so will she.) […]
“My religious vocabulary’s Urdu–Arabic, social vocabulary Urdu–English, but sexual vocabulary only English, while yours—”
“Ouch. Do it again.” I stop. In a flash, he rolls me onto my back. “Stop thinking.”
Between laughing and hurting, I struggle to remember what I was thinking, “You’ve only looked at yourself—”
“I prefer to only look at you,” he mumbles.
“I mean, you’ve only looked at both of us, sexually, in Urdu or Punjabi. Isn’t it?”
He sighs. “Maybe English is like your endless questions. It helps you hide your jinsi bhook. Do you even know what that is?” […]
I can’t. My mother tongue is as chaste as my mother.
He nods. “Urdu isn’t as proper as you Urdu wallahs think. You leave out all the good words, forgetting the language comes from those who loved to love. There’s a specific word for female sexual desire. Did you know that?”
“What is it?”
“Find out.” […]
He opens my mouth and starts naming me.
The words are hotter than the oil down my back, sweeter than the saliva on his tongue. They belong to me. They loosen me. Geography first exists in the mind. My names give me shape. (“What’s this? This? Do you finally understand jinsi bhook?”)
Noman
My father stands up, takes off his shoes, steps into the gateway of the Badshahi Masjid. I’ve already prayed. Now I have homework to do. Algebra.
I remember my teacher saying, “Did you know your Al Gorithms are named after the man who made them up, Al Khwarizmi? Or that civilization depends on the sifr, what you English-speakers call the cipher, what you should call the magic zero?”
No, I didn’t know.
I sit in the park, watching Aba disappear inside the mosque. He’s changed. We haven’t gone out together for months, not to feed the pigeons in the courtyard of Wazir Khan Masjid, or lick our fingers at the fish shops in Mozang Chungi, or welcome the Sikh pilgrims who come from India every year to visit the gurdwara next to these gardens. We used to do these things.
In my copy book, I save the vision of someone long ago: 10, 100, 1000.
My heart isn’t in it. I sip ice cream soda with a straw.
An odd thing happens.
The three pearly domes of the mosque start floating toward me. Three giant sifrs with the smaller sifrs of my sums swirling inside each like flies in a stomach. The giant ones burst, releasing the small. Tiny zeroes dance between the pages of my book, dive down the straw in the green soda bottle, one after another, till finally, they all burst.
A number is made up. It doesn’t exist.
I look at the marble domes inside which Aba prays. Designed with numbers that burst, with made-up lines and made-up sifrs.
Inside me, a devil is unleashed. Like Al Khwarizmi, God needs empty space to create. Without it, He faces an impasse. His intersections get crammed, like the roads in Lahore.
He leaves.
By the time I’ve done the algebra and Aba slips through the gateway again—stoops, steps back into his shoes, walks toward me—I’ve finished my soda, and calculated that God has left this country. And this is why Aba’s changed.
From now on, I pray for the return of the bloom of sifr. For the Unreal Zero.
Zahoor
Zahoor’s long arms motion a downward sweep. “Please. I have something you will want to hear.” Another couple sneaks away but others return to their chairs. […]
“Now. You have all heard of the French philosopher Pascal”—two others slip away—“I want to tell you what happened to him one night. It is a good story, you will enjoy it.”
He paces, eyeing everyone, including me. “He was standing in a wheat field. The sky was clear. The stars, bright. It was a very fine night indeed. But then something changed. Pascal suddenly noticed a flea crawling up a wheat stalk. He had excellent eyesight this man, all philosophers do.” The older girl giggles. He smiles at her. “You laugh but what did Pascal do? He cried.” Now others laugh as well. “Why? Because when he looked up at the sky and saw the infinite world above, it felt right. But when he saw the tick in the wheat, he realized there was a second infinite, and this one worried him.”
Zahoor stops pacing and looks around, making sure everyone’s paying attention. Except for the young girl asleep on the other’s shoulder, everyone is. “He saw that the tick was arranged like him. With a head, joints, veins, blood.” He says the next sentence rapidly, like a riddle. “In the drops in the blood in the veins in the knuckles in the feet there was heat. What caused it?”
A man in the front row murmurs, “The Almighty.” Others mutter and nod.
Zahoor smiles. “Pascal’s mind blazed. He saw the heat churning, the blood burning, the fingers twitching, the wheat bending, the wind causing tiny flea wings to flutter, as the creature struggled for balance. He saw a chain of reactions with no beginning and no end. He saw the universe inside himself.” He stops. Repeats, “He saw the universe inside himself. But not the way he saw the outside universe. He would never see the one inside. But he’d recognized it. So from now on, the only way to see was by searching. And that is why he wept: his mind would never rest again.”
He stops. His skin’s old but his stride, young. He wears red leather slippers.
“Pascal should not have wept. He was given a gift, the most precious gift there is, the gift of infinite curiosity. Many have had it. Few have not been punished for it. We can recall the fate of Ibn Sina and Al Kindi. Who cares about them today?
“The gift of infinite curiosity,” he repeats. His voice is a low rumble, a gentle thunder capable of extreme cruelty. I feel the menace in him as much as in Aba, though his words have the opposite effect on me. They revive; Aba’s deflate. “My granddaughter Amal has it too.” He points to the curly-haired girl. Startled, she blushes. “A lot happens beneath her feet.” He smiles broadly for the first time today. His skin sheds a thousand layers. He glows. “She was only eight years old when she found this,” he picks up a bone, “a copy of the diamond key,” he looks at Henry, who doesn’t acknowledge him. “Her sister Mehwish also has the gift, even while she sleeps.”