Salman Rushdie - Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Omar the Ayyar— ayyar means “spy”—had come a long way in the royal service from humble beginnings. He was a good-looking fellow, full-lipped, large-eyed, a little effeminate in fact, and a long time ago he had been obliged to wear women’s clothing and take up residence in the harems of earthly princes so that he could smooth the path for his jinn master to visit the ladies at night, when the princes’ attention was elsewhere. On one occasion, the Prince of O. unexpectedly showed up while King Shahpal was dallying with the bored O. wives, for whom a jinni lover made a spirited and welcome change. Omar unfortunately misheard his master’s command, Away with us at once, as, Do away with him at once, and so alas and alack he cut off the royal head of the Prince of O. After that in Peristan the ayyar was known as Omar the Cloth-Eared and it had taken him two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights in earth time to live down that mistake. Since then he had risen to the top, trusted above all others both by Shahpal and by his daughter Skyfairy known as Dunia, becoming the unofficial head of the intelligence services of Qâf. But he had been the first to find the fallen monarch and so the cold fingertip of suspicion naturally came to rest upon his brow. When he came running to the princess he was not only bringing the news. He was also fleeing a mob of angry palace servitors, and carrying a Chinese box.

She was the princess of Qâf and the heir apparent, so of course she could quell the misdirected wrath of her angry people, she raised a palm and they froze like children playing grandmother’s footsteps, she waved her hand and they scattered like crows, all that was straightforward, her faith in Omar the no-longer-cloth-eared was complete, and what was that in his hand, maybe an answer, he was trying to tell her something. Your father is a strong man, he said, he’s not dead yet, he’s fighting with all his power and maybe his magic will be stronger than the dark magic attacking him. She understood all of this very well but what caught her off guard and was harder for her to grasp was that when the dreadful news reached her ears, poison, the king, your father, she neither reacted with majestic restraint as she had been bred to do, nor did she fall weeping into the arms of her handmaidens, who had gathered behind her clucking their unease, no, she had turned to him, Geronimo Manezes, the ungrateful gardener, the human being, and needed his embrace. And as for him, as he held in his arms the loveliest female entity he had ever seen, and felt simultaneously drawn to this fairy princess and disloyal to his dead wife, simultaneously intoxicated by Fairyland and even less grounded than when his feet left the ground of his own city in his own world, an existential bewilderment, as if he were being asked to speak a language without knowing any of its words or syntax, what was right action, what was wrong action, he no longer had any idea, but here she was nestling sadly into his chest, and that, he could not deny it, felt good. And behind her and beyond her he saw a cockroach scuttle under a chaise-longue and a butterfly hover in the air, and the thought occurred to him that these were memories, that he had seen this specific cockroach and this particular butterfly before, elsewhere, in his lost country, and that the ability of Peristan to read his mind and bring his deepest memories to life was in danger of driving him insane. Turn away from yourself, he said, look outwards through your eyes and let your interior world take care of itself. There’s a poisoned king here, and a frightened spy, and a shocked and saddened princess, and a Chinese box.

What’s in the box, he asked the spy.

It dropped from the king’s hands when he fell, Omar said. I believe the poison is inside.

What sort of poison, said Mr. Geronimo.

Verbal, said Omar. A fairy king can only be poisoned by the most dreadful and powerful of words.

Open the box, Dunia said.

like layers of rectangular skin, were many other boxes, disappearing into the center of the enclosed space as if tumbling into an abyss. The outermost layer, the box containing all the other boxes, actually seemed to be alive, and Mr. Geronimo wondered with a small shudder of disgust if it, and all that it contained, might actually be made of living, perhaps human, skin. He found it impossible even to think of touching the accursed thing, but the princess handled it easily, displaying her long familiarity with recursive skin-onions of this type. The six surfaces of the Chinese box were intricately decorated — the word tattooed came to Mr. Geronimo’s mind — with images of mountainous landscapes and ornate pavilions by babbling streams.

In such boxes, now that contact between the Two Worlds had been reestablished, the emperor’s spies sent him detailed and varied accounts of the world below, the human reality, which Shahpal found endlessly fascinating. The centuries of separation had created in the monarch of Qâf a profound feeling of enervation which often made it difficult for him to get out of bed, and even the jinnia harlots who ministered to him there found him sexually sluggish, a shocking thing in the jinn world, where sex provides the one, unceasing entertainment. Shahpal remembered the story about how the Hindu deity Indra had responded to the boredom of heaven by inventing the theater and staging plays for the amusement of his underemployed pantheon of gods, and he toyed for a moment with the idea of bringing the dramatic art to Peristan as well, but abandoned the idea because everyone he asked about it ridiculed the notion of watching imaginary people doing imaginary things that did not end in sexual intercourse, though a few of his sample conceded that make-believe might be a useful way of jazzing up their smoke-and-fire sex lives. The jinn, Shahpal concluded, were uninterested in fiction, and obsessed by realism, no matter how dull their realistic lives might be. Fire burned paper. There were no books in Fairyland.

These days the Ifrits, or dark jinn, had retreated from the so-called Line of Control that separated Qâf from their savage territory, and busied themselves with an attack on the human world that distressed Shahpal, who was an earth-lover, a terraphile. The consequent near-cessation of hostilities at the borders of Qâf, while providing a welcome respite, had also lessened the flow of incident, and increased the tedium of the days. Shahpal envied the freedom of his daughter the Lightning Princess, who, having set her protective barriers in place, could be absent from Qâf for long periods, exploring the pleasures of the world below, and battling the dark jinn while she was there. The king had to stay on his throne. That was the way of it. The crown was a prison. A palace did not need barred windows to hold its resident within its walls.

We tell this story still as it has come down to us through many retellings, mouth to ear, ear to mouth, both the story of the poisoned box and the stories it contained, in which the poison was concealed. This is what stories are, experience retold by many tongues to which, sometimes, we give a single name, Homer, Valmiki, Vyasa, Scheherazade. We, for our own part, simply call ourselves “we.” “We” are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is. As they pass down to us the stories lift themselves away from time and place, losing the specificity of their beginnings, but gaining the purity of essences, of being simply themselves. And by extension, or by the same token, as we like to say, though we do not know what the token is or was, these stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be.