Moth Smoke (28 page)

Maybe I am a monster, after all.

In the cell a man moves and I watch him, his shadow in the shadows, as he looks past the bars at the light, itself so pale the hot yellow of its filament fails to fill evenly the glass of the bulb. An ember unable to catch fire.

The envelope glows in my hands. It reminds me of things I’d rather not remember, a smell like burning flesh, a hazy world seen through smoke. Mumtaz’s face, the faces of many boys blurred together. A ringing sound. Places I will not let my mind go.

I want to tear it up. But I can’t. So I pull my knees to my chest and open it. Across the top of the page, Mumtaz has written, ‘The Trial, by Zulfikar Manto.’

It is the story of my innocence.

A half-story.

I read it over and over again, until I notice the paper getting wet, the ink blurring into little flowers.

At the ends of their stories, Emperors like empires have the regrets that precede beginnings. As he lay on his deathbed, exhausted by half a century of rule, Emperor Aurangzeb dictated a final letter to his favorite daughter. ‘I reflect now on my life with sadness,’ he wrote. ‘Tell my sons not to fight as we did. To each I will leave a portion of my lands, so he need not make war on his brothers.’

But merciless Aurangzeb, who faced an elephant without fear as a child and ruled his empire as a land of one belief, failed at the task of fathering sons unlike himself. The war of succession was again bloody, and the empire left the victor by his father too frail and too rigid to contain its own people.

Fission of empire, a new fusion, then fission again as children parted ways.

It is perhaps between hope and memory, in the atomized, atomic lands once Aurangzeb’s empire, that our poets tell us Darashikoh, the apostate, called out to God as he died.