Two Stories

by Mehreen Ahmed

a circle of fifths

Past Sehri, a distant azaan from the minaret of a local mosque wakes, Rifaat. She yawns and turns off the alarm, set to ring at 5:53 am, on a pale morning; the morning azaan, every Ramadan, reminds her of Raja—King. 

Raja he sure was; gilded, he was not. Without a kingdom to rule, or any gold throne to ascend, people throned him in their hearts, even when they mourned. For he was the “People’s King,” which everyone called him. Hence, Rifaat also called him that, "‘Raja.’ He was the King of a kind who supervised spices, silks, and trinkets that traversed down the Silk Road to western towns, trading ladies’ gowns, amongst other things. No merchant could ever get passed without paying Raja his due. He called it “taxes” for the poor, regardless of friends or foes. Come to think of it, he was pretty poor himself; no traces of gold were ever found in his crumbly shack, musty roof, or under his old, cracky plank of a floor. Pots and pans had to be pushed under each leak in the roof to catch the drip of many a monsoon.

However, every time Rifaat saw him, her heart soared, reasons unknown. Simply desiring to be in his company; she would be by his side in a leaping lemur stride. While he stood at the checkout point, stopping and taking coins. Merchants made good money, no big deal to give him some of it, not of any consequence. Other regulators also took a cut, on every caravan passing down the track. They pocketed and amassed wealth in no time; no traders along the spice road ever had free pass. Unlike them, Raja continued to live under the shaken roof of his nearly broken den.

“What do you do with all this money?” Rifaat asked him once.

“Come with me, I’ll take you somewhere.”

It was the smooth month of Ramadan. Without anything to eat or drink, they embarked on a journey down the Silk Road, an hour’s horse ride toward the East. They arrived at a mountain range circling a small green lake, a veritable paradise. Adjacent to the lake, Raja and Rifaat stopped to rest.

“Hungry?” Raja asked.

Rifaat nodded.

“Go over there and sit by the lake—wait for my return.”

“If I’m crazy enough to come this far with you on an empty stomach, a few short hours of waiting should not hurt,” I yelled back.

He smiled and left Safina here; all alone. The People’s King (that’s what everyone called him) left her to deal with her own nemesis.

A couple of hours passed, but still no sign of him. Clouds gathered in the meantime over the mountain ridge, and the lake changed from green to a tinged grey. The passing of time had some effect on Rifaat, too. Her eyes stung; she felt a slight obstruction in her lungs. Then, she heard children’s voices through the mist shrouding the mountain pass. She looked in the direction of the sound, and there he was, her King, with a multitude of children following him, of their own free will. He came down the slope—the children in tow—to the lowland below.

“These are mountain orphans from the Circle of Cloudy Tops.”

“Oh, I see. Is this who you give the money to?”

“Yes, to the borborygmi you hear in your belly, they hear it all year through.”

“Do they not get enough money, then?”

“I cannot give them any directly, but to the paymasters, who then give them the bread crumbs that fall off tables—mere trickles.”

“Why?” Rifaat asked.

“Greed. What you do think? They steal food from the children,” he said.

We were both somber and looked at the children. They laughed and started to chant. They sat down on the dirt in their wild, tattered pants, and then they began to sing. They sang a circle of fifths, some in minor and some in major keys, starting at the point of C, in the sequence of C, G, D, A, E, B, F♯, C♯, A♭, E♭, B♭, F. 

A creature appeared out of the grey lake, shaped like the Highlander Nessie. It joined in the chorus and played its part in the music of the glen; the Nessie-lookalike of the loch reared its long head, tail, and its black distinctive hump. The vibration shook the heavens and the earth. Its mysterious ways eluded Rifaat, who only stared at this spectacle, nothing short of a divine sighting. It whipped up a quick, quirky storm that feasted on the burly waves; a grunge grey, a changeable colour; green was at bay. The dust from the storm blinded Rifaat, but it also gave her insights. She blinked for a second. 

When she opened her eyes again, she saw quiet descend. Nessie was gone, and so was the supping storm. She gazed at a space without Raja, or the race for a perfect harmonic pitch in the circle of fifths. Within the miles’ widths, she saw nothing but mountain range, the lake was turned back into green. The famished children vanished in the mist. Rifaat’s last link to the King was severed many Ramadans ago. Raja did not dote on the merchants of the Silk Road, although their caravans came and went in a row. As soon as the orphans stopped the chants of a circle of fifths, the melody snapped and ended up in the scrolls.

However, the infinite notations and vibrato of the circle of fifths are captured in the azaan—a remnant of divinity, the orphans and King both are bonded in tune, eternal and cosmic by any definition.

Liquid Doll

Sulaiman and his friend Omar were rummaging through dolls at a doll store, looking to buy the perfect one for Sulaiman’s five-year-old niece, Hamza.

“Where is this “promised land” I keep hearing about all around me? What sort of a place is this?” Sulaiman asked.

Omar looked at him and shrugged.

They searched through the selection of all kinds of dolls in various lengths of skirts. Some with hijabs, some without. Through blonds, brunettes, black hair, and white. None would satisfy.

“What kind does she like?” Omar asked. “Perhaps, that could give us some direction, rather than continuing this clueless search for the perfect choice.”

“I don’t really know; the kind that wouldn’t melt in the desert sun,” Sulaiman laughed. “The last one I bought her disintegrated on a dune by the time I gave it to her.”

“How did that happen?” Omar asked.

“I was stuck in a desert storm with it in my sack.”

“Pity! What a pity?” Omar chuckled.

“In that moment, I also had a strange vision of my mother’s dead, desiccated body submerged in a fountain of youth. When her body was hydrated enough, it was taken out, the water shaken off, leaving it transformed into the body of a teenager; new life was infused into her. She became a young woman, full of life. Perfect, but in the form of a doll—a living doll.”

“Could she speak, dance, and skip?” Omar asked.

“Yes, she could do all those, again, and more. Her life was forever, but it was doll-like, somewhat.” Sulaiman answered.

“What do you mean “doll-like?” Omar asked.

“As I recall, I had called her in my vision. It was a long-distance trunk call. I felt trepidation inside—a mad rush to see her,” Sulaiman said.

“What did she tell you though?” Omar asked.

“She said that I couldn’t, because she was in the land of the dolls, where she lived and breathed, but she was also tied to a visible string. I wasn’t allowed there. The vision was strange.”

“I’d say,” Omar said, who didn’t understand either.

In the doll store, the two friends sat abreast on a bench, the most beautiful dolls in the world before them. They held several of them in their hands, too, both tall and short; blue, brown, and black-eyed dolls in blue, tight slacks. But they bought nothing. Eventually, they rose and stepped out of the store. Sulaiman looked concerned that he couldn’t find something perfect for his niece. 

*****

His camel dug its lanky legs into the deep sand; a black storm rose in the desert, gusts blew the dust around, and sand rolled in, blocking out the sky. The doll was in a sack on the camel’s back, melting away. He sat there watching the dense storm, his head and face covered with a long, checked scarf. In the thick of it, the vision of his mother returned, came back to life, but as a puppet; it was clear. When the storm passed, the dunes returned to their undeterred, seamless states. But the plastic doll he had bought for his niece had collapsed: sunken eyes, sagging cheeks, crooked nose, lopsided lips; colours dripping down its shrinking feet. A liquid mass of plastic, not a single drop of water in the desert. The storm lasted long; he couldn’t gauge the exact time.

He performed his prayers on the dune’s sand, which slid away and off to his sides in sheets. The sun was setting over a high, reddening horizon; a southern star blinked. He took a leaching date from one of his pant pockets, chewed it, and split the pit into his palm, which he then shoved back into his pocket.

Back up on his camel, he rode for another quarter of an hour; the camel’s footprints marring the desert’s smooth surface with dimpling tracks. They stopped after a while at a red, mud-door house with a domed, red roof up against a hill. He heard women’s voices inside, and footsteps scurrying up and down stairs. When they came out, some stood at the door, others outside in the yard; they greeted him with ululation. He got off his camel; they came forward to kiss him on his cheeks, then led him inside.

Sulaiman didn’t know that the doll had dissolved. When he went inside and sat down on the cushioned carpet in the living room, he finally opened his bag. To his—and everyone’s—dismay, he reached inside and revealed a liquified doll. Hamza sat close by, looking eagerly, then shrieked in horror. She broke down in tears before the decapitated mess, her longing for dolls quickly dissipating. Everyone tried to calm her, but Hamza was inconsolable. Lambs, too, began to bleat frantically outside the mud walls. Sulaiman told her that he was sorry, but that it wasn’t over, that it all happened because of the long wait in the hot sun of the desert storm. That these things happened in life but noting that nothing was ever really set in stone.

*****

The lambs were still crying out in his mind as he sat with his friend Omar outside a glass cubicle at the doll store. Where was this promised land?

One melted doll in the high desert sun. Sulaiman’s mother was old when she died, but she rose, again, and became a laughing, walking, talking living doll, even loving like a sweet sixteen in one of the alleys. Here he was again, with Omar, to buy another doll. That would’ve been pleasing if he could decide, yet he could not choose one.

Satin sands slipped through his fingers in the storm. Heavenly bodies moved on the far side of the dunes; the sun dropped, and the moon rose. A sun also descended in the land of the dolls but much more benign than the one that had destroyed Hamza’s doll—a persuasive sun, a rejuvenating one.

Couldn’t he buy her another doll from the store? Couldn’t he keep his promise? He was wrong. All wrong. Some things were set in stone in these strictly parametric worlds.

BIO: Mehreen Ahmed is an award-winning Australian novelist/short fiction born in Bangladesh. Her historical fiction novel is Drunken Druid's Editor's Choice. Midwest Book Review and DD Magazine have also acclaimed her other works. Her recent publications are with Chiron Review, Kitaab International, The Bombay Review, Muse India, Litro, Icefloe, Popshot Quarterly, Panorama Journal The Chiron Review. She has also received multiple awards and botN, James Tait, and Pushcart nominations.