[vc_row el_class=”mobile-padding extract-padding”][vc_column width=”2\/3″ offset=”vc_col-lg-offset-2″][vc_column_text]”In the Embrace of Darkness”<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you not know that a feast cannot be merry with fewer than four companions, and that women cannot be truly happy without men?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n The curtain rises.\u00a0 Darkness, that furry old familiar of night, spreads itself onstage.\u00a0 It means to stay, this sinuous, long-tailed night, moulting its woolly skin again and again, a thousand times if necessary.\u00a0 Or a thousand and one times\u2014a safer measure of uneven infinity.<\/p>\n There are four figures in this night\u2019s embrace, two men and two women.\u00a0 One of them, a man, sits apart from the other three, kneeling behind a screen, or a door.\u00a0 He holds a plaything in his hand, an ancient, blood-dripping sword.\u00a0 His back is straight and rigid with waiting.\u00a0 Though he is well-armed, his wild eyes brim with fear.\u00a0 Who knows what unfathomable, magic-tainted visions he must sit through, what terrors of the night he must strike down before they unman him?\u00a0 This is Shahzaman, sometimes called Zaman, Sultan of Samarkand.<\/p>\n Of the remaining trio, two are on a low bed.\u00a0 Two, a man and a woman, Sultan Shahryar and his most recent bride, Shahrzad.\u00a0 Here too there is a sword, but this one seems a mere ornament.\u00a0 It is a grand, showy thing of gem-encrusted gold; and it lies on the floor, almost innocent, almost forgotten.\u00a0 Not far from this pointless spectacle is a modestly robed and veiled woman, Shahrzad\u2019s younger sister.\u00a0 She, Dunyazad, crouches monkey-like on the floor, waiting for her cue to ask a question, or exclaim piously, or gasp, or groan or sigh at the right times. \u00a0Her eyes concentrate on Shahrzad, her words and gestures, on the whole scene\u2014with the man, the woman and the bed\u2014as if she will never let go of it.<\/p>\n The bed is a moist, rumpled mess of sweaty silk.\u00a0 Though the half-naked man on it is a fastidious king, he does not seem to have noticed the hint of slime and stickiness on his sheets.\u00a0 He is seated, propped up against pillows, this Sultan Shahryar, listening.\u00a0 His eyes are fixed on the talking woman, his new wife, Shahrzad.\u00a0 Her head is bare, her hair hangs unpinned and dishevelled down her back.\u00a0 Her hastily worn robe does not quite cover her damp neck, or the breasts with the fresh, red marks swelling on them.\u00a0 But her sultan does not see any of this though he is staring at Shahrzad as if ready to devour her.\u00a0 He is willing himself, this king with the lion\u2019s appetite, to see<\/u> her words, flesh them out; draw strength from them once he has confirmed their trustworthiness.<\/p>\n Shahrzad, the woman who is talking for her life, does not look frightened.\u00a0 She must be though, how can she not be terrified?\u00a0 This could be her very last performance.\u00a0 Even now, dawn is making its way up the palace walls, considering the window where it must bare its sword-toothed yawn.\u00a0 The sultan may say this morning, or the next: \u201cThat\u2019s enough storytelling!\u00a0 Off with her head!\u201d\u00a0 Shahrzad does not betray her fear, but as night nears morning, she stoops now and then, lifts the hem of her robe and wipes the sweat on her neck and face.\u00a0 Or she throws back her neck, holds her goblet high and drinks deeply, eyes shut.\u00a0 What she does not swallow she holds for a moment or two, rolling the liquid in her mouth as if she is tasting it for the last time.\u00a0 Then she wets her lips with her tongue and begins again.<\/p>\n Dunyazad\u2019s lamp lights the room.\u00a0 Its small but stubborn flame is a mirror that stalks the woman who is never still. It picks up her image and stretches it across floor and wall, a second Shahrzad, elastic, shadowy, massive; a matriarch of impressive proportions.<\/p>\n Shahrzad appears to be the only person in the world gifted with movement.\u00a0 The three other figures in the scene hold still as if bewitched into their waiting, listening postures.\u00a0 But Shahrzad, though solidly built\u2014her breasts heavy domes, her legs palatial pillars\u2014flows in one continuous glimmer of movement.\u00a0 Her words are not always elegant or apposite or even her own.\u00a0 But for the space of the night at least, all that is vital in this palace is here, in this sweating, exhausted, ambitious body. It is she who holds the scene together.\u00a0 If she stops, if she collapses, if she loses Shahryar\u2019s interest or attention, the roof could cave in, and with it, all hope of the city\u2019s deliverance, or its sultan\u2019s redemption.\u00a0 Sometimes, mid-sentence, Shahrzad pauses as if to take stock of her audience. \u00a0Her eyes move from Dunyazad on the floor, crouched like a suppliant, to a half-naked, half-believing Shahryar on the bed, to the unseen Zaman, kneeling behind the door, his breath wheezing with impatience as he waits for her to finish.\u00a0 Shahrzad\u2019s eyes turn shrewd; she begins again.<\/p>\n This self-absorbed scene lives on, shamelessly immortal.\u00a0 It unfolds itself every night for a thousand and one nights.\u00a0 It could be the entire play itself, all of life compressed into a permanent entanglement\u2014so self-contained does it seem, so complete its power over the players who make up its four limbs. But this scene is only the heart\u2014though the hungry, searching heart\u2014of a much larger body.\u00a0 The scene lives in the shade of a ragged, porous umbrella of a story, a wandering story, said to haunt travellers on the roads leading to paradise.<\/p>\n This story is propped up by a pair of upright, stallion-mounted brothers.\u00a0 Two pillars, tall, firm-backed, standing apart from everything around them.\u00a0 Each holds a kingdom at the crown. Each brother rules, not over mere cities and fields, but over his property.\u00a0 Not over men and women, but over his subjects.<\/p>\n When the story begins, the brothers have already enjoyed their royal status for twenty years.\u00a0 Since we are to know them so intimately for the next twenty or more, we look to the storyteller for clues to satisfy our curiosity about our heroes. There is, for instance, a father, \u201ca Sassanid king who lived in the lands of India and China\u201d and who \u201ccommanded armies, courtiers, followers and servants.\u201d\u00a0 But it is not clear what role he played in his sons\u2019 lives except to provide their kingdoms when he died; his own for the elder son, Shahryar, and Samarkand for the younger son, Shahzaman.\u00a0 So the storyteller is vague about the father, and indeed about geographical location, beginning with the familiar all-encompassing realism-resisting formula, \u201cIt is related\u2014but Allah alone is wise and all-knowing…\u201d As for the mother (or mothers), the storyteller is completely silent on the point.\u00a0 Surely even Shahryar and Shahzaman must have required the services of a mother before they mounted their steeds, snapped their fingers to summon waiting slaves?<\/p>\n The two brothers, when we meet them, are orphans.\u00a0 We also know they care for each other, because when the story begins, Shahryar, not having seen his younger brother for twenty years, feels \u201ca great longing\u201d for his presence.\u00a0 It has taken him a while to notice that he misses Shahzaman.\u00a0 But when he does, he is quick to act.\u00a0 He summons his right arm and guardian angel\u2014the wazir we will accompany on his hard and solitary journey as minister, father and upholder of the faith.\u00a0 Shahryar orders this wazir, his trusted chief minister, to travel to Samarkand immediately and invite Shahzaman to his city.<\/p>\n Till this turning point, a longing and an invitation that will alter the fate of many men and many more women, the brothers\u2014our elusive storyteller tells us\u2014are happy.\u00a0 They are happy in their legacy, the legacy to rule, having been taught to mount, steer, lord over, from the day they were born.\u00a0 They are renowned (particularly Shahryar) for their horsemanship, having sat on haughty white stallions before they learnt to walk.\u00a0 We know nothing of Shahzaman but his cleverness with a horse, and his rather ambitious name, shah-zaman, shah of time, ruler of the age. But the principal heir, Shahryar (shahr-yar, friend of the city, master of the city), is also reputed to govern his kingdom with such justice that all his subjects love him, such as the love of a subject is.\u00a0 So, two kings mounted on their thoroughbred horses, from that height surveying the world around them, dispensing what is right and wrong.\u00a0 Shahryar and Shahzaman must have become aware quite early in their lives of their entanglement with justice, and that they, with the advantage of height, could dispense it as they chose.<\/p>\n Between these two oases of justice lie unconquered deserts and wildernesses.\u00a0 Shahryar\u2019s wazir makes a dangerous journey to deliver the invitation that will reunite the brothers in more ways than they expect.\u00a0 We are not told if this is the same wazir who will one day be equally famed as minister and as father, but for our purposes his courageous journey may provide the clue. What are deserts and wildernesses to a man who has already fathered a martyr-in-the-making?<\/p>\n The wazir delivers the message of brotherly love and longing from the just king Shahryar.\u00a0 Shahzaman is properly overjoyed, and with alacrity appoints his wazir deputy ruler and sets out with \u201ctents, camels, mules, servants, retainers.\u201d\u00a0 So much is the background, the necessary (if sketchy and moth-eaten) setting of our tale.<\/p>\n Shahzaman is in a camp a few miles from his city.\u00a0 The gates, closed for safety, are still in view, though somewhat diminished in size and grandeur by distance.\u00a0 Zaman wakes; and finds he cannot sleep again.\u00a0 He emerges from his tent and meets night.\u00a0 Zaman encounters the deepest part of night, the unadulterated splendour of moonless darkness.\u00a0 There is something about this velvety, cloud-textured universe that is not so easily escaped or domesticated; especially when a man is alone and naked, without the twin crutches of city and palace, under a vast, brooding sky.\u00a0 For a minute Zaman is overwhelmed by the size, the depth, the blackness of it all\u2014this world which he has always believed wore his kingdom like a proud and substantial jewel.\u00a0 Zaman\u2019s throat is clogged by a little lump, just the size of an insignificant nut.\u00a0 He blinks, swallows with difficulty.\u00a0 His eyes water.<\/p>\n The storyteller turns sly here, as if suddenly sensitive to royal privacy.\u00a0 We are left to imagine why Zaman who commands \u201cservants and retainers\u201d chooses to go back to his palace alone; or why he leaves the camp secretly; or why he enters the palace through an entrance known only to him, up to his rooms by a hidden staircase.\u00a0 There is some half-hearted mention of yet another gift for Shahryar, a gift conveniently forgotten in the palace.\u00a0 The storyteller would have us believe perhaps that Zaman, like any of the subjects he rules, would go fetch it himself.\u00a0 Or is the gift so valuable, so essentially private in nature, that only he can set eyes on it?<\/p>\n In that moonless darkness that so disturbs Zaman, he wakes up and his memory summons a great ruby that lights up in glaring crimson the unknown terrors of the night.\u00a0 He goes back, he must<\/em> go back, to find the ruby himself, see for himself what this terror is that has woken him so rudely, dared to plant its seed of doubt in his royal heart.\u00a0 He must make the unknown known, tear it from the embracing arms of darkness.<\/p>\n His ardour for knowledge, a dusky, beckoning secret, is richly rewarded.\u00a0 In the heart of night, he finds his room.\u00a0 The pale gleaming body of his wife lies on his bed.\u00a0 Two muscular arms\u2014though he can just about make out the ebony contour of one elbow\u2014hold her in blissful sleep.\u00a0 A deeper shade of black flows into the room.\u00a0 A sword dangling limply wakes at the touch of a quick hand.\u00a0 It moves forward and pierces, slices all the flesh before him.\u00a0 Zaman\u2019s vision of the foul woman and the black slave is dying as a wet blanket spreads itself between his eyes and their locked embrace.\u00a0 Now he can see only blood, all of it an identical belligerent ruby-red so he can\u2019t tell whose it is. Swiftly he wipes the sword on the bed and races back to the camp. He wakes up his men and orders them to set out immediately. Though his queen will probably wait patiently for him now, he is in a hurry to get to Shahryar\u2019s city.<\/p>\n Shahryar, hearing that Zaman is at his city gates, hastens to meet him in style.\u00a0 Feasts and other entertainments begin.\u00a0 But Zaman is pale and preoccupied.\u00a0 In answer to Shahryar\u2019s enquiries, he can only say, \u201cI am afflicted with a painful sore.\u201d (The sore in one version of the story is black; in another a giant; but always a slave. \u00a0And in all of them Zaman is struck by the fact that he is barely out of his city.\u00a0 What did the woman plan to do once he had actually left?)<\/p>\n Shahryar suggests a therapeutic hunt, but Zaman remains behind in the palace.\u00a0 Alone, he trails from room to room as if in search of something.\u00a0 Then he finds himself at a window overlooking the royal gardens.\u00a0 Zaman takes a deep breath and trains his hungry eagle-eyes on the scene below.<\/p>\n It is day this time, but almost on order, a door opens, and not one but forty slaves, twenty women, twenty men, emerge. Zaman sees his brother\u2019s wife among the slaves, leading them to the fountain.\u00a0 She looks up and he retreats quickly, but even from behind the lattice screen he can see her undressing, then stretching out naked on the grass.\u00a0 All around her clothes pile up in satiny bushes, the whole world is shedding trousers, robes, veils.\u00a0 A naked circus cavorts before Zaman\u2019s eyes, its hungry, panting contortionists twisting themselves into impossible shapes. Zaman watches. His face has turned bloodless, as if all their hands are round his neck, squeezing.<\/p>\n Though he is far above the garden Zaman can hear the queen\u2019s invitation to one of the slaves.\u00a0 Her call, \u201cCome, Masood,\u201d must be a familiar one because he sees the man go to her promptly.\u00a0 As on a signal the others grope for each other, the remaining twenty women and nineteen men, though Zaman is not keeping count, smothered as he is by their grunting, saliva-dripping kisses.\u00a0 But then he pushes their sweaty bodies off him and his head clears.\u00a0 He is soaring now, relief has given him light wings and saved him.\u00a0 He<\/u> is not the only one; in fact, his brother\u2019s wife is worse than his.\u00a0 He turns away from the window, feeling a sharp, healthy hunger.\u00a0 It is time to break his fast and enjoy his brother\u2019s hospitality.<\/p>\n Naturally Shahryar is surprised by this sudden return to health and good humour.\u00a0 But at first his questions draw out only the Samarkand part of the story.\u00a0 Zaman pauses, giving his brother time to let the images (and their implications) sink in. Shahryar is now alert.\u00a0 He can feel his body bracing itself to meet a blow, from an enemy he still cannot see though he can recognise the smell of its treachery.\u00a0 He listens to Zaman describing the orgy in his own garden in all its inflaming detail.\u00a0 Zaman hangs his head in sympathy.\u00a0 Shahryar is still officially a just king, a Friend of the City.\u00a0 He refuses to believe it till his own eyes have played witness; but the brothers feel very very close.\u00a0 Zaman, with his recent experience of clandestine operations, suggests that Shahryar pretend to go on another hunt, but actually conceal himself in the room with the view.\u00a0 The two brothers will then confirm together, inevitably, that women, even their<\/u> wives, their<\/u> noble queens, are tainted with untrustworthy desire.<\/p>\n Now it is Shahryar\u2019s agony which is in the limelight.\u00a0 Our storyteller tells us he is \u201chalf demented\u201d at the sight of his wife and slave women cuckolding him in his own garden with his own slaves.\u00a0 Unlike Zaman he does not draw his sword and drown the disgrace in blood.\u00a0 But that he is truly Zaman\u2019s brother is revealed by his proposal: that they renounce their royal state and roam the world till they meet another king who has been equally (or more) dishonoured.<\/p>\n The brothers travel far till they reach a seashore.\u00a0 While resting under a tree, they see the waves part and a huge black pillar thrust itself skyward.\u00a0 In terror they scramble up the tree and watch a gigantic jinni come to the shore with a chest, open it up and remove a box. \u00a0The box in turn opens to reveal a fresh-faced girl rising like a pale and trembling moon.\u00a0 The jinni, her supernatural master, gazes at her with satisfaction, lays his head on her knees and falls asleep.\u00a0 The girl looks up and spies two pairs of awestruck eyes that barely blink, afraid they may miss something.\u00a0 So wide-open and receptive are these eyes that they seem to have mastered, instantly, the entire language of gestures.<\/p>\n In the girl\u2019s look and moving hands they now read, \u201cCome down, he is asleep.\u201d\u00a0 Then, \u201cCome down or I will wake him up.\u201d\u00a0 Her mime is so effective that she gets immediate results.\u00a0 They slip down the tree trunk one after the other.\u00a0 Again she tells them without a word (and what signs these must have been, these unnamed gestures that issue a sexual invitation with the postscript of a threat), that if they do not sleep with her (\u201cpierce her with their rapiers\u201d) she will wake the jinni.<\/p>\n She pulls her clothes deftly over her head without stirring a muscle below her waist.\u00a0 She arranges the clothes in a nest on the ground.\u00a0 Then she lifts her jinni\u2019s head, gently, gently, a ripe and bloated pumpkin that will fall to the ground and hurt itself if she is not careful.\u00a0 She smiles lovingly at the tranquil bald head gleaming on his new pillow. \u00a0Then she turns to the brothers, spreads her legs.<\/p>\n The brothers still their trembling bodies and meekly take turns mounting her.\u00a0 It is a swift, silent business, a novel experience for both men in more ways than one.\u00a0 When she has had enough of them, she reaches for the jinni\u2019s sleeping head and her clothes.\u00a0 She removes a large purse from a pocket and pulls out a string weighed down with ninety-eight rings.\u00a0 She takes Shahryar\u2019s ring and Shahzaman\u2019s and adds them to her collection. The ravished brothers shudder. In this moment, in what appears to be a sudden rush of insight, they are convinced they can read a life in a face. They read the girl\u2019s story now, in the gloating face she wears as she looks down at the jinni, his head back on her knees.\u00a0 The jinni carried her away on her bridal night when she was still a virgin, but since then she has been unfaithful to her master a hundred times, always in his presence and without ever being caught.<\/p>\n What comfort to discover a shame larger than one\u2019s own!\u00a0 The brothers recover as if they have been fed a magic potion; what are they doing in this desolate witch-infested spot by the sea when a palace, a city, a whole kingdom waits for them?\u00a0 They turn back, their freshly polished pride crowning their heads again.\u00a0 Once in his palace, Shahryar has his wife, her women slaves and their black lovers killed.\u00a0 (He, unlike Zaman, retains his royal fastidiousness about messy blood and sticky hands.)\u00a0 Perhaps it is the same fastidiousness that dictates his new harem policy.\u00a0 Women (or wives, or queens) are necessary; celibacy never occurs to him.\u00a0 The ideal plan: find a fresh virgin every day; marry her for the night; in the morning, there are eunuchs, wazirs and executioners who will see to the dangerous woman whose desire has just been awakened.<\/p>\n The plan flowers into action.\u00a0 Brides enter the palace, and even before the inmates have learnt their names or faces, they are meat for the executioner\u2019s hungry axe.\u00a0 Shahryar does not know it, but he has ensured that his name will be inscribed in myth and history much longer than his palaces, monuments or his conquests.<\/p>\n Three years pass.\u00a0 The city thins; even loyal subjects may prefer flight to giving up their daughters.\u00a0 Shahryar\u2019s wazir is reduced (or so our storyteller would have us believe) to confiding in his daughter about the severe shortage of virgins in the city.\u00a0 Shahrzad, he must know, is an ideal candidate.\u00a0 He has named her well, shahr-zad, born of the city.\u00a0 Not only is this child of the city chaste but clever, ambitious and quick-tongued. The wazir tells Shahrzad a somewhat double-edged cautionary tale, almost confident that she will not take fright.\u00a0 Once she volunteers to be the bride\u2014though she talks of being a saviour or a martyr, not of bridal delights or dreads\u2014there is a chance that this bloodthirsty story will head towards a happier ending.\u00a0 At the end awaits salvation, and to get there Shahrzad must reconcile the sultan to the hard lot of men.\u00a0 With the help of her silent sister Dunyazad she must coax him to repent, and acknowledge that all women need not be killed.\u00a0 A thousand and one nights later, it is all accomplished.\u00a0 When we part from them, the brothers are united with the sisters.\u00a0 The story ends onstage.\u00a0 Offstage it has just begun.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row el_class=”mobile-padding”][vc_column width=”3\/6″ offset=”vc_col-lg-offset-2 vc_col-md-offset-2 vc_col-xs-8″ el_class=”border-top”][vc_column_text]From<\/em>\u00a0When Dreams Travel<\/a>[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”1\/6″ el_class=”border-top” offset=”vc_col-xs-4″][vc_column_text]Buy<\/a>[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"