Paid to Remember

By Emad El-Din Aysha

This

Union you want

With the earth and sky,

This union we all need with love,

A golden wing from God’s heart just

Touched the ground,

Now

Step upon it

With your brave sun-vows

And help our eyes

To Dance!

— Hafiz

“Is this not a bit too much,” Al-Jahiz said, a concerned tone in his voice.

“I am your wife,” Nayrouz said sweetly. “We are home. It is only for you. My sweetest audience. My only audience.”

He swallowed hard and relaxed the set of his shoulders. “Very well. Your smile is compensation enough for me!”

***

How had it all started? A bowl full of strawberries. The African variety was always the best, and Nayrouz had bought them from the local Arabic souk [market].

They were ripe. So ripe they would go bad if not consumed on the day.

She had many errands to run that day, not least in the kitchen, so she placed them in a bowl, the softest ones she could find, placed the bowl in the sink and poured cold water on them from the tap – and she was so wrong to do that, as a Persian. The water turned red, tipping out of the bowl into the sink and draining the pulpy refuse away with the grains of dirt and the loose seeds in the skin.

It drew her to poetry. “Washing strawberries is like… cleaning a wound,” she said from the earthen brown of her full lips to the tiled walls of the empty room.

***

“We are here on the red planet,” the peacock farmer argued politely to the crowded, seated audience. “There is no need to extend our bureaucracy here too,” he added to the decorated walls of the congregation hall. The first meeting of the said committee of the said fund of the said association they had just formed. “Think of all we have accomplished. How our people have turned our corner of the red planet, not only to a blue and then a green planet, but a giant Howz [pool] of pink and yellow and purple waves. We did this, not our so-called administrators. Through the bazaar and the mosque and the farmers and the tribesmen and the industrial guilds. The desert and the paddy field and the mountain and the city, all in unison.”

“And with the help of the Arab,” Nayrouz said in her customary fiery way.

She wasn‟t met with chagrins but she wasn‟t met with applause either. The women that predominated the meeting were slouched over in their flowing black chadors, the lovely flowery patterns of their dresses hidden beneath. If it were not for the flowery decorations of the walls and ceilings above, with their green, blue and black patterns, the eye of the observer would not have caught onto the carpeted wonder of the ladies‟ second set of clothes.

Nayrouz was seated next to her brother, the peacock farmer from legend. Her brother was in his usual flowing Afghan robes, small feet never evident to the naked eye. As for herself, she was in her jurist‟s garb, lovely gleaming shades of avocado dip green and effervescent crimson red juxtaposed to the harsh blacks of the long arm of the law. Even seated her considerable height was evident to all, her dark, dark eyes as imposing as her words, irises so pitch black they blended into the pupils, accentuating the whites of her eyes without the aid of kohl eyeliner, which she did in fact have on however sparsely. The table they sat behind was decked out in a silvery carpet decorated with undulating geometric flower patterns calculated to remind everyone of the grey crab-grass carpets beneath their feet in the conference hall.

“And so we can do the same with our latest improvisation of idle hands in need of a mission now in the era of the Long Martian Peace,” the peacock farmer went on after the initial blow had dissipated with his younger sister‟s comments. “We must find things to do, ever, always. Remember that he who does not preoccupy himself with the doing of good will by necessity preoccupy himself with the doing of evil,” he added, quoting a religious saying ascribed to the Prophet (PBUH). “And we are always on the precipice of doing evil to ourselves, when we grow slovenly and fat and learn that there is no one to drive us apart but ourselves.”

“But…,” somebody rose his hand in mock protest. “Surely, a social fund for the promotion of conservatism? Are we not conservative enough!”

“An Energy Conservation Fund,” Nayrouz corrected.

“And what has that to do with anything,” someone sitting right next to the first man said. You could hardly tell them apart. They dressed in such a nondescript fashion, to a woman’s eyes. “Do we not have enough energy as it is, on a planet drenched with sunlight and heated sands and manure conversion?”

“The previous war we fought and won, at the behest of the Arabs,” Nayrouz responded with considerable gumption, “was a war over energy on a planet, as you say, with an over abundance of it. And yet, as the glorious Prophet says, If a man is given a field of gardens, he will want a second. If a man is given a mountain of gold, he will want a second. Truly, the only thing that fills the eye of the son of Adam is dirt!”

“True enough.” The man said begrudgedly.

“And,” she added, “we are admonished in Islam to be generous and to give in charity, food and alms, even when there are no poor. The benefit is twofold when there are deserving recipients but the ultimate gain is to us, the givers. For it reminds us what we are always keen to forget. That money is the money of God, another blessing we are entrusted with. And no more. Therefore,…” she paused as if about to make a judicial proclamation, “as there are no limits to men‟s greed we should tighten our belts to ensure that we have enough energy left over for a rainy day, as the Anglophone expression goes.”

“But what is this to do with conservatism,” the two of them pitched in.

“You two are thinking like the scientist, the textual literalist,” she responded promptly. “Think like a poet. Conservatism and conservation are one and the same. We conserve, we preserve the past. Our traditions that make us who we are, our accumulated experiences that we draw on in the here and now. All else is arbitraralism or having to start from scratch. Even our genes tell us otherwise, coding the experiences to the benefit of the present. To conserve is to live is to thrive. And the same with energy. Encouraging one is encouraging the other. We save energy for the future as we save customs for the future, to bequeath them to our descendents and their descendents, in as whole and untarnished a form as is possible. That is our responsibility as… elders.” That last word came out heavily on her tongue. Her twins were still children and she had much vitality left in her. Her brother looked the other way, noticing the prolonged pause.

A silent cough from her delicate neck and she found another track to pursue. “As Persians, we have learned long ago the value of conserving water in our arid environment, whatever the changing moods of the seasons and fates. Our ancestors washing everything, fruits and vegetables, in the communal pool. And so modern Iranians did the same even when housed in apartment blocks, filling the, ahem,” a more audible cough this time, “the kitchen sink with water and pouring the produce from the sou… bazaar in it to take its goodly time and clean itself. Without any waste of effort, in water or energy from the cleansing hands. Therefore, our forefathers in likewise fashion switched to nuclear power, and then fusion power, and then cold fusion. And why do this when they had an over abundance of oil? If they had not, they would have not been able to weather the storm of the eventual end of the oil era, and the attendant oil wars, stoked by the armaments racers. Who is to tell what will happen in the near future with our own renewable energies?”

“So be it,” the same recalcitrant man said. “And how then do you propose that we solve this pre-emptive problem?”

“That is for you to decide,” Nayrouz almost yelled. She almost wanted to say, „if you are man enough‟, but she restrained herself. “Our proposal is that you devise a means, but in unison, in the field.”

“I do not follow,” someone else said.

“A field trip of good intentions, with our brethren from the Planetary Council.” She wanted to say Arab brethren but decided to leave that in limbo.

“To present them with a solution we do not have, for a problem we can scarcely discern?” the man said very rightly.

“We do have it, we just do not see it,” she said joyously. “I have faith in you, in our people, to think our way out of any difficulty. You will walk, you will see, and you will then find a solution.”

It took some time to sink in but it did.

Engineers walking side by side with artisans and housewives and legalists, out in the bazaars and the promenades, a walking, talking brains trust, and with foreign dignitaries to waylay and impress. Nayrouz was pressing on the weak point of every Iranian man, woman, and child, and she knew it. And they knew she knew it.

“And, ah…,” he swallowed difficulty. “When is this, exactly?”

“Ah, but it is today,” she said triumphantly. “The delegation is outside these very walls, in waiting for us… to make our country proud in the gaze of the planetary eye.”

***

The sun was winking at them from between man-made clouds, solar canopies that sheltered them from the summer heat as they walked the beaten path of the Persian streets.

A crowd of foreign onlookers mingling with a crowd of mixed natives, wary of the eyes of the foreign delegates, meanwhile drawing a crowd of onlookers around them from the assortments of peoples populating the street of the Persian zone. Their feet were not guided by any preordained map in their minds or set of instructions, but by the watchful gaze and the chitter chatter of the accompanying crowds. It was quite a sight to see, a melodrama playing itself out under the all seeing, all knowing eye of the Martian sun.

“What are these houses made of,” one of the delegates asked, gesturing to the classical buildings they had constructed here out of the Martian surface, as if transplanted from the homeland itself.

The women in the crowd were too shy to answer so a man, an otherwise recalcitrant one, answered. “Mud,” he said simply.

“But these constructions are wonderful. I could have sworn they were made out of solid rock.” The delegate was an Egyptian and thought anything of a beige construction must by necessity be made out of sandstone or limestone. It was not so in the Persian zone, or in Iran proper.

“We are… alchemists. Our people, our women,” the man gestured proudly to his co-workers in the team, “can turn dust into solid rock. Metaphorically, but our granuals of dirt can do what solid rock does, as far as withstanding the heat is concerned. It is an old, old tradition that we have preserv…” A blank expression on his face as he realised what he was saying.

Nayrouz smiled contentedly to herself.

She moved like a princess, without the need of high heels.

She pause a moment to close her eyes and mouthed silent verses of poetry:

Circle, circle,

The eye winks from beyond The iris bleeds a tear

To plant a seed

Of a pomegranate tree

Resuming her horse-like gait, she disappeared gently into the light.

***

They were in a mosque now, the local imam guiding them through the labyrinth of orangey brown pillars, over the red, green and blue of the thick, thick carpets that stretched from one end of the horizon to the other. The light from the Martian sun pushed its way through the coloured glasses that adorned the windows, igniting the already brightly coloured garden of flowery fabrics beneath their bare feet.

Even the Arab delegates, Muslims to a man – and woman – could not help but be impressed.

But there was still more to see. Mosques everywhere in the hot lands struggled to keep the light at bay, but only Persians seem to have succeeded. Everything was shrouded in light-hearted shadows. The perfect place for supplication, neatly tucked away from the worries of the world outside. Enough light to read by, without the aid of a candlewick or magic lantern, but enough dark to forget yourself in as you read, catapulted to another world of bliss as you imagined paradise, brought back to you from the patterns you sat on and witnessed and smelt in the fragrant air.

The books were housed on shelves close to the formidable wooden minbar, where the imam made his sermons to the assembled worshippers, and that standing next to the mihrab, pointing the believers back to Terra and Mecca beyond that.

There was stained glass there too, only less carpets to distract you from the tapestry of rosy lights.

It was always easier to focus closer to the source of prayer.

That’s when it happened. That same recalcitrant man kept staring and staring at the assortment of coloured glasses that positively stained the air with their gooey magnificence, rays of subdued light enflaming the Martian dust that stubbornly hung in the air. Rays of light pushing their way through the particles as surely as they were forcing their way through the glass. You could almost see the glass, and the air, bending to the will of the sunlight.

Something was happening inside him, Nayrouz could not help but observe. Some fermentation, the same thing she’d felt when she’d washed away the stains from the fruits of love earlier in the day. Hence, this elliptical trip.

The idea wasn’t entirely clear in his head just yet, but he was getting there. Give it a little more time, she chided pleasantly to herself.

Nayrouz then looked away, into the distance, imaging her husband’s bland, sand-coloured face, and the reflection of light caught in his spectacles. She remained silent, lips parting on the inside of her mind to greet her ears with a poem:

Meteorites stain the air with their presence The arrows of God

Harbingers of doom,

To those who defy His mercy

For wisdom must pierce the heart of the believer

As surely as falling rocks cut through the skin of the skies To pollinate the land

She said her vows out of respect to this so finely crafted house of God, fashioned from the same mud as the forefather Adam, and moved on.

***

They reconvened in the conference hall, the only difference this time was that Nayrouz and her elder brother were sitting with the other guests while a member of the Planetary Council and the two original men who had been complaining all the time, with more stubborn of the two now making the presentation.

Instead of using an overhead projector, they hung the carpet that had originally been on the table, up onto the wall. With a little reprogramming the engineer who had been so reprehensible not so long ago made his announcement.

“Nature knows no waste, as Aristotle said. And so it is with us,” the man went on. “If we are to establish a fund to encourage energy conservation, we must at first find new and more efficient ways to generate energy. From there, we can assign energy credits to the social fund for conservation… Pardon, conservatism, bankrolling arranged marriages for those who aren’t related and have been DNA-screened or daycare centres for single-mothers or charitable entrepreneurship schools or the building of kitchens for the needy or after hours religious instruction sessions, or mosques as parliamentary incubators, things that all in some form or other existed in our illustrious past, that we have forgotten somehow…”

He took a sip of water before continuing. More diagrams emerged in the silken fabric of the solar- powered carpet. “The economics of this can be sorted out by our friends in the Planetary Coun… our Arabic friends,” he gestured to the seated dignitary. The Arab quadrant controlled most of the energy votes on the Council, being the main hub of thermal and solar power on the Martian plains, after all. But every little bit counted, and if the Persians could make their own distinct contribution then that Arab-generated energy could always be diverted elsewhere.

“We… our people are alchemists. We can make, remake, retrofit, subsume everything into anything. And we have an abundance of two things on this planet. Sun and sand. So far we have tapped into the heated sands of the desert, but what of a plethora of other sources that combine the two. There are our coloured-glass windows in mosques, solar panels waiting to be harvested in effect. And better still, the light pressure exerted on dust particles in the air. Surely we can utilise them, and I am confident of this from my own field of expertise as a thermal engineer, and from the field of my brother in arms…”

He gestured to his recalcitrant colleague from that first meeting. “He is an expert, a world-renowned expert, in solar sails. He has suggested that we could use mosques as a dry run for a larger project to kick sands up into the air and harvest the reflected, refracted and vibrated light in them, and then substitute the sand with multicoloured glass beads that are energy treated and superconductive, floating on and feeding electromagnetic fields, shaped like… the domes of mosques.” He added that one off the top of his head, but it made sense. They were experts, in the Persian zone, on domed solar rooftops.

Now he gulped some water down before resuming. A few coughs and then, “All I ask for in exchange is a small research loan to assemble my team of engineers and scientists and begin our initial studies and calculations. I defer to you, Nayrouz Khano [Mrs] and your grateful brother, our long time benefactor.”

The peacock farmer smiled contentedly behind his wavy white beard. He was humbled, and impressed, as always by his little sister.

But that‟s what love did to you, and for that he was thankful. He knew she would have never dared take such bold, outlandish moves in her days of romantic isolation. It took a man to stir the adventurer in her, a desert dweller mated to the urbanite who himself was trying to become as urbane as his new relations. A parting and joining of minds only a poet could appreciate.

Alas, he was too cynical in his old age for that kind of thing. Or else he wouldn‟t have built his alliance with the Arab quadrant to win the Martian Wars. And for that he was thankful too.

***

Nayrouz was safely at home now, after a long and rewarding day bringing a little light to the Persian presence on Mars. Time to bring a little light to her own home away from home, here in the Arab quadrant. It wouldn’t be long before her husband was back from his own labours. Time to reward him, and herself.

This had been a long time coming. As logic dedicated, she‟d consulted an expert. In this case the lady Nour, the lovely if petite wife of her husband‟s obtrusive employer. Thank heavens Al-Jahiz, her husband, was nothing like him. There was no telling what the poor had lady to put up with with that unfortunate choice of husband. She, Nayrouz, was the one who had lucked out when it came to Arabic men.

Still, there was no harm. Nour knew a thing or two, or three or four, about men. Not least Arabs.

“What exactly do you do with your husband? To make him happy,” she had asked, from the corner of her eyes.

Nour, her whole body smiling, said, “Everything.”

Nayrouz blushed, which wasn‟t easy to detect with the loving tones of her brown skin. “Yes, but what specifically… does a man like?”

Nour‟s body turned more supple than usual and explained that it was all to do with starters and the storyline to follow, to stimulate them and get their imaginations to run wild. A devilish smile had almost made its way onto Nayrouz‟s features. Almost. But she transmuted it into something else entirely.

And so she was here, in her dance outfit, to titillate the only one of the masses she cared about.

The door knocked, no one came to her husband‟s aid, so he let himself in anyway, wondering where everybody was, only to find his wife holding a silver bowl of strawberries in her hands.

“Sweetness, what is th…,” he tried to ask, stupefied.

She stuffed some strawberries into his mouth before he could do any more damage to the moment.

It had the required effect. She could see the dumbfounded look in his eyes dissipating. Some apricots would have gone nicely with the brew but she hadn’t been that fortunate this time in the marketplace.

A few more munches and then they shared a strawberry between their lips. The colour went so nicely with her purple brown lipstick, the texture of succulent gravy now covered in flecks of tomato sauce.

Time to get it on, as the Americanism went, Nayrouz thought. She handed over the bowl to her husband‟s trusty hands, then she put on her pearl white gloves. Her outfit was complete. She extracted a folded dancing stick from the sleeve of her black dancing suit, elongated it to perfection, with the coattails on the back end that left her looking like Fred Astaire. Along with the elongated top hat.

Al-Jahiz knew the deal. He’d had his compulsory dosage of classics on the Golden Oldies Channel, with Jurassic Park broadcast alongside Doris Day. Black and white, she was, as she danced, waving her black magic wand with its white tip at him. Swirling and swirling in dizzy magnificence like the alternating seasons of night and day on this planet of extremes.

The most he could do was put down the silvery bowl, or else he would have dropped it and made a right royal mess on the carpeted ground. The red beams of the sun were one thing, strawberry‟s were hard to wash out of the fabric of the house. That’s when she stopped waving her long, long legs, housed in boots that made her even taller, and took a predatory step towards him. He would have taken a tentative step back if it had not been for her basketballer’s arms that reached behind his taut muscular neck to draw him nearer to her.

“A poem for my sweet, before the festivities,” she said delicately like she was whispering into his ear. He could almost feel her tongue that wasn‟t even there.

“But… should not I be the one doing the poem, my lov…” He was a poet laureate, and had the certificate to prove it.

“No. That is my prerogative,” she said seductively, while snatching his oversized glasses from his face. “You exhaust your tongue and your imagination enough on the outside. Here, in my kingdom, I should do the speaking for the two of us.”

He swallowed, a pained expression in his eyes. A worried expression in hers. “I am not worthy,” he finally said.

“Do not think such things,” Nayrouz said. Her gaze receded into her soul as her eyelids went on a lover’s vacation.

Seconds that felt like an eternity came to an abrupt and sweet end when she spoke:

We are two mirrors, Laying next to each other

Fallen by the roadside

Broken and bleeding, shards of glass Reaching out, a trail of vapour in the wind

The mist obscures the light we reflect From the glory of the sun

Cools us from our passions for what the winds Cannot comprehend

The passing of times makes not for the strength

Of opinion

Any more than the waters of the river allows

For a foothold in time

Were we not conceived in the same womb

The oven of the glassmaker?

Separated at birth, we searched for one another In the others we saw in ourselves

In the shade of the dusty sun

Never more clear can we be

If not polished by the rains of a cloud

That lies beneath the Truth

The subdued glow

Of your broken heart

Is light enough for me, my Love

I am flawed, you say

For does not the moon hide more than it reveals

The cracks in your skin are your strength,

I say

For how is one to rise early in the morn

And read the Truth

With a clear conscience

Eyes sharp, heart alert

Armed with the slumbers of the night

You mend your bridges In the furnace of love

My cracks for yours

As the moon borrows from the glow

Of the daylight before

Remember, my Love

The day we were born

In the dark of the celestial furnace

When creation

Turned our shards into the stars that guide a wanderer

To his resting place

In the heart

Of the night

The tears that fell from his eyes polished them into heavenly spheres as the droplets pierced the carpet of roses beneath their rooted feet.

Author’s Note

The quip about alchemy, dust and mud brick houses comes from a UNESCO officials commenting on Kashani architecture – “Traditional Persian residential architecture”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Persian_residential_architecture.

As for the dust-glass-sunlight-energy machine, that’s my idea but I got it in part from showing a photograph of the inside of a Persian mosque to a Sudanese friend. His comments on the coloured-sunlight streaming in through a stained-glass window got my imagination running.

Finally, the title. It came to me in a dream, with a beautiful, brown-skinned dancing girl in a Fred Astaire outfit mouthing that single phrase of remembrance, whereas everybody in the world of today is paid to forget past accomplishments and nothing more!

Emad El-Din Aysha is an academic researcher, freelance journalist and translator and author currently residing in Cairo, Egypt. He is currently a member of the Egyptian Society for Science Fiction, and the Egyptian Writers’ Union. He has one published anthology to his name (in Arabic) and has published numerous short stories online and in anthologies (in English and Arabic) and has participated in conferences on literature and science fiction. His first non-fiction book on science fiction should be published this year with McFarland.