Chapter 5 · Untitled Chapter

The eighth hour comes and the majlis across the lane is already lit.

From the end of my gallery I can see most of it: the long room, the cushions set back against the wall, the low brass table, the men in white around it, and one in a pale bisht because he is a guest and this is a formal evening. My notebook is open on my knee and the pen is uncapped and I am early, which is the only advantage I have ever needed.

The host is the eldest. In my book he has no name, only the word for eldest, because I have never found a better one and I am not in the habit of giving a man a name I cannot defend.

He lifts the silver burner himself. That is the first thing worth writing. There are three servants in that room and he does not use one of them; he takes the brass handle in his right hand and holds it at the height of his own chest, and the coals inside it breathe once, and the Oud goes up.

Then he passes it across the table.

And the eyes go down.

I have watched this room for eleven months and I thought I knew this part of it. I had it written as respect for the smoke, the way a man drops his gaze when something is carried past him that is older than he is. But the burner is not what they answer.

The youngest three drop their eyes before the smoke has crossed the table, before the silver has left the host's hand — a half breath before, no more, and a half breath is everything. It is not a response. It is already in them, trained into the neck like a horse taught to stand.

The guest in the bisht does it properly. He takes the smoke toward his chest with his palm, twice, and says two words low enough that I lose them, and the room accepts that he has been honoured and moves on.

The one at the far corner receives the burner in his right hand and says, Ya ustadh, and holds it a moment longer than he needs to, and I write that down too, because a man who holds the burner longer than he needs to is telling the room something and I have not yet decided what.

It is the order that interests me.

I write the eyes down as they fall, one after another, and when I read the column back it is not the order of age and it is not the order of money. It is not the order they came in at the door. It is a ledger I have never seen the other half of, and every man in that room can read it without looking up.

The one I named last winter does not lower his eyes at all. He watches the coals until the silver is out of the host's hand, and then he watches the guest, and then he looks at nothing, which is the most expensive thing a man can do in a room like that.

I put a mark beside his name. A man who does not lower his eyes is either too senior or too young, and eleven months have not told me which, and I do not like a mark I cannot close.

Below me the Gahwa goes round. The Dallah comes down from the height it is poured at, and the Finjan takes less than half, and the second pot follows the first, and I check my page against it. The merchant's arrival, the reception, the departure.

Still wrong. All three of them, by a few minutes.

I have been over this page four times. I do not lose minutes. I lose nothing; that is the whole of what I am. And yet the morning is written down in my own hand and it is not the morning that happened, and I cannot find the place where I stopped being exact.

I turn to the front of the notebook where the names are, the ones I gave them all, one to a line, in the order I met them. I have been proud of these names. They are better than the men.

They are guesses. That is all they have ever been. A guess I have never once had to test, because no one in that room has ever known I was testing it.

I uncap the pen and write under the column, in the plain hand I use for things I cannot yet argue with: the eyes go down in an order I do not know.

The host sets the burner back on its stand. The coals are still going. The room settles into its ordinary business, and I close the notebook on the sentence and keep my hand flat on the cover, as if it might get up and go down there without me.