garden, ashes

Marriage is one year flames, thirty years ashes.
---The Leopard.

~~~

What were you looking for? You do not know How will you find it then? I don't know.

...

With a  few minutes to kill before the food was ready (Afghani naan and a dish from Baku..and if you ain't had an Afghani/Peshawri naan, you ain't had nothing) I decided to check a small bookstore. Of course, that's a caricature. I was lured there by the doors that were flung wide open and the bright lights and so it was hardly a "decision" by any stretch of the imagination. 

You walk down the steps and your first impression is: there's no chance in hell that these people have ever sold a book. This has to be the worst bookstore in Lahore, I thought to myself. Some of the books were laid out on a 1970's table the way you'd expect fruit at a village store or wares at a roadside establishment to be arranged. Half of the shelves were taken up by old, tattered books with garish covers conveniently labeled under the heading of 'Romance', the kind of books that are supposed to attract dreamy, lost teenager girls I suppose. Most of the books had cracked spines, fading covers and titles that it was a strain to even make out. Your eyes wearily glanced over the titles, mechanically, and it was if your eyes were working but your mind had refused to register the information. This silly, robotic act just to pass the time. 

Faced with a vast, overwhelming sea of information what do you do? Somehow my mind kicked into gear and I decided upon just reading the titles of the books on the top shelf. I would come back again when I had more time and was less rushed (which is never), I thought. Start at the north-east corner. Directions, orientations...where would we be without them?

Then, lo and behold, what do I spot? Again, one wonders at how a small part of the brain-and it did feel like that given the lack of attentiveness-comes to strike upon a particular facet of reality. "What is the final price of this book?" I ask, trying to cut out any scope for bargaining. Let's just get to the end moment and forget the "you said this", "I said that" (this does not work in marital relations, by the way).

So, there you are. That is how you acquired Danil Kis's book. The first page, intensely lyrical, sensuous. To enter a world through attention to a simple object, a door, a brightly lit door that leads downstairs to nothing...