The Names

12

In the morning! went looking for Owen Brademas. The piece of paper I'd been carrying since Bombay contained a set of directions rather than an address. The address Owen used was the Old Campus, Punjab University, strictly for receiving mail, Anand said. If I wanted to find him, I would have to look for a house with a closed wooden balcony roughly halfway between the Lohari Gate and the Kashmiri Gate in the old city.I made my way to the edge of the old city easily enough. From the street din of motorcycles and buses to the voices of the long bazaar. The thoroughfare narrowed as I passed through the Lohari Gate, a brickwork structure with a broad towerlike fortification on either side.Once inside I began to receive impressions, which is not the same as seeing things. I realized I was walking too fast, the pace of the traffic-filled streets I'd just left behind. I received impressions of narrowness and shadow, of brownness, the wood and brick, the hard earth of the streets. The air was centuries old, dead, heavy, rank. I received impressions of rawness and crowding, people in narrow spaces, men in a dozen kinds of dress, women gliding, women in full-length embroidered white veils, a mesh aperture at the eyes, hexagonal, to give them a view of the latticed world, the six-sided cage that adjusted itself to every step they took, every shift of the eyes. Donkeys carrying bricks, children squatting over open sewers. I glanced at my directions, made an uncertain turn. Copper and brassware. A cobbler working in the shadows. This was the lineal function of old cities, to maintain an unchanged form, let time hang with the leather goods and skeins of wool. Hand-skilled labor, rank smells and disease, the four-hundred-year-old faces. There were horses, sheep, donkeys, cows and oxen. I received impressions that I was being followed.Signs in Urdu, voices calling over my head from the wooden balconies. I wandered for half an hour, too closed in to be able to scan for landmarks, the minarets and domes of Badshahi, the great mosque at the northwest edge. Without a map I couldn't even stop someone, point to an approximate destination. I moved into a maze of alleys beyond the shops and stalls. Intensely aware. American. Giving myself advice and directions. A woman stuck cow dung in oval disks on a low wall to dry.I turned to see who might be following. Two small boys, the older maybe ten. They held back for a moment. Then the younger said something, barefoot, a bright green cap on his head, and the other one pointed back the way I'd come and started to walk in that direction, looking to see if I would follow.They led me to the house Owen was in. One slender white man looking for the other, that boy had reasoned. What else would I be doing in those lost streets?The door to his room was open. He reclined on a wooden bench covered with pillows and old carpets. There were some books and papers in a copper serving tray on the floor. A water jug on a small chest of drawers. A plain chair for me. Not much else in the room. He kept it partially dark to reduce the effects of the April sun.He was reading when I entered and looked up to regard me in a speculative manner, trying to balance my physical make-up, my shape, proportions, form, with some memory he carried of a name and a life. A moment in which I seemed to hang between two points in time, a moment of silent urging. The house smelled of several things including the trickle of sewage just outside.Owen looked a little weary, a little more than weary, but his voice was warm and strong and he seemed ready to talk.

(It wasn't until I'd put my hand to the marble tomb, the night before, that I knew I'd try to find him, talk to him one last time. Wasn't that the image he'd wanted me to retain, a man in a room full of stones, a library of stones, tracing the shape of Greek letters with his country-rough hands?)