Rabia


            I love you with two loves;
                  a selfish love and a love of which You are worthy.
            That love which is a selfish love
                  is my remembrance of You and nothing else.
            But as for the love of which You are worthy
                  Ah, then You've torn the veils from me so I can see You.
            There is no praise for me in either love,
                  But praise is Yours in this love and in that.
                              Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya, Sufi (d. 185/801)


I fell in love with Rabia the first time I saw her in the Old Himalayan Bazaar. It was a fleeting glimpse through the crystalline air of mid-winter, a flourish between stalls and amongst the massed flesh of anonymous faces, hands, lips. Yet it was enough for a lifetime. And beyond.

I was seventeen at the time and had been sent by my mother to buy provisions for the household. Some distant relatives from the town of Leh were coming to visit, and we would need almost three times the usual amount of food, not to mention gifts with which to make them feel welcome as guests. It was a strange time of year to be travelling. Snow and ice competed with each other to see which might cover more of the world, while the sun gave off heat like an impoverished aristocrat. We hadn't seen these relatives for years - they had never known me, and my mother and father had last met them when they were all children. They would be bringing their entire family along, and so in a few days' time, I would be greeting long-lost cousins as well as aunts and uncles of whom I had heard only through tales. Over the years, they had become fictions in my head, so that a little apprehension was mixed in with the curiosity I felt at their impending arrival. It was in this somewhat pensive mid-winter mood that I set off early that morning for the Old Jumma Bazaar.

The sun had not yet risen and a pale milk light flitted uneasily between the shadows. The houses were all shuttered-up and only the occasional clatter of servants' shoes on stone issuing from within the haveli broke the gray dream slumber of the morning. The air was cold glass in my throat. I pulled my shawl more tightly around my shoulders and walked quickly to keep warm. The Old Bazaar had been there since before living memory. Some said that Dungpa Miru had strolled among its noisy stalls, and had haggled with its Afghani traders. Like the Yehudi, the Afghans went everywhere, lending money and selling jewellery, and always making a profit. Though charging interest is against Islam, they somehow seemed able to circumvent this legality. They traveled from the great twin rivers of the West, all the way across the land of Fars, and were known in places as far east as Rangoon and Tibet. Nothing had stopped them, not even the rampages of Timur Lung which had occurred a century-and-a-half before my birth. Even wild men needed to eat. However, most of the merchants in the market were white-robed Hindus from the lands of Kush, far to the south where I had heard the Great Moghul, Akbar, held sway with wealth which was beyond the dreams of poor villagers such as ourselves. But I digress, as has become my habit, over the years.

As I drew closer to the Bazaar, there was still no sign of any activity. I might have been the only person in the town. However, the moment the narrow mud streets opened into the broad square, it was as though I had emerged into a world at the very instant of its creation. In a jangling hub-bub, the mountain devils danced the dance of the soul upon the old stone slabs, and the misty breath of the people around me was like the breath of the saints upon my skin. Everyone was wrapped in furs and woollens: ankle-length chughas of thick, black material shorn from the long-haired sheep of Baltistan; bristling flying-fox headgear with the flaps pulled down over the ears; boots of pale brown fur. The people of my town knew how to dress against the cold. They had learned to survive the high winters of the mountain valleys. But to survive, is not everything. Even though there was no wind that morning, yet the silent ice of the day stole through fissures in the skin, into the picot of the soul.

I had a list of provisions to buy, and a large sack in which to carry them, and I set about my task with the vigour of a winter fire. It was customary to offer guests something sweet on their arrival, and the delicious beshak shirin melons which I spotted in the stall of a Tajik merchant would be ideal. It was while I was bargaining with the merchant, that I first caught sight of Rabia. Of course, I didn't know her name then (although later, I felt I had always known it). She passed by, a figure on the edge of my vision, on the precipice of the morning. A fleeting figure in black. Green eyes. A russet lock, brushing her cheek. Her delicate, pale skin and her red, scimitar lips.
I thought she smiled at me. The perfect, dizzying curve of bird's flight from mountain-top. My heart beat inside my chest like that of a dying man and my lips were dry as the dust beneath my feet. My whole body trembled. I could not move. My breath stopped and became one with the frozen air. Things seemed not to exist. Only time, hanging by a thread from the sky, stood between the entity that was me, and Rabia.
The blade fell.
I looked up.
She was gone.
The merchant had been speaking to me. I had missed most of what he had said. I managed to catch up with the conversation, but my mind was elsewhere. Today I would not be able to strike a good bargain. I didn't care. It had ceased to matter. The morning had become filled with the face of a woman I had never met. Was not even sure existed. And yet, already I knew her name. I had named her just as, when I was a child, I had named all things. For me, she was Rabia, the girl of the mountains, the fleeting gazelle of the plains (though at that time I had set eyes on neither plains nor gazelle, yet I had heard much of both from the long tongues of old women and travelling merchants).

For the rest of the morning, I was utterly distracted, even more so than the empty-eyed, yellow-robed lamas who would come to beg in the bazaar, every Jumma. I purchased provisions haphazardly, so that it took twice as long as usual, and my body felt unsure of itself. In the subtle mountain air, every movement seemed exaggerated and clumsy. Every so often, my heart would bounce against my ribs as though it was trying to escape from the confines of my chest. It, too, longed to soar with the bird, to peck at the sky, to dwell in emptiness. But in the emptiness I was not alone, for Rabia had grown to fill everything that was me. She was the first glint of sun across the spines of cliffs, the warm swish of her black, tribal costume was perpetuated in a thousand identical market-place mornings, the sweet taste of her lips lay in every grain of golden halvah. O my Rabia! Where was she? Even though she was all, yet I longed to touch her, to reach her presence, as I must have longed for life in the time before I was born.

When the relatives arrived, I was scarcely interested. What should have been the event of the year became for me just another manifestation of a love which I knew was the blood in my heart but which, like that blood, I was unable to grasp. Their Ladakhi accents make me imagine the sound of Rabia's voice. I longed to hear her voice. Animated conversations would pass across the sandali and I would nod and smile, but I was thinking only of the caravan which I knew at that moment would be travelling by the low bank of a frozen river. My thoughts were icicles. The river would melt a little during the day, yet it would freeze again at night, so that throughout the winter, it never changed. And in a thousand drops of ice, was my Rabia reflected. I even attempted to find out more about her from my relatives. Obliquely, I questioned them about the caravan which I was certain had set off from their land. But they had heard nothing of such a caravan. I dared not ask about Rabia, partly from fear of arousing their - and my parents' - suspicions, and partly because I felt she was my secret. I did not wish to share her with anyone, even if that meant that I would never see her again. Strange, how love can destroy those it attracts. In stinging, the bee commits suicide.

Winter lightened into spring, the almond and rose trees began to blossom, and strawberries grew ripe for the picking. The men went up into the high crags where they blew sonorous notes from the mouths of long, wooden horns. Even these loping, invisible notes followed the gracious gait of my beloved across the empty stillness. I thought they might summon her back from the frozen waterfalls of the land of the Dards, back to where the ice had broken up into tiny, white floes which seethed with the current far below.

As the sun's power strengthened and life began to burst out everywhere, I grew weaker. I ate less and less, finding that only a little halvah and goat's milk would suffice my diminishing appetite. My mother became worried, and took me to see a Yunani hakim. I was given a liquid distilled from some foul-tasting herbs which I pretended to swallow but actually spat out as soon as their heads were turned. I had no wish to recover from the love which had possessed me. My obsession had become my life.

I waited for summer's warmth to clear the mountain passes, for I had resolved to go in search of my beloved. Secretly one night, I stole away from my house, my town, the valley which was the only world I had known, and I climbed the high path, heading eastwards. I had as my guides, the moon which waxed and waned through the night and across the months, and the stars which pullulated from behind their burqa. The night was my Rabia's cloak, the day, her shining eyes, the sunrise and sunset, the matched clasp of her lips. Every swaying branch of every tree I passed, beckoned me on, higher and higher, each nod of a flower confirmed my course as surely as any chart. In those days, I could not read, so what use would a map have been? The land, the streams, the sky were my maps; I read them like a manuscript, rolled out before me in sound, colour, smell, touch and taste. Like a farmer, I tasted the soil and knew where I was going; like a minstrel, the notes of the wind spoke to me in wordless tongues; the quality of the dew upon my lips changed every morning and by this, I trod as a hunter might, with deft steps, risking all in the certainty of the chase. When I prayed, it was on the summits of mountains. My heart seemed closer to Rabia at these moments; the air, diamond clear with my longing.

I was in one of those high mountain villages during the festival of Eid al Azha. A lamb was readied to be sacrificed, and I was given the honour of performing the Qurbani. I took hold of the curved blade, newly-cut on the grindstone. It was winter again, and the sharp light of the sun sliced through the pale blue mantle of the sky as it must surely do, in heaven. I could feel the heart's blood of the lamb pulse faster beneath my fingers as I took hold of its neck. With one, swift stroke, I opened the great vein. Blood gushed over my hands, turning snowflakes into rubies. It is said that when a lamb is sacrificed in memory of Hazrat Ibrahim's great act, the last thing the animal sees is a vision of Paradise. The fading light in the lamb's eyes as it bled into oblivion, that was the longing of my heart for Rabia.

After many months of travel, living off the earth and as the guest of the people of countless isolated villages, I came at last to the land of Ladakh. All around me, I felt the wailing of Dards and Mons and the battle-cries of the Yellow Lamas as they drew the blood of the Red Lamas. In these high lands, the Great Khans of Tibet vied with fat Buddha stones and with the invisible, omniscient God of my own folk. For while my land of Baltistan was entirely Muslim, the peoples to the east adhered to many different faiths. Strange rock-carvings and cryptic flower-symbols became part of my map, and I tasted the wine of paganism on my journey. I was certain that my love had passed through all these lands, had partaken of the same cartograph in which I now immersed myself. Rabia, I knew, was born of the fire of faith, she was hewn from the rock and stone of this high world, she poured herself from the goatskin gourd with every intoxicating drop of liquor. It was she, in the cry of the muezzin across the endless chasm of time. I even accompanied a party of merchants to the capital of the Great Mughal and there did I discover that the Shah-en-shah Akbar had also drawn maps whose edges extended, far beyond the borders of the known world. And when I had passed through all of these lands, had tasted of everything and more, then would I re-unite with those enticing green eyes, that silken voice, the gentle tread of delicate feet. Then would I leap off the cliff and not fall, not be smashed on the rocks below. Then would I soar for miles, for years, in Rabia and with her at the same time. We would fly together over the world's roof.

I became a great traveller, a chronicler of humanity and of nature (during the course of which, I finally learned to read and write). I was known as Son of Ibn Battuta, which was a great honour, and I became one of the Friends and yet none of my admirers, nor yet any of my family (who were now treated almost like royalty in their home town) knew of my real quest. Not a soul was aware of that gray morning back when I was barely out of childhood, and none had been permitted to glimpse my source, my beloved, my Rabia.

Perhaps some day, I will find her. My heart tells me that I must find her. Perhaps, everyone has their own Rabia, their own yearning for that which they can never possess, something that is beyond matter, beyond themselves and the short span of their lives. I am not yet old, but one day, I shall (God Willing) acquire the wisdom of the idiots which age engenders. And then perhaps, I may glimpse her once again. I sometimes wonder whether if, at the moment of my death, I will see her face, if that image, the poem which contains everything and that which is beyond everything, will be imprinted upon my soul as I leave this world and journey into the next. Into Rabia. All that I have done, each thought that I have thought, every one of my actions have been consequences merely, of that moment which lies outside of time and which is therefore eternal. It has defined my life, and it will carve my death. I have never left the Old Bazaar, but am still there, waiting for her to return. Even as night falls.



Suhayl Saadi

Copyright Notice
The content on glasgowreview.co.uk is © 2008-2009 The Glasgow Review and
individual contributors, and may not be reprinted, reproduced or retransmitted
in whole or in part without the Editor's prior express written consent.