Atlas and Alice, Issue 19
Bassam Sidiki
Uninvited Guests Author’s note: The following personal essay is an example of the Indo-Persian mode of oral storytelling called dāstān or qiṣṣah. The essay adopts a very specific subgenre of this mode, the t̤irāz. According to Urdu scholar Pasha M. Khan, the t̤irāz was grouped into four chapters called “ḳhabars,” plus a conclusion (ḳhātimah), and the names of the khabars signaled the situations in which they were to be recited: razm, bazm, ḥusn o ‘ishq, and ‘ayyārī—battle, courtly gatherings, beauty and love, and trickery. The essay, in its homage to this oral tradition, takes the “telling” in “storytelling” seriously, defying that hackneyed commonplace of writing workshops in the West today: “show, don’t tell.” Esteemed listeners, invited, uninvited—or, if you were invited but worldly matters got in the way of your attendance at this mehfil, and you have only these pages to read from—let me preface this dāstān with a little glimpse into what you can expect. This is not a “content or trigger warning” of today’s literary circles, but it can be if you so wish. Accordingly, in this dāstān you shall find magic, sickness, demons, healing, empire, family ties, and even a little poetry. Join me. Bazm: Courtly Gathering My mother said that Saeen must have been about 110 years old when he died last year. I grew up in Karachi, but my family frequently visited my aunt when she lived in Hyderabad, the second-largest city in the Pakistani province of Sindh and the place where my parents were married (and not to be confused with its namesake town in southern India). Saeen lived there and he was an omnipresent, if not omnipotent, figure in our lives: my mother zealously believed in his mystical powers. As a child I sometimes accompanied my mother and aunts to the little shack Saeen called home on Sarfraz Road. I don’t recall what he looked like beyond the silvery shock of hair and the wrinkles on his face. Most of all, I recall that he was a woman. 34
