The worst sinners
An extract from Faiqa Mansab's The Sufi Storyteller
Despite the traffic and the radio in the cab, it was difficult to hold back the tidal wave of memories. She could almost smell the sharp turpentine and the linseed oil paints of Khayyam’s studio, which had been swarming with people eager to tell him how much they admired his work and keen to chat with him about art and in doing so let him know how cultured they were compared to others. Because it wasn’t about identity but identity in comparison to others. Someone made an inane remark about a painting, and he answered mechanically in the enigmatic parlance expected from artists, about inspiration, artistic temperament, and the mysteries of creation.
He’d followed her as she went around the studio standing before each painting for long moments while he had expatiated on technique and subject. Both of them not much older than the young art students thronging the studio.
One of them had asked her own mother tentatively, “Mama…er, is it okay if we wave to those girls?”
Her eyes were on the young prostitutes across the street. It was a daring act for an over-protected young girl that would make her feel good about herself because she’d have given the gift of acknowledgement to a fallen woman. Layla didn’t hear what the mother said but couldn’t help thinking that his use of this neighbourhood as backdrop was rather clever. After all, he owed his mystique in a large part to it.
Then Layla had asked him, gesturing towards the sexworkers, “How old do you think those girls are?”
He’d shrugged and answered, “Teenagers mostly.”
“They look older.”
“It’s because they’ve seen too much.”
“Haven’t we all?”
“How old are you exactly?” he’d mocked, grinning.
“Older than I look,” she’d parried. She’d said almost as an afterthought, “I’ll take one painting. I can afford one.”
She’d taken much more than the painting.
Given back quite a bit too…
They’d watched in silence as one of the prostitutes disappeared through a door with a middle-aged man who wore his guilt lightly and his desperation far too openly.
“What’s his story do you think?”
Khayyam had shrugged. “The same as everyone else’s I suppose.”
He had added wryly, “My mother used to say men who come here are seeking what they’ve lost to their women at home.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Their mothers emasculate them, and their wives demonize them.”
She’d cracked up with laughter.
She smiled now at the memory, but his smile had faltered before it had formed fully.
Even then, that familiar murmur, the buzz that travelled with him everywhere, had risen in pitch and volume and become audible. The echo of a whisper he’d first heard when he was five, he said, and had been echoing in his ears ever since.
“His mother was a prostitute, you know. All of his paintings depict this area and these women.”
“Seriously? How sad.”
“Wasn’t he in South America since like, forever?”
“Is she still alive? The mother, I mean?”
“I don’t know. Why’s that important?”
“Well…he’s so well-known and respected now. I guess it would’ve made her happy…”
Youth was so romantic. Everything was a tragedy. All whores were victims and all bastards made good. But some whores were more equal than others. And as always, every time he heard those whispers he heard the silence too, where the unasked all-important question resounded. Silence that to him was as loud as the voluble branding he’d received all his life. Who was his father, they asked? Or wasn’t that important because his mother was a whore?
Layla remembered his pain like her own. It was her own. She knew him like she knew herself.
Although no one asked, he’d been obsessed with the question until he’d finally put a face to that phantom, the shadow that had darkened his life and blocked the light with its far-reaching stretch. He’d managed to trace him before Layla had left Lahore. His father, it turned out, was a bigger whore than his mother had ever been, and Khayyam had been too ashamed of that tenuous connection to respectability. His mother may have sold her body, but his father had profited from robbing the weak, the poor and the powerless. If he’d wanted to be melodramatic and Faustian, he’d have said his father had sold his soul. His mother had been an honest whore.
It was nothing more than trickery and smokescreens in the end. The lost boys of the night, the scavengers and the predators who roamed the city and dwelt in their own darkness, all ended up as victims of these upright citizens. They were all the same under their masks, some worse, some better at camouflaging their darkness than these creatures born of dark destinies born to die on the garbage heap. And these others, people like his father, were born to watch and wince in momentary sympathy. Then, they moved to the next spectacle, the next novelty.
There was such darkness in Khayyam. It had frightened her. But it also fascinated her, drew her to him. He had become almost violent when he had found out about his father. But before that, on that first night, they had connected due to their hurt.
“That’s a nice look for the man of the hour,” Layla had whispered when she’d found him sitting alone in a dark corner later, watching the throngs of people with a scowl.
He’d made an effort to smile and had said on an impulse, “Let me show you something.” He’d led her towards the back wall of the studio.
“Solo exhibition at twenty-three? You’re already famous and rich.”
“Almost famous…and not at all rich.”
She’d linked her arm through his, in mocking disbelief.
She paid the cab driver and pulled her bag behind her, into the beautiful Union Station. She had always loved architecture, art of any sort really. Slowly, she walked towards her train, still thinking of Khayyam. He’d worked with museums since then, she knew, and had had exhibitions all over the world, one in New York only six years ago. He hadn’t ever tried to find her, and she wished he had tried. He would never have, she knew, he was too stubborn and hurt. Or maybe he had forgotten her, she had feared. And it was only she who was carrying the torch for him still.
The night of his exhibition he’d shown her the portrait of his mother that first day she had come. He’d put his dreams to sleep on canvas after canvas, crystallized in a vice of colour and form. Some had emerged as twisted nightmares, others as singed vestiges of shattered hopes.
That painting was both.
Like the woman, the painting had exacted much from him. Layla could almost feel the weight and texture of the palette knife as if it were she who had mixed and smeared, brushed and stroked paint on canvas in a frenzy of ecstasy and despair, until the woman emerged out of its blankness in the arms of a man, a faceless lover. Those dark eyes stared back forever following him, unforgiving, uninterested, the eyes of a stranger. Only they weren’t the eyes of a stranger. Worse. They were the eyes of a mother not interested in her child. He wasn’t merely a painter; he was voyeur and conspirator, sinner and judge, plunderer and saviour. “Is this your mother?” Layla had asked; it didn’t matter to her who his mother was and what she did. With her, he had confessed later, he hadn’t felt the burning shame that he had with others about his lineage because for Layla it really didn’t matter. Mothers could be sinners too. They were the worst sinners. She and Khayyam both knew the secret ugly truth.
The Sufi Storyteller was published in April 2025