row, made the frozen trees bloom with his music, and received the National Medal for Excellence in Art and that made Ahmad wonder: Why was Maestro’s music a whiff of life but his own poetry a flash of raging fire? He concluded that the same form of energy flowed within both forms of art; the difference was the medium. Through sound, the energy was directly issued from the instrument and enveloped all that was around it. It penetrated and warmed in a way that excited life into things. With writing, all the energy was concentrated in the words, on the page, and through the eyes into the reader who was already alive. It was the concentration that heated the words, made them burn things. If he could read his poems himself, he would have read the ones he could not write down on anything. Then he would have done more than make trees blossom, and the National Medal would be his. Since that was not possible, Ahmad suspected that there must be a way to make words themselves into sound. A machine to extract the hidden sounds of the words directly off the page? Something analogous to a cassette player.
Occupied with his new passion, he bought a phonograph and started to work. First, he wrote his poems in circles and glued the paper onto a record, then he scratched words into the record with a needle, but to no avail. He penned his poems in small letters on the tape of a new cassette. Once rewound and played, nothing came out of the speakers but some faint clicking and cracking. Using two large magnifying glasses, he repeated the experiment, this time putting extremely tiny letters on the tape. The broken hiss and fizz was meaningless and fleeting and Ahmad knew it was not a question of size. Next, he spread out the words on the whole length of the tape, but nothing came out and at that point he realized that the available machinery would not suffice for what he had in mind. He took his cassettes and tape recorder in his arms and walked down into the basement and in a short while surrounded himself with tools and apparatuses: several models of cassette players and recorders, gramophones, screwdrivers, hammers, pliers, small motors, batteries, and soldering irons.
After his daily attempt at shoveling, Khan walked over to the top of the basement steps and climbed down with the help of Ahmad to sit in the chair and watch his grandson work. When Ahmad came to the conclusion that he had to better understand the relationship between each word and its inherent sound, Khan’s memory was keen enough to point to the philosophers of the past, to Miskawayh, Mulla Sadra, Avicenna, and others whose books he had gathered through years in the large wooden bookcases against the wall. Ahmad read the books and thought and came to the conclusion that the key missing piece was sight. If the gramophone and tape recorder had failed to speak his poetry, it was because those machines were bereft of a reading eye. His nephew, Majeed, had the eyes. Down in the basement, Majeed showed Ahmad the features of a handheld video camera that you had to hold and point at the subject like a gun. After Ahmad gave a confirming nod that he knew what he needed to know about the machine, Majeed went up to shovel the roof, as it was around that time that Pooran made Khan stop shoveling. One early morning Khan had gotten up from his bed and pulled a second pair of wool leg warmers on in spite of the electrifying pain in his knees. Once on the veranda, he looked for his shovel in the dim light of the cloudy dawn, but it was not leaning against the dead cherry tree where he had left it the day before.
“As long as I’m alive,” Pooran had said a few hours later when Khan knocked on her door and went in, “you won’t shovel anymore. If something happens, I can’t take care of you. I’m not strong anymore, Khan, and neither are you.”
Khan turned around and closed the door behind him, but the disappearance of the shovel did not make him sit in a corner like an old man. He began getting up in the dark and shuffling his way to the oil line with an empty can swinging in his hand which later, if he was lucky enough to get