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Cracked Portraits My grandfather's painted grandfather, son of Ali, a strange physician in embroidered robes, a white turban, the Koran lying open on a table beside him. I look for prayers in his eyes, for inscriptions in Arabic. I find his will: He's left us plots in the family graveyard. Great-grandfather? A sahib in breeches. He simply disappoints me, his hands missing in the drawing-room photo but firm as he whipped the horses or the servants. He wound the gramophone to a fury, the needles grazing Malika Pukhraj's songs as he, drunk, tore his shirts and wept at the refrain, "I still am young." Grandfather, a handsome boy, sauntered toward madness into Srinagar's interior. In a dim-lit shop he smoked hashish, reciting verses of Sufi mystics. My father went to bring him home. As he grew older, he moved toward Plato, mumbling "philosopher-king," 9 Napoleon on his lips. Sitting in the bedroom corner, smoking his hookah, he told me the Siberian snows froze the French bones. In his cup, Socrates swirled. I turn the pages, see my father holding a tennis racquet, ready to score with women, brilliance clinging to his shirt. He brings me closer to myself as he quotes Lenin's love of Beethoven, but loses me as he turns to Gandhi. Silverfish have eaten his boyhood face. Cobwebs cling to the soundless words of my ancestors. No one now comes from Kandahar, dear Ali, to pitch tents by the Jhelum, under autumn maples, and claim descent from the holy prophet. Your portrait is desolate in a creaking corridor. (for Agha Zafar Ali) 10 ...

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