There Are Rivers in the Sky

by Elif Shafak

Books, like paper lanterns, provide us with a light amidst the fog. That

Time is circles within circles. It neither dies nor declines but whirls in epicycles. Like a wheel that continues to spin even after its power is turned off, family conflicts live on long after the individual members have passed away. Although he would never put it in so many words, Zaleekhah senses that, deep within, Uncle worries she will turn out to be just like her mother – a small-town teacher married to another small-town teacher on the outskirts of Manchester, indifferent to the trappings of wealth and status, intensely critical of the world and its inequalities but content with her own humble place in the universe.

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Immigrants don’t die of existential fatigue or nihilistic boredom; they die from working too hard.

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Mourning is a woman’s job – and so is remembrance.

Only the small things can hearten him enough to hang on to a slender thread of existence.

‘When someone gives you the food they’ve prepared, they give you their heart.’ Grandma says

He has no idea what it is like not to have to work every moment of each day, to go for a walk for no other reason than to see and to be seen.

Brahmamuhurtha, the time of the Creator, when light energy is at its strongest, according to various faiths. The most opportune moment to burrow into your own soul and face your deepest fears, they say. For her, it is not about that. Not prayer, not meditation. It is the hour of melancholy – pure, unfiltered, restless.

Home is where your absence is felt, the echo of your voice kept alive, no matter how long you have been away or how far you may

have strayed, a place that still beats with the pulse of your heart. There is no one waiting for him in London – except perhaps Mabel. But in the light of their brief and superficial courtship, he does not expect her to miss him. As for his museum colleagues,

Poverty has a topography all of its own. It rises from the ribs of the earth, stretching its naked limbs against the sky, its features dry and gaunt, sore to the touch. Poverty is a nation with no borders, and he is no foreigner in it but a native son.

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‘Where you have set your mind begin the journey Let your heart have no fear, keep your eyes on me.’ ‘It’s lovely,’ says Zaleekhah.

‘You’re saying Gratitude swallows Love.’ ‘Yes, if it gets too big.’ Nen’s gaze is unflinching. ‘Forgive me, I don’t mean to pry into your personal life. All I’m saying is, one needs to keep an eye on that Gratitude fish, I learnt to my cost.’

Empires have a way of deceiving themselves into believing that, being superior to others, they will last forever. A shared expectation that tomorrow the sun will rise again, the earth will remain fertile, and the waters will never run dry. A comforting delusion that, though we will all die, the buildings we erect and the poems we compose and the civilizations we create will survive. Arthur knows they were frightened of death,

When they arrived at the place designated for the royal grave, one by one, they drank the poison in their cups. They were all to be buried in the very same tomb, just so the king would still have his barber and his servants to serve him and his musicians to play him songs and his storyteller to tell him stories in the afterlife. That afternoon they all killed themselves as arranged, simply so that a man accustomed to power would not have to face his own mortality alone.

Arthur is beginning to suspect that civilization is the name we give to what little we have salvaged from a loss that no one wants to remember. Triumphs are erected upon the jerry-built scaffolding of brutalities untold, heroic legends spun from the thread of aggressions and atrocities. The irrigation system was Nineveh’s glowing achievement – but how many lives were squandered in its construction? There is always another side, a forgotten side. Water was the city’s greatest asset and defining feature, yet it was also what undermined it in the end. The large amounts of salt deposited by torrent and tide wrecked the soil. Rivers raised, rivers razed. Sometimes your biggest strength becomes your worst weakness. Every night Arthur returns to the Yazidi village with more

kind of expected better from a man known for building an amazing library.’ ‘You’re far from alone in that assumption. But it’s actually a useful reminder that someone can be cultured and polished, generous, worldly, but still commit acts of startling cruelty.’

She says when we look at a person all we see in that moment is a partial image of them, often

river of mud, and we dare to dip our hands every now and then, searching for a button of hope, a coin of friendship, a ring of love. We are mudlarkers, all of us.’ Mahmoud has no idea what Arthur is ranting about,

one was indifferent to the auguries: kings and servants, all yearned for a glimpse of the unseen. Partly because they understood how fragile life is and how close the breath of death. And partly because they retained a naive hope that, despite the inequalities and injustices of this world, someone or something from another realm might give them counsel and assistance in their hour of need.

In the end, perhaps what separates one individual from another is not talent but passion. And what is passion if not a restlessness of the heart, an intense yearning to surpass your limits, like a river overflowing its banks? Gilgamesh, the cruel and arrogant king who embarked on journeys, experienced loss and defeat, and learnt humility. Ashurbanipal, the remorseless and cultured king, prided himself on his magnificent capital, palace and library, all of which were razed to the ground. And he, Arthur, King of the Sewers and Slums, so named by a band of good-hearted toshers, miles away from home, has lost the certainty of his convictions. Tears well up in his eyes. He would have liked to have been a better father to his children, to have spent more time with them, to have seen them grow up. His wife deserved a better husband. There is an immense loneliness in his heart, where there should have been intimacy. He carries within him desires suppressed, secrets withheld. Love is a puzzle in cuneiform, one he has not been able to solve. In truth, he has always been happiest when working on an ancient tablet. With a clarity that is almost painful, he recognizes that only when studying the past has he felt at home, only when sorting broken shards

We carve our dreams into objects, large or small. The emotions we hold but fail to honour, we try to express through the things we create, trusting that they will outlive us when we are gone, trusting that they will carry something of us through the layers of time, like water seeping through rocks. It is our way of saying to the next generations, those we will never get to meet, ‘Remember us.’ It

our way of admitting we were weak and flawed, and that we made mistakes, some inevitable, others foolish, but deep within we appreciated beauty and poetry, too. Each historical artefact, therefore, is a silent plea from ancestors to descendants, ‘Do not judge us too harshly.’ We make art to leave a mark for the future, a slight kink in the river of stories, which flows too fast and too wildly for any of us to comprehend.

And if we could only see the world through a baby’s eyes, gazing up with innocent wonder, we could watch the rivers in the sky. Mighty rivers that never cease to flow.