The Names

12

In the morning! went looking for Owen Brademas. The piece of paper I'd been carrying since Bombay contained a set of directions rather than an address. The address Owen used was the Old Campus, Punjab University, strictly for receiving mail, Anand said. If I wanted to find him, I would have to look for a house with a closed wooden balcony roughly halfway between the Lohari Gate and the Kashmiri Gate in the old city.I made my way to the edge of the old city easily enough. From the street din of motorcycles and buses to the voices of the long bazaar. The thoroughfare narrowed as I passed through the Lohari Gate, a brickwork structure with a broad towerlike fortification on either side.Once inside I began to receive impressions, which is not the same as seeing things. I realized I was walking too fast, the pace of the traffic-filled streets I'd just left behind. I received impressions of narrowness and shadow, of brow

(It wasn't until I'd put my hand to the marble tomb, the night before, that I knew I'd try to find him, talk to him one last time. Wasn't that the image he'd wanted me to retain, a man in a room full of stones, a library of stones, tracing the shape of Greek letters with his country-rough hands?)

"I've been preparing for this all my life," he said. "Not that I knew it. I didn't know it until I walked into this room, out of the color and light, the red scarves worn as turbans, the food stalls out there, the ground chili and turmeric, the pans of indigo, the coloring for paint, those trays of brilliant powders and dyes. The mustard, bay leaf, pepper and cardamom. You see what I've done, don't you, by coming into this room? Brought only the names. Pine nuts, walnuts, almonds, cashews. All I can tell you is that I'm not surprised to find myself here. The moment I stepped inside it seemed right, it seemed inevitable, the place I've been preparing for. The correct number of objects, the correct proportions. For sixty years I've been approaching this room.”"Anand speaks of you.”"He wrote. He told me you'd been there. I knew you'd come.”"Did you?”"But when you stood in the door I didn't recognize you at all. I was surprised, James. I wondered who you were. You looked familiar-but in the damnedest way. I didn't understand. I thought something was happening. Am I dying, I wondered. Is this who they send?”"You took it calmly, if you thought I was a messenger from the other side.”"Oh I'm ready," he said laughing. "Ready as I'll ever be. Counting the cracks in the wall.”There was a pale gray booklet in the copper tray. Kharoshthi Primer. I picked it up and turned the pages. Lesson number one, the alphabet. Lesson number two, medial vowels. There were seven lessons, a picture on the back cover of a stone Buddha with a halo inscription in Kharoshthi."The ragged mob squats in the dust around the public storyteller," he said. "Someone beats a drum, a boy wraps a snake around his neck. The storyteller begins to recite. Heads nod, heads wag, a child squats down to pee. The man tells his story at a rapid clip, spi

He was a wanderer. He wandered by bus and train and walked a great deal, walked for six weeks at one point, rock-cut sanctuary to stone pillar, wherever there were inscriptions to look at, mainly ancient local languages in Brahmi script. Anand had offered to lend him a car but Owen was afraid to drive in India, afraid of the animals on the road, the people asleep at night, afraid of being stuck in traffic on some market street with crowds moving around the car, men pushing, no space, no air. The nightmarish force of people in groups, the power of religion-he co