On Armenian Christmas Eve

We eat a pudding named after a man who drowned in the lake. We are not Armenian, my father and I, but we are practicing the art of letting go of worldly attachments. To outcomes and identities. To lose ourselves in the history of human emotion from our designated spots on the couch. At Valois, my father tells my sister to ask me the story of Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb—but all I can recall is the drawing by the grandson of the Mughal historian to whose heart my father tends. The boy just six, the crown-princes on gleaming horses, their grandfather’s sword, a pool of black graphite spilling out between their hands. I cannot tell this plot—the head on the dinner plate, the sullied elephant, the great betrayal, the fight to the death—I can only recite a short litany of what is lost in the aftermath. The prince’s body, a once-secular empire, an unmarked grave in one of a hundred and twenty chambers of a sandstone tomb in old Delhi. Misfiled and never found again. Ghalib: Who holds the reins of the Final Catastrophe? Self: How to explain the insurrection of my mind? After great loss our lives become a ceremony of erasure. The picnic by the cemetery. The cable car over the river. The memory of citrus. The amnesia of the present. The rituals of letting go. These days when asked to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the deaths of men: I practice refusal. Let’s say I know just one story—from their great-great-grandfather Hamayun’s diaries—of a philandering carpet-seller, whose wife returns home early from the bazaar one day, and to escape her notice tells his manservant: Quick! Roll me up—carry me away! In another, the exiled boy-emperor is on study-abroad in Persia as the guest of Shah Tahmasp. He is standing at the edge of a marble swimming pool filled with lemon sherbet. He is surrounded by a sea of courtesans with whom he shares just one thing: a common imperial tongue. Wondering about politeness and licking his lips.