I am wandering the streets of an unfamiliar city. At first I can’t place the ancient-looking buildings—the curved city walls with their high, mullioned windows, the white slabs of a palace—but when I reach the bank of the river, the slow curving water beneath me is unmistakable. I know this city. This is the Tigris. This is Baghdad!
At that moment, a high-pitched sound rings out; I spin round but can’t see where it’s coming from. It calls out for me once more. It’s a woman’s voice, I realise: ‘I can’t bear the separation,’ it says. ‘Come and find me.’
* * *
As always, the dream didn’t last and I woke with my heart racing and the sound of a pigeon singing at my window: ‘Cokookty … Cokookty…’ I rubbed my eyes and slowly got to my feet, walking towards the window in order to salute this brave creature that had made it all the way up to the twenty-seventh floor. The closest my heart got to it, however, was as I reached the edge of the window, triggering a sensor that set the blinds in motion, unfolding bit by bit, at which point the pigeon saw me and took flight.
I did this every morning: moved around the flat, as I slowly woke up, observing the whole city in a single panorama, peeking round the skyscrapers with the eyes of a child coveting what doesn’t belong to him, committing to memory everything I saw, before it was too late … Baghdad.
This is why I lived in the centre of this bustling city, in this modest tower, among much taller ones. I was happy to get a place from which I could view the whole city, district by district; I lived in Karkh and could see Resafa on the opposite bank of the Tigris. My parents were appalled at the rent I was paying, called it extortionate, but for me it was more than just rent I was paying.
* * *
The dream that kept returning each night was trying to tell me something, I knew: a countdown had begun, ticking off the days until my life would change. Despite learning to expect this dream, each night, the experience of having it was always shocking. I’d wake up wanting to contact the special helpline, but what could I tell them about the dream that I hadn’t already? What could the robot on the other end know about how I felt? In the past they’d committed me to a special care unit for mental-health patients suffering from textbook symptoms of ‘Baghdad Syndrome’. But I’d escaped knowing that in my heart, despite everything, I was what they called ‘a smiley person’!
I quickly put my clothes on. It was Thursday morning and I had to get to work. On the round, green table in the middle of the sitting room, I had left a kettle of cold tea; I quickly poured some into an estikan, took a swig, then abandoned it, and started inspecting the pile of letters stacked neatly in front of me. I ignored the letter with my name printed rudely along the top—Patient Sudra Sen Sumer—followed by a summary of a recent set of results. I ignored the letters addressed to ‘The Centre of Care’. Instead I picked out the files addressed to ‘Architect Sudra Sen Sumer’, and those related to the square that I had been commissioned to design.
I descended in the elevator, surrounded by the puffy faces of the half-slept, and smiled to myself as I greeted my vehicle, parked in the first space at the front of the building. The space had been reserved for those with special needs, which I didn’t have at that time, but who can say no to the luxury of such a convenient, permanently reserved parking space in the middle of a crowded city? This could very well be the last space going. Lack of parking space is what drives so many workers to invest and live in the newer, residential cities around Baghdad—which is also where my parents live.
Arriving at my office, I greeted this person and that person. I promised so-and-so I would spend an evening with him, and someone else insisted I started visiting him daily. The morning passed with a mixture of other such pleasantries and work. At noon, my colleague Utu accompanied me to the square that I had to create a design for.
The square was on the Resafa side; a long stretch of land reaching along the bank of the Tigris close to Gilgamesh Street—or ‘Abu Nuwas Street’, as my granddad called it, the way he always accidentally referred to places by their old names—the bookshops on ‘Al-Mutanabbi Street’, the shops in ‘Karradah’, or the restaurants in ‘Mansour’. Utu and I stood and examined the dimensions of the space and considered what might be possible for it. The decision wasn’t easy, as the theme of the commission was a well-trodden territory—the mythic past—explored by countless architects and sculptors before us, with their statues of Mesopotamian kings, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, the Code of Hammurabi, the Hanging Gardens, or the Winged Bulls.
I stood and imagined a different kind of design—a tribute to someone that wasn’t famous at all, perhaps a monument representing a Sumerian doctor, highlighting another side of this civilisation …
Utu cut off my train of thought by murmuring something to himself that I couldn’t make out.
‘Share your thoughts with me,’ I said.
‘It’s nothing…,’ he replied at first. ‘I just feel … that I’m betraying my people by being here changing this square.’ He seemed embarrassed by what he was saying. Perhaps he saw then the sudden change in my expression as I struggled to process his reply.
‘Well … I think that we are finished here,’ he added with a smile. I suggested that we walk a little to the front where a series of restaurants served fish fried in a particular way, passed down through generations. They grilled the fresh fish after cutting it from its back and sticking it on stakes in front of flaming wood.
I would treat myself to this ‘Mesguf fish’ whenever I felt oppressed by work or tired of the canned and frozen food that my mother would supply me with each time I visited. Utu apologised for not taking me up on my offer and went to his obligatory weekly dinner with his family.
I decided against eating there on my own, and contacted my niece, Ishtar, who was at her private secondary school in some street near the four-storey Bridge of Mesopotamia. I invited her to join me once her classes had ended.
* * *
Perhaps it’s not the most exciting thing for a teenage girl—to be asked to go eat fish with her uncle—and she complained instantly about the walk, and suggested other non-fish options instead. She soon warmed up, though, when she found out that I was mainly meeting to share my thoughts with her on the square. Ishtar’s eyes glimmered, as she sat down to eat with me: ‘I can’t wait to tell my friends that my uncle is creating the new design for Lovers’ Square,’ she exclaimed. The name ‘Lovers’ Square’ was not unfamiliar to me; I knew the old tale behind it.
It was said that the square was a place where a sculpture of two lovers had stood from time immemorial, and that one day the two lovers had simply vanished without trace, causing many people to mourn and curse the circumstances that would drive two lovers, even sculpted ones, out of Baghdad. The place had remained empty in honour of their love, ever since. Other cities around the world have exploited this idea, some of them replicated the statue exactly, others dedicated parks and squares of their own to the two lovers, offering them a haven to arrive at. It seemed that Ishtar and her friends had all heard of this story, and the rest of the world’s relationship to it, but, to me, the square represented just another project. Despite this, and without regarding the story as anything more than a sentimental myth, I felt passionate about this project. I knew that it might be the last piece of work my eyes would see.
* * *
I returned to my flat in the evening to spend the rest of my day alone. I followed the news for a bit, then spent some time returning calls. Most importantly, I ignored the letters on the table regarding Baghdad Syndrome until, finally, I retired to my room and gave myself up to sleep and the dream that haunted me.
* * *
Once again I find myself wandering the streets of a city that appears to be Baghdad, with the cries of that woman in my ears: ‘I can’t bear the separation … Come and find me!’ But this time it’s different; this time she doesn’t stop there.
‘The night of the separation was black. This hand, which wiped away my tears, is no longer my hand! Black, it’s black and my nights are black!’
I woke up terrified. I stumbled to my feet and began pacing around in a corner of my flat, reassuring myself that the black the woman in the dream spoke of hadn’t taken me yet: I still had my eyesight.
My heart racing, I made my way towards the pile of letters about Baghdad Syndrome, despite already knowing most of their contents.
Baghdad Syndrome—a phenomenon whose exact causes are still the subject of considerable genetic and medical research—is characterised by a small number of key symptoms, including an irregular heartbeat and a seemingly arbitrary subclinical depression, measurable through neurotransmitter activity and other indicators in the blood. Despite the evidence for the depression, patients remain largely ‘smiley’—that is to say, sociable, active, emotionally balanced, and free of typical depressive behaviour.
Ultimately, sufferers—who are often between the ages of thirty and forty—succumb to complete blindness, which is preceded by a period of waking hallucination, in turn preceded by unusual nightmares. The syndrome takes its name from the city that has so far produced the majority of diagnosed cases. Experts are currently trying to make a connection between the condition and the prolonged exposure of our ancestors to toxic substances a century ago. However, even now, the exact nature of the substance is unknown. All that is known is that there is a spontaneous DNA mutation found in all patients, although the position of this mutation on the gene map varies from person to person.
Each gene sequence starts mutating after birth and continues up until the blindness phase; consequently it is often difficult to detect early enough to advise against reproduction. Diagnosis is possible, however, before symptoms become manifest, and wide-spread screening in infancy is currently being proposed: so as to provide future sufferers with priority opportunities in education and work, as well as treatment and special provisions, to help them cope with the condition and the complete visual loss.
I knew all this, but they still attached the booklets to every letter, as they knew I hadn’t used the contact number they’d given me. I was aware that the gene was inside me, changing at an accelerated rate. I knew that soon my vision would start to go the way the lights once did over Baghdad all those years ago.
When the dreams began I consulted my doctor; she said that it was a sign that the blindness phase was nearing, and recommended I see a specialist quickly. That was what I was resisting.
I stared at the address on the leaflet and was close to giving in, but managed to postpone it one more time, fearing it would prevent me from enjoying my family gathering that Friday.
* * *
Friday came and I went to visit my parents, with my brother and sister’s families all visiting as well. The time passed quickly with conversation, laughter, real tea and large helpings of my mum’s signature dish. When it was over, my brother surprised me by taking me to one side and presenting me with an early birthday present. He couldn’t wait another month, and wanted to see my face as I opened the box in front of him. I was delighted and surprised but instantly trembled on seeing what it was. Inside the box was a sculpted forearm. It looked almost heroic, all black and marble-like, and, while I didn’t think it was, the arm reminded me of the lady’s hand from my dream.
‘Don’t you see how awesome it is!’ my brother exclaimed. ‘You’re mad for these sculptures, aren’t you?… I pulled a lot of strings to get this, believe me…’
‘It looks like an artifact, how did you come across it?’ I asked, trying to collect myself.
‘The black market, my dear boy! Nothing is impossible,’ he beamed.
‘As much as I like it,’ I confessed, ‘I’m not comfortable with the fact that you bought it from a thief, or at least someone who bought it from a thief … Maybe we should just hand it in to the Museum.’
A wave of disappointment crashed over my brother’s face, who launched into his defence: ‘I bought it, I paid good money for it—that’s what’s important here. Even if it isn’t a genuine piece, the Museum isn’t going to say, “Oh you take it, we don’t need it.”’
I didn’t want to hurt my brother, or expose my true feelings towards this present of his, so I took it and tried to think more rationally about the whole thing.
Once back in my flat, I unwrapped and inspected it. Despite feeling strangely possessive over it, I still intended on taking it to the Museum. I struggled to recall why exactly it reminded me of the dream … The woman had talked about a hand and blackness, and here was a black hand which my brother had bought from the black market … This is an omen of the oncoming darkness of Baghdad Syndrome, I thought to myself, then chided myself: the syndrome is limited to psychological effects, not coincidences! I haven’t dreamt of this hand before now!
When my fear subsided, I put down the thing that was supposed to be a hallucination, and went to bed, awaiting more sentences to be added.
‘I can’t bear the separation … Come and find me …
The night of the separation was black. This hand, which wiped away my tears, is no longer my hand! Black, it’s black and my nights are black …
I’ve wept for so long and no one has wiped away my tears, unless you count the tears of Heaven that have washed my cheeks, and maybe one other who watches me as I weep …
The ring that he wanted for her hand is too small for my finger and I’m not his love, and he’s not my lover …
My body is the story of a woman who flouted the restrictions, who fled and now pleas to return—so that she can tell her king the story of the thousands of nights, of the tens of decades…’
I woke panicking. It took me an hour or more to get back to sleep, and when eventually I did, the dream returned once more. By the morning I had lost all composure. I felt as if every new event was a sign that I would now turn blind, and that I stood on the edge of insanity.
When I couldn’t find a way out of my train of thought, I decided to embrace it all, and search for the identity of the woman in my dreams.
I phoned in sick at work and typed out the sentences in full, so I didn’t forget them. I prepared a few things, including the Kleecha cookies that my mum, who hoarded them, kept me in constant supply of. I set up three hologram screens on the wall in front of me and began my search.
* * *
I didn’t know what I would ask the search engine; the first thing was to work my brain. I had to accept that the woman would not leave me alone unless I found her, and that the arm my brother had given me was in some way a message from her.
I scanned the black forearm searching for a clue, but found nothing. The base of it, severed just above the elbow, suggested the arm was in a bent position, and must have been cut from the left side of the original statue.
Despite all this, I didn’t know where to search and soon became exhausted by the whole process. I stretched out on my bed and tried to relax enough to sleep. If she invaded my peace once more, she would at least bring me another sentence.
‘Don’t leave me weeping forever.’
She was guiding me towards her with this sentence. I went back to the holograms that I had set up in my office. I entered the sentence into the search engine which instantly produced thousands of results, all adding to my confusion. I changed the search to ‘images’ and there were even more results than before. One of the pictures, however, stopped me.
Unlike the countless other images melodramatically conveying themes of love and separation, this picture was of a sculpture of a woman standing serenely, with her arm raised, in front of a man, sitting listening to her. They both wore old fashioned clothes. I clicked through to the page and learned that the photograph came from a University outside of Iraq. Attached to it was a poem.
* * *
I felt disappointed as the page didn’t lead back to Iraq. After looking carefully at the picture, though, I was certain it was from this city and that the forearm of the sculpture in the photograph resembled the one that had been gifted to me. I also realized that the setting of the statue was very similar in dimensions to Lovers’ Square.
I read the poem; the language was difficult to unpack but the pain flowing from it was undoubtedly real.
The last line of the poem read: ‘And you, Scheherazade, will remain weeping forever.’ Evidently the woman who had been stalking me each night was Scheherazade, herself. I started some basic research into the author of the poem.
She was an Iraqi writer: born over a hundred years ago into a well-established Baghdad family. Her father had been taken from her, by government security forces, while she was still a child, never to return. Her mother died in an air raid during the war that ousted that regime. She lived a real-life story of star-crossed lovers until her husband was killed for belonging to a different religious sect to her. After that, living as she did in an area populated by her husband’s sect, she had no choice but to flee in the middle of the night, with her child. She left all her clothes and possessions behind, all her worldly goods, and abandoned her country to seek peace in another. However, Iraq never abandoned her and she continued writing short stories, which she always signed with the sentence: ‘And you, Scheherazade, will remain weeping forever’—the last thing she remembered from her home city.
* * *
Just as I arrived at this information there was a knock at the door. My niece, Ishtar, stood at the entrance: ‘Uncle, tell me you’re okay so I can ring your sister and reassure her!’ she blurted. I laughed before inviting her inside. She explained that my sister’s friend, who worked at my office, had told her that I hadn’t turned up for work that day, and that she had tried ringing me to no avail; so she sent her daughter to see if I was okay.
Even when I’d managed to forget about the syndrome, everyone else conspired to remind me.
I picked up my phone to find more than ten missed calls from my sister and twenty from my mum. The phone started ringing in my hand; it was Utu asking about me.
‘I’m fine, I’m working on the square design from home today,’ I told him before he’d had a chance to speak. ‘Actually, since you’re there, tell me: what do you know about the monument that used to stand on the site?’
‘There was a monument of Scheherazade and Shahryar … Shahryar was some ancient king who killed each one of his wives the day he married them, so they couldn’t be unfaithful to him. He married and killed a thousand; but then he married the daughter of his minister, Scheherazade, and couldn’t kill her because she played with his mind, telling him a story each night which she wouldn’t complete until the next day. It was a book, or a film or something…’ Utu paused. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘This may sound suspect, but … Scheherazade is following me,’ I explained.
‘You need some rest my friend…’ Utu replied. Then, under his breath: ‘The emigrants dream of returning but they never return.’ The phone cut out.
* * *
When Ishtar heard what I’d said to Utu she got scared. ‘Uncle … don’t you think you should have a talk with mum?’ she asked.
‘Is it urgent?’
‘I heard you talk to your friend about a stalker … Scheher … Schehera … I didn’t catch the name.’
‘Her name is Scheherazade … you know the name of Lovers’ Square but you don’t know the name of the lovers in it,’ I laughed. ‘Look, I’m fine. There’s just a small matter that confuses me.’ Then an idea struck me. ‘Actually you can help. You’re better with technology than me. How do you feel about staying a few hours and helping me? I’ll ring your mum and tell her that I can drop you back tonight.’ Then I added: ‘We can order take out from any restaurant you want.’
‘Oh Uncle,’ she replied, ‘if it’s to do with Lovers’ Square, you don’t even need to ask!’
* * *
I told Ishtar about all that had happened to me, about the dream and the mystery of the statue’s hand coming into my possession, about discovering this early twenty-first-century author. All this drew Ishtar in and we both started building upwards from this.
Ishtar and I tried getting the names of the author’s descendants but the city’s online genealogy archive only went back three or four generations, and none of them seemed connected to her.
I couldn’t find a way of getting to the author’s relatives to link, in any obvious way, to me or to the ancient figure of Scheherazade. Nor could I find a copy of A Thousand and One Nights, which I now knew was a very ancient text, to fathom any clues from its plots.
We attempted to use the official government data port that holds specific threads for every citizen, starting with their births and recording all subsequent life events; but this proved useless, as the system only reached so far back. At one point Ishtar thought of searching the regional archives knowing that, in the olden days, people would meet at established places for socialising, and subsequently exchange photographs of these meetings through online networks that were called ‘social media’. These sites were no longer available, but after a few private calls I was able to obtain a large archive of random images of social websites from the archives. I managed to access these by claiming they were needed for my design research; so my professional practice was now being exploited by Baghdad Syndrome!
I was sent a folder of photographs showing people who participated in establishing the site and the various dates involved. However, the names were blurred and unclear due to the low quality of photography back then.
We tried giving the photographs a resolution boost to make them clearer, and with this, we were able to sort the images into groups. Clearly these people cared about the statue, and considered it a symbol of Baghdad, but what we found perplexed us. The statue didn’t just disappear overnight as the story about the square claimed; it was more gradual, people must have simply not noticed this as they so distracted by other events.
In one set of pictures the statue is missing a forearm, in a later batch both arms, and in the third group Scheherazade is minus a head, and in a fourth set Shahryar is there alone, listening to no one. I stared at this groups of pictures.
‘Uncle look!’ Ishtar said, interrupting my thoughts. ‘There’s an earlier set, with the statue intact … And here’s a close-up of Scheherazade’s face … and, if you look, you can see fine white lines, or scratches, running down her black cheeks … These lines … they look like tears!’
I looked at the pictures and she was right. There were tears streaming down Scheherazade’s face.
I was certain that the tears on Scheherazade’s face were somehow connected to the author and her migration from Baghdad, as the appearance of the tears happened around the same time. I then returned to the task of searching for the author’s descendents. Ishtar proved invaluable here, as she downloaded an app onto my system that used faces of people from the past to find contemporary descendants.
I uploaded a picture of the author and her partner and immediately received algorithm-estimates of what her children and grandchildren might look like, which were then matched with contemporary records. Initially, I doubted the process greatly; all the matches were with people living outside Iraq and still used names that seemed ancient compared to contemporary Iraqi names. Then I realised that she and her family never returned to Iraq, so proceeded to email three of her alleged grandchildren.
Ishtar and I had a break, ate a little and discussed her studies, but my mind remained on the mission. I was nearly finished when I jumped at the sound of an email alert.
The first reply was from a grandson confirming his relation to the author but confessing he didn’t know anything about a statue. Likewise from the second. The granddaughter then replied saying she had once heard her grandmother tell a story about a statue with a scratched face. She also said she knew nothing of the loss of the statue’s hands and head.
I went back to the start, pulled up the photographs again, and tried to think about the bigger picture. Ishtar and I pored over them again, one by one, and slowly the obvious dawned on us.
The pictures that showed Scheherazade’s tears dated from immediately after the poem was first published. It was the author who had scratched those tears on the stature, before writing that Scheherazade would remain weeping, and then abandoning her, and her city, to cry.
Then came the first photo in which she’d lost her left arm. This was not the usual selfie of lovers or teenagers posing in the square, with the statue in the background; this was a different type of selfie, of a military person, with an ancient piece of weaponry round his neck. He appeared to be waving at the statue—as if bidding it goodbye after performing some great service to it. In all the pictures from this set, Scheherazade could be seen, in the background, surrounded by chaos, smoke rising in the sky above her, people scrambling for cover. This led me to suspect that her hand must have been stolen in this chaos, by thieves, and what it must feel like to have part of you owned by one of them, for the hand not to be her hand any longer.
With that I felt that I had an explanation for two of the sentences from my dream, the tears and the left hand. A few sentences still remained vague as we tried to connect each of them to the remaining pictures and arrange them:
‘The night of the separation was black. This hand, which wiped away my tears, is no longer my hand! Black, it’s black and my nights are black…’
—We pulled out this sentence and attached it to a photo in which Scheherazade’s left arm, the one gifted to me, was missing.
After that:
‘I’ve wept for so long and no one has wiped away my tears, unless you count the tears of Heaven that have washed my cheeks, and maybe one other who watches me as I weep…’
—we attached to a headless picture.
Lastly:
‘My body is the story of a woman who flouted the restrictions, who fled and now pleas to return—so that she can tell her king the story of the thousands of nights, of the tens of decades…’
—was attached to the picture where she is both headless and without arms. One sentence was still missing though.
In the photos where Scheherazade had only lost one arm, our attention was drawn to the repeated appearance of a young man and woman in the foreground. We ordered these images chronologically but could find nothing but happiness in their expressions. In another picture, the man seemed to have been inspired to decorate the statue as he waited for her, to surprise her. Another photo showed the place filled with smoke.
The following group of photographs were the headless ones. The severed neck was hard to look at. Shahryar couldn’t have cut her head off, the way he threatened to in the story, but there was another person in the background of several of these photos. An old man.
None of the photos were taken for the old man’s benefit it seemed, he was never centre stage. And Ishtar downloaded another program to search all the photos for any other appearances, in the archive. It seemed he appeared in many of them, not interacting with the main people in the photos, but sitting on his own, in the background, staring up at Scheherazade’s face. He only stopped appearing in them after the head was removed.
After the head disappeared, the number of photos of the square reduced sharply. Most of the images from this time showed groups of women around the decapitated statue; peace, it seemed, had been restored to the background city. Shortly after this, Shahryar and the remains of Scheherazade disappeared altogether. Despite the progress we’d made, connecting the faces in the pictures to names of people now living in Baghdad was extremely difficult. Hiding links to the past was very common back then. Old names and surnames became dangerous things to hold on to, and people were allocated new, neutral names, free from any affiliations to religions or sects of the past. The slogan we read about in history was: ‘Leave behind your names and live!’
Every generation yearns for the past. The father says that his time was the best. The grandfather says that his was the best. This leaves us forever romanticising the past and singing its praises until we find ourselves reliving it; this is why we ended up bearing the same names and surnames we used five thousand years before. The cycle had to be broken. So our history teacher told us.
* * *
The following day I excused myself from work. Downloading a list of names and addresses, I left the house in pursuit of any information that would guide me back to Scheherazade.
I had with me downloads of the images, in the hope they might mean something to those descendants I’d managed to trace. The first dozen or so addresses I visited, I left disappointed, knowing nothing more about their ancestors or their connection to the square. I was starting to doubt the whole project.
I returned to my flat and threw myself onto the bed. Once more, I was haunted by the same dream, but for the first time I woke without panicking. I knew for certain it was guiding me. No longer was it merely a nightmare painted on the walls of my mind by Baghdad Syndrome. I took an official leave from work and continued my door-to-door investigations for three further days until I had answers.
That young man, in the early photos, had planned to propose to the woman he was often seen with—there, under the statue. He arranged everything, even decorated the square. But he never managed to place the ring on his darling’s finger. On her way to their rendezvous, just a street away, she had been caught by a car bomb, and had lost her right arm. After this, she refused the marriage and fled with her family to the North. With this, the young man broke off Scheherazade’s right arm and placed the ring on its finger. He married his cousin and the hand remained with him as a reminder of the severed love. The ring stayed on the hand for many decades—completing an unlikely broken treasure that later owners would never appreciate—until eventually it became detached, and was lost.
As for the old man, he turned out to be a famous sculptor who, in that corner of the square, found a place to watch Baghdad. When the author came to scratch the tears onto Scheherazade’s face, she told him her story. The sculptor remained there, depressed, watching the events unfold around Scheherazade until he could no longer bear the sight of her weeping alone, without anyone to console. So he removed the head and took it home.
The head remained safe, hidden among the many sculptures of his own that his family inherited.
As for the women seen gathered around the statue in its final years, these represented an Iraqi women’s rights association, who couldn’t bear seeing her stand there in front of Shahryar helpless, enslaved, and beheaded. They produced slogans demanding the restoration of the remains for the dignity of all Iraqi women, and when these went unheard they conspired to remove the remains of Scheherazade’s body and continued to protect the statue for so long that they forgot it wasn’t actually theirs.
Within a few weeks, I had managed to locate all the pieces of Scheherazade but failed to track down Shahryar. The search had cost my sanity dearly, however; I had lost all sight of the design I was supposed to be working on for the square. It was as if Scheherazade had told me stories that I couldn’t ignore and I needed to return to her place each day to listen.
* * *
Then one night the final piece arrived. I had popped out to get some take-away biryani from a nearby restaurant and returned to eat it in my flat, before phoning the office for an extension on the design deadline. As I dozed I heard her voice again:
‘My lover is closer than you can imagine. The migrants dream of returning but they never return. My lover, however, didn’t emigrate and he isn’t a migrant.’
Her words spun through my thoughts, and made contacting Utu my first priority the next morning. I passed the window without even glancing at Baghdad, and that morning’s tea sat untouched as I went to call him.
‘Where can I find Shahryar, Utu? I need to find him!’
‘Sudra,’ he sounded like he was about to laugh. ‘You have become obsessed with Scheherazade. I’m afraid your symptoms have intensified.’
‘Scheherazade has charged me with finding Shahryar; I can’t return her statue to the yard on her own. I don’t want to go blind before I do this.’ Utu sighed and fell silent for a few seconds. Then suddenly he spoke: ‘There is a gathering. Of the old families. You should come. My family will be there.’
* * *
The day of the gathering arrived, and though I was full of anticipation I hadn’t forgotten that this was going to be the first time I met Utu’s family. I left early to shop for some sweets to take with me. I made my way to the location and found that it was a family-run, private club, hidden away in the back alleys of old Baghdad, surrounded by date-palm trees. The door was locked so I called Utu and I soon heard him unlocking a series of inner doors for me. Eventually the outer door swung open and shocked me with what it revealed.
In the middle of the spacious inner hall sat Shahryar. Men, women and children were gathered around him talking, laughing and playing. I stood there dazed, not quite processing what I was seeing.
A group of men approached me with Utu among them: ‘None of us have forgotten the names of our ancestors—be it the fourth or fifth generation,’ Utu explained. ‘My great-grandfather’s name, on my father’s father’s side, was Ali,’ one of the men said. ‘My grandfather’s on my mother’s side was Omar,’ another said. ‘My paternal great-uncle was named after Jesus,’ a third man added. ‘My mother’s father was Azzad,’ said a fourth. ‘Sarkis’, said another. ‘Yashar.’ ‘Seth.’
The names went on and on, until Utu concluded: ‘All of them were lecturers and friends at Baghdad University. They were worried for Shahryar, afraid that he would become dishonoured and would fall from being a king to a mere customer in this new world, that he would be accused of disloyalty to the country, not being an Iraqi.
And yet Shahryar has witnessed all the blues of the Tigris, all its reds and its blacks; its floods and its draughts. The men had succeeded in keeping him hidden, to be returned only when Scheherazade returned. You see, if you’re a sufferer of Baghdad Syndrome, you know that nothing has ever driven us, or our ancestors, quite as much as the syndrome of loving Baghdad.
* * *
A year on and here I stand, between Scheherazade and Shahryar in a square on the bank of the Tigris. I cannot see her but it’s as if I can hear her telling him stories—stories of the thousands of nights that they were separated for. Stories that fill the air, along with the sound of the pigeons fluttering above our heads, singing, ‘Cokookty … Cokookty…’