Thank you, Elizabeth.
That's the nicest introduction I've ever gotten, and is
commensurate with how I felt about having you read
my stories for the first time.
And some of the stories that appear in my book and some
of the stories that I hope will appear in other books
are the ones that Elizabeth read first.
So thank you so much.
And just very briefly, Arizona for me was this amazing place.
I had been a lawyer and had been pretty miserable as a lawyer.
I was working in a horrible New York law firm,
making rich people richer.
And I hated it.
And I'd never been to the southwest.
And I'd never really been to the west, even.
And I came to this place.
And it was amazing, the light and the color
and the air, which is like in the winter, as you know,
the air is like champagne.
It's so light and delicious.
And to be here and to have every morning wake up, and it's sunny
and it's nice.
And you sit down, and you write stories.
That was for me, an amazing emancipation.
And so I'm so grateful to you, Elizabeth.
I know you were one of the people who
helped to shepherd along my application
when I wanted to come here, and who obviously, helped
me great deal when I was here.
All right, I'm going to read you three things.
I'll try to be relatively brief.
There's nothing worse than writers
who come to these things and then read for a great length.
And I think what I'll do is I'll read to you
first, a piece from the book.
So this is from a story called, "About a Burning Girl."
And it's about a judge.
It's told in the first person.
And the judge is this corrupt judge in the Lahore high court,
who is sort of battling his way through life
and making money as and when he can.
And he has the misfortune to discover one day, that his cook
or his bearer, I guess it would be a bearer, which
would be like his majordomo, I suppose
or his butler, has gone off on vacation
and allegedly killed his wife by burning her
to death, which in Pakistan unfortunately,
is a very common way of disposing of undesirable wives.
So he is presented with the problem of what
to do about this butler.
And his wife says to him, no I want you to get the guy off.
I want him to go free, because I want him back as a butler.
And he thinks about this problem and realizes
that the only way he can get the butler off and get him brought
home is by sending his own secretary,
I suppose you would call him, to the place where
their butler lives and to go and bribe the police
and talk to the police and do everything that's
necessary to get the guy off.
Having been a lawyer and not having
been a judge, but having lived in that atmosphere,
that delicious atmosphere.
I know that, in fact, the guys on top
do very little of the work.
The work is all done by the guys on the bottom,
I having been on the bottom, I resented this mightily.
And so this is sort of a thumbnail of the guy who
is sent, the secretary of the judge,
who is sent to make sure that the butler does not get
put in prison.
And it's spoken in the voice of the judge.
"The two steeds pulling my career rapidly forward
along the treacherous road of the Pakistani judiciary,
are my wife and Mia Sarkar.
Mia Sarkar is the secretary sent.
Each is, in a different sphere, absolutely matchless.
My wife you already know.
Mia Sarkar deserves not merely a thumbnail,
but a biography in two volumes, if it were possible to find out
anything at all about him except his present rank and station.
So far as I'm aware, Mia Sarkar wore a cheap, three-piece suit
and a pair of slightly tinted spectacles,
of an already outmoded design on the day
that he emerged from his mother's womb.
When he leaves the office in the evening, exactly at 5:00,
he doesn't turn a corner or get into a cab or a bus.
He simply dematerializes.
No one knows even what quarter of the city he lives in,
much less his address.
He drinks nothing but milk, one careful glass
full each day at lunch.
And because of his digestion, he eats each day,
only a single cheese sandwich on white untoasted bread,
with a crust cut off, brought to him by a boy from a tea store.
Before speaking, he clears his throat with a little hum,
as if pulling his voice box up from some depth where
he secretes it for safekeeping.
His greatest feature, however, is
his nose, a fleshy, tubular object,
gorged with blood, which I've always longed to squeeze,
expecting him to honk like a bus.
That would be a fatal act.
There is nothing connected with the courts of Lahore
that he has not absorbed.
For knowledge in this degree of detail
can only be obtained by osmosis.
Everything about the private lives of the judges
and of the staff, down to the lowest sweeper,
is to him, incidental knowledge.
He knows the verdicts of the cases
before they have been written, before they even
have been conceived.
He sees the city panoptically, simultaneously.
And if he does not disclose the method
and the motive and the culprit responsible for each crime,
it is only because he is more powerful if he does not do so.
Locked in his impenetrable bosom are
all the riots and inequities of the past and perhaps
of the future.
And when his mid figure steps out
of the law courts of an evening and is
lost in the crowds along the mall,
I am irrationally reminded of Lenin disembarking
at the Finland station in 1917.
He is a man of secret powers and a mover of great events.
This is the bacillus my wife sent out
to resolve Haddam's case, as she wanted it resolved.
Mightier man than I fear him."
That's Haddam.