The Reed Flute

Listen to the reed and the tale it tells,

how it sings of separation.

Ever since they cut me from the reed bed,

my wail has caused men and women to weep.

- Rumi

It all started with Enkidu. Trouble usually did. The mean-tempered water buffalo was always getting into fights, and I had to keep an eye on him. I had insisted on naming him after the wild, savage beast-man from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and he lived up to his name. As soon as I noticed Enkidu and another male staring each other down, I dropped my flute and ran to separate them. By the time I got back, another water buffalo had trodden on the instrument, half-burying it in the mud and cracking it.

I wasn't too upset. The poor beast didn't know any better, and I knew how to make a new one. I just had to find a good reed, and reeds were our most abundant resource.

Those days, all I did was play my flute. I had no interest in playing football with the other boys, or even reading the books of poetry I used to love. Morning, noon, and night, whenever I wasn't in school or doing chores for my parents, I played the flute. When my family grew sick of hearing sad songs, I took the boat out into the marshes and played for the reeds, the buffalo, the birds. Over a year had passed since the loss of my beloved Najma, but the passing of time had not lessened the grief. The only thing that brought me a measure of solace was expressing my sorrow through music.

So the next morning, when I went out into the marshes to cut reeds for the buffalo, I searched for a good reed to make a new flute. I can't explain exactly what I was looking for. It needed to be the right size and have the right number of segments, but there was something else, something harder to measure. It needed to be a reed that carried a story, and was willing to tell it.

Does this sound strange to you? I told you I can't explain it. All I can say is that our marshes are full of stories. The clay, the mud, the water- they are saturated with tales. The reeds become story-keepers, drawing them up from their roots and holding them. And sometimes, they become storytellers. When our ancestors, the Sumerians, first began writing down their stories, they used these reeds and this clay to make the styluses and tablets that would preserve their words for thousands of years.

Alone in the marshes, I felt Najma's presence strongly. The wind whispering between the reeds felt like her ghost. I reached into the water and imagined taking her hand as she swam alongside the boat. I had a hundred memories of meeting her in the marshes, in the mornings when our parents sent us out to cut reeds. Sometimes I would recite poems for her as we worked side by side, my favourites by Rumi and Gibran Khalil Gibran, or ones I wrote myself. Even now, I half-expected to see her poling her boat toward me, greeting me with a grin. She was never really gone. I carried her with me like the mud under my fingernails.

Maybe her presence haunted me because we never buried her. I never saw her wrapped in a shroud, never heard verses recited over her as we lowered her into the earth. The last memory I had of her was a Friday lunch our families had together. We all gathered around dishes of fish, salad, and flatbread on the reed mat that covered the floor.

The conversation was mostly grim that day. It was a drought year, and things were bad. Whole swaths of marsh had dried up and become desert. The remaining shallow water was saltier, its pollution more concentrated. Since childhood I'd been warned not to drink water from the marsh, but last summer even the water buffalo were getting sick from it. Two in our herd gave birth to stillborn calves, and many of our neighbours suffered worse losses. Droughts had always been part of life in the marshes, but they were much worse and more frequent than they had been even a generation ago.

I was only half-listening to the adults' dire gossip. I kept stealing glances at Najma between bites of fish. Our parents had recently agreed that we would be engaged, though the wedding wouldn't be for another year, once we'd finished school. I was thinking about the poem I'd written for her, imagining how she would blush when I recited it to her the next time we cut reeds together.

The next morning I heard that she was missing. She had gone out into the marshes in the evening and never returned. The whole village went out searching for her. I went with my father in our boat, and we passed through the waterways between the reeds, calling her name, hearing no reply but the distant shouts of other searchers. I couldn't eat anything that day. We searched from morning to night without success. The next day passed in much the same way, and the day after. After weeks of fruitless searching, there was nothing more we could do.

The tragedy consumed the whole village. For days, no one talked of anything else. Had she slipped in the boat, hit her head, and drowned? Had she been attacked by a jinn? Was it suicide? Had someone from another tribe kidnapped her? The men gathered in tense groups, making plans for rescue, or vengeance if need be, but nothing came of their plans. The end of Najma's story remained a secret kept only by the reeds.

The mystery drove her family mad. Her mother, once the liveliest woman in the village, became hollow and brittle and silent. Her father looked like he had aged ten years in one year. Her younger sister Huda, one of the brightest students in our school, stopped coming to classes. I wondered if the marsh was so salty last year because of all the tears that were poured into it. If there is anything in the world worse than burying your child, it is losing her without being able to bury her.

Najma was on my mind, as always, as I went out to gather reeds and find a new flute. I was in no hurry to get back, so I traveled further than usual, into an area that was unfamiliar to me. Silence surrounded me, broken only by the occasional bird, the water gently lapping against the wooden boat, and the wind's breath stirring the reeds.

As I listened, I began to hear something different in the wind's song. There was one place where the reeds were not simply rustling a toneless whisper, but singing a melody as the wind breathed through them.

All the women talked about Najma's angelic voice. I lost track of how many times I'd begged her to sing for me. But she was perfectly modest and always refused. The last time I asked her, after her father had agreed to our marriage, she said she'd sing for me after we kissed for the first time. Then she blushed fiercely and covered her face with her scarf.

I followed the sound until I found the stand of reeds where it was coming from. The many-toned music swelled and ebbed as the wind rose and fell. It was an achingly beautiful song, and deeply sad. I knew I had found what I was looking for. I found a reed that was the right size for a flute, cut it, and carefully set it aside in the boat.

I went home and began crafting my instrument. I took my time; it was a delicate process. I worked on it while I watched the water buffalo. Enkidu behaved himself better than usual, as if he respected the solemnity of my task and didn't want to interrupt me.

When it was finished, I lifted it to my lips and blew. The sound that came out stunned me. It was far richer and more resonant than any of my previous flutes. Even the buffalo looked impressed.

Pleased with my success, I brought the flute with me to Friday lunch. It had become tradition for my family to eat lunch with Najma's family- we were relatives after all, and though our families hadn't been joined by marriage after all, the whole tragedy had brought us closer together. When the fish were stripped to the bones, and we were all drinking tea and leaning back on the cushions that lined the walls, my father suggested I play them some music.

I took out my new instrument. Remembering how the wind had sounded in the reeds, I pressed the flute to my lips and began to play. The melody I played wasn't a song I knew. It came to me in the moment, and I gave myself over to it. Every musician knows that there are moments, rare but transcendent, when the music simply takes over, when the instrument almost seems to play itself.

Conversation around the room died down. Soon everyone was listening. I noticed Najma's mother staring at me with a stricken expression. Her eyes, no longer lifeless and numb, glistened with a sharp longing. Her husband sat perfectly still, eyes closed, brow furrowed as if in pain. Suddenly Najma's presence filled the room so strongly, I was almost sure I could see her out of the corner of my eye, sitting beside her sister Huda, swaying to the music. I can't explain it, but I know everyone else felt it too.

Without warning Huda let out a piercing wail. I faltered and stopped playing. She bent over, covering her face with her hands. The women next to her immediately began trying to comfort her.

"It's her," cried Huda, "it's Najma, it's her voice." She began sobbing loudly and no one could calm her.

Her mother's face shone with tears. "Yes," she said in wonder. "God be praised, the flute is singing with Najma's voice."

A hushed chattering spread through the room. Now that they had said it, I realized the flute sounded very much like a woman's voice. I was suddenly afraid to play it again. I wanted to throw it far from me, this instrument that was possessed by a dead girl's spirit, and at the same time I wanted to hold it as close as I could and never let go.

Despite the women's best efforts, Huda was growing more upset. Finally she raised her head and looked around the room with anguished eyes. "It was my fault," she said wretchedly. "I did it. I killed her."

The room erupted in chaos. Everyone was suddenly shouting, demanding an explanation. She curled up against her mother, who wrapped her arm around her.

Her father shouted for silence. "Huda," he said, "what do you mean? What happened?"

"I envied her," she said in a small, miserable voice. "All the time. I envied her hair, I envied her voice, I envied her-" She broke off, and her tormented eyes met mine.

"I should have known," she said, breaking down in sobs again. "I should have known something would happen."

"You didn't kill her," the women were saying to Huda. All of us, I think, felt relieved. We all knew that envy was a serious thing, that it could cause harm, but it didn't make Huda a murderer.

"No, it was my fault," said Najma's mother with an anguished groan. "My fault. I had a bad dream about her the night before she disappeared. It was a warning. I shouldn't have let her go out that day."

Everyone was talking at once, trying to convince her that she couldn't possibly have known what would happen. Najma's father motioned for silence again. He looked around the room. "No one here is to blame for what happened," he said sternly. Then he looked at me. "Please, Abbas. I want to hear my daughter's voice again."

So I took a deep breath and played again. This time, there was no mistaking the human voice that filled the house. There was not a single dry eye in the room.

"Najma!" shouted her brother Husayn. He stood up and looked, not at me, but at the instrument. He called his sister as if she could hear him. "Tell us what happened to you. Tell us who killed you."

His face was dark and livid. Husayn, whose grief had not hollowed him, but burned him up, who had spent the past year consumed by a firestorm of quiet, helpless anger because his sister was gone and he could not avenge her.

"Hush," the others said to him, "she's not really here, she can't answer you-"

But the sound of the flute was changing.

I didn't understand what was happening, just that something was, something wondrous and terrible, and I had no choice but to keep playing. There were words in the flute's music now. Najma, who no longer had breath of her own, was borrowing mine to tell her story.

She told us how the sunset had taken her breath away, a masterpiece of crimson and gold spread across the sky, mirrored in the water.

She sang of watching the stars come out, alone in her boat far out in the marshes, and the song of the crickets and the evening birds, too enchanting to leave even though she was supposed to be home before dark.

She told us how she'd lost her way, in the dark with no moon to see by, and traveled all night only to find herself further than ever from home.

Desperately thirsty when the sun came up, she had no choice but to drink water from the marsh.

All day long she tried to find her way through the unfamiliar reeds, eating nothing, drinking only salty, acrid marsh water, singing to herself to keep her spirits up. She knew the marshes as well as any of us, but the drought had changed the familiar landscape.

She came to dry land and left the boat. She walked for hours over dry, cracked mud, past long-abandoned boats and stands of dead reeds hissing in the wind. The sun beat down on her.

By evening she could no longer stand. The water that kept her alive had also poisoned her.

She sang of the dragonfly that landed beside her face as she lay wretched and sick, its delicate wings shimmering in the glow of dusk.

All night her frail body fought the toxins. She sang of the stars that slowly wheeled above her, the cracked ground beneath her that had once been covered in water, the wind that whispered a lullaby through the dry reeds. She fell asleep as the sky was turning pink and never woke up.

For months she lay under the scorching sun, alone, unburied, unmourned, until at last the winter rains came and covered the marsh with water again, and the cracked ground turned to mud and drew her into its embrace, and new green reeds grew up around her.

The song was finished. Dazed and lightheaded, I lowered the flute. No one spoke for many minutes.

Husayn sat down again. The anger on his face had cooled and hardened into bleak despair. How could he avenge himself on every person upstream who had polluted the rivers? Who could be blamed for something like a drought?

And then the wailing began. Anyone walking past would have thought someone had just dropped dead. Screams of grief poured out of us like a torrent of rain.

I sat in silence with my head bowed. Playing Najma's song had drained me to the bone. I was too empty to even shed a tear. But I held the reed flute tight against my chest, as if I could bury it inside me.

After some time, Najma's father came over to me. "Abbas," he said gravely, "can you show us the place where you found that reed?"

So they found her at last. They wrapped her bones in a shroud and brought her home and buried her in the cemetery. They had to hold her mother back from throwing herself into the grave. The wound of our grief was ripped open, and we had to start the mourning all over again. But we did it properly this time, and the wound slowly began to heal.

Huda approached me one day after school, when I was playing football with my friends. I saw her watching me and went over to talk to her. She clutched her schoolbooks tightly.

"Do you still have the flute?" she asked quietly. I understood what she wanted: to hear Najma's voice again. Some days I wanted it too, so badly it hurt.

"No," I told her. "I buried it beside her grave. It didn't seem right to keep it."

For a moment, she looked crushed, and then she nodded. "That's better," she said. "She should rest now."

We walked home together in silence. Just before we parted ways, she said, "Thank you." She didn't say anything more, but she held my gaze and I understood.

"Don't thank me. Thank Enkidu," I said.

"Who?"

I told her how it had all started with the mean-tempered water buffalo, and I felt the whole event start to pass into legend: one more story in held in the clay and the reeds and the water.