by Tahir Shah
On the table was an assortment of used mineral-water bottles and second-hand jars. They were filled with tawny-brown honey. The man looked at me without blinking, his eyes burning into mine.
'It's a little bitter,' he said.
I kept his gaze.
'It's not for eating,' I replied.
The man nodded, almost as if I had delivered the right password.
He murmured a price and I selected five bottles. Fifteen minutes later I was on the highway again, the engine grinding its way back to Casablanca.
It was getting dark. The streetlights had died decades before. I was concentrating on the darkness and road when, quite suddenly, the engine stopped. As any owner of a Korean Jeep knows, it can be temperamental at the best of times. I pulled over to the shoulder and pledged my love for the spirit of the car. Nothing. So I tried every trick that had ever worked. Still nothing. There can be few situations more fearful than breaking down in darkness on the highway leading to Casablanca. I have rarely felt quite so vulnerable or alone. I abandoned the vehicle and, after considerable difficulty, managed to hitchhike home, the honey clutched in my arms.
That night when I closed my eyes, the black faded to a warm yellowy red. We were at a camel market near Guelmine, on the edge of the Sahara. My father wanted us to see camels. He said that to understand the desert you had to understand camels, and to understand camels you had to understand the people who kept them. Camels, Sahrawis and sand were all interlinked, he said.
I didn't like camels much because they stank, and I hated the sand because it got between my toes and into the food. My father told me a story about a little boy who ran away into the desert and dreamed of becoming a fish. It was a strange tale with an even stranger ending.
We all laughed at it.
'Did you like the story, Tahir Jan?'
'Yes, Baba.'
'Do you understand it?'
'Yes, I think so.'
'Keep it with you. As the years pass, you will feel it change inside you.'
'How will it change, Baba?'
'It will be in there, growing quietly. One day you will realize that it has done something very wonderful.'
'What will it do, Baba?'
'It will bear fruit.'
The next morning I decided to drain our bank account dry and buy a brand-new Land Cruiser. I had never bought a new car before. It had always seemed an extravagance way beyond my bank balance. But an evening marooned on the highway changed my outlook on priorities.
At breakfast, Zohra had noticed me all dressed up and asked where I was going.
'To buy a new car,' I said bashfully.
'Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!' she barked. 'If you go in a suit, they will double the price. Believe me. I speak the truth.'
I went back upstairs and changed into a moth-eaten sweater and a torn pair of jeans. Then I made my way through the shantytown on foot, towards the road. As I waited to hail a little red taxi, I heard someone yelling my name. I looked round. It was Zohra. She was waving a sieve and running as fast as her bedroom slippers could carry her.
'You must take this!' she crowed. 'Don't forget it, I told you before!'
I put the sieve in my bag and took a taxi to the largest Toyota dealership I could find. The guardians had caught wind of my plan to buy a new car and insisted that it be a Toyota. Korean Jeeps were for the dim-witted, they said in agreement, but Toyotas were for bold, fearless men.
At the dealership, I pulled out the sieve and toyed with it threateningly. When the salesman was ready for me, I held it up, told him I was not a tourist and demanded a large discount.
'Monsieur,' he said straightening his tie, 'tourists do not usually buy our vehicles. They tend to rent.'
Straining to look aloof, I enquired what models of Land Cruiser they had available.
'You will of course be requiring all the usual extras, Monsieur?'
He scribbled a figure on the corner of the brochure.
'No, no,' I said, 'I just want the basic model. No need for all that expensive stuff.'
The Toyota man seemed concerned.
'No leather seats, no cruise control, turbo engine, air bags or alloy wheels?' he choked in disbelief.
'No. None of that stuff. I just want to get from A to B without breaking down.'
'But, Monsieur . . .'
'But what?'
'But, Monsieur, if you take only the basic model . . .'
'Yes?'
'How will anyone be impressed?'
FOUR
Kings rule men; wise men rule kings.
Abu el-Aswad
BACK AT DAR KHALIFA, THE GUARDIANS WERE HARD AT WORK painting the doors with honey. They had cajoled me into buying them new brushes and toiled with a dedication that was rarely present in their work. Rachana had gone out to meet a friend. When she came back, the house smelled like a summer meadow. She commented on the pleasing aroma and went upstairs to change. There was a pause of thirty seconds and then a loud piercing shriek. Hamza came scurrying down the stairs with a honey-coated brush. Rachana was close on his heels.
'What on earth is going on?' she demanded.
'It's for the jinns,' I said limply.
My wife glared at me.
'You had an exorcism, for God's sake! Harmless animals were cut down in their prime, all in the name of the damn jinns. Don't you remember – the house was rinsed in blood!'
'I'm just keeping everyone happy,' I said. 'Got to keep the status quo.'
Rachana rolled her eyes.
'You believe in all this stuff, don't you?' she said.
'I try not to,' I replied. 'But it gets into your head.'
There may be no tourists in Casablanca, but the sieve had worked its magic all the same. After much persuasion, and having stressed again and again that I was in no need of impressing anyone, I was given a sizeable discount for the car. The salesman had gritted his teeth and said that no one in the Toyota dealership's history had ever ordered the basic model before. It was such a rare commodity that he had to order it specially from Japan.
When the car eventually arrived, I returned to the dealership, took the key from the salesman, and clambered aboard. The Land Cruiser was shiny silver and seemed to run very well. I was very pleased with it until I arrived at the shantytown.
The Korean Jeep had always offered a cloak of invisibility, just as the butcher's car had done before it. But the sleek lines of the gleaming new Land Cruiser stuck out terribly. As I descended on to the track that leads down towards the Caliph's House, I squirmed in the plastic-covered seat. A hundred eyes were on me. I was deeply embarrassed at such an open display of wealth.
When I pulled into the garage at home, the guardians lined up and saluted. Then they thanked me.
'Why are you thanking me?' I asked angrily.
They seemed confused.
'For making us proud,' said Hamza.
In the days that followed I begged them not to wash the car, as I wanted it to obtain the lived-in look that went with the neighbourhood. But they refused. Each morning before I got up, they cleaned every wheel-nut, polished every inch of bodywork, until the vehicle gleamed like a Roman chariot. It was Rachana who explained the guardians' obsession with the new car.
'It's raised their standing in society,' she said.
One morning I went into my library to find Ariane trying desperately to get a book from a shelf that was beyond her reach. She had placed a bucket on the floor and was using it as a step. But instead of turning the bucket over, and standing on its end, she had placed something across the mouth. It was a dull silver colour, about an inch thick. It was my laptop. I rushed in, scooped her up and reached for the book she was hoping to get.
'If you had turned the bucket over,' I said, 'you wouldn't have needed to stand on my precious computer.'
'But, Baba, it felt very strong,' she said.
Ariane ran out into the garden with the book. I picked up my laptop, my eyes widening at my little daughter's inexperience. As I stood th
ere, the laptop in my hands, I found myself remembering something my father had once said. We were sitting on the lawn, under the sprawling yew tree. I must have been eleven or twelve. It was summer. We were in shirtsleeves. My father had said that a man had come to see him that morning from a long way away.
'Did he come from America, Baba?'
'No, further than that.'
'From Canada?'
'No, not from Canada. It doesn't really matter where he came from, Tahir Jan. What matters is that he wanted me to help him, but I couldn't.'
'Why not?'
'Because he wasn't ready.' My father lay back on the grass. 'In some ways the West is like a small child holding an encyclopedia,' he said. 'It has extraordinary potential in its hands, enormous energy and the chance to learn from a thousand generations that came before. But it can't really benefit from the wisdom it holds until it's learned to read.'
'Will the man who came to see you ever be ready?'
'I hope so.'
'Did you talk to him, Baba?'
'A little bit. But he's not even ready for that.'
'So what did you do?'
'I gave him a story, Tahir Jan,' he said. 'And I told him to study the story again and again until he didn't understand it any more.'
'Baba?'
'Yes, Tahir Jan?'
'Will you tell me the story you told the man who came today?'
My father sat forward, legs crossed. He cocked his head back for a moment, and said: 'Once upon a time there was a Persian king. He spent all his time eating delicious things. As the years passed, he grew fatter and fatter, until he could hardly stand. He was forced to roll about on cushions. No one ever dared to speak out until, one morning, the king complained of bad circulation in his legs. The blood had drained away, leaving them blue.
'Doctor after doctor was called to the court. But the more doctors he saw, the more the monarch ate. And the more he ate, the fatter he became.
'One day, a very wise doctor arrived in the kingdom. He was immediately taken before the king and the royal condition was explained to him. The doctor said, "Your Majesty, I can reduce your weight within forty days and then I can save your legs. If I do not, then you can execute me." "What special medicines do you require?" asked the king. The doctor held out a hand. "Nothing, Your Majesty. I don't need anything at all."
'The king suspected that the physician was going to have him for a fool. He asked his grand vizier what to do. "Lock him up for forty days," said the adviser. "After that we will chop off his head."
'A pair of royal guards stepped forward to haul the doctor to the dungeon. Before he was led away, the king asked him if there was anything he wished to say. "Yes there is, Your Majesty." "Speak!" shouted the king. "I must tell you that I have seen the future, Your Magnificence. And I have seen that you will drop dead exactly forty days from now. And be assured that there is nothing you can do to prevent it."
'The doctor was locked in the darkest, dampest cell. The days began to pass. As they did so, the king clambered off his cushions and walked up and down, fretting. He worried and worried, and worried and worried, until none of the courtiers could recognize him. He lost his appetite, didn't wash, and, through fretting, could hardly sleep.
'On the morning of the fortieth day, the doctor was dragged from the dungeon. He was taken before the king and ordered to explain himself.
'"Your Majesty," he said in a calm voice, "forty days ago you were in danger of dropping dead from obesity. I could see your condition, but knew that an explanation would not lead to a cure. And so I caused you to endure forty days of anguish. Now that your weight has been so drastically reduced, we can administer the medicines that will restore your circulation and cure your illness."'
Painting the doors with honey may have protected us from dark forces, but it led to an infestation of biting flies. I have never seen anything like it. The flies swarmed in and coated the sticky surfaces so completely that they could be scraped off with the end of a spoon. Zohra forced the guardians to clean up the mess. She said that dealing with jinns was men's work.
Rachana had stormed out of the house early, a stream of threats spewing behind her like a vapour trail. By the afternoon, I had been bitten from head to toe. Mustering all my strength, I ordered Osman to slay the flies and wipe away the honey.
He seemed disappointed.
'You cannot rush these things,' he said.
Unable to stand it any longer, I went down to Café Mabrook, where I found Dr Mehdi sitting in the sun reading L'Économiste. He was dressed in a thick maroon wool jelaba. It must have been eighty degrees in the shade. He shook my hand, pulled back the hood and smirked.
The thumbless waiter, Abdul Latif, dealt me an ashtray and a glass of café noir.
Dr Mehdi removed his reading glasses and folded the newspaper neatly in half.
'I will tell you something,' he said in a soft voice. 'I am a Berber. You may not have noticed it, but we Berbers are very proud. This used to be our country before the Arabs invaded. We still laugh at them and we say that they're lazy and weak. We are a much stronger race, you see. Why do you think that is?'
I shook my head. 'I don't know.'
'It's because of the Berber childhood,' he said. 'Until fifty years ago every newborn child in my village was left out on a hillside on the seventh night of its life. Those who survived were considered blessed and were expected to live to maturity. Those who died were returned to God.'
I sipped my coffee and asked myself what the surgeon was getting at. There was usually a point to any story he passed on. He stopped smirking and blinked.
'There's another thing we Berbers do in childhood,' he said.
'Circumcision?'
'As well as circumcision.' The doctor combed a hand through his thin grey hair. 'We search for the story in our heart,' he said.
For seven nights in a row I dreamed of the magic carpet.
In the late summer the evening air is still, punctuated by dogs barking at the shadows and the crazed braying of donkeys all around. Woken by the clamour outside, I would rise out of bed and stroll down through the house and out on to the terrace. The
gardens were filled with fruit bats and the sour fragrance of datura flowers, the trumpet of the devil.
The carpet would be waiting laid out on the lawn, its geometric designs highlighted by the moon. I would move over to it and, cautiously, step aboard, my bare feet touching the silk. The carpet would ripple in anticipation and gently rise heavenwards.
We would fly out across the ocean into a realm of ink-black domes and minarets. The carpet would sense my wishes, swooping down through the narrow streets of the great sleeping city. There would be teahouses closing up for the night, thieves poised in the shadows, and soldiers from the royal guard patrolling the palace walls. The carpet would soar to the left, up over the parapets, until we were hovering outside the royal chambers. Beyond the apartments of the king was a tower, square walls of moss-covered stone. The door was bolted and locked, a pair of sentries standing guard. Inside, staring forlornly into the embers of a fire, sat the girl I had seen at the banquet.
Zohra said the dream had a meaning, that her friend Sukayna could interpret it for me. She lived behind a bakery in the nearby suburb of Hay Hassani, and had a skill, a knack of peering into the dark reaches of a troubled mind. After a week of insomnia I should have gone for a reading, but all I could think of was Dr Mehdi's comment, that Berbers search for the story in their heart.
On the Friday morning, I came down to find the guardians scurrying about near the front door. A new crop of chalk symbols and numbers had appeared in the night. There were more than the first time. All of it was in white, except for a single word in pink chalk. It was Arabic, and read: Mut, 'Death'.
Osman, Hamza and the Bear fell into line. They ordered me to buy more honey at once.
'That will not be happening,' I said.
'But the jinns have returned,' Hamza insisted. 'Do nothing about it, and there
will be problems.'
Zohra muscled in and echoed Hamza's words.
'He is right,' she said sternly. 'Believe me. I speak the truth.'
Dr Mehdi had the habit of rationing his conversation. He knew I would turn up the next Friday if he had left me with sufficient bait the week before. For seven days and nights I found myself thinking about his remark. There was something poetical about it, something irresistible. That afternoon I hurried through the shantytown and made my way to Café Mabrook. I nodded a greeting to the other regulars, took my usual place and waited for a thumbless hand to slap down an ashtray and a glass of café noir.
After about an hour the surgeon entered. He was very calm, almost calculating.
'You have been thinking about what I said, haven't you?'
'I can't help it,' I said. 'It's eating away at my mind.'
A lengthy pause followed. Then the retired surgeon said: 'The Berbers believe that when people are born, they are born with a story inside them, locked in their heart. It looks after them, protects them.' Dr Mehdi flicked the hood of his jelaba down on to his neck and sipped his coffee. 'Their task is to search for their story,' he said, 'to look for it in everything they do.'
'But how do they know it's there?'
The doctor smiled.
'You have never seen your lungs,' he said placing a hand on his chest, 'but I am sure you will agree that they are in there.'
The doctor broke off to greet his friend Hakim. As they exchanged salutations, I wondered what he was talking about. It sounded a little mad, but the more I thought of it, the more the idea grew on me. At the same time, it seemed like unbelievable luck – luck at ever hearing of such a secret Berber belief. It was as if I was being handed the idea on a plate, just like that, without having to dig away to find it.
'Some people find their story right away,' Dr Mehdi said, once Hakim had sat down. 'Others search their entire lives and never find it.'
