He who faithfully strives to understand and do what is best; who frees himself from excessive appetites and anger and other blameworthy acts and ugly deeds; who sits in a place empty of others and closes the eye of his senses to open the eye of the hidden and to listen; who keeps his heart in the world of God’s kingdom, uttering the name of the Almighty, preserving this name in his heart always, and of course on his tongue, until he is no longer a separate being, a person in the world; until he sees naught but God, praise be to His Exaltedness. To this striving person will be opened a window. When he looks through it, a person who is able will perceive more than ordinary folk will. Though he be awake, this discerning person will perceive the stuff of dreams. The spirits of the angels and prophets will come to him, and so will other beautiful and mighty images, the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of earth. He will have visions that he cannot explain or describe. As our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, said: The earth was concealed to me yet I saw its east and its west both. Azzan, if you would be this person, for seven days commit yourself to repeating only the name of God. Fast in the daytime and remain awake for as much of the night as you can. Detach yourself from others; do not speak to a soul, and the wonders of creation will be revealed to you. Do this for a further seven days and you will receive the grace of seeing the wonders of the heavens. Another seven, you will visit the wonders of the highest kingdom. Should you reach forty days God will show you His miracles and impart His hidden knowledge.
Azzan felt a shudder run through his body and sweat covered him. Najiya leaned toward him. What’s the matter?
He gave her a look of terror. I must go.
He snatched up his slippers and was gone.
Judge Yusuf, I am afraid. Afraid! My heart’s been snatched away and it sits high in the eagles’ nest. The black expanses that shadow my heart crowd all of the other images out, I cannot see them in its mirror. I cannot see, Judge Yusuf. I cannot see anything.
Abdallah
Zarifa told me that as a tiny baby I cried endlessly. After her husband made up with her and she went back to him, my aunt wanted to take me with her but my father turned her down flat. He assigned Zarifa to raise me. He bought several milking ewes but their milk wasn’t enough to quiet me. So sometimes Zarifa packed my nose with snuff to make me go to sleep. Whenever she sensed me crying because my ears hurt, she poured a few drops of coffee into my ear canals. Or she took me to nursing women, asking them to squeeze drops of their milk into my eyes, since she thought I might be crying because my eyes hurt. When I was a little bigger she strung amulets around my neck to protect me from envy and convinced my father to pierce my ears so she could hang silver earrings there. What she called the night-folk might not recognise that I was a boy and snatch me away just as they had kidnapped my mother. She embroidered the caps I wore with her own hands. It certainly didn’t diminish her pride that on feast days I was the only child in al-Awafi who wore slippers and a jubba decorated with tiny mirror-sequins procured from India.
Zarifa would recount all of this, chuckling. She raised me until the coming of The Great Anger as she called it, the massive argument between her and my father; I never learned the causes of it. He punished her by abandoning her and then marrying her off to the most eccentric and aggressive slave he had, Habib, who was at least ten years her junior.
London
The buses coming from Asma and Khalid’s wedding were back in al-Awafi just before dawn. The women’s passion for song and dance had given way to exhaustion, and some of them had fallen asleep. Mayya, though, sat wide awake next to the window. Everything, all of it, had seemed like a dream sequence. Without any warning, she had been married to the son of Merchant Sulayman. Next, her sister was married to the son of Issa the Emigrant. Her youngest sister Khawla was still waiting – waiting for her cousin Nasir.
During Asma’s wedding festivities, she had whispered, over and over: Lord, bring Nasir back to me. Everyone knew that Nasir wasn’t coming back. But stubborn Khawla would not listen to anyone.
Mayya stared out the window at the hills still half-submerged in darkness, and tightened her arms around her baby daughter, only a few months old. If that was it, simply, if life was a dream, when would anyone wake up? She stroked her little one and whispered her name almost silently. London . . . London. Will you be happy, my baby darling?
Barely twenty years later London would be a new divorcee, extracting herself from a marriage contract though not yet in her marital home. With the divorce finalised she began struggling with all of the difficult-to-untangle emotions that bruised her sense of self-respect – an incalculable blend of longing, fury, antagonism and regret. She was certain she would never again be that person she had been before. What people called ‘an experience’ was in reality a chronic disease, surely – not one you can die from, but not one that is ever cured. Not one you ever really manage; you’re never free of it, either. Wherever you go it comes along with you, and it’s liable to erupt at any moment, reminding you of consequences it carries that you were either unaware of or were diligently ignoring. And the advice people give us to ‘turn the page’ is nothing more than a sick joke. London had tried to turn the page on Ahmad. To close that page and open a new one. How many people were doing the same thing, day in and day out?
London, come on! Hanan said to her. Life goes on. Where Ahmad’s concerned, just hit Delete, okay? Let it go, she said, in English to underline her point. But this page was a heavy one indeed, and trying to turn it, she couldn’t keep her hand steady. My God, people are so different. How do other people turn the page? She tried to turn to a new page but she already knew there were no blank pages in life. She’d felt this scar deepening into a wound, her dignity festered and she saw humiliation stamped in the very spot where desire still burned. She arranged her stuffed teddy bears against the pillows, sprayed her expensive Gucci perfume around the room, lowered the curtains on Muscat’s night-time and tried to sleep but could not.
Her hard gaze turned inward and ripped open her heart. In her mind’s eye, her heart was a triangle. When memories began to rise from the base of the triangle, they were so powerful and so disturbing that they shook all three sides of the triangle hard. The words pelted down, all of the words he’d said to her since the very first time she’d encountered him in the lecture hall, and the long telephone conversations too. The sides of the triangle collapsed, pulverised by all the words, and leaving only tiny word-shards in its place. She turned her eyes away but then she couldn’t see anything.
Hanan’s words echoed, over and over: Let it go! As if this were a rewind of some foreign film: he was a treacherous lover and so the heroine left him. When a friend said to her, Oh dear . . . my dear, let it go! the heroine forgot him immediately. Bygones were bygones, the heroine turned the page. End of film. So why did London’s hand remain frozen in place, letting itself be crushed under the weight of the page, until she could no longer turn it? Why did this pain, obscure but ruthless, squeeze her so hard? Why couldn’t she shake this humiliating sensation, desire and failure in equal measure? London thrashed about in the darkness. She couldn’t sleep. Or turn the page.
Zarifa
Zarifa returned from Asma’s wedding in a state of collapse prompted by all of the dancing, singing and constantly serving guests. But Merchant Sulayman was wide awake and waiting for her. He particularly liked taking her when she had just come back from a wedding, both because she was still in her outside finery and because she carried with her the allure of the new marriage, which excited him. Zarifa wanted badly to get some rest but she gave him what he wanted as quickly as she could and then he did fall asleep.
She thought she would drop off immediately too, but a sense of unease was edging its way into her though she couldn’t pin down the source of it. Weddings didn’t bring her the pleasure they once had. And, as proud as she could be of how true her dance steps still were, she really had gotten too heavy for such things. Anyway, what more did a wedding really ho
ld for her than the endless service she had to give to the women who were there as guests? Constantly supplying them with food and drink, and on top of that, the dancing and singing, and all the gossip as well. There was no real pleasure to be had in weddings any more. Only in zar exorcisms.
Those endless ceremonies intoxicated her, everything from the grilled meat and the drinking to the heavy and incessant pounding of the drums, until the ecstasy of it all lifted her outside of herself, beyond consciousness and into one sort of trance or another. In such a state she might walk across live coals or lie beneath horses’ hooves or roll in the dirt under the careening circles of dancing bodies. Her mother – God be merciful to her mother – had been the zar’s Big Mama, the one who decided on when to hold one of these events in the first place, and then who presided over them. She was the medium, after all, the woman in direct contact with the jinn who had attached themselves ruthlessly to the human beings writhing on the hot coals. So let Merchant Sulayman whip her for an absence of two or three days while she was immersed in the zar. Let him accuse her of playing around with one of his slaves, let him curse her mother as the child of generations of runaway slaves! Let him do whatever he might, but she simply couldn’t put an end to these raging blistering ecstasies.
Even Habib couldn’t keep her from going. She’d leave newborn Sanjar there next to him and slip out silently during the night to join her mother. Habib never did anything to bring himself any pleasure, she told herself, and so he didn’t want anyone else to get any joy out of anything. If it weren’t for this unmanageable son of his she would have forgotten him completely. He was a lot younger than she was. From his mother he inherited his pale skin and short stature. When he clutched her she felt like she was being held by one of the teenaged sons of Shaykh Said who used to put their hands on her when she was barely a teenager, before Merchant Sulayman bought her. She made her aversion clear in every possible way until Habib left her, before she could cause a total scandal, acting as her mother had done with her own husband, Nasib.
Before long, Habib was gone. She thought she was well rid of him, no longer forced to put up with the way he screamed, from the depths of his sleep, We are free people, free! No longer forced to listen to his ravings about the corpses that were thrown into the sea, the pirates, the eye disease. But here was his son turning out exactly like him. Sanjar, too, would run away before long and her heart would burn with grief. If only she had never had him. It still made her groan to remember the long hours of labour and Sanjar’s difficult birth. Her mother tried everything to ease the way. She made Zarifa drink a rotten-smelling viscous oil, followed by water into which was mixed soil from a grave, and then more water, this time collected from the dirt floor of an abandoned and collapsed mosque. She made her drink the dissolved leaves of a lotus tree, and honey over which Judge Yusuf had recited verses from the Qur’an. She even turned Zarifa upside down, so frantic was she by this point. When she despaired completely she said to her daughter, Your grandmother died giving birth. Death is fate. But Zarifa did not die, nor did the baby. Ankabuta stuck her hand up the birth passage, tugged until the bluish flesh appeared, and slapped the shapeless thing several times until life surged into it. She performed the date-in-the-mouth ritual, tossed the baby into Habib’s hands, and buried the afterbirth under the threshold after smearing it with ashes and salt. She sprinkled the soft sand around exhausted Zarifa with water, gave her fenugreek and clarified butter to drink, placed a knife at her head to ward off any evil magic that might be making its way to her or the baby, and went home to sleep after a vigil that had gone on for several nights.
Still awake at dawn, she asked herself who she had been, the grandmother who died giving birth? Zarifa knew almost nothing about the generations before her. She’d heard it said that her father’s mother had run away. That was all she knew. Questions about them had never particularly plagued her in the past and they didn’t much occupy her now, though now and then she did think she could see the little African village in which her great-grandfather had spent his nights in peace before it was written that he and his offspring after him would be thrown into entirely different lives?
As Senghor was being born in a small Kenyan village, the Sayyid, Said bin Sultan, was signing a second pact with Britain to ban the slave trade. In the 1885 accords, Sayyid Said had already agreed to put an end to the commerce in slaves that moved between his African and Asian dominions. He had consented to allowing British naval ships to stop and search Omani vessels, even in Omani territorial waters, and throughout the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. They were to seize and sequester any vessels violating the accords. But Senghor wasn’t even quite twenty when he was gone after by pirates from other, more powerful villages. Under cover of darkness they slipped into the dense forests around the village and set up their traps. When Senghor went out at dawn to gather some firewood he fell into a trap and it snapped shut, caging him in. They seized him immediately and took him back to their village along with the other captives, their harvest for the day.
The new slaves were assembled at Kalwa and loaded onto a ship headed for Zanzibar. It was a three-day trip but there was nothing to eat or drink. By the time they arrived at a clandestine collection point on the shore near the harbour, sixty slaves had died, their bodies pitched overboard. The waiting merchants – some were Arabs, some Africans – had paid the head tax, two dollars apiece. The ship emptied its cargo of slaves onto the shore to await the native Sur boats that would sail from the port of Zanzibar. As they waited the merchants seized their opportunity to strike bargains with certain English plantation owners, who returned to their farms with their own bounty: more than one hundred slaves.
A few days later the Sur boat left port, the captain having sold its cargo of dried fish. Evading the British naval ships, at the secret coastal collection point it took on board the remaining human cargo, those still alive who had not been bought by the Englishmen, Senghor among them. He began to suffer from hallucinations. The ship captain kept a heap of French flags in his cabin; he had acquired from the French authorities in Aden. He had them raised high above deck as a ploy to avoid inspection from any British ships he might encounter unexpectedly in the sea lanes. And so the boat arrived safely at Sur harbour at the end of August, carried by the seasonal gusts of wind coming from the southeast. Senghor had recovered from his hallucinatory spells and the seasickness by then, and had begun to learn Arabic.
The merchants in Sur got to work dividing up the slaves, their argumentative bargaining lasting through the night. Having once again taken full advantage of the clash of interests between Britain and France, the boat captain hid his flags away carefully in his cabin and went home happy. The next morning when the merchants had come to an agreement, the slaves were transported in groups to shacks of two or three floors. With some others Senghor went up to the higher rooms. The windows were merely long slits but they allowed air in from all directions. Though the ground floor was meant for storage, some of the more troublesome slaves were deposited there.
At night the heat was still unbearable. The slaves were permitted onto the roof to sleep in the open air. Even with the breeze off the sea the air was stifling. Senghor tried to counter it by pouring water repeatedly over his body. His eyes were red but he did not cry. He no longer thought about the past, or the future. All he wanted was to sleep on firm ground.
A few days later Senghor was placed with a small group who were sent to the east coast where farm workers were needed. He didn’t stay long, for he was sold to a shaykh in al-Awafi. There, Senghor worked in the house and on the farm too. He married one of the shaykh’s slave women. When he died at forty of tuberculosis he had had two daughters who died of it too, and a son who married and had sons and a daughter before joining up with a gang of highwaymen and disappearing. His daughter Ankabuta grew up, after her brothers had all been sold away, as an orphan in the home of Shaykh Said. He had just inherited his shaykhly position from his father, although he had bar
ely reached the sixteenth year of what would be a very long life.
Asma and Khalid
When his bride Asma recited the words she’d memorised as a child, about restless souls in search of their departed halves, Khalid had simply remarked, You found that in an old Arabic book? The Dove’s Necklace, likely.
The Dove’s Necklace? Asma repeated. Who wrote a book with such a lovely title?
He gave her a rather lofty smile. An Andalusian legal scholar named Ibn Hazm. I think this is from that book.
Asma leaned towards him eagerly. But do you think it’s true, Khalid? That people’s souls really were united when the world began, and then were split in half?
He laughed. Asma, it’s only an ancient legend. That people were all the same, all one sex, male and female both, all children of the moon. Every being had four hands, four feet and two heads, that’s what they said. And then, the gods were afraid that creatures with all of this would be too strong, so they split them in two. Only the belly button remained as a reminder of that original wholeness. People became either one sex or the other. Each half has to search for its other half.
She whispered, Am I your other half, the half that was split off?
He hugged her tightly. The half I have finally found.
He had told her how, just seeing her once, he had fallen in love with her. It wasn’t very long, though, before Asma began to realise that people are not simply unmade halves who find their other halves and miraculously become whole. Neither bodies nor spirits are empty globes split down the middle; no pair exists whose souls adhere perfectly like the two identical halves of a perfectly round sphere. Even more disturbing, she began to realise that there was no way she could be Khalid’s other half, once upon a time sundered but which (he assured her) he had now found.
Celestial Bodies Page 16
