The Mahboob Chaudri Mystery

by Josh Pachter

  Back home in Karachi, Chaudri had taken his children more than once to ride the gaily decorated tourist camels at Clifton Beach, but this was the first time he had ever mounted one of the ugly, sour-smelling beasts himself. The weathered wooden saddle and thin cloth cushion he sat on were intensely uncomfortable, and the creature’s clumsy rolling gait jarred his long-suffering head at every stride.

  He had been aboard the animal for over an hour now, and he was deeply regretting the chain of events which had put him there. If he had known that the government would bestow this honor on him for preventing the attempted theft of that little bit of stone from the National Museum from turning into an international incident, he might just have let that photographer get away with it. The museum’s curator had given him a golden replica of the famous Dilmun seal as a reward for his recovery of the original. That was nice—he’d had one of the Arab jewelers in the suq turn it into a lovely necklace for Shazia. But this. This privilege. He had managed to put it off for several months with assorted excuses, but his luck had finally run out—and here he was.

  Camels! The ships of the desert, they were called, and Mahboob Chaudri could understand why: he felt himself about to become seasick at any moment. Dear Allah, he prayed fervently, if the worst should happen, allow me at least to avoid soiling my uniform and disgracing myself!

  He understood now, too, the truth behind the ancient poet’s description of the nomadic Arab tribesmen who had formerly roamed the desert as “the parasites of the camel.” As he rode through the scorching heat, Chaudri had frequent occasion to consult the jirbeh he had been given, the goatskin bag of sweet water that hung by his side. But the hulking camel plodded on steadily, diligently, not showing the slightest sign of weakness or thirst. Man was not well suited for life in the desert—but with his camels to provide transportation, and milk in times of no water, and meat in times of no food, the Bedouin could survive even this most harsh and desolate of existences.

  A sudden crack from below broke the stillness of the afternoon. Chaudri leaned to his left and looked down—to see beneath him the remains of one unfortunate ship of the desert that had capsized in this infinite ocean of sand. Its skeleton had been picked clean by carrion birds and bleached a dusty white by the ferocious summer sun and largely covered over by the ever-shifting sands, but its gently curved jawbone still lay on the surface of the desert, and the hoof of Chaudri’s camel had shattered the brittle bone and the oversized ivory teeth loudly.

  “Desert driftwood,” said Chaudri aloud, though there was no one but the camel to hear. He turned the words over in his mind as his mount moved remorselessly onward, indifferent to the lonely fate of its cousin. The phrase pleased him: those scattered bones, softly sculpted by wind and sand, were indeed the flotsam and jetsam of the arid vastness that made up most of Bahrain’s 250 square miles.

  He had left the inhabited northern half of the island behind him an hour or more earlier, had passed the national oil company’s residential compound at Awali and skirted around the base of the Jebel ad-Dukhan, the Mountain of Smoke. At less than 400 feet in height, it was not much of a mountain, but it was the emirate’s highest point, and on a clear day the whole of the country, from al-Muharraq in the north to Ras al-Barr in the south, could be seen from its summit.

  Chaudri drank sparingly from the jirbeh at his side, then touched the few droplets of water which clung to his upper lip with the point of his tongue so as not to waste even the smallest amount of the precious fluid. His olive-green uniform was itchy and sticky with perspiration. He felt foolish with the traditional red-and-white checkered ghutra on his head, but the camel master had insisted he wear it as protection from sunstroke. At least there was no one around to see how incongruous it looked in combination with his uniform.

  There was no one anywhere, there was nothing to see and no one to see it. Just Mahboob Ahmed Chaudri and his trusty camel, alone in the middle of an endless expanse of sand and dead or dying brush, the midday sun dizzying his poor brain in spite of the ghutra, his aching body numbed by now to the further indignities of the torturous ride.

  He would feel it tomorrow, he knew. O pehan yah geya, he would feel it tomorrow—unless he was lucky enough to perish today, to tumble insensate from the back of this damnable beast and give up his bruised flesh to the birds and his battered bones to the sun.

  “A privilege,” he muttered dully, reaching for his half-empty jirbeh with a tired hand. “By the beard of the Prophet, it’s a privilege.”

  * * * *

  When at long last he saw the Tree of Life take shape through the shimmering haze of heat before him, his first thought was that it must be a mirage. This was his destination, his turn-around point—a sad reminder of the fact that there had once been an underground spring beneath this far corner of the desert. Ancient legend had it that this was the very Tree of Life that the Lord God had planted for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But this tree was long dead, its trunk wasted, its branches barren—and the Garden of Eden had crumbled to a wilderness of unfriendly sand.

  One minute the tree stood there, not a hundred yards distant, and the next minute, mirage-like, it was gone. In its place was an angry tan swirl in the air, and a strange low-pitched whistling that teased Chaudri’s ears.

  Mirage? he wondered, and then his sunbaked mind shifted back into focus and a different word stabbed horribly at his consciousness.

  Shumal!

  The deadly scourge of the desert sandstorm!

  Instantly alert, the Pakistani’s thoughts raced frantically over the available options. Back in the city, the shumal was nothing to fear—one simply fled indoors until the raging winds had spent themselves. But out here there was no shelter to be had. And since the wind could carry the suffocating sand in any direction, flight was as likely to be futile as helpful. More likely.

  Grateful now for the ghutra, Chaudri wrapped its long tails across his mouth to keep the choking sand from his throat and lungs. He dug his heels into his camel’s flanks and urged it forward, straight toward the spot where he had seen the Tree of Life. If he could find it again, at least be would have something sturdy to hang onto.

  And there it was, immediately in front of him! With all his dwindling strength, he pulled back on the length of rope that served him as reins and managed to bring the lumbering animal to a halt. Forgetting the camel master’s careful instructions on dismounting, he swung his left leg to the beast’s right side and jumped quickly to the sand. He tore the black agal that held the ghutra in place from his head, figure-eighted it and forced the camel’s forehooves into its loops, hobbling the creature to prevent it from wandering away into the storm.

  Then he sat down with his back to the tree, settling himself as firmly as possible against it, and squeezed his eyes shut tight. The wind roared furiously around him. Whirling grains of sand stung at the exposed skin of his face and the backs of his hands like a thousand sharpened needles. He thought he could make out the hoarse breathing of the camel through the clamor of the wind, but assumed he was hearing that sound with his imagination, not his ears.

  At least he could breathe. The mesh of the ghutra was fine enough to filter out the gritty desert sand from the air he drew in with great shuddering frightened gasps.

  Merea rabba, he told himself bitterly. First that miserable ride, and now this. And today was Friday, supposedly his day of rest, when he could have been back at the police barracks in Juffair, reading a book or chatting with Sikander Malek and the other men from Karachi!

  He shifted position irritably, already beginning to feel the soreness in his joints return, and his hand brushed against something hard and smooth and warm, half buried in the sand. More desert driftwood. He lifted the object and held it with both hands in his lap to keep the wind from picking it up and flinging it at him. He could not see it, with the shumal raging and his eyes closed, but he traced its bleached surface with his fingertips
, comforted by the feel of something firm and unyielding amidst the maelstrom.

  It was nearly round—a globe, a skull with the jawbone broken away but the upper row of teeth still in place. The deep eye sockets told him which side was the front. The back of the head was —

  It was almost round. And the teeth were much too small.

  A camel has teeth the size of a 10-fils coin, he remembered, and its head is elongated, not practically spherical.

  This was the skull of a human being.

  * * * *

  “Charming!” exclaimed Dr. Emad Rezk, looking up from his microscope with a glint in his eye and a beatific smile on his oval face. “Perfectly charming. Oh, my fascinating friend, you never fail to bring me the most delightful surprises.”

  Rezk, an Egyptian, was a professor of science at the Gulf Polytechnic University. He was frequently asked to do lab work for the emirate’s Public Security Force, which did not yet have a forensics department of its own, though the Ministry of the Interior had been promising one for several years.

  “Human?” Mahboob Chaudri asked the man now.

  “Oh, yes,” Rezk responded. “Oh, yes, indeed, most definitely human. See for yourself.”

  As Chaudri bent toward the eyepiece, a spasm of pain clutched cruelly at his lower back. He straightened with a groan.

  “Something wrong, my friend?”

  The Pakistani smiled weakly. The shumal had lasted for almost half an hour, leaving his nut-brown face and hands agonizingly raw. Then had come the endless ride back to civilization, which had been even worse than the trip out to the Tree of Life—though at least the day had become somewhat cooler. When he had finally returned to the barracks in Juffair, he had rubbed a soothing ointment into his tender, wind-burned skin, soaked his aching muscles in a hot tub for an hour, and then gone straight to bed. But this morning he was back on duty, though his body was stiff and sore all over, and the only thing that hurt worse than moving was the torture of sitting or standing still.

  “No, no,” he lied, “I am quite all right.” He was, after all, an officer of the police, and the Security Force’s image of impassive strength and dignity must at all cost be maintained. He forced himself to peer at the meaningless jumble of cells displayed in the microscope’s field of view, then nodded his head wisely and said, “Yes, I see.”

  Rezk chuckled. “You are quite all right,” he said indulgently, “and you see. Very well, my friend.” He grinned mischievously. “Then tell me: what else can you say about the former possessor of this magnificent pericranial specimen, other than the fact that he was human?”

  “Ah,” said Chaudri sagely, “but that is your specialty, Doctor. I would not want to rob you of your moment of scholarly exposition. And besides, I have not been trained in these matters. I can tell very little, I’m afraid. The skull belongs to a Bedouin, of course, an adult male—that much is obvious. He did not die a natural death. Oh, no: he was murdered. Murdered by strangulation at least 10 years ago. But other than those simple facts I can tell nothing. I depend on you for further enlightenment.”

  The Egyptian stared at him, dumbfounded. “How—how can you know all that?” he spluttered. “You looked at one preparation only, and at that for but a few seconds! Where did you study forensic medicine, my amazing friend, and why have you never told me that you did?”

  Now it was Chaudri’s turn to laugh. “I know nothing of forensic medicine,” he admitted. “But after five years in Bahrain, I know much of the Arabic way of life. Everything I told you I knew almost as soon as I first discovered the skull, without recourse to your microscopes and preparations.”

  “But how? Yes, the size of the specimen alone suggests that the victim was an adult, but how do you know he was a Bedouin, a male, and dead for at least 10 years? I can list at least a dozen indications which prove you to be right, but nothing you can have seen without careful chemical testing and a great deal of very specialized knowledge.”

  “To one who knows a bit about the Arab,” Chaudri explained, “this simple skull speaks eloquently. Who but a Bedouin would lie buried beneath the desert sands? A city dweller or a peasant would have a more traditional resting place, in a cemetery in Manama or one of the villages. Only a Bedouin would be left in the desert, and then only if he had died 10 or more years ago, before the government implemented its policy of sedentarization, of settling the various Bedouin clans in villages so that they could be kept track of, controlled, and taxed.”

  “But how can you say he was murdered—strangled, no less! All we have here is a skull, without a mark of violence on it. And how do you know he was a male?”

  “If he had been buried with the usual care and ceremony of a Bedouin funeral, a thousand years of shumals would never have uncovered his bones. No, he was buried hastily, without ceremony and too close to the surface of the desert. Why? Because he had been murdered, and his killer wanted to get the body under the sand before the crime was discovered. And if you agree that there was a murder, then it follows that the victim was male and an adult, and that he was strangled, because only a Bedouin would have reason to kill another Bedouin, and a Bedouin would never slay a woman or a child, and when a Bedouin murders he invariably does so by strangulation. As I said, Doctor, it’s all quite simple if you only understand the Arab’s way of life.”

  Emad Rezk shook his head in bafflement. “lf you already knew all that, my dear Chaudri, then why on earth did you bother coming to me?”

  “Because deduction based on a knowledge of the Arab is all well and good,” the Pakistani answered, “but police work rests on scientific proof, not confident guesses. I felt certain that my ideas were correct, but I needed your opinion before bringing them up with my superiors.”

  “Well, I’m afraid that I can’t help you as much as you might wish. Yes, the dead man—and it was a man—was a Bedouin, perhaps between 30 and 40 years of age at the time of his death, which was at least 15 and possibly as many as 25 years ago. But was he strangled? Was he truly murdered at all? Your deductions sound convincing to me, my friend, but there is no evidence to either confirm or contradict them. Unfortunately, I can tell you nothing more.”

  “Unfortunately,” Mahboob Chaudri scowled, “you have already told me something rather important.”

  “I have?”

  “You have. You’ve told me that I am likely to be spending a great deal of my time drinking Bedouin coffee over the next few days.” He turned to go, then thought better of it and faced his friend Rezk once more. “And I detest Bedouin coffee,” he complained.

  * * * *

  Sitting cross-legged on the worn palm-frond matting which covered the floor of the majlis, the main living area of Sheikh Mahmood’s coral-and-rubble house, Mahboob Chaudri waggled his tiny porcelain cup from side to side to say that he had drunk as much of the cardamom-flavored liquid as he desired. One more cup, he thought irritably, his stomach purring with hunger and too much coffee, and I will float away to sea.

  This was the sixth Bedouin village Chaudri had been to since his session with Emad Rezk the day before. Still sore in every muscle of his body, he had dragged himself down countless narrow alleyways, searching diligently for the identical government-constructed home of each village’s sheikh. The sheikh did not “rule” his clan, of course: even though they had been successfully sedentarized, the Bedouins still recognized no power higher than that of each separate individual. The sheikh was, instead, an arbiter, an advisor, a respected figure who exerted considerable influence while avoiding any pretense of actual authority. Still, the sheikh’s residence was the logical place for Chaudri to begin his inquiries in each village.

  And five times now those inquiries had gone no further. La, five sheikhs had told him, after the ritual exchange of formal compliments and the drinking of too many cups of the slightly bitter coffee Chaudri despised, no one of my qawm has ever vanished into the desert—not 20 year
s ago, never. Some have died, of course, and a few of the young have taken jobs in the city or gone away to school. But none have disappeared, none have run away out of anger or sorrow. Our qawmiya here, our feeling of unity, is very strong.

  This time, though, in this sixth village on Chaudri’s tour of the country’s Bedouin communities, when the amenities were finally over and the Pakistani posed at last his question, Sheikh Mahmood rocked back on his heels and stroked his white beard thoughtfully.

  “Hassan,” he said. “It’s a long time ago, but yes, it’s Hassan you describe. Hassan al-Shama, we called him.”

  Chaudri had never heard the expression before. “What does it mean, al-Shama?”

  The old man smiled. “The city Arabs have always thought of us as lazy wandering gypsies,” he said, “traveling only in order to avoid regular work, stealing from the peasants, taking what we can from society and giving back nothing at all. But in truth the Bedouin’s life is harsh and always challenging. It takes great skill to survive in the desert, and great courage. During the rainy season, for two months of every year, the desert is Allah’s garden. Then we can stay in one place for a while, then our life is less bitter. But for most of the year, we move about because we must. We go where the rain is, since where there is rain there is water to drink and grass for our animals.

  “Shama is a Bedouin word. It means to watch for flashes of lightning in the distance so as to see where the next rain will fall. So Hassan al-Shama was, for us, Hassan the Watcher. He had marvelous eyes: he knew where the rain would come long before anyone else in the qawm. Then we would hurry to the place he had seen and we would stay there until the sun and the wind destroyed the grass brought forth by the rain.”

  “And you say this Hassan disappeared?”

  “Yes.” The old sheikh rocked back and forth as he spoke, his voice a crooning murmur. “One afternoon, many years ago, perhaps 10 years before they brought us to this village, Hassan went off alone into the desert to watch. I remember the day very well. It was summer, we had no water at all. We were living off the milk of our camels, and Hassan went off alone to watch. There was a rainstorm that day. It was a miracle, a magnificent downpour at the very spot where we were already camped. By nightfall, there was grass as far as the eye could see. But Hassan did not return. He never returned. His first wife, Aiysha, still waits for him. He will come back when the qawm needs him, she thinks. She has been waiting for 20 years.”