The Mahboob Chaudri Mystery

by Josh Pachter

  “And his other wives?”

  “He had one other wife, Falila.” The sheikh sighed. “It was not a good marriage. That one does not wait for her husband’s return: a year after we last saw him, she left the qawm with Hassan’s younger brother, Ali. They went to live in al-Hidd, near the airport. They are still there, I think. I am told they have a cold store, though I’ve never been there myself.”

  “Did you report Hassan’s disappearance to the authorities?”

  “The authorities,” Sheikh Mahmood scoffed. “What have the authorities to do with my qawm? We take care of ourselves, we look after our own—we have no need of your laws, your taxes, your authorities. When Hassan the Watcher went off, in the Aiyamu’l Arab, the day of the Arab, we were the only authorities in the desert—we reported nothing. Today we report, and see what has happened to us.”

  He waved a feeble hand at the coral walls which surrounded him, their recessed niches filled with the many accoutrements of the settled life. He glared at the wind tower in the corner, at the electric lights above. “We have become weak,” he mourned. “We have lost our heritage. The Aiyamu’l Arab is at an end.”

  * * * *

  The front door of the house to which Sheikh Mahmood had directed him was wide open. Chaudri stood in the doorway and peered into the gloomy space within. The building—like all of the residences in all of the Bedouin villages he had visited—was built to the same size and general floor plan as the home of the sheikh, but even in the dim sunlight which filtered in through the closed wooden shutters he could see that this home was much more simply furnished than was usual—a plain table bearing a basin and a pitcher of sweet water, a cushioned bench, a chair, mankur matting on the floor, a minimum of other odds and ends. The mangrove beams supporting the ceiling were, though attractive, strictly functional. The only decorative touch in the room was the framed photograph on the far wall. Oddly, it was not the standard color portrait of the Emir, but a yellowed newspaper clipping of John F. Kennedy, the American president who had been shot and killed around the time of Hassan’s disappearance. He was outdoors, behind a waist-high lectern, in a somber black suit delivering a speech to the great crowd that surrounded him, a broad confident smile on his youthful face.

  The face of the woman who sat in the chair by the shuttered window was old, the story of her 50 years in the desert and her decade in this village written across it in tortured lines. She wore a simple red shift, its half sleeves and neckline trimmed with bands of gold, and over it a loose white sleeveless tunic. There were gold bracelets on her wrists and a tiny silver ball affixed to the right side of her nose just above the nostril.

  She was sewing the hem of an abba with fine black thread, and Chaudri wondered how she could see to work in such poor light. A mangy gray kitten, its enormous ears stiff and pointed like the horns of a devil, caressed her bare foot silently, and the woman absently stroked its fur with her toes. Neither of them gave the slightest sign they were aware of Chaudri’s presence in the doorway. He waited there for several minutes, and then he put his fist before his mouth and coughed self-consciously.

  The old woman raised her head. “Who is that?” she demanded querulously. “Who’s there?”

  He took a step forward. “My name is Chaudri,” he explained. “I—”

  “Chaudri? I don’t know any Chaudri. You’re not of my qawm, are you? Where do you come from? What do you want here?”

  What was she babbling about? She could see he was not a member of her clan, couldn’t she, with his Pakistani features and his Public Security uniform? Unless she was senile, perhaps, or —

  Ah, yes, of course. Nothing decorative in the house, except for the single dusty picture which had obviously been hanging there undisturbed, unlooked at, for years. The shutters closed and no artificial lighting, yet the ability to do detailed handwork in the almost darkness of the room. The old woman was blind.

  She had lost her sight sometime since the sedentarization of the qawm—the photo on the wall told him that she had been able to see for at least part of the time she had lived here—and now he was about to take away from her as well the hope of her husband’s return, a hope she had cherished for the past 20 years of her life.

  How did one steal a helpless old woman’s dream? What words did one use to soften the terrible blow?

  “I come from the police,” Chaudri said to her tentatively. “I come to speak with you about Hassan.”

  “Hassan is dead,” she replied, with the simple conviction of one who spoke a self-evident truth.

  Chaudri was stunned. “But—but Sheikh Mahmood was telling me you believed him still to be alive.”

  She made an exasperated spitting noise and kicked the scrawny kitten away from her abruptly. With an angry yowl, it bolted through the open doorway and out into the street beyond.

  “Sheikh Mahmood is even older than I am,” she said. “He is an honest man, and often a wise one, but he sees only what he chooses to see.” She touched a hand to her useless eyes. “Even with these, I am not so blind that I cannot tell the difference between reality and a foolish dream.”

  “I hear no bitterness in your voice,” said Chaudri.

  “About my eyes, do you mean? Or about my husband? I loved Hassan, and I loved my sight. But there is no God but God, and who am I to question His wisdom?”

  There was a serene strength to her which Chaudri had never before experienced in a woman, or in a man either, and he watched with admiration and respect as her nimble fingers worked tight stitches along the fabric of the abba. “Tell me about Hassan,” he said.

  She sighed deeply and set down the cloth, needle, and thread.

  “Hassan.” The quality of her voice had changed—it no longer fit with the wrinkles etched into her face. It was young and vibrant, the voice of a woman who loved. She thought back across the gulf of years and gathered her memories around her like a warm and comfortable cloak.

  “He was not a member of our qawm by birth. But when we met in the desert and decided to marry—more than 30 years ago—instead of asking me to leave my family and put on the skin of his clan, he came to us and put on the skin of ours. Ali came with him. Their parents were long dead, there was no other close family, his place was with his brother. Ali was good with the animals—the camels, the sheep, the goats—but Hassan was a watcher. He knew where the rain would fall before anyone else. Some said he didn’t need to watch at all, that Allah came to him in the night and told him of His plans for rain.”

  “And Falila?” Chaudri prompted gently.

  A frown flickered across the cracked, pale lips. “Falila was a baby when Hassan and I first met, an infant. Many summers passed and she grew into a complicated child, strong-willed and hot-tempered, but in the end always loyal to the qawm and respectful of her elders. She loved Ali even then, I think, but Sheikh Mahmood suggested that it would be good for Hassan to take a second wife, and it was agreed that Falila should be his bride.”

  Because of her blindness, it was not necessary to look at her while she spoke, and Chaudri’s gaze swept the dimly lit room with professional interest. The niches in the walls were mostly empty. A closed door led off to the rest of the simple dwelling. There was an inscription printed across the bottom of the photograph on the wall; the letters were too small for him to make out, but he could see that a few words of Arabic had been handwritten above the typeset line of English text.

  “A few more years went by,” the woman continued. “Hassan and I grew even closer than we had been before his marriage to Falila. He cared for me with great tenderness. He gave me all I asked him for—all except for one single thing.”

  “And what was that?”

  “He would not treat my sister Falila with the respect she deserved as his wife—and what pained my sister pained me, pained the entire clan.”

  Chaudri was taken aback. “Sheikh Mahmood did not mention that
you were sisters.”

  The woman’s smile revealed a flash of gold at the back of her mouth. “We were married to the same man. That made us sisters.”

  “Ah. But Hassan favored you.”

  “He loved me,” she said. “And at first he seemed to love Falila, too. But she was still a child when he married her, and his feeling for her faded as she grew into womanhood. The Quran says that a man may take four wives if he so desires, but he must treat them with complete equality. Hassan’s only failing was that, where he treated me with kindness and love, he came to treat Falila with nothing more than cold contempt.”

  Chaudri stood up and moved about the room in a vain attempt to ease the soreness of his muscles. “Why?” he asked. “Why did he hate her?”

  Aiysha shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. She was a good wife to him for a long time after he began to mistreat her. Finally, though, she became resentful. What woman would not?”

  There was no way to avoid it any longer. “Might she have become resentful enough to follow him into the desert on the day he disappeared,” Chaudri said, “to murder him in anger and bury his body beneath the sand?”

  The old woman considered it. “Yes,” she said, and there was sudden craftiness in her tone, “she might have.”

  “Do you think she did?”

  The answer, this time, was immediate and forthright: “No.”

  “No,” Chaudri repeated. “But of course she is your sister. If she did kill your husband, or if you thought she had, would you tell me?”

  She looked straight at him as if she could see him. For a moment, Chaudri glimpsed the spirited nomad she must have been as a girl.

  “No,” she said again, “I would not. My qawmiya runs very deep. And though Falila and Ali have gone to the city, they are still of my clan. My loyalty is to my sisters and brothers, not to you or to the uniform you wear.”

  Chaudri was standing next to the framed photograph of John F. Kennedy, and as he tried to think of a response he read the line of printing at the base of the picture. It was a quotation he remembered having heard as a child. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” the inscription ran, “ask rather what you can do for your country.” The word “country” had twice been crossed out, and both times the word “qawm” had been written in above it in precise Arabic calligraphy.

  Ask rather what you can do for your qawm.

  The blind woman would not hesitate to withhold information from him. She would not hesitate to lie to him if she thought that was needed to protect her clan from danger.

  Chaudri did not agree with her attitude. Nor could he approve. But as he looked down at the firm set of her determined old face, he felt in his heart that he understood.

  * * * *

  A light breeze rippled the emerald waters of the Khawr al-Qulayah as Mahboob Chaudri steered his Land Rover across the narrow causeway to al-Muharraq, second most important of the 33 islands in the Bahraini archipelago. To avoid the twisted labyrinth of the old town, he turned off the Sheikh Salman Road at the end of the causeway, past the bustling shipyard of the dhow builders and the Coast Guard barracks and the Abu Mahir fort. He followed the road around the inner curve of the horseshoe-shaped island, along the international airport’s perimeter fence and out to al-Hidd.

  The cold store was only a few doors down from the al-Khalifa Road police station, within sight of the graceful white minaret of a neighborhood mosque. The shop’s windows were piled high with boxes of Omo and Tide, disposable razors in cardboard blister packs, candies and chewing gum and breakfast cereals and bags of British biscuits and American cookies. From a poster advertising cigarettes taped to the inside of the door, a camel regarded him suspiciously with a single narrowed eye. He avoided its steady gaze with a shudder.

  The sea breeze that had cooled him while he was driving was gone now, and he was grateful for the air conditioning that greeted him as he entered the store. There were few customers at this time of day: a woman in a black abba picking through a bin of tomatoes and muttering irritably to herself as she rejected each of them in turn, two children leafing the pages of an Arabic Sesame Street comic at the magazine rack by the door. A man in a thobe was rearranging a shelf of canned goods in the back and a woman in Western clothing sat on a high stool by the electronic cash register, the only modern fixture to be seen. The cashier glanced at him as he crossed to the cooler in the corner, helped himself to a dewy can of Pocari Sweat, ripped off its pop top, and drank deeply, then she went back to her newspaper.

  Chaudri waited patiently while the children finished giggling at their magazine, replaced it on the rack, dawdled over the candy display before selecting a brightly colored package of bubble gum and went back out into the street blowing and snapping a series of ever-larger pink bubbles. He waited while the woman in the abba finally settled on three small tomatoes and grudgingly paid for them, complaining all the while about their lack of freshness and their price. He drank his Japanese soda and waited until he was alone in the shop with Ali and Falila, the younger brother and second wife of the dead man, Hassan al-Shama. Then he set down his empty can and said the words old Aiysha had said to him but a few hours earlier: “Hassan is dead.”

  Falila’s hands spasmed, ripping her paper cleanly down the middle. Ali dropped a can of fava beans, which knocked over a pile of jam jars, shattering more than one on the cold concrete floor.

  A gratifying response, thought Mahboob Chaudri.

  * * * *

  “Of course he’s dead,” the woman scowled. The shock of Chaudri’s sudden announcement had worn off. “If we hadn’t believed him to be dead, we would never have left the qawm and begun a new life together. We would have stayed in the desert and waited for him to return.” The black kohl that had been applied in a broad band across her eyelids did nothing to conceal the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. Her powder and lipstick did not disguise the damage time had done to her face. The man in the thobe came and stood by her side, with the counter on which customers piled their purchases between them and the Pakistani.

  “But why did you believe him dead?” Chaudri wanted to know.

  It was Ali who answered, his dark face tight with a blending of concern and anger: “He went away. He was gone for a year. He did not come back. Obviously he was dead. Hassan would never have deserted the qawm once he had put on its skin. His qawmiya was much too strong.”

  Chaudri remembered that Aiysha had said almost the same thing about her own sense of loyalty to the clan. “And your qawmiya?” he asked, addressing them both. “Why did you go away a year after Hassan’s disappearance?”

  Again it was Ali who spoke. “My brother was not good to Falila,” he said. “It saddens me to admit that, but it is true. I was as kind to her as I could be to try to make up at least a little bit for the shame Hassan’s behavior brought to her and to the clan. We were close, Falila and I. When Hassan went away, we grew closer. I wanted to marry her, but although the Quran allows a man to take four wives, a woman may have only a single husband. We were certain Hassan must be dead, but our certainty was not enough. In the eyes of the qawm my brother still lived, so we could not marry, we could not even allow them to see the love we shared without further disturbing the harmony of the clan.” He drew himself up and said proudly, “It was because of our qawmiya that we came to al-Hidd, so we could live our lives as man and wife without bringing still more shame to our people.”

  * * * *

  Never in Mahboob Chaudri’s career had he felt so perplexed. The constant ache in his muscles had dulled by now to a mild discomfort, but his muddled brain was throbbing with the greater pain of confusion.

  Hassan had treated Falila badly, that much he knew. Had she killed him for that reason, to free herself from his hatred? Surely not: she had been but a girl at the time. How could she have strangled a full-grown man?

  Had Hassan been strangled, a
fter all? That conclusion was as yet unproven, was nothing more, really, than the flimsiest of deductions.

  Well, then, had Ali committed the murder, to rescue Falila from his brother’s grasp? Was Hassan’s death the first step in Ali’s campaign to win the girl for his own, the girl who already loved him, the girl who he perhaps already loved?

  But not only these two had had a motive for following Hassan al-Shama into the desert that day, for robbing him of his life and burying him beneath the sand. Though Hassan had been invaluable to the clan as a watcher, his failure to treat his wives equally, as prescribed by the Holy Quran, had disturbed the effectiveness, the balance, of his qawm’s social structure. And to the Bedouins, that balance was all-important: the clan must function smoothly and cooperatively to survive in the unforgiving harshness of the desert. To restore harmony, anyone in the qawm might have killed Hassan, even Sheikh Mahmood himself.

  Especially Sheikh Mahmood, if it came down to that.

  Which of them was guilty? How could he ever answer that question, given the Bedouins’ powerful mistrust of the Bahraini government, which had compelled them to give up their nomadic existence—of any government that might challenge their centuries-old autonomy? And, worse, how could he hope to find an answer to this riddle, given the even more powerful stricture of qawmiya, the tribal loyalty that made him despair of ever getting the truth out of any of them?

  Oh, dearie me, Mahboob Chaudri thought sorrowfully, my head!

  * * * *

  This time, he used the Land Rover to go out into the desert. Beyond the tropospheric scatter stations and the site of Oil Well Number 1, the road ended, but the four-wheel-drive vehicle had been built for the sand, and Chaudri continued on at speed. The camel may have been the ship of the desert in the good old days, he thought, but no more. Today it is this mighty creature which is deserving that title.