In an Antique Land

by Amitav Ghosh

  ‘Not always,’ I protested, ‘my grandmother for example …’

  Jabir was drinking this in, wide-eyed.

  ‘And of course,’ Ustaz Mustafa continued, ‘you have Indira Gandhi, and her son Sanjay Gandhi, who used to sterilize the Muslims …’

  ‘No, no, he sterilized everyone,’ I said.

  His eyes widened and I added hastily: ‘No, not me of course, but …’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, nodding sagely. ‘I know. I read all about India when I was in college in Alexandria.’

  He had spent several years in Alexandria as a student, he said; he had specialized in civil and religious law and now practised in a court in Damanhour. He talked at length about his time at university, the room he had lived in and the books he had read, and in the meanwhile two of Abu-‘Ali’s sons came up to join us, carrying a tray of tea.

  Soon, the conversation turned to village gossip and for a while, to my relief, I was forgotten. But Jabir was not going to allow me so easy an escape: he had noticed that Ustaz Mustafa’s questions had unsettled me and he was impatient for more entertainment.

  ‘Ask him more about his country,’ he whispered to his uncle. ‘Ask him about his religion.’

  The reminder was superfluous for, as I later discovered, religion was a subject never very far from Ustaz Mustafa’s mind. ‘All right then,’ he said to me, motioning to the boys to be quiet. ‘Tell me, are you Muslim?’

  ‘No,’ I said, but he didn’t really need an answer since everyone in the hamlet knew that already.

  ‘So then what are you?’

  ‘I was born a Hindu,’ I said reluctantly, for if I had a religious identity at all it was largely by default.

  There was a long silence during which I tried hard to think of an arresting opening line that would lead the conversation towards some bucolic, agricultural subject. But the moment passed, and in a troubled voice Ustaz Mustafa said: ‘What is this “Hinduki” thing? I have heard of it before and I don’t understand it. If it is not Christianity nor Judaism nor Islam what can it be? Who are its prophets?’

  ‘It’s not like that,’ I said. ‘There aren’t any prophets …’

  ‘So you are like the Magi?’ he said, bright-eyed. ‘You worship fire then?’

  I shook my head vaguely, but before I could answer, he tapped my arm with his forefinger. ‘No,’ he said, smiling coquettishly. ‘I know—it’s cows you worship—isn’t that so?’

  There was a sharp, collective intake of breath as Jabir and the other boys recoiled, calling upon God, in whispers, to protect them from the Devil.

  I cleared my throat; I knew a lot depended on my answers. ‘It’s not like that,’ I said. ‘In my country some people don’t eat beef because … because cows give milk and plough the fields and so on, and so they’re very useful.’

  Ustaz Mustafa was not to be bought off by this spurious ecological argument. ‘That can’t be the reason,’ he began, but then his eyes fell on his watch and a shadow of alarm descended on his face. He edged forward until he was balanced precariously on the rim of the bed.

  ‘You still haven’t told me about this “Hinduki” business,’ he said. ‘What is your God like?’

  I tried to stutter out an answer of some kind, but fortunately for me Ustaz Mustafa wasn’t really paying attention to me any more.

  ‘Well thanks be to Allah,’ he said quickly, eyeing his watch. ‘Now that you are here among us you can understand and learn about Islam, and then you can make up your mind whether you want to stay within that religion of yours.’

  He jumped to his feet and stretched out his hand. ‘Come with me to the mosque right now,’ he said. ‘That is where we are going—for the noon prayers. You don’t have to do anything. Just watch us pray, and soon you will understand what Islam is.’

  I hesitated for a moment, and then I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t. I have many things to do.’

  ‘Things to do?’ cried Ustaz Mustafa. ‘What is there to do here that you can’t do later? Come with us—it’s very important. Nothing could be more important.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’ he insisted quietly. ‘Just come and watch—that’s all I’m asking of you.’

  And just then the voice of the muezzin floated over from a nearby mosque, singing the call to prayer, and before I could say another word Ustaz Mustafa and the boys had vanished from the room.

  But I couldn’t go back to work even after I was alone again. I began to wonder why I had not accepted Ustaz Mustafa’s invitation to visit the mosque and watch him at his prayers; he had meant well, after all, had only wanted to introduce me to the most important element of his imaginative life. A part of me had wanted to go—not merely that part which told me that it was, in a sense, my duty, part of my job. But when the moment had come, I’d known that I wouldn’t be able to do it: I had been too afraid, and for the life of me I could not understand why.

  But soon enough, Ustaz Mustafa came back to talk to me again. This time he had a child in his arms. ‘This is my son,’ he said, tweaking the child’s cheeks. He glowed with love as he looked at the boy.

  ‘Say salâm to the mister,’ he said, and the child, alarmed, hid his face in his father’s shoulder.

  Ustaz Mustafa laughed. ‘I missed you the last few days,’ he said to me. ‘I was busy in the evenings—I had to go and meet someone in Nashawy, so I couldn’t come to talk to you. But today I decided that I would come over as soon as I got back from work.’

  I was better prepared for him this time, and I began to talk at length about the hamlet’s history and his family’s genealogy. But Ustaz Mustafa had little time for matters of that kind, and soon he began to steal anxious glances at his watch over his son’s back.

  Eventually he brushed my patter aside and began to ask questions, first about my family and then about Indian politics—what I thought of Indira Gandhi, was I for her or against her, and so on. Then, with a wry, derisory smile he began to ask me about ‘The Man from Menoufiyya’—the current nickname for the President, the Raïs—phrasing his questions in elaborately allusive, elliptical forms, like riddles, as though he were mocking the Raïs’s habit of spreading surrogate ears everywhere. My answers left him a little disappointed however, for many of his riddles had stock responses with which I was not then familiar.

  Suddenly the bantering note went out of his voice.

  ‘Tell me something,’ he said, ‘tell me, are you a communist?’

  He used a word, shiyu’eyya, which could mean anything from ‘communist’ to ‘atheist’ and ‘adulterer’ in the village dialect; my understanding of it was that it referred to people who rejected all moral and ethical laws.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘All right then,’ he said, ‘if you’re not a communist, tell me this: who made the world, and who were the first man and woman if not Adam and Hawâ?’

  I was taken aback by the abruptness of this transition. Later I came to expect elisions of this kind in conversations with people like Ustaz Mustafa, for I soon discovered that salaried people like him, rural mowazzafeen, were almost without exception absorbed in a concern which, despite its plural appearance, was actually single and indivisible—religion and politics—so that the mention of the one always led to the other. But at the time I was nonplussed. I mumbled something innocuous about how, in my country, people thought the world had always existed.

  My answer made him flinch. He hugged his sleeping son hard against his chest and said, ‘They don’t think of Our Lord at all, do they? They live only for the present and have no thought for the hereafter.’

  I began to protest but Ustaz Mustafa was not interested in my answers any more. His eyes had fallen on his watch, and he rose hurriedly to his feet. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘I will take you with me to the graveyard, and you can watch me reciting the Quran over my father’s grave. You will see then how much better Islam is than this “Hinduki” of yours.’

  At the door he
turned back for a moment. ‘I am hoping,’ he said, ‘that you will convert and become a Muslim. You must not disappoint me.’

  Then he was gone. A moment later I heard the distant voice of a muezzin, chanting the call to prayer.

  He had meant what he said.

  He came back the next evening, his Quran in his hands, and said: ‘Come, let’s go to the graveyard.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said quickly. ‘I have to go out to the fields.’

  He hesitated, and then, not without some reluctance, decided to accompany me. The truth was that walking in the fields was something of a trial for Ustaz Mustafa: it demanded ceaseless vigilance on his part to keep particles of impure matter, like goat’s droppings and cow dung, from touching his jallabeyya, since he would otherwise be obliged to change his clothes before going to the mosque again. This meant that he had to walk with extreme care in those liberally manured fields, with his hem plucked high above his ankles, very much in the manner that women hitch up their saris during the monsoons in Calcutta.

  Before we had gone very far we came upon some of his relatives, working in a vegetable patch. They invited us to sit with them and began to ask me questions about the soil and the crops in India. Ustaz Mustafa soon grew impatient with this and led me away.

  ‘They are fellaheen,’ he said apologetically. ‘They don’t have much interest in religion or anything important.’

  ‘I am just like that myself,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Really?’ said Ustaz Mustafa, aghast. We walked in silence for a while, and then he said: ‘I am giving up hope that you will become a Muslim.’ Then an idea occurred to him and he turned to face me. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘would your father be upset if you were to change your religion?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  He relapsed into thoughtful silence for a few minutes. ‘Has your father read the holy books of Islam?’ he asked, eagerly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered.

  ‘He must read them,’ said Ustaz Mustafa. ‘If he did he would surely convert himself.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He is accustomed to his own ways.’

  He mulled the issue over in his mind, and when we turned back towards Lataifa he said: ‘Well, it would not be right for you to upset your father. That is true.’

  After that the heart went out of his efforts to convert me: he had a son himself and it went against his deepest instincts to urge a man to turn against his father. And so, as the rival moralities of religion and kinship gradually played themselves to a standstill within him, Ustaz Mustafa and I came to an understanding.

  A connection was already beginning to form in my mind now, as I turned towards Shaikh Musa’s wife. ‘Is Ustaz Mustafa really your uncle?’ I asked her, uncertain of whether she was using the word in a specific or general sense. ‘Your father’s real brother, your ‘amm shagîg?’

  She was too shy to address me directly, at least in Ahmed’s presence, so he spoke for her. ‘Ustaz Mustafa is her real uncle,’ he said. ‘Her father and he were carried in the same belly. They still live in the same house.’

  ‘But then Jabir must be her cousin,’ I said in astonishment. ‘They must have grown up in the same house.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ahmed, ‘she is Jabir’s bint ‘amm, his father’s brother’s daughter.’

  He could have added: ‘If Jabir were older he could have married her himself.’ Certainly Jabir’s parents and relatives would probably have wished for nothing better, since a marriage between first cousins, the children of brothers, was traditionally regarded as an ideal sort of union—a strengthening of an already existing bond.

  ‘So she is of Abu-‘Ali’s lineage then?’ I asked Ahmed.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ahmed, ‘Abu-‘Ali is her father’s first cousin. His half-sister is her grandmother as well as Jabir’s. She still lives in their house: you’ve met her.’

  And so I had, a portly matriarch dressed in black, with fine features and delicate papery skin: she bore not the remotest resemblance to Abu-‘Ali. I remembered her because of the posture of command she had assumed, perfectly naturally, with one knee flat on the floor and the other drawn up to support her arm and clenched fist. A glance from her had been enough to keep even Jabir quiet.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ahmed, ‘Abu-‘Ali’s father was her great-grandfather’s brother. And of course, his father, Abu-‘Ali’s grandfather, was my great-great-grandfather’s brother.’

  By this time I had lost my way in this labyrinth of relationships. It was only much later, when Shaikh Musa helped me draw up a complete genealogy of hamlet of Lataifa (all of whose inhabitants belonged ultimately to a single family called Laîf) that I finally began to see why he was always so careful never to voice a word of criticism about Abu-‘Ali: his wife, Sakkina, was Abu-‘Ali’s great-grand-niece. The lines of the genealogy led inexorably to the conclusion that Abu-‘Ali had played a crucial part in arranging the marriage.

  It became clear to me then that there were complexities in Shaikh Musa’s relationship with Abu-‘Ali that I did not understand, and probably never would; that it would be deeply embarrassing for him if I were to ask him to help me find some other house, or family, to live in.

  I realized then that my deliverance from Abu-‘Ali would not come as easily as the dreams that took me to Cairo.

  5

  FOR BEN YIJU the centre of Cairo would have lain in a modest building near the eastern walls of the fortress of Babylon: the Synagogue of Ben Ezra, also known as the ‘Synagogue of the Palestinians’. The building was destined to last until a good seven hundred years after Ben Yiju’s lifetime; it was still standing late into the nineteenth century. In 1884 it was described, by a British historian and archaeologist, A. J. Butler, as a small and somewhat simplified version of a Coptic basilica. By then most of its woodwork was gone and in ‘point of detail there is not much remaining …’

  When Ben Yiju first saw it, the building probably had a faint whiff of novelty about it, having been completely rebuilt only a hundred years or so earlier, in about 1025. It is known to have had two entrances then: one for the men, the main gateway, and a ‘secret door’ leading to a wooden platform inside the building, the women’s gallery. The main chamber of the synagogue had a gabled ceiling and glass windows, and it was decorated with woodwork of very fine quality: some of it has survived and can still be seen in the Louvre, and in museums in Cairo and Jerusalem.

  As far as Ben Yiju was concerned, his membership of this synagogue was probably more a matter of birth than personal preference. His origins lay in a region that was known as Ifrîqiya in the Arabic-speaking world of the Middle Ages—an area centred around what is now Tunisia. The region had fared badly in the eleventh century and over a period of several decades, since well before Ben Yiju’s lifetime, its merchants and traders had been moving eastwards, towards Egypt. Jews figured prominently among these migrants and those amongst them who moved to Masr generally chose to join the ‘Palestinian’ congregation in Babylon. Ben Yiju was thus following a well-marked trail.

  For the Synagogue of Ben Ezra the influx of migrants from Ifriqiya was to prove providential: the newcomers proved to be the most industrious members of the community and they soon assumed its leadership, setting the pattern for the others in matters of language and culture, as well as trade and commerce. The North Africans appear to have had a particular affinity for the flourishing trade between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean and over a period of several centuries the Jewish traders of Fustat counted as an integral part of the richly diverse body of merchants who were involved in the conduct of business in Asian waters. Carried along by the movements of that cycle of trade many of them travelled regularly between three continents—men whose surnames often read like the chapter headings of an epic, linked them to sleepy oases and dusty Saharan market towns, places like El Faiyum and Tlemcen.

  Thus it was no ordinary congregation that Ben Yiju joined in Masr: it consisted of a group of people whose travels and breadth
of experience and education seem astonishing even today, on a planet thought to be newly-shrunken. Yet, unlike others of that time who have left their mark on history, the members of this community were not born to privilege and entitlement; they were neither aristocrats nor soldiers nor professional scholastics. The vast majority of them were traders, and while some of them were wealthy and successful, they were not, by any means, amongst the most powerful merchants of their time—most of them were small traders running small family businesses. Yet, despite their generally modest circumstances, a majority of the men were endowed with a respectable level of education, and some were among the most learned scholars of their time. Their doctors, for example, studied Hippocrates and Galen in Arabic translation, as well as the medical writings of Arab physicians and scholars, such as Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and al-Râzî. Indeed, one member of the Synagogue’s congregation is reckoned to have been one of the finest minds of the Middle Ages: the great doctor, scholar and philosopher Mûsa ibn Maimûn, known as Maimonides. Like so many others in his community, he too had close familial links with the India Trade.

  The greatest achievement of the Ben Ezra congregation, however, was the product of largely fortuitous circumstances. The Synagogue’s members followed a custom, widespread at the time, of depositing their writings in a special chamber in the synagogue so that they could be disposed of with special rites later. This practice, which is still observed among certain Jewish groups today, was intended to prevent the accidental desecration of any written form of God’s name. Since most writings in that epoch included at least one sacred invocation in the course of the text, the custom effectively ensured that written documents of every kind were deposited within the Synagogue. The chambers in which the documents were kept were known by the term ‘Geniza’, a word that is thought to have come into Hebrew from a Persian root, ganj, meaning ‘storehouse’—a common element in place-names in India and Iran, particularly beloved of the British who sprinkled it liberally across their Indian settlements, in odd Anglicized forms like ‘Ballygunge’ and ‘Daltongunj’.