In an Antique Land

by Amitav Ghosh

  The road now led directly to Princeton University, where Goitein had taught for many years: I was told that his colleagues and students in the Department of Near Eastern Studies had compiled an archive of his papers there. Eventually I went to visit the archive myself but a disappointment awaited me there: I found that access to most of his papers on the India trade was restricted because an edition of his notes for the projected India Book was in preparation, although it was unlikely to be published within the next several years. From the papers that I was allowed to see, I had the impression that Goitein had in fact already published most of his information regarding Ben Yiju’s life in scattered bits and pieces, for much of the material was already familiar from my earlier reading.

  At the end of the visit it was clear to me that there was only one way forward now, and that was to go to the Geniza documents themselves, directly to Ben Yiju’s own papers. But across that road lay a seemingly impassable barrier: the obstacle of language.

  Ben Yiju’s documents were mostly written in an unusual, hybrid language: one that has such an arcane sound to it that it might well be an entry in a book of Amazing Facts. It is known today as Judæo-Arabic; it was a colloquial dialect of medieval Arabic, written in the Hebrew script.

  Judæo-Arabic evolved after Muslim armies, recruited mainly from the Arabian peninsula, conquered most of the Middle East and North Africa in the seventh century. The language of the conquerors soon came to supplant the other languages of the empire, including Aramaic, the language then generally in use among the Jews of those regions. But of course, Jews continued to use Hebrew for religious purposes and, in time, when they started writing in their newly adopted tongue, it was in the sanctified alphabet of their Scriptures.

  From this odd smelting came an alloy that had its own distinct sheen and texture, with little resemblance to the language written by Muslim Arabs. Written Arabic, in its usual form, is the literary variety of the language and is more or less standard throughout the Arab world, from Morocco to Iraq. Spoken Arabic, on the other hand, varies so much from region to region that the speech of an Iraqi is almost incomprehensible to a Moroccan. A great gulf separates the two registers of Arabic, the formal, literary language, and the slangy, regional dialects: for all practical purposes they are separate languages, with their own distinct vocabularies and grammars.

  Judæo-Arabic, determinedly contrary, was not like either form of Arabic: unlike the dialects, it was a written language, and unlike written Arabic, it had the vocabulary and grammar of the spoken language. It was in a way something much simpler than either form of Arabic: a representation of colloquial speech in writing. But since colloquial Arabic has always varied between regions, Judæo-Arabic too tended to take on somewhat different colours in different parts of the Arab world. The language of the Geniza documents, for example, has a strong flavour of North African Arabic, since so many members of the community were from that region.

  But although Judæo-Arabic was much closer to the spoken language than literary Arabic, it was not uniformly colloquial. The people who used it would often try to introduce Arabic classicisms into their written language, with varying degrees of success. Often they would use words and spellings which would have startled well-educated Muslim Arabs, but which they took to be elegant usage. Eight centuries later, those odd solecisms often have an awkward, endearingly human grace, where the correct form would seem merely formal or stilted.

  At the same time, everyone who wrote Judæo-Arabic had a thorough knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, and though they were not usually able to use Hebrew as a language of expression, they were well able to quote in it. Thus their prose is studded with Hebrew proverbs and long passages from the bible, as well as legal and religious terms from the archaic language Aramaic.

  When I first read about it, Judæo-Arabic sounded bafflingly esoteric: it is not easy, after all, to see oneself sitting down to leaf through a collection of eight-hundred-year-old documents, written in a colloquial dialect of medieval Arabic, transcribed in the Hebrew script, and liberally strewn with Hebrew and Aramaic. At its easiest, Arabic is very difficult for a foreigner, and such knowledge as I had of it was mainly of the dialect spoken around Lataifa: a broad, peasant tongue, so earthy that my accent would often earn sniffs from waiters in Cairo restaurants and provoke shopkeepers to ask to see my money before they reached for their shelves. Those experiences had given me something of the fellah’s diffidence about his language: it would never have occurred to me that this simple, rustic dialect could be of any use in so rarified a domain of erudition as the reading of twelfth-century Judæo-Arabic manuscripts.

  Worse was still to come, for I soon discovered that there was no accepted method of learning to read the manuscripts except through a long apprenticeship with one of the handful of scholars who had made a lifetime’s speciality of the subject. The only other means was to take copies of those documents that had been published, and to compare them with the actual folio pages—smudged, worn eight-hundred-year-old bits of paper—until such time as one’s eyes grew expert in deciphering the script.

  At that point I almost gave up, but just then, when all the tunnels on the road seemed finally to have closed, a short conversation with one of the foremost experts in the field, Mark Cohen, a one-time student of Goitein’s, and custodian of his archive at Princeton, gave me pause. The language was not as difficult as it seemed, Mark Cohen told me; Hebrew characters were easy to learn, and once the writing had been deciphered, the Arabic itself was fairly simple. It was the deciphering of the documents, rather than the language itself, that was the hard part: the language would not present a particular problem to someone who knew colloquial Arabic. The palæography, on the other hand, the deciphering of the texts, was often extremely difficult, yet many students had been known to grow quickly adept at it. Of course, I would never be equipped to produce authoritative editions of Geniza texts, but it was perfectly possible, if I worked hard at the palæography and learnt to decipher and transcribe the documents, that I would be able to deal with them well enough to follow the stories of the Slave of MS H.6 and Abraham Ben Yiju.

  Mark Cohen’s encouragement made up my mind: I decided I couldn’t give up without trying.

  To my surprise I found that he was right, that the Hebrew script was indeed much easier to decipher than cursive Arabic since the letters stood apart, each by itself. Soon enough, I made other surprising discoveries. I found that some of the usages of the dialect of Lataifa were startlingly close to those of the North African Arabic spoken by Ben Yiju; that far from being useless the dialect of Lataifa and Nashawy had given me an invaluable skill.

  Over the next couple of years, as I followed the Slave’s trail from library to library, there were times when the magnifying glass would drop out of my hand when I came upon certain words and turns of phrase for I would suddenly hear the voice of Shaikh Musa speaking in the documents in front of me as clearly as though I had been walking past the canal, on my way between Lataifa and Nashawy.

  NASHWY

  1

  IN DECEMBER 1988, when I was at last hot upon the Slave’s trail, I went back to visit Lataifa. It was almost eight years since I had left Egypt.

  It was cold and wintry the day I left Cairo, with rain hanging down in thin sheets from a cloud-corded sky. By the time I reached Damanhour night had fallen and the streets were clogged with shoals of churned mud. I had wanted to get there in the afternoon, on one of the old Hungarian trains, where the seats had cushioned foot-rests and the attendants served elaborate meals on trays. I had imagined myself watching the familiar sights roll past my window while I ate my lunch, just as I used to all those years ago, when the railway’s fried chicken had tasted richly of metropolitan excitement after weeks of village fare.

  But by the time I reached Ramses Station it was too late in the morning: all the tickets were sold for the day.

  I’d wanted to be there early, but I had spent the first part of the morning running feverishl
y between shops, wondering whether I had enough presents in my bag, stopping to buy a pen there and a wallet here and adding to my store of scarves, lighters and watches. That had been pretty much the pattern of my days ever since I arrived in Cairo. Every day, upon waking, I’d told myself that I would go to Lataifa that very morning, and every time I had found some excuse to put it off. No one was waiting for me, after all: I had not written ahead to tell anyone of my visit. My correspondence with Lataifa and Nashawy, once frequent, had become increasingly irregular and then ceased altogether. It was now almost three years since I had last received a letter from Egypt. I had no idea of what to expect, who was doing what, who was alive and who dead: the years in between were a chasm of darkness between me and a brilliantly floodlit corner of my memory.

  Since all the trains were full, I had no option but to go over to the other side of Ramses Station and take a share-taxi with eight other people. ‘The world’s awash with rain,’ said the man sitting next to me, as we set off: it was a bad day to go into the countryside; there’d been rain all through the week and the village roads had probably turned into swamps. The Datsun trucks probably wouldn’t be able to get through; nobody could get through that kind of mud, nobody except the fellaheen, sitting on their donkeys. I had better be prepared to spend the night in Damanhour; it wasn’t likely that I would be able to go any further.

  But when we reached Damanhour he walked with me to the truck-stop and helped me get a place on the last truck heading in the direction of Nashawy. The driver made room for me in his cabin, but he wasn’t eager to venture far into the countryside in such weather. As soon as we had set off, he said: ‘I can’t go as far as Nashawy. The road’s a river of mud out there.’

  ‘What about Lataifa?’ I asked. ‘Can you get as far as that?’

  ‘Let’s see,’ he said, grudgingly. ‘I don’t know.’

  Within a few minutes we had left the town behind and were speeding down a narrow, deserted road. I had tried to imagine this moment for years: the drive from Damanhour to Lataifa and Nashawy. In my mind I had always seen a bright, sunlit day, the canal beside the road glittering under a blue sky while children played naked in the water and women walked towards the town balancing baskets of vegetables on their heads. The scene was so vivid in my mind that even in the imagining my stomach had often knotted in excitement. But now, travelling down that road after so many years I felt no excitement at all, only an old, familiar sensation, one that had always accompanied me on my way back from Damanhour, no matter whether I’d been away an hour or a week: the lassitude of homecoming mixed with a quiet sense of dread.

  Most of the truck’s passengers got down at the first stop, a small market town, a good distance from Lataifa. It was late now, well after the evening prayers, and the main street was deserted. All the shops were shut and there were no lights anywhere except for a few flickering lamps. Once we were past the town, the truck began to yaw and skid on the ridges of mud the rain had carved into the road. The villages around us were eerily dark, and as we crawled past them, packs of dogs came racing after the truck, snapping savagely at the tyres. The other passengers got off in ones and twos along the way, and soon I was alone in the cabin with the driver.

  The driver was nervous now, unsettled by the darkness and the howling dogs. He lit a cigarette, holding the wheel steady with his elbow, and cast me a sidelong glance. ‘Whose house are you going to in Lataifa?’ he asked.

  ‘Shaikh Musa’s,’ I said. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘La.’ In front of us, half the road seemed to have dissolved into the canal which ran beside it.

  ‘I don’t know if we can go on for long,’ said the driver. All that was visible ahead through the shimmering rain-drenched windscreen was a small patch of road lit by the headlights.

  ‘How will you find the house in this darkness?’ the driver asked. ‘Everyone’s asleep—no one can show you the way.’

  ‘I know the house,’ I said. ‘If you stop where I tell you, I’ll be able to find it.’

  ‘How do you know the house?’ He was suddenly curious. ‘Aren’t you a foreigner? Why are you going there all alone so late at night?’

  I explained how I’d been brought to Lataifa by my Professor at the University of Alexandria, but his nerves were on edge and the story only served to arouse his suspicion.

  ‘Why did they bring you here?’ he said sharply. ‘Why here, and what was it that you were doing exactly?’

  I tried to reassure him as best I could, but my Arabic had become rusty in the years that I had been away, and my halting explanations only served to deepen his suspicions further.

  ‘I’ll come with you to the house you’re going to,’ he said, glaring into the windscreen. ‘Just to make sure you find it.’

  ‘And you will be welcome,’ I said, hoping that he was not one of those people who were disposed to carry tales to the police. ‘You will bring blessings with you. It’s not much further now.’

  Suddenly I saw Lataifa’s little mosque on the left, through the driver’s window. ‘There,’ I said, pointing ahead. ‘Stop—I’ll get off there.’

  He stamped too hard on the brakes, inadvertently, and the truck skidded across the wet mud and came to a halt with its nose poised over the edge of the canal. Climbing out gingerly, I stepped back from the edge, squelching heavily through the mud. When next I looked up I saw a slight, ghostly figure in the distance: a boy in a jallabeyya, leaning against a wall, under an overhang, watching me. For a moment I was certain it was Jabir and I almost shouted out aloud: in the reflected glow of the headlights he seemed to have the same blunt, rounded features, as well as the ruddy complexion of all the Latifs. But it took only that moment to remind me that I was thinking of a Jabir I had known eight years ago, when the figure in the shadows would have been a seven- or eight-year-old boy.

  I shifted my feet awkwardly in the mud, and then, raising my hand, I said: ‘Al-salâm ‘aleikum.’ My tongue was suddenly heavy, weighted with an unexpected shyness.

  “Aleikum al-salam,’ he said, responding in full. ‘Wa ramatullâhî wa barâkâtu.’

  The truck suddenly started up again and came to a halt between us, engine roaring.

  ‘Hey, boy,’ the driver shouted. ‘Who’s Shaikh Musa? Do you know him?’

  The boy stepped forward and looked into the driver’s window. ‘Yes,’ he said, in the gruff, surly voice which the boys of the village kept for townspeople.

  ‘Where’s his house?’

  ‘There.’ The boy pointed down the lane.

  ‘Good, let’s go,’ said the driver. He stepped out of the truck and kicked his feet, to dislodge the long tentacles of mud that had attached themselves to his shoes.

  ‘Come on, yalla,’ he said, in irritation. ‘I want to talk to this man, this Shaikh Musa.’

  Halfway down the lane the boy fell in beside me. ‘I know you,’ he said, smiling in surprise. ‘You used to come to our house when I was little and you used to walk in the fields when we were out picking cotton.’

  I looked at him carefully, trying to remember his name, but of course, he’d been a child when I had last seen him, and at that time I was myself of an age when I had hardly noticed children. Before I could ask him his father’s name he came to a stop and gestured at Shaikh Musa’s door. The house was in complete darkness. I could not see so much as a chink of light behind the door or between the shutters of the windows. The boy saw me hesitating and gave me a nudge, pointing at the door.

  Scraping the mud carefully off my shoes, I went up to the door and knocked. A long time seemed to pass before a voice answered, asking: ‘Who’s there?’ It was a woman’s voice and it seemed to echo all the way down the lane.

  ‘Ana,’ I said stupidly, my legs oddly unsteady, and that very instant Shaikh Musa’s voice began to roar—‘Amitab, ya Amitab, ya doktór, where have you been?’—and for all the time it took his wife to undo the latch he kept repeating: ‘Amitab, ya Amitab, where have
you been?’ When the door was open at last we brought our hands together with a great resounding slap and shook them hard, first one, and then both together, and all the while he kept saying—‘where have you been all this time? where were you?’—but there were tears in his eyes now, as there were in mine, and so it was not until months afterwards that it occurred to me to wonder how he had recognized my voice when all I had said in answer to his wife’s question was ‘It’s me’.

  The driver stepped up to Shaikh Musa and shook his hand. ‘So you know him?’ he asked with a nod in my direction, smiling a little sheepishly.

  ‘Yes,’ Shaikh Musa laughed. ‘Yes, we all know him here.’

  ‘That’s all right then,’ the driver said, turning to leave. ‘I just wanted to make sure that he reached you safely.’

  ‘Come in and have some tea with us,’ Shaikh Musa shouted after him, but he was already gone, stamping noisily down the lane.

  Shaikh Musa’s wife ushered us into the guest-room, out of the rain, showing us the way with a kerosene lamp. ‘You sit here and talk,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring you some tea and food in a couple of minutes.’

  Placing the lamp on a window-sill, she gave its sooty glass chimney a rub with her sleeve. ‘We hardly bother to clean our lamps any more,’ she said, ‘we have electricity now. It’s just fate that you should arrive in the middle of a power cut.’

  ‘Everything’s changed in all these years that you’ve been away,’ said Shaikh Musa. ‘All this time I used to say to myself, the doktór will come back one day, he will come back soon, everyone comes back to Masr; they have to, because Masr is the Mother of the World.’