In an Antique Land

by Amitav Ghosh

  His wife gave the lamp a final scrub and opened the door. ‘Do you know?’ she said, as the cold wind whistled in, shaking the flame. ‘He used to ask about you every day. “Where’s the doktór al-Hindi? Where is he? What is he doing?” Every day he used to ask.’

  There was a long moment of silence when she left the room. Shaikh Musa sat on the divan with a leg crossed under him, watching the flame with a gently quizzical smile: except for a few wrinkles at the corner of his mouth, he was completely unchanged.

  Then, raising his eyes, he pointed to a framed photograph hanging on the wall, an enlargement of the picture of his son Hasan that he had always carried in his wallet. ‘I had this big one made in Damanhour,’ he said. ‘In a studio near the railway station,’

  He had hung it beside his own picture, taken when he was a young man serving his draft in the army. They were very alike, father and son, both in uniform, Shaikh Musa in a peaked cap and Hasan in combat fatigues.

  ‘You were away in Masr when he died,’ he said. ‘When you came back the mourning ceremony was already over.’

  He looked down at the floor, fingering his worry-beads with the slow, deliberate gesture that had become inseparably linked with him in my memory.

  ‘All the officers came,’ he said. ‘The officers and all the soldiers in his unit. They all came and we had a Quran-reader from Damanhour. But by the time you came back it was all over.’

  Then, unaccountably, his eyes lit up and he jumped to his feet and opened the door. ‘Wait a moment,’ he said, and hurried out of the room. He was back in a few minutes, carrying an ornamented box in his hands. Setting it reverently upon the divan he turned to me: ‘Do you know what this is?’

  I was unsure for a moment, but then suddenly I remembered.

  ‘It’s the Quran al-Sharif you brought for me from Masr,’ he said. He opened the lid and took a long look at the cover.

  ‘It was after Hasan’s death,’ he said. ‘You came back from Masr, and afterwards you said you were leaving Lataifa and going away to Nashawy.’

  2

  EVEN AFTER I had gone to live in Nashawy, eight years before, it was always Shaikh Musa I came to visit when I had questions to ask. Shaikh Musa had known Nashawy well once, when he was younger, and his memory was still crammed with stories about its inhabitants: when we talked he would sometimes surprise himself by recalling an incident or a detail from fifteen or twenty years ago. Thinking back later, it often seemed to me that we had created a village of our own during those conversations, between the two of us.

  Most of his memories dated back at least a decade, for with his advancing years, the one and a half miles to Nashawy had come to seem like an increasingly formidable distance and he rarely went there except to attend an old friend’s funeral or a relative’s wedding. The only reason why he was still able to keep up with Nashawy at all was because so many people came to visit him in his own house. That was why he enjoyed our conversations as much as I did: he liked to hear the news and keep in touch.

  It was in the early days, when I first moved to Nashawy, that I was most regular in my visits to Shaikh Musa in Lataifa. He would ask me questions about who I’d met and what I’d been doing, and then he would give me advice about the people I would do best to avoid and who I ought to seek out. It was he, for instance, who first told me about Imam Ibrahim.

  They were both of the same age, he told me, but you wouldn’t believe it now if you saw them together, Imam Ibrahim looked so much older. Not many people knew of him now, because he lived in seclusion and didn’t go out very much, but as a young man, his name had been well-known throughout the area: people had said of him that he had the gift of baraka.

  It so happened that Imam Ibrahim belonged to one of the two founding families of Nashawy, a lineage called Abu-Kanaka. The other was the Badawy: they were the first two families to come and settle in the area. They had not been there very long, for Nashawy was not an old village by Egyptian standards: in fact, only a few generations ago the land around it had been a part of the great desert to the west. It was only after the Mahmudiya Canal was completed in 1820, linking Cairo and Alexandria, that the area was brought under the plough. But even then it was a wilderness for a long time, without people or settlements.

  Then one day, two young men had set off westwards from a village in the interior, looking for land and a good new place to settle. One of those men was of Bedouin origin: his ancestors had once wandered as far afield as Libya and Tunisia, but in time, tiring of the nomadic life, they had abandoned the desert for the sown. They had settled in the Delta, where for many generations their descendants worked on the land as fellaheen, until all that remained to remind them of their Bedouin past was the name of their lineage—al-Badawy.

  The other young settler was from a lineage of barbers and healers, a family called Abu-Kanaka whose members were well known throughout the region for their zeal in religious matters and for their skill in the arts of healing. The Abu-Kanaka youth who set out on that westward journey had a fine reputation, despite his tender years: all the world knew him to be a model of goodness and piety, as well as a skilled and knowledgeable healer.

  So the two young men had set out from their native village, and after a long and difficult journey they reached the area around Nashawy. There was nothing there then, no houses or canals or fields, but the Abu-Kanaka youth had declared that he could feel in his heart that the land had baraka and they had decided to settle there. Soon the young Badawy man acquired some land and began to raise crops. As the years passed more and more of his kinsmen came out from their native village and they too bought land and built houses in Nashawy. Before long the village was so full of Badawy families that they came to be known as the pre-eminent lineage of the village, the ‘al albalad’. Later people of many other lineages settled in Nashawy, but right until the Revolution of 1952 it was the Badawy who owned most of the land and it was always a Badawy who was the chief official, the ‘omda of the village.

  The young Abu-Kanaka man, on the other hand, bought no land at all: he earned his living by healing and cutting people’s hair, as his family had always done—a humble man, with a modest house and a small family. But at the same time, his renown as a good person and a man of religion continued to grow, and when at last a mosque was built in Nashawy, he was made the Imam, the caretaker and the leader of the prayers. Such was the respect in which he was held that his son inherited the position after him and his lineage held it ever afterwards. When he died he was universally mourned and the people of the village built him a special grave, right next to the canal. Later, he even came to be acknowledged as the guardian saint of the village.

  When he was a young man, Shaikh Musa said, there were many who thought that Imam Ibrahim Abu-Kanaka had taken after his famous ancestor. He had shown remarkable skill in curing the sick, for example; there was a shelf in his house that was lined with texts on medicine, and everyone knew that he was very learned in the classical arts of healing. He had soon acquired a reputation as a healer who could do miracles with his herbs and roots, and he had had patients from all the surrounding villages. He had also become known for his learning in the scriptures, and at one time he had been much sought after for his opinions on points of theology and matters of religious law and jurisprudence.

  ‘You must make sure to meet him,’ said Shaikh Musa. ‘He’s well read in history and religion and many other things and there’s a lot you could learn from him.’

  But when I asked how I might meet Imam Ibrahim, Shaikh Musa’s answer was a sigh and a doubtful shake of his head. He hadn’t seen the Imam around for the last so many years, he said, and he heard reports that he kept very much to himself nowadays and rarely went anywhere or met anyone. He had a great many troubles on his head, people said, because he had made an unfortunate second marriage in middle age, and had been tormented by domestic difficulties ever since. His son had now taken over many of his duties, and for the most part he kept to himself, living more or
less in seclusion.

  ‘But you must try to meet him,’ said Shaikh Musa. ‘Ask the other people you meet in Nashawy: they’ll be able to tell you about him …’

  3

  LATER, ON SEVERAL occasions, Shaikh Musa made a point of asking me whether I had talked to anyone about Imam Ibrahim. But as it turned out, when I did eventually have something to tell him, he was taken by surprise: he was not quite prepared for how differently people of a younger generation looked upon the world, even in a place so close to home as Nashawy.

  One of the people I had talked to recently was a young teacher called Ustaz Sabry. Shaikh Musa had never met him himself, but like everyone else in the area he had heard of him, for Ustaz Sabry was rapidly becoming quite a well-known figure in the surrounding villages.

  ‘People say he’s an impressive talker,’ said Shaikh Musa, pursing his lips. ‘But I’ve also heard it said that he’s one of those men whom we call Too-Much-Talk in these parts—has something to say about everything.’

  ‘I can tell you this,’ I said, ‘he knows a lot. He’s read a great deal, and he’s one of the best-informed people I’ve ever met.’

  ‘You must be right,’ said Shaikh Musa. But a look of doubt descended on his face as he puffed at his shusha.

  Ustaz Sabry had taken me by surprise the very first time I met him.

  I had been introduced to him by the headmaster of the school he taught in, the primary school in Nashawy. The headmaster was a friendly, pleasant man in his early forties who had been elevated to his post largely because his father had been headmaster before him. He played the part he had inherited with conscientious diligence but he was at heart too gentle a man to enjoy the authority that came with it. I once watched him caning a boy with a ruler: he had applied himself to the task with such an evident lack of relish that the boy had never once lost his smirk.

  In me I think the headmaster hoped to find a source of sympathy for his daily vexations, a connection with the student-world in Alexandria that he had once inhabited himself. In any event, he always went out of his way to be kind to me, inviting me frequently to his house and always sending word the moment a letter addressed to me went astray and ended up on his desk.

  It was on one such occasion, when I’d been asked to go to his office to collect a letter, that I first met Ustaz Sabry.

  The mid-morning break was in progress when I arrived at the school, and a number of teachers had drifted into the headmaster’s office to take refuge from the hurricane of screaming children that was whirling through the corridors. I knew several of the teachers already, and the headmaster introduced me to the rest, one by one. Most of them were from Damanhour and other nearby towns, and they were all smartly dressed, the men in jackets and ties and the women in skirts and white nylon scarves. I had been surprised at first, to see how they always arrived in Nashawy looking perfectly turned out, proper effendis, with every hair in place despite the dusty ride from Damanhour; I discovered later that it was their privilege to travel in the drivers’ cabins of the trucks that ran through the area—the villagers had given them the right of sanctuary from their lowly dust.

  Going around the room, shaking hands, we came to a man who did not seem to belong with the others. He was dressed in a grimy, ink-stained jallabeyya, a barrel-bodied man in his mid-thirties, with thick, liver-coloured lips, and large, watery eyes.

  ‘This is Ustaz Sabry,’ said the headmaster. ‘He is from Nashawy; his family live at the far end of the village, across the canal from the government clinic. You will have a lot to discuss with him because he is writing a thesis too.’

  He put a hand on Ustaz Sabry’s shoulder and asked: ‘What is it that you’re studying exactly?’

  Ustaz Sabry flashed me a smile and said something quickly about medieval Egyptian history. His voice had the precise, resonant pitch of that of a man accustomed to addressing large gatherings and when he turned to me and asked what my subject was, I found to my surprise that he spoke in the simple fellah dialect of Nashawy. All the other teachers had educated city accents.

  ‘Anthropology,’ I answered, and he responded immediately with another question: ‘Social or physical?’

  ‘Social,’ I said, and he nodded, smiling: ‘Yes, good; that’s a bit like history or philosophy, isn’t it? Much better than all those bones and skeletons.’

  The headmaster was pleased by this exchange. ‘I knew you would have a lot to talk about,’ he said. He gave me a slap on the back and said: ‘You must go and talk to Ustaz Sabry properly. He’s read so much he’ll be able to tell you about many things.’

  Later, after we had exchanged a few remarks about our respective subjects, Ustaz Sabry invited me to visit him at his home that evening, so we could carry on our conversation.

  I set off for his house a little before the sunset prayers, and in my eagerness to get there I forgot to find out exactly where he lived. As a result I was soon lost, for Nashawy was much larger than Lataifa, with its houses squeezed close together around a labyrinth of tunnel-like lanes, some of which came to unexpected dead ends while others circled back upon themselves. At the centre of the village was a large, open square where the mosque and the ceremonial ‘guest-house’ stood, adjoining each other, a modest pair of buildings, neat, square and whitewashed, with the mosque’s single minaret rising high above the tousled hayricks that topped the surrounding houses. After I had passed through the square a second time I swallowed my pride and turning to the long train of children who had attached themselves to me, I asked the tallest among them to lead me to Ustaz Sabry’s house.

  He ran ahead of me and after a couple of turnings he stopped and pointed at a carved door at the corner of two lanes. A communal water-tap stood directly opposite and the teenage girls who had gathered there looked up from their jerrycans and earthen pots as I came around the corner in a cloud of dust, with my train of children rumbling behind me. They watched as I stood in front of the house, looking undecidedly at the heavy wooden door, and soon they began to giggle and make catcalls.

  ‘Come and talk to us, over here.’

  ‘Why so shy, ya Hindi?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like a drink of water?’

  I turned my back upon them while the children squealed with laughter, and holding myself stiff and stony-faced I went up and knocked at the door. ‘Who’s there?’ came the response, in a woman’s voice, and from across the road one of the girls shouted: ‘It’s the Hindi.’

  The door opened and a woman dressed in the severe black robes of an elderly widow appeared in front of me. ‘Yes?’ she said, frowning in puzzlement.

  ‘Let him in,’ the girls laughed. ‘Or he’ll run away.’

  The woman’s head snapped upright, eyes blazing. ‘Shut your mouths, you over there,’ she shouted. ‘Don’t you have any shame?’

  The girls muttered rebelliously under their breath—‘Listen to her, who does she think she is?’—but to my relief their giggles died away.

  ‘Is Ustaz Sabry here?’ I asked.

  She was watching me closely now, and suddenly, clapping her hands to her thin, fine-boned cheeks, she cried: ‘Why, aren’t you the doktór al-Hindi? I saw you at the Thursday market last week: tell me, why did you pay fifteen piastres for that little handful of peas? Everyone was talking about it.’

  I cast my mind back, but try as I might, I could not remember how much I had paid for my peas.

  ‘You should let ‘Amm Taha go to the market for you,’ she said. ‘Isn’t he helping you in your house? He’ll know what to do—he knows all about buying and selling.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘but I’m here now because Ustaz Sabry told me …’

  ‘Welcome, welcome,’ she said. ‘Please come in, you’re welcome, but Ustaz Sabry isn’t in just this minute.’

  ‘He isn’t here?’ I said. ‘But he told me.…’

  Craning her head around, with a considerable effort, she shouted into the interior of the house: ‘Where did Sabry go?’

  The
re was no answer, and she turned around again to face me, so slowly that I could almost hear her joints creak. ‘He should be back soon,’ she said.

  Then, all of a sudden her eyes focused brightly on me, and she stretched out a thin, bony finger and tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Is it true what they say about you? That in your country people burn their dead?’

  ‘Some people do,’ I said. ‘It depends.’

  ‘Why do they do it?’ she cried. ‘Don’t they know it’s wrong? You can’t cheat the Day of Judgement by burning your dead.’

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Do you know when Ustaz Sabry is going to be back?’

  ‘Soon,’ she said. ‘Soon. But now tell me this: is it true that you worship cows? That’s what they were saying at the market. They said that just the other day you fell to your knees in front of a cow, right out in the fields in front of everyone.’

  ‘I tripped,’ I said, taking a backwards step. ‘I’ll come back some other time: tell Ustaz Sabry.’

  ‘You have to put a stop to it,’ she called out after me as I hurried away down the lane. ‘You should try to civilize your people. You should tell them to stop praying to cows and burning their dead.’

  4

  THE CARETAKER OF the house I had moved into in Nashawy was called Taha. He was a familiar figure around the village, and was known to everyone as Uncle; I never heard anyone address him without adding an ‘Amm to his name. He was in his late fifties or thereabouts, excruciatingly thin, slack-mouthed because his lower jaw was not quite in line with the upper, and with one unmoving eye that looked away from the other at a sharp angle, in a fixed, unblinking glare.

  Soon after I moved in, he and I reached an arrangement whereby he fetched me a meal from his house once a day: he did several different odd jobs and this was yet another in a long list. He usually came to my room at about midday with my meal, and one day, not long after I had missed Ustaz Sabry at his house, I told him about my abortive visit.