In an Antique Land

by Amitav Ghosh

  ‘No, no, that’s not true,’ I said, obscurely offended by this imputation. But no sooner had I begun to argue than I realized that Khamees’s interpretation was not intended as a slur: on the contrary he was overcome by a kind of appalled admiration at the wiliness of ‘my people’—as far as he was concerned we were friends now, our alliance sealed by this daring cosmic confidence trick.

  ‘All right then,’ said Zaghloul, silencing the others with a raised hand. ‘The people in your country—do they have a Holy Book, like we do?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, pausing to think of an answer that would be both brief and undeniably true. ‘Yes, they have several.’

  ‘And do you have a Prophet, like we do?’

  I answered with a quick nod, and having had enough of this conversation, I tried to turn it in a more agronomic direction, by asking a question about phosphates and rice-growing. But Zaghloul, as I was to discover later, had all the patient pertinacity that went with the weaver’s craft and was not to be easily deflected once he had launched upon a subject.

  ‘And who is your Prophet?’ he said, ignoring my question. ‘What is his name?’

  I had no option now but to improvise; after a few moments of thought, I said: ‘Al-Buddha.’

  ‘Who?’ cried Khamees. ‘What was that you said?’

  ‘Al-Buddha,’ I repeated feebly, and Zaghloul looking at the others in stupefaction, said: ‘Who can that be? All the world knows that Our Prophet, the Messenger of God, peace be on him, was the last and final Prophet. This is not a true prophet he is speaking of.’

  Khamees leant over to tap me on my knee. ‘All right then, ya doktór,’ he said. ‘Tell us something else then: is it true what they say? That you are a Magûsî, a Magian, and that in your country everybody worships cows? It is it true that the other day when you were walking through the fields you saw a man beating a cow and you were so upset you burst into tears and ran back to your room?’

  ‘No, it’s not true,’ I said, but without much hope: I knew from experience that there was nothing I could say that would effectively give the lie to this story. ‘You’re wrong. In my country people beat their cows all the time; I promise you.’

  ‘So tell us then,’ said someone else. ‘In your country do you have military service, like we do in Egypt?’

  ‘No,’ I said, and in an effort to soften the shock of that revelation I began to explain that there were more than 700 million people in my country, and that if we’d had military service the army would have been larger than all of Egypt. But before I could finish Busaina interrupted me, throwing up her hands with a cry of despair.

  ‘Everything’s upside down in that country,’ she said. ‘Tell us, ya doktór: in your country do you at least have crops and fields and canals like we do?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we have crops and fields, but we don’t always have canals. In some parts of my country they aren’t needed because it rains all year around.’

  ‘Ya salâm,’ she cried, striking her forehead with the heel of her palm. ‘Do you hear that, oh you people? Oh the Protector, oh, the Lord! It rains all the year around in his country.’

  She had gone pale with amazement. ‘So tell us then,’ she demanded, ‘do you have night and day like we do?’

  ‘Shut up woman,’ said Khamees. ‘Of course they don’t. It’s day all the time over there, didn’t you know? They arranged it like that so they wouldn’t have to spend any money on lamps.’

  After the laughter had died down, one of Khamees’s brothers pointed to the baby who was now lying in the shade of a tree, swaddled in a sheet of cloth.

  ‘That’s Khamees’s baby,’ he said, with a grin. ‘He was born last month.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ I said: I had no idea then that he had made me party to a savage joke at Khamees’s expense. ‘That’s wonderful; Khamees must be very happy.’

  Ignoring his brother, Khamees gave a cry of delight. ‘The Indian knows,’ he said. ‘He understands that people are happy when they have children: he’s not as upside down as we thought.’

  He slapped me on the knee, grinning, and pushed forward his brother ‘Eid, an exact miniaturized version of himself, no taller than his waist.

  ‘Take this fellow with you when you go back, ya doktór, take him with you: all he does here is sit in the cornfields and play with himself.’

  Stretching out a hand he squeezed the back of the boy’s neck until he was squirming in discomfort. ‘What would happen,’ he said to me, ‘if this boy ‘Eid knocked on the door of your house in India and said: Is anyone there?’

  ‘Someone would open the door,’ I said, ‘and my family would look after him.’

  Khamees pulled a face: ‘You mean they wouldn’t set him on fire so that he wouldn’t have to answer for his sins? What’s the point of sending him then?’

  Everyone else threw their heads back to laugh, but Busaina leaned across and patted my arm. ‘You had better not go back,’ she said, with an earnest frown. ‘Stay here and become a Muslim and marry a girl from the village.’

  Zaghloul was now rocking back and forth on his heels, frowning and shaking his head as though he had given up all hope of following the conversation.

  ‘But tell me, ya doktór,’ he burst out. ‘Where is this country of yours? Can you go there in a day, like the people who go to Iraq and the Gulf?’

  ‘You could,’ I said, ‘but my country is much further than Iraq, thousands of miles away.’

  ‘Tell me something, ya doktór,’ he said. ‘If I got on to my donkey (if you’ll pardon that word) and I rode and rode and rode for days, would I reach your country in the end?’ He cocked his head to peer at me, as though the prospect of the journey had already filled him with alarm.

  ‘No, ya Zaghloul,’ I said, and then thinking of all the reasons why it would not be possible to travel from Egypt to India on a donkey, something caught fire in my imagination and I began to talk as I had never talked before, in Lataifa or Nashawy, of visas and quarantines, of the ribbon of war that stretched from Iraq to Afghanistan, of the heat of the Dasht-e-Kabir and the height of the Hindu Kush, of the foraging of snow leopards and the hairiness of yaks. No one listened to me more intently than Zaghloul, and for months afterwards, whenever he introduced me to anyone, he would tell them, with a dazzled, wondering lilt in his voice, of how far away my country was, of the deserts and wars and mountains that separated it from Egypt, and of the terrible fate that would befall one if one were to set out for it on a donkey.

  To me there was something marvellous about the wonder that came into Zaghloul’s voice when he talked of travel: for most of his neighbours travel held no surprises at all. The area around Nashawy had never been a rooted kind of place; at times it seemed to be possessed of all the busy restlessness of an airport’s transit lounge. Indeed, a long history of travel was recorded in the very names of the area’s ‘families’: they spoke of links with distant parts of the Arab world—cities in the Levant, the Sudan and the Maghreb. That legacy of transience had not ended with their ancestors either: in Zaghloul’s own generation dozens of men had been ‘outside’, working in the shaikhdoms of the Gulf, or Libya, while many others had been to Saudi Arabia on the Hajj, or to the Yemen, as soldiers—some men had passports so thick they opened out like ink-blackened concertinas. But of course, Zaghloul and Khamees were eccentrics in most things, and in nothing so much as this, that for them the world outside was still replete with the wonders of the unknown. That was why our friendship was so quickly sealed.

  9

  FOR BEN YIJU the journey from Egypt towards Aden and India would have begun with a four-hundred-mile voyage down the Nile.

  The trip could have taken as long as eighteen days since it meant sailing against the current; the same journey, in the other direction, could sometimes take as little as eight. The first leg of the eastward journey ended usually at one of several roadheads along the southern reaches of the Nile. In the twelfth century the largest and most frequently use
d of these was a place called Qus, now a modest district town a little north of Luxor. An Andalusian Arab, Ibn Jubaîr, who travelled this leg of the route some sixty years after Ben Yiju, spent a few weeks there while waiting for a camel caravan, for the next stage of his journey. He noted in his account that the town was admirably cosmopolitan, with many Yemeni, Ethiopian and Indian merchants passing through—‘a station for the traveller, a gathering place for caravans, and a meeting-place for pilgrims.’

  On Monday, 6 June 1183, he and his companions took their baggage to a palm-fringed spot on the outskirts of the town where other pilgrims and merchants had gathered to join a caravan. Their baggage was weighed and loaded on to camels, and the caravan set off after the evening prayers. Over the next seventeen days they progressed slowly through the desert, on a south-easterly tack, camping at night and travelling through the day. A well-marked trail of wells helped them on their way, and all along the route they passed caravans travelling in the opposite direction so that the barren and inhospitable wastes were ‘animated and safe’. At one of the wells Ibn Jubair tried to count the caravans that passed by, but there ‘were so many that he lost count. Much of their cargo consisted of goods from India; the loads of pepper, in particular, were so many as to seem to our fancies to equal the dust in quantity’.

  It was a long, arduous journey, but there were ways of easing its rigours—for example, special litters called shaqâdîf, the best of which were made in the Yemen, large, roomy constructions, covered with leather inside, and provided with supports for a canopy. These litters were usually mounted in pairs, one balancing the other, so that two people could travel on each camel in relative comfort, shielded from the heat of the sun. Ibn Jubair remarked that ‘whoso deems it lawful’ could play chess with his companion while travelling, but as for himself he was on a pilgrimage, and being disinclined to spend his time on pursuits of questionable lawfulness, he spent the journey ‘learning by heart the Book of Great and Glorious God.’

  On 23 June, the caravan reached its destination, a Red Sea port on the coast of what is now northern Sudan. Fifty-three days had passed since Ibn Jubair had left Masr.

  The port he had reached, ‘Aidhâb, is one of the mysteries of the medieval trade route between Egypt and India. It was a tiny outpost, a handful of reed shacks and a few newly built plaster houses, marooned in a fierce and inhospitable stretch of desert. The area around it was inhabited by a tribe which regarded the merchants and pilgrims who passed through their territory with suspicion bordering on hostility. The sentiment was amply reciprocated by travellers like Ibn Jubair: ‘Their men and women go naked abroad, wearing nothing but the rag which covers their genitals, and most not even this. In a word they are a breed of no regard and it is no sin to pour maledictions upon them.’ Nothing grew in the harsh desert surroundings; everything had to be imported by ship, including water, which tasted so bitter when it arrived that Ibn Jubair found it ‘less agreeable than thirst’. It was in every way a hateful, inhospitable place: ‘A sojourn in it is the greatest snare on the road to [Mecca] … Men tell stories of its abominations, even saying that Solomon the son of David … took it as a prison for the ‘ifrît.’

  Yet this little cluster of huts wedged between desert and sea was a busy, thriving port. Ibn Jubair himself, for all his dislike of the place, was among the many travellers who marvelled at the volume of Aidhab’s traffic: ‘It is one of the most frequented ports of the world, because of the ships of India and the Yemen that sail to it and from it, as well as the pilgrim ships that come and go.’

  For about five hundred years Aidhab functioned as one of the most important halts on the route between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. Then, suddenly, in the middle of the fifteenth century its life came to an end: it simply ceased to be, as though it had been erased from the map. The precise cause of its demise is uncertain, but it is possible that the port was destroyed on the orders of the then Sultan of Egypt. In any case, all that remains of it today are a few ruins and a great quantity of buried Chinese pottery.

  A curious fragment, a piece of twelfth-century paper, links Abraham Ben Yiju to this doomed port. It contains an angry accusation against him, the only one of several such letters that has survived. It was not however sent to Ben Yiju himself. Cannily, the writer addressed it to the man who was in the best position to exercise an influence on Ben Yiju—his friend and mentor, the Nagid of merchants in Aden, Madmun ibn Bundar.

  Madmun appears not to have taken the complaints very seriously at first, but the old man’s sense of injury was deep enough to make him extraordinarily persistent. He wrote to Madmun again and again, and finally, in about 1135, when Ben Yiju had been in India at least three years, Madmun cut off a part of one of the letters and sent it on to Ben Yiju in Mangalore, along with a letter of his own.

  Madmun’s letter is a long one, one of the most important he ever wrote. It is only towards the end of it that he makes a cryptic reference to the note of complaint from Aidhab. ‘The carrier of this letter,’ he writes, will deliver to you a letter from Makhlûf al-Wutûm, which he sent from ‘Aidhâb, and of which I already have more than 20 … He is old and has become feebleminded. He is reaching the end of his life and doesn’t know how to go on.’

  By an extraordinary coincidence it so happens that the letter has survived and is currently lodged, like Madmun’s own, in the library of the University of Cambridge. It is written on a fragment of paper of good, if not the best, quality, more than a foot in length, and about four inches wide. The paper is considerably weathered and discoloured; it is torn at the top, and there is a small hole in it that looks as though it has been caused by a burn. But the writing, which extends all the way down both sides, is clear and can be read without difficulty: it is written in a distinctively Yemeni hand. The complaint is worded thus:

  Shaikh Abraham ibn Yijû bespoke the porterage of 5 bahârs from me. But every time I see him he crosses words with me, so that I have become frightened of him. Each time he says to me: Go, get out, perish … a hundred times … [My master Mamûn] deals with me according to his noble character and custom … I spoke previously to the ship-owner about this matter, and he told me I should turn to you … [I ask] of your Exalted Presence to act in this matter, until you reclaim the [money] … Stand by me in this, and strengthen your heart, O my lord and master … and extend your help to me …

  Nothing else is known either about the writer of this letter or where the two men met. In any event the old man clearly felt that Ben Yiju owed him a large sum of money for transporting goods of the weight of five bahars. As it turned out he eventually even succeeded in persuading Madmun of his claims. Madmun’s dismissive comments about the old man are probably nothing more than a gesture to spare Ben Yiju’s feelings: he is hardly likely to have forwarded the letter all the way to Mangalore if he thought the old man’s complaints to be entirely unfounded.

  There is one last piece of evidence that bears upon the incident. It occurs in a later letter from Madmun to Ben Yiju. It consists of a brief entry on the debit side of Ben Yiju’s account with Madmun. It says : ‘For the affair of Shaikh Makhlûf, three hundred dînârs exactly.’

  Evidently, Madmun was able to persuade Ben Yiju to pay off his insistent creditor.

  10

  AS IT TURNED out, Busaina had a hand in the events that led to my first meeting with the Imam—or a finger, more accurately, for it was largely by accident that she happened to embroil me in a conversation with the Imam’s son at the village market.

  It was no accident that the Imam’s son, Yasir, happened to be there that morning, for by tradition his family had always had a special role to play in the Thursday souk. The market was held in the open threshing-ground beside the tomb of his ancestor, Sidi Abu-Kanaka, in exactly the same place as the saint’s annual mowlid: in a way the mowlid and the market were a twinned pair, for although one was a weekly and the other an annual, one a largely secular and the other an avowedly spiritual event, by virtue of th
eir location they both fell within the immediate sphere of the Sidi’s blessings, and his benign presence stood surety for the exchanges of the market-place just as much as it guaranteed the sanctity of the mowlid. For that reason, it fell to his descendants, as the executors of his spiritual estate, so to speak, to collect a share of the proceeds of the market for the village. The organizing committee of the village mosque had authorized Yasir to sell tickets to every trader who came to the market, so that everyone who profited from the Thursday souk would also make a small contribution to the general betterment—towards the upkeep of the Saint’s tomb, the maintenance of the village mosque and perhaps even the relief effort in Afghanistan. At one time the Imam had collected the proceeds himself, but with advancing age and an increasing disinclination to spend his time on workaday business, he had delegated more and more of his responsibilities to his son, and now it was Yasir who made the rounds of the market on Thursday mornings.

  Yasir was a pleasant, cheerful-looking person, and although our acquaintance had never proceeded beyond a few polite words, he always called out a friendly greeting when we passed each other in the lanes of the village. He was in his early forties or so, a tall, deep-chested man who, like his father, always wore a large, white turban—a species of headgear that was as distinctive of men who practised specialized trades as lace caps were of educated men, or woollen ‘tageyyas’ of the fellaheen. Like the old Imam, Yasir had learnt to cut hair and do everything else that went with the hereditary trade of his lineage, but while the Imam had never had much of a taste for barbering, Yasir, on the other hand, had taught himself to take a good deal of satisfaction in his craft. In his later years the Imam had driven away nearly all his customers; his increasing contempt for his profession eventually lent his razor so furious an edge that a time came when few men were willing to sit still with that agitated instrument hovering above their naked throats and bared armpits. But then, at just the right moment, Yasir had stepped in, and much as though he were the aberrantly conscientious son of a decaying industrial family, he had turned the business around and made it profitable.