by Amitav Ghosh
Now, it so happened that this family was both very poor and very large, and between all of them together they probably had no more than a couple of pounds in savings. But it was many, many years since such good land had been put up for sale in Nashawy, and they knew that they would never again be presented with such an opportunity. So they took their chance and said to him: ‘Give us a month, ya Effendi, to see if we can raise the money, insha‘allah, and if at the end of that time we do not succeed, you will be free to dispose of the land as you please, and we shall not stand in your way, by God.’
The moment the Effendi left, the brothers began to run around the village—even the youngest one, who was just a boy. They went from house to house, from distant cousins to far relatives, borrowing a few pounds here and a few piastres there. They sold their cattle, they sold parts of the house they lived in, they even sold their ploughshares, but on the day the Effendi came back they had the money ready and were able to take possession of the land. They were heavily in debt by this time, but still, from that day onwards they could be counted amongst the largest landowners in the village. They had realized the secret dream that every fellah inherits from his ancestors: they had succeeded in expanding their family’s landholdings.
‘That was six years ago,’ said Shaikh Musa, ‘just a couple of years after you left. It took only three or four harvests for your friend Khamees and his family to pay off their debts, and now they’re so well-to-do they’ve built a new brick-and-cement house on their own land, outside the village.’
‘What about Busaina?’ I asked. ‘What’s become of her?’
Her life had changed too, Shaikh Musa said, but not quite so dramatically as her brothers’. She had decided to set up on her own, with her two sons, when her brothers moved to their new house. She had managed to save a fair bit of money in the meanwhile, because she had become a seasoned businesswoman, trading regularly in the market in Damanhour. With her savings she had bought a little two-room house in the centre of Nashawy, right beside the square. People said she made her two sons study late into the night, and they were both doing quite exceptionally well at school, although they were still very young.
‘What about her husband?’ I asked. ‘The boys’ father?’
Shaikh Musa laughed. ‘He went away to Iraq,’ he said. ‘And no one’s heard from him for years.’
Shaikh Musa recalled the story’s ending later in the night, while talking of something else.
‘I forgot to tell you,’ he said cutting himself short. ‘There’s another piece of news about Khamees and his family: I heard it from Jabir.’
A few months ago, Shaikh Musa said, a large truck had driven past Lataifa, piled high with suitcases and cardboard boxes, of the kind that were used for television sets and such like. It took just one glance at that truck to see that somebody had returned from Iraq, or the Gulf, or some place like that, having made a lot of money. Jabir had seen the truck go past from a window in his house, and had gone off at once to make inquiries about who it was that had driven past in such state. He’d soon discovered that the returning hero was none other than Khamees’s brother, ‘Eid.
‘Do you remember him?’ said Shaikh Musa. ‘You mentioned him sometimes, when you were living in Nashawy. He was a little boy then, of course, but now he’s taller than any of his brothers.’
‘Eid had been away in Saudi Arabia for some three or four years, and had done very well for himself, working in construction. He had come home with a colour television set, a fridge, a washing-machine, and many other things of that kind. On top of that, he had also saved a lot of money and was soon going to buy his family a new tractor.
‘And not long ago,’ said Shaikh Musa, ‘we heard that ‘Eid is soon to be married. He is going to pay a large sum of money as a marriage-payment, and he’s going to have an educated wife. Can you imagine! And him a Jammal, and an unlettered fellah!’
Shaikh Musa shook his head in wonderment.
‘He’s marrying a Badawy girl,’ he said. ‘They say it’s a real love-match, and the two of them have been waiting for years.’
16
THERE IS GOOD reason to believe that soon after moving—or being forced to move—to Mangalore Ben Yiju contracted a liaison which eventually led to his marriage. The evidence lies in the earliest documents that can be dated to Ben Yiju’s stay in India: two unusual and intriguing fragments which can fortunately be dated without fear of inaccuracy.
The first actually specifies both the day and the place where it was drawn up, for it happens to be a legally attested deed. The second, which is closely linked to the first, is a rough draft of another legal document, written in Ben Yiju’s handwriting, on one of those scraps of paper which he used for making notes.
Of the two, the first is the more important, but it has long been relatively inaccessible being lodged in a collection in the erstwhile Leningrad. Fortunately, there can be no doubt about the nature of its contents, for Goitein chanced upon it during his researches there and referred to it frequently in his later writings: it is a deed of manumission which records that on 17 October 1132, in Mangalore, Ben Yiju publicly granted freedom to a slave girl by the name of Ashu. The second fragment, which is now in the Taylor-Schechter Collection in Cambridge, is a supporting document: the draft of a deposition backing up the deed of manumission.
The date on the deed of manumission establishes it as the earliest document that can be reliably dated to the period of Ben Yiju’s stay in India. It is uncertain how long he had been in Mangalore at the time of its writing; it must, at any rate, have been long enough for him to acquire slaves and set up a household. This could mean that Ben Yiju had left Aden and moved to India as early as 1130 or 1131; in any event the date must have preceded Ashu’s manumission by a good few years.
It is probably not a coincidence that the first dated document from Ben Yiju’s stay in India has to do with the woman who probably bore his children. Indeed, he may well have expected to contract a marital or sexual liaison soon after his arrival, for amongst the people of the Middle East, India then bore a reputation as a place notable for the ease of its sexual relations. Had Ben Yiju read the works of his contemporary, the Sharif al-Idrisi, for example, he would have discovered that in India concubinage is permitted between everyone, so long as it is not with married women.’ A couple of centuries before Ben Yiju’s lifetime, a chronicler in the Persian Gulf port of Siraf had professed shock upon hearing of the duties of Indian temple dancers. ‘Let us thank God,’ he had written, in pious disapproval, ‘for the Qur’ân which he has chosen for us and with which he has preserved us from the sins of the infidels.’ Some travellers, such as the Italian Nicoló Conti, who visited India in the fifteenth century, were struck by the number of courtesans. ‘Public women are everywhere to be had,’ he wrote, ‘residing in particular houses of their own in all parts of the cities, who attract the men by sweet perfumes and ointments, by their blandishments, beauty and youth; for the Indians are much addicted to licentiousness.’ A contemporary of his, a Persian ambassador called ‘Abd al-Razzâq al-Samarqandî who travelled to the kingdom of Vijaynagar in 1442, appears to have acquired a much closer acquaintance with the customs of courtesans. Soon after his arrival in the capital, he was taken by his hosts to visit the area in which the women lived, and discovered that: ‘Immediately after midday prayer they place before the doors of the chambers … thrones and chairs, on which the courtesans seat themselves … Each one of them has by her two young slaves, who give the signal of pleasure, and have the charge of attending to everything which can contribute to amusement. Any man may enter into this locality, and select any girl that pleases him, and take his pleasure with her.’
It could well be that Ben Yiju encountered Ashu on just such a visit, soon after moving to Mangalore.
The fact that Ben Yiju manumitted Ashu a short while after having acquired her custody indicates that his intentions towards her were anything but casual. Since he also appears to have celebrated he
r manumission with some fanfare, it is possible that he made use of the occasion to issue public notice of a wedding, or betrothal.
At any rate, before three years were over Ben Yiju was the father of a young son. The proof of this lies in a letter written to him by his mentor, Madmun, in 1135: ‘I have also sent a piece of coral for your son Surûr,’ wrote Madmun, listing the presents he had sent for Ben Yiju in Mangalore, along with a shipment of cargo.
There is no particular reason to connect Ashu’s manumission with Ben Yiju’s fatherhood yet it is difficult not to. The connection seems so obvious that Goitein, for one, was persuaded that Ben Yiju had married Ashu, and that Ashu was probably beautiful’.
About Ashu’s origins there is only a single clue. In a set of accounts scribbled on the back of one of Madmun’s letters, Ben Yiju refers to a sum of money that he owed to his ‘brother-in-law’, who bears the name ‘Nâîr’. The lucky accident of that reference provides Ashu with a semblance of a social identity: it links her to the matrilineal community of Nairs, who still form a substantial section of the population of the southern part of the Malabar coast.
Ashu is not mentioned anywhere else in the entire corpus of Ben Yiju’s documents, although her children figure in it frequently. Ben Yiju did not once refer to her in his letters or jottings, and his correspondents in Aden, who were always careful to send their good wishes to his children, never mentioned her either, not even by means of the euphemisms customary in their time, and nor did they send her their greetings. This haunting effacement may in fact be proof that Ben Yiju did indeed marry Ashu, for only a marriage of that kind—with a slave girl, born outside the community of his faith—could have earned so pointed a silence on the part of his friends. Ben Yiju probably converted Ashu to Judaism before their marriage, but the conversion may have signified very little, either to Ashu or to Ben Yiju’s friends and relatives. It is also possible that their liaison was modelled upon the institution of ‘temporary marriage’, a kind of marital union that was widely practised by expatriate Iranian traders.
There were certain marital choices open to Ben Yiju in India that may well have been more acceptable to his friends. For instance, he could well have married into the ancient sect of the Jews of Malabar—a community so well-known for its strictness in religious matters, that it had even found favour with Ben Yiju’s near contemporary, the strict and learned Spanish Rabbi, Benjamin of Tudela, who wrote after his visit to the Malabar: ‘And throughout the [land] including all the towns there, live several thousand Israelites. The inhabitants are all black, and the Jews are also. The latter are good and benevolent. They know the law of Moses and the prophets, and to a small extent the Talmud and the Halacha.’
Yet, since Ben Yiju chose, despite the obvious alternative, to marry a woman born outside his faith, it can only have been because of another overriding and more important consideration.
If I hesitate to call it love it is only because the documents offer no certain proof.
17
EVEN THOUGH KHAMEES never mentioned the subject himself, everyone around him seemed to know that he was haunted by his childlessness.
Once, on a cold winter’s day, I dropped in to see him and found him sitting with his father in the guest-room of their house—one of the shabbiest and most derelict in the village. His father was sitting in a corner, huddled in a blanket, hugging his knees and shivering whenever a draught whistled in through the crumbling walls. He smiled when I stepped in, and motioned to me to sit beside him—a thin, frail old man with absent, wandering eyes. He had worked as a labourer in Alexandria during the Second World War, and he had met many Indians among the soldiers who had passed through the city at the start of the North African campaign. They had made a deep impression on his memory and at our first meeting he had greeted me as though he was resuming an interrupted friendship.
Now, after I had seated myself beside him, he leant towards me and ran his hands over my wool sweater, examining it closely, rubbing the material carefully between finger and thumb.
‘That’s the right thing to wear in winter,’ he said. ‘It must be really warm.’
‘Not as warm as your blanket,’ interjected Khamees.
His father pretended not to hear. ‘I’ve heard you can get sweaters like that in Damanhour,’ he said to me.
‘You can get anything if you have the money,’ said Khamees. ‘It’s getting the money that’s the problem.’
Paying him no attention, his father patted my arm. ‘I remember the Indian soldiers,’ he said. ‘They were so tall and dark that many of us Egyptians were afraid of them. But if you talked to them they were the most generous of all the soldiers; if you asked for a cigarette they gave you a whole packet.’
‘That was then,’ Khamees said, grinning at me. ‘Now things have changed.’
‘Do you see what my children are like?’ his father said to me. ‘They won’t even get me a sweater from Damanhour so I can think of the winter without fear.’
At that Khamees rose abruptly to his feet and walked out of the room. His father watched him go with an unblinking stare.
‘What am I to do with my children?’ he muttered, under his breath. ‘Look at them; look at Busaina, trying to rear her two sons on her own; look at Khamees, you can’t talk to him any more, can’t say a thing, neither me, nor his brothers, nor his wife. And every year he gets worse.’
He pulled his blanket over his ears, shivering spasmodically. ‘Perhaps I’m the one who’s to blame,’ he said. ‘I married him off early and I told him we wanted to see his children before we died. But that didn’t work, so he married again. Now the one thought in his head is children—that’s all he thinks about, nothing else.’
A few months later, in the spring, after nearly a year had passed and the time for my departure from Egypt was not far distant, I was walking back from the fields with Khamees and ‘Eid one evening, when we spotted Imam Ibrahim sitting on the steps of the mosque.
Khamees stopped short, and with an uncharacteristic urgency in his voice he said: ‘Listen, you know Imam Ibrahim, don’t you? I’ve seen you greeting him.’
I made a noncommittal answer, although the truth was that ever after that ill-fated meal at Yasir’s house the Imam had scarcely deigned to acknowledge my greetings when we passed each other in the village’s narrow lanes.
‘My wife’s ill,’ said Khamees. ‘I want the Imam to come to my house and give her an injection.’
His answer surprised me, and I quickly repeated what Nabeel and his friends had said about the Imam’s blunt needles, and told him that if his wife needed an injection there were many other people in the village who could do the job much better. But Khamees was insistent: it was not just the injection, he said—he had heard that Imam Ibrahim knew a lot about remedies and medicines and things like that, and people had told him that maybe he would be able to do something for him and his wife.
I understood then what sort of medicine he was hoping the Imam would give him.
‘Khamees, he can’t help in matters like that,’ I said, ‘and anyway he’s stopped doing remedies now. He only does those injections.’
But Khamees had grown impatient by this time. ‘Go and ask him,’ he said, ‘he won’t come if I ask; he doesn’t like us.’
‘He doesn’t like me either,’ I said.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Khamees. ‘He’ll come if you ask him—he knows you’re a foreigner. He’ll listen to you.’
It was clear that he had made up his mind, so I left him waiting at the edge of the square, and went across, towards the mosque. I could tell that the Imam had seen me—and Khamees—from a long way off, but he betrayed no sign of recognition and carefully kept his eyes from straying in my direction. Instead, he pretended to be deep in conversation with a man who was sitting beside him, an elderly shopkeeper with whom I had a slight acquaintance.
I was still a few steps away from them when I said ‘good evening to the Imam, pointedly, so he could no longe
r ignore me. He paused to acknowledge the greeting, but his response was short and curt, and he turned back at once to resume his conversation.
The old shopkeeper was taken aback at the Imam’s manner; he was a pleasant man, and had often exchanged cordial salutes with me in the lanes of the village.
‘Please sit down,’ he said to me, in embarrassment. ‘Do sit. Shall we get you a chair?’
Without waiting for an answer, he glanced at the Imam, frowning in puzzlement. ‘You know the Indian doktór, don’t you?’ he said. ‘He’s come all the way from India to be a student at the University of Alexandria.’
‘I know him,’ said the Imam. ‘He came around to ask me questions. But as for this student business, I don’t know. What’s he going to study? He doesn’t even write in Arabic.’
‘That’s true,’ said the shopkeeper judiciously, ‘but after all, he writes his own languages and he knows English.’
‘Oh those,’ said the Imam scornfully. ‘What’s the use of those languages? They’re the easiest languages in the world. Anyone can write those.’
He turned to face me now, and I saw that his mouth was twitching with anger and his eyes were shining with a startling brightness.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘why do you worship cows?’
Taken by surprise I began to stammer, and he cut me short by turning his shoulder on me.
‘That’s what they do in his country,’ he said to the old shopkeeper. ‘Did you know? They worship cows.’
He shot me a glance from the corner of his eyes. ‘And shall I tell you what else they do?’ he said. He let the question hang in the air for a moment, and then announced, in a dramatic hiss: ‘They burn their dead.’
