In an Antique Land

by Amitav Ghosh

  ‘What is the meaning of this?’ he said.

  I knew I had to choose my words with care, so speaking slowly, I told him that I had heard many people talking about the mowlid of Sidi Abu-Hasira over the last several days. They had said that many tourists came to Damanhour to visit the mowlid, so I had decided to do some sightseeing too, before catching the train to Cairo, later in the day.

  He listened with close attention, and when I had finished, he said: ‘How did you learn Arabic? And what were you doing travelling in the countryside?’

  ‘I’d been here years ago,’ I said, and I explained how, after learning Arabic in Tunisia, I had come to Egypt as a doctoral student and been brought to that district by Professor Aly Issa, one of the most eminent anthropologists in Egypt. Fortunately I had taken the precaution of carrying a copy of the permit I had been given when I first went to live in Lataifa and I handed it to him now as proof.

  My interrogator examined the document and then, giving it back to me, he said: ‘But this does not explain what you were doing at the tomb. What took you there?’

  I had gone there out of mere curiosity, I told him. I had heard people talking about the mowlid of Sidi Abu-Hasira, just as they talked about other such events, and I had thought I would stop by to take a look, on the way to the station. I had had no idea that it would become a matter of such gravity, and I was at a loss to understand what had happened.

  A gesture of dismissal indicated that my interrogator had no intention of offering me an explanation. ‘What was it that interested you about that place?’ he asked again. ‘What exactly took you there?’

  ‘I was just interested,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘But you’re not Jewish or Israeli,’ he said. ‘You’re Indian—what connection could you have with the tomb of a Jewish holy man, here in Egypt?’

  He was not trying to intimidate me; I could tell he was genuinely puzzled. He seemed so reasonable and intelligent, that for an instant I even thought of telling him the story of Bomma and Ben Yiju. But then it struck me, suddenly, that there was nothing I could point to within his world that might give credence to my story—the remains of those small, indistinguishable, intertwined histories, Indian and Egyptian, Muslim and Jewish, Hindu and Muslim, had been partitioned long ago. Nothing remained in Egypt now to effectively challenge his disbelief: not a single one, for instance, of the documents of the Geniza. It was then that I began to realize how much success the partitioning of the past had achieved; that I was sitting at that desk now because the mowlid of Sidi Abu-Hasira was an anomaly within the categories of knowledge represented by those divisions. I had been caught straddling a border, unaware that the writing of History had predicated its own self-fulfilment.

  ‘I didn’t know Sidi Abu-Hasira was a Jewish saint,’ I said at last. ‘In the countryside I heard that everyone went to visit the tomb.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have believed it,’ he said. ‘In the villages, as you must know, there is a lot of ignorance and superstition; the fellaheen talk about miracles for no reason at all. You’re an educated man, you should know better than to believe the fellaheen on questions of religion.’

  ‘But the fellaheen are very religious,’ I said. ‘Many amongst them are very strict in religious matters.’

  ‘Is it religion to believe in saints and miracles?’ he said scornfully. ‘These beliefs have nothing to do with true religion. They are mere superstitions, contrary to Islam, and they will disappear with development and progress.’

  He looked down at his papers, indicating that the subject was closed. After a moment’s silence he scribbled a couple of sentences on a slip of paper and rose slowly to his feet.

  ‘We have to be careful, you understand,’ he said in a polite, but distant voice. ‘We want to do everything we can to protect the tomb.’

  He stood up, gave my hand a perfunctory shake and handed me my passport. ‘I am going to instruct the man who brought you here to take you straight to the station,’ he said. ‘You should catch the first train to Cairo. It is better that you leave Damanhour at once.’

  Leaving me sitting at his desk, he turned and left the room. I had to wait a while, and then a policeman came in and escorted me back to the van.

  Mohsin was sitting inside, next to the man in the blue jallabeyya; he looked unharmed, but he was subdued and nervous, and would not look me in the eyes. The railway station was only a few minutes away, and we drove there in silence. When we got there, I went around to Mohsin’s window, and after paying him the fare, I tried to apologise for the trouble the trip had caused. He took the money and put it away without a word, looking fixedly ahead all the while.

  But the man in the jallabeyya had been listening with interest, and he now leant over and flashed me a smile. ‘What about me, sir?’ he said. ‘Are you going to forget me and everything I did to look after you? Isn’t there going to be anything for me?’

  At the sight of his outstretched hand I lost control of myself. ‘You son of a bitch,’ I shouted. ‘You son of a bitch—haven’t you got any shame?’

  I was cut short by a nudge from Mohsin’s elbow. Suddenly I remembered that the man was still holding his papers in his hands. To keep myself from doing anything that might make matters worse for Mohsin, I went quickly into the station. When I looked back, they were still there; the man in the jallabeyya was waving Mohsin’s papers in his face, haggling over their price.

  I went down to the platform to wait for my train.

  Over the next few months, in America, I learnt a new respect for the man who had interrogated me that morning in Damanhour: I discovered that his understanding of the map of modern knowledge was much more thorough than mine. Looking through libraries, in search of material on Sidi Abu-Hasira, I wasted a great deal of time in looking under subject headings such as ‘religion’ and ‘Judaism’—but of course that tomb, and others like it, had long ago been wished away from those shelves, in the process of shaping them to suit the patterns of the Western academy. Then, recollecting what my interrogator had said about the difference between religion and superstition, it occurred to me to turn to the shelves marked ‘anthropology’ and ‘folklore’. Sure enough, it was in those regions that my efforts met with their first rewards.

  I discovered that the name Abu-Hasira, or Abou-Hadzeira, as it is spelt when transcribed from Hebrew, belongs to a famous line of zeddikim—the Jewish counterparts of Islamic marabouts and Sufi saints, many of whom had once been equally venerated by Jews and Muslims alike. Ya’akov Abou-Hadzeira of Damanhour, I discovered, was one of the most renowned of his line, a cabbalist and mystic, who had gained great fame for his miracles in his lifetime, and still had a large following among Jews of North African and Egyptian origin. ‘The tomb of Rabbi Abû-aîra of Morocco [in Damanhour] attracted large numbers of pilgrims,’ I learnt, ‘both Jewish and non-Jewish, and the festivities marking the pilgrimage closely resembled the birthday of Muslim saints …’

  It seemed uncanny that I had never known all those years that in defiance of the enforcers of History, a small remnant of Bomma’s world had survived, not far from where I had been living.

  EPILOGUE

  SOON AFTER I arrived in New York I tried to call Nabeel in Baghdad. It wasn’t easy getting through. The directory listed a code for Iraq, but after days of trying all I got was a recorded message telling me that the number I had dialled didn’t exist.

  In the end I had to book a call with the operator. She took a while to put it through, but then the phone began to ring and a short while later I heard a voice at the other end, speaking in the blunt, rounded Arabic of Iraq.

  ‘Ai-wah?’ he said, stretching out the syllables. ‘Yes? Who is it?’

  I knew at once I was speaking to Nabeel’s boss. I imagined him to be a big, paunchy man, sitting at the end of a counter, behind a cash-box, with the telephone beside him and a Kodacolor poster of a snow-clad mountain on the wall above. He was wearing a jallabeyya and a white lace cap; he had a pair of s
unglasses in his breast pocket and a carefully trimmed moustache. The telephone beside him was of the old-fashioned kind, black and heavy, and it had a brass lock fastened in its dial. The boss kept the key, and Nabeel and the other assistants had to ask for it when they wanted to make a call.

  It was late at night in New York so it had to be morning in Baghdad. The shop must have just opened; they probably had no customers yet.

  ‘Is Nabeel there?’ I asked.

  ‘Who?’ said the voice.

  ‘Nabeel Idris Badawy,’ I said. ‘The Egyptian.’

  He grunted. ‘And who’re you?’ he said. ‘Wa mîn inta?’

  ‘I’m a friend of his,’ I said. ‘Tell him it’s his friend from India. He’ll know.’

  ‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘From where?’

  ‘From India, ya raiyis,’ I said. ‘Could you tell him? And quickly if you please, for I’m calling from America.’

  ‘From America?’ he shouted down the line. ‘But you said you were Indian?’

  ‘Yes, I am—I’m just in America on a visit. Nabeel quickly, if you please, ya raiyis …’

  I heard him shout across the room: ‘Ya Nabeel, somebody wants to talk to you, some Indian or something.’

  I could tell from Nabeel’s first words that my call had taken him completely by surprise. He was incredulous in the beginning, unwilling to believe that it was really me at the other end of the line, speaking from America. I was almost as amazed as he was: it would never have occurred to me, when I first knew him, that we would one day be able to speak to each other on the phone, thousands of miles apart.

  I explained how I had recently been to Egypt and visited Nashawy, and how his family had given me his telephone number and told me to call him, in Baghdad. Suddenly, he gave a shout of recognition.

  ‘Ya Amitab,’ he cried. ‘How are you? Zayyak? Where were you? Where have you been all these years?’

  I gave him a quick report on how I had spent the last several years, and then it was my turn to ask: ‘What about you? Zayyak inta?’

  ‘Kullu ‘âl,’ he said, mouthing a customary response. Everything was well; he and his cousin Isma‘il were managing fine, sharing rooms with friends from back home. Then he asked me about India, about each member of my family, my job, my books. When I had finished giving him my news, I told him about his own family in Nashawy, and about my visit to their new house. He was eager to hear about them, asking question after question, but in a voice that seemed to grow progressively more quiet.

  ‘What about you, ya Nabeel?’ I said at last. ‘How do you like Iraq? What is the country like?’

  ‘Kullu ‘âl,’ he said—everything was fine.

  I wanted him to talk about Iraq, but of course he would not have been able to say much within earshot of his boss. Then I heard a noise down the line; it sounded as though someone was calling to him from across the room. He broke off to say, ‘Coming, just one minute,’ and I added hurriedly, ‘I’m going back to India soon—I’ll try to stop by and visit you on the way, in Baghdad.’

  ‘We’ll be expecting you,’ he said. ‘You must come.’

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll tell Isma‘il you’re coming,’ he said hurriedly. ‘We’ll wait for you.’

  I heard his boss’s voice again, shouting in the background. ‘I’ll come,’ I promised. ‘I’ll certainly come.’

  But as it turned out I was not able to keep my word: for a variety of reasons it proved impossible to stop in Baghdad on the way back to India. My breaking of that promise made me all the more determined to keep another: I resolved that I would do everything I could to return to Egypt in 1990, the following year. I had given my word to Shaikh Musa that I would.

  I was certain that by then Nabeel would be back in Nashawy.

  BOMMA’S STORY ENDS in Philadelphia.

  At the corner of 4th and Walnut, in the heart of downtown Philadelphia, stands a sleek modern building, an imposing structure that could easily be mistaken for the headquarters of a great multinational corporation. In fact, it is the Annenberg Research Institute, a centre for social and historical research: it owes its creation to the vast fortune generated by the first and most popular of Americas television magazines, ‘TV Guide’.

  Housed within the Institute’s resplendent premises is a remarkable collection of Judaica, including manuscripts of many different kinds. Among them is a set of Geniza documents that was once in the possession of Philadelphia’s Dropsie College.

  The documents are kept in the Institute’s rare book room, a great vault in the bowels of the building, steel-sealed and laser-beamed, equipped with alarms that need no more than seconds to mobilize whole fleets of helicopters and police cars. Within the sealed interior of this vault are two cabinets that rise out of the floor like catafalques. The documents lie inside them, encased in sheets of clear plastic, within exquisitely crafted covers.

  Between the leaves of one of those volumes lies a torn sheet of paper covered with Ben Yiju’s distinctive handwriting. The folio is a large one, much larger than any of Ben Yiju’s other papers, but it is badly damaged and almost a quarter of the sheet is missing. The handwriting on the remaining parts of the fragment is unmistakably Ben Yiju’s, but the characters are tiny and faint, as though formed by an unsteady and ageing hand.

  The document is one of Ben Yiju’s many sets of accounts, but the names of the people and the commodities that are mentioned in it are very different from those that figure in his earlier papers: they suggest that these accounts belong to the years he spent in Fustat, towards the end of his life.

  The document mentions several people to whom Ben Yiju owed money for household purchases such as loaves of bread of various different kinds. Much of the document is indecipherable, but amongst the sentences that are clearly legible there is at least one that mentions a sum of money owed to Bomma.

  It provides proof that Bomma was with Ben Yiju when he went back to settle in Egypt in the last years of his life.

  In Philadelphia then, cared for by the spin-offs of ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’ and protected by the awful might of the American police, lies entombed the last testament to the life of Bomma, the toddy-loving fisherman from Tulunad.

  Bomma, I cannot help feeling, would have been hugely amused.

  AN ENTRY IN my passport records that I left Calcutta for Cairo on 20 August 1990, exactly three weeks after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Newspapers were already talking of plans for the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of American and European troops: the greatest army ever assembled.

  My most vivid memories of the journey are of reading about the vast flood of Egyptian workers that was now pouring out of Iraq, and of looking for Nabeel and Isma‘il in the packed lounges of the airport at Amman, while changing planes.

  In Egypt, everyone I talked to seemed to be in a state of confused apprehension: in the taxi from Cairo to Damanhour, the other passengers talked randomly of disaster, killing and vengeance. In the countryside the confusion was even worse than in the cities; Lataifa alone had five boys away in Iraq, and none of them had been heard from since the day of the invasion. Jabir, I discovered, was not amongst that five. He was still at home, in Lataifa, although he had been trying to leave for Iraq virtually until the day of the invasion. Shaikh Musa was well, but desperately worried: his nephew Mabrouk was one of the five who were away in Iraq.

  Walking to Nashawy to inquire about Nabeel and Isma‘il, my mind kept returning to that day, almost exactly a decade ago now, when Mabrouk had come running up to my room, and dragged me to his house to pronounce judgement on the ‘Indian machine’ his father had bought. And now, that very Mabrouk was in the immediate vicinity of chemical and nuclear weapons, within a few minutes’ striking distance of the world’s most advanced machinery; it would be he who paid the final price of those guns and tanks and bombs.

  Fawzia was standing at the door of their family house; she saw me as I turned the corner. ‘Nabeel’s not back y
et, ya Amitab,’ she said the moment she saw me. ‘He’s still over there, in Iraq, and here we are, sitting and waiting.’

  ‘Have you had any news from him? A letter?’

  ‘No, nothing,’ she said, leading me into their house. ‘Nothing at all. The last time we had news of him was when Isma‘il came back two months ago.’

  ‘Isma‘il’s back?’

  ‘Praise be to God,’ she smiled. ‘He’s back in good health and everything.’

  ‘Where is he?’ I said, looking around. ‘Can you send for him?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘He’s just around the corner, sitting at home. He hasn’t found a job yet—does odd jobs here and there, but most of the time he has nothing to do. I’ll send for him right now.’

  Looking around me, I noticed that something seemed to have interrupted the work on their house. When I’d seen it last I had had the impression that it would be completed in a matter of months. But now, a year and a half later, the floor was still just a platform of packed earth and gravel. The tiles had not been laid yet, and nor had the walls been plastered or painted.

  ‘Hamdu’lillah al-salâma.’ Isma‘il was at the door, laughing, his hand extended.

  ‘Why didn’t you come?’ he said, once the greetings were over. ‘You remember that day you called from America? Nabeel telephoned me soon after he’d spoken to you. He just picked up the phone and called me where I was working. He told me that you’d said that you were going to visit us. We expected you, for a long time. We made place in our room, and thought of all the places we’d show you. But you know, Nabeel’s boss, the shop-owner? He got really upset—he didn’t like it a bit that Nabeel had got a long-distance call from America.’

  ‘Why didn’t Nabeel come back with you? What news of him?’

  ‘He wanted to come back. In fact he thought that he would. But then he decided to stay for a few more months, make a little more money, so that they could finish building this house. You see how it’s still half-finished—all the money was used up. Prices have gone up this last year, everything costs more.’