Incendiary Circumstances

by Amitav Ghosh

  Later, when her husband, Aly, had come home from the fields and we had all had dinner, she gave me the number of the shop in Baghdad. Once every couple of months or so she and Nabeel's brothers would make a trip to a post office in a nearby town and telephone him in Baghdad.

  "It costs a lot," she said, "but you can hear him like he was in the next house."

  Nabeel couldn't telephone them, of course, but now and again he would speak into a cassette recorder and send them a tape. He and his brothers had all been through high school; Nabeel himself even had a college degree. But they still found the spoken word more reassuring than the written.

  "You must hear his voice on the machine," said Aly, producing a tape. He placed it carefully inside a huge cassette recorder cum radio and we gathered around to listen. Nabeel's voice was very solemn, and he was speaking like a Cairene, almost as though he'd forgotten the village dialect.

  "Does he always talk like that now?" I asked Fawzia.

  "Oh no." She laughed. "He's talking like that because it's a cassette. On the telephone he sounds just like he used to."

  Nabeel said almost nothing about himself and his life in Iraq, just that he was well and that his salary had gone up. He listed in detail the names of all the people he wanted them to convey his greetings to—members of his lineage, people in the village, his school friends. Then he told them about everyone from the village who was in Iraq—that so-and-so was well, that someone had moved to another city, and that someone else was about to go home. For the rest he gave his family precise instructions about what they were to do with the money he was sending them—about the additions they were to make to the house, exactly how the rooms should look, how much they should spend on the floors, the windows, the roof. His brothers listened, rapt, though they must have heard the tape through several times already.

  Later Aly wrote down Nabeel's address for me. It consisted of a number on a numbered street in "New Baghdad." I pictured to myself an urban development project of the kind that flourishes in the arid hinterlands of Cairo and New Delhi—straight, treeless streets and blocks of yellow buildings divided into "Pockets," "Phases," and "Zones."

  "You must telephone him," one of Nabeel's younger brothers said. "He'll be so pleased. Do you know, he's kept all your letters, wrapped in a plastic bag? He still talks of you, a lot. Tell me, didn't you once say to him..."

  And then he recounted, almost word for word, a conversation I had once had with Nabeel. It was about something trivial, about my college in Delhi, but for some reason I had written it down in my diary that very day, while it was still fresh in memory. I had read through my diaries of that time again recently. That was why I knew that Nabeel's brother had repeated that conversation, or at least a part of it, almost verbatim, in near exact detail. I was amazed. It seemed to me an impossible, deeply moving defiance of time and the laws of hearsay and memory.

  "You can be sure that I will telephone him," I said to Nabeel's brother. "I'll telephone him soon, from America."

  "You must tell him that we are well and that he should send another cassette."

  "Won't he be surprised," said Fawzia, "when he hears Amitab's voice on the phone? He'll think someone's playing a joke on him."

  "We'll write and tell him," said Aly. "We'll write tomorrow so he won't be surprised. We'll tell him that you're going to phone him from America."

  But they hadn't written: the surprise in Nabeel's voice as he greeted me over the phone was proof of that. And I, for my part, even though I had the advantage, was almost as amazed as Nabeel, though for a different reason. When I was living in their village, in 1980 and '81, Nabeel and Ismail had had very definite plans for their immediate future: they wanted salaried jobs in the Agriculture Ministry. It would not have occurred to any of us then to think that within a few years they would both be abroad and that I would be able to speak to them on the phone from thousands of miles away.

  There was only one telephone in the village then. It had never worked, as far as anyone knew. It was not meant to—it was really a badge of office, a scepter. It belonged to the government, and it resided in the house of the village headman. When a headman was voted out in the local elections, the telephone was ritually removed from his house and taken to the victor's. It was carried at the head of a procession, accompanied by drums and gunshots, as though it were a saint's relics. "We carried the telephone that year," people would say, meaning "We swept the elections."

  Nabeel's family was one of the poorest in the village—and the village was not by any means prosperous. Few families in the village had more than five feddans of land, but most had one or two. Nabeel's family had none at all. That was one of the reasons that he and his brothers had all got an education: schools and colleges were free, and they had no land to claim their time.

  Nabeel lived with his parents in a three-room adobe hut, along with Aly and Fawzia and their three other brothers. Aly worked in the fields for a daily wage when there was work to be had; their father carried a tiny salary as a village watchman. He was a small, frail man with sunken cheeks and watery gray eyes. As a watchman he had the possession of a gun, an ancient Enfield, that was kept in a locked chest under his bed. He said that he'd last had occasion to use it some fifteen years ago, when somebody spotted a gang of thieves running through Hassan Bassiuni's cornfields. The thieves had escaped, but the gun had mowed down half the field—it was really very much like a blunderbuss. He was very proud of it. Once when a fire broke out in Shahata Hammoudah's house and everyone was busy doing what they could, I noticed Nabeel's father running in the opposite direction. When I next looked around, he was standing at attention in front of the burning house, holding his gun, smiling benignly.

  Nabeel's mother, a dark, fine-boned woman, secretly despaired of her husband. "He's been defeated by the world," she would say sometimes. "There's no one to stand beside Nabeel and his brothers except themselves."

  Now, eight years later, Nabeel's father and mother were both dead. "And the saddest thing," Fawzia said to me, "is that they didn't live to see how things have changed for us."

  The three mud-walled rooms were gone now. In their place was a bungalow, or at least its skeleton—four or five rooms, in a largely unfinished state but built of brick and cement and entirely habitable. There was provision for a bathroom, a kitchen, a living room, as well as another entire apartment upstairs, exactly like the one below. That was where Nabeel would live once he was married, Fawzia said to me. She, for her part, was content; in her house she now had a television set, a cassette recorder, and a washing machine.

  It wasn't just her life that had changed. When I first came to the village, in 1980, there were only three or four television sets there, and they belonged to the handful of men who owned fifteen to twenty feddans of land, the richest men in the village. Those men still had their fifteen to twenty feddans of land and their black-and-white television sets. It was the families who had once been thought of as the poor folk of the village whose homes were now full of all the best-known brand names in Japan—television sets, washing machines, kitchen appliances, cameras ... I could not have begun to imagine a change on this scale when I left the village in 1981. If I had not witnessed it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it possible.

  It was a kind of revolution, but it had happened a long way away. It had been created entirely by the young men who had gone to work in Iraq, once that country began to experience severe labor shortages because of its war with Iran. They were carried along by a great wave of migration. In the late 1980s there were estimated to be between two and three million Egyptians in Iraq. Nobody knew for sure: the wave had surged out of the country too quickly to be measured. All of Nabeel's contemporaries were gone now—all the young men with high school educations and no jobs and no land and nothing to do but play football and lounge around the water taps when the girls went to fetch water in the evenings. Some of the old men used to say that they would all go to the bad. But in the end it was they who
had transformed the village.

  "It's we who've been the real gainers in the war," one of the village schoolteachers said to me while I was walking down the lanes, gaping at all the newly built houses and buildings. "The Iraqis are doing all the fighting, it's they who're dying. The Arab countries are paying them to break the back of Khomeini's Islamic revolution. For them it's a matter of survival. But in the meantime, while Iraqis are dying, others are making money. But it won't last—that money's tainted, and the price is going to be paid later, someday."

  The young men who'd left were paying a price already. "Life is really hard there," their families said. "You never know what's going to happen from day to day." And they would tell stories about fights, about lone Egyptians being attacked on the streets, about men being forced to work inhuman hours, about how the Iraqi women would look at Egyptian men from their windows, because so many of their own men were dead, and how it always led to trouble, because the Iraqis would find out and kill both the woman and the Egyptian.

  "How does Nabeel like it in Iraq?" I asked his brother Aly.

  "He's fine," said Aly. "He's all right."

  "How do you know?"

  "That's what he says on the cassettes," he said. "I'm sure he's all right."

  "I hope so," I said.

  He was frowning now. "God knows," he said. "People say life is hard out there."

  Nabeel could not tell me as much over the telephone, with his boss listening. But he was well, he said, and so was his cousin Ismail, and they were managing fine, living with their relatives and friends from back home. In turn he asked me about India, my job, my family. Then I heard a noise down the line; it sounded like another voice in the same room. Nabeel broke off to say, "Coming, just a moment."

  I said quickly, "I'm going back to India soon. I'll try and visit you on the way."

  "We'll be expecting you," he said. In the background I could hear the voice again, louder now.

  "You'd better go now," I said.

  "I'll tell Ismail you're coming," he said hurriedly. "We'll wait for you."

  But the year passed and the visit eluded me.

  2

  It was exactly three weeks since Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and miraculously, Abu-Ali, the old shopkeeper, was on his feet. That was how he happened to see me as I walked down the road past his window.

  Nabeel's village was just a mile and a half away, and I was on my way there when Abu-Ali sent a child running after me. Abu-Ali's house was where the asphalt road ended and the dirt track began. Taxi drivers would not go any farther.

  Abu-Ali was standing by the window again cradling a radio, twiddling the knob. He had always behaved as though all the village's worries had fallen on his shoulders. Now it looked as though he had taken on all of Egypt's.

  The radio was a big one, with a built-in cassette recorder, but in Abu-Ali's huge, swollen hands it seemed as slim and fragile as an advanced model of a calculator. It spat out a medley of electronic sounds as the pointer flashed across its face. But the sounds were lost; the noise in the room was already deafening. Abu-Ali's cousin's daughter was getting married next door. A crowd of women and children had gathered in the lane outside their house. A boy was beating a tin washbasin with a spoon, and the women and children were clapping in time and chanting, "Ya rumman, ya rumman," singing of the bride as the bloom of a pomegranate.

  At intervals Abu-Ali rose from his bed, went to the window, glared at the women and children outside, shuffled back, and collapsed onto his bed again. This was an astonishing feat. When I first knew him years ago, he was already so fat that he found it nearly impossible to leave his bed. Now he was fatter still. Every time he stood up, his belly surged away from him like backwash leaving a beach. It was pure greed, his neighbors had always said; he ate the way other people force-fed geese—he could eat two chickens and a pot of rice at one sitting. And now that there was all this Iraqi money in his house, that was exactly what he did sometimes—ate two whole chickens and a pot of rice, right after the midday prayers.

  "Ate it," muttered Abu-Ali, shuffling across the room yet again. "The son of a bitch just ate it like it was a chicken's liver. Saw a tasty little morsel and just swallowed it."

  He sounded envious: an appetite was something he could understand.

  "So what do you expect?" someone said. The room was quite full now: several men had stopped by to see Abu-Ali on their way to the wedding. "What was Kuwait but a tasty little morsel cooked up by the British and sucked dry by the Americans?"

  "Just ate it!" Abu-Ali twirled the knob of the radio, sending the pointer screeching through a succession of stations. "BBC, BBC," he muttered, "where's that son-of-a-bitch BBC?"

  A distant, haranguing voice suddenly burst out of the radio, screaming shrilly. Abu-Ali started back in surprise, almost dropping the radio. "Who's this son of a bitch now?"

  "That's Damascus," said someone.

  "No, it's those son-of-a-bitch Americans broadcasting in Arabic," said someone else.

  "No, it's Riyadh," said Abu-Ali. "It sounds like a Saudi."

  "Riyadh is where he should have gone," said another man. "But he didn't—stopped too soon. It's those Saudi sons of bitches who should have been fixed."

  I jogged the elbow of the man sitting next to me. I knew him well once; he used to teach in a nearby school. Now he was teaching in the Yemen; he'd come home on a visit, intending to leave once the summer holidays ended. But his wife wouldn't let him go; she had four children to bring up, and she was not going to let him vanish into a war zone.

  "Do you know if Nabeel Badawy is back from Iraq yet?" I asked him.

  "Nabeel?" he said. He'd been looking distracted, anxious, ever since he came into the room. Now he looked as though he'd been dazed by the noise and the cigarette smoke. The man next to him had his arm firmly in his grasp; he was shouting into his other ear, his voice hoarse.

  "The worst sons of bitches, the most ungrateful, do you know who they are?" he shouted.

  "Nabeel Idris Badawy," I said insistently. "You remember him?"

  "The Palestinians," shouted the man hoarsely. "The worst sons of bitches."

  "Nabeel Idris Badawy," I repeated. "From Nashawy?"

  "From Nashawy?" said the schoolteacher. "How many wars have we fought for them, you tell me? Haven't I lost my own brother?"

  "Nabeel Idris Mustafa Badawy," said the schoolteacher jubilantly, his voice rising to a shout. "He was in Iraq—my nephew told me."

  "Them and the Israelis, God forsake them, the sons of bitches. In the end they're always at the bottom of everything."

  "I know Nabeel's in Iraq," I shouted back. "But do you know if he's back yet?"

  He thought for a moment and then shook his head. "No," he said, "I can't tell you. There are so many boys over there, you know, it's impossible to keep track. Mabrouk Hussein is still there, you know, my own nephew. You remember him? And there are others from this village—there's Fahmy and Abusa and..."

  He began to repeat the names, as everyone else who had come into the room had done. The village was a very small one, no more than 350 souls, just a hamlet really. I knew it well when I lived in the area. At that time only one man from the village was abroad; he taught Arabic in a school in Zaire. But over the past few years more than a dozen of its young men had left. Most had gone to Iraq, a couple to Jordan (it was almost the same thing). Several had returned since the beginning of the year, but five still remained, trapped in Iraq. People said their names over and over again, as though to conjure them out of Iraq, back to the village: Mabrouk, who used to keep goal; Abusa—"the Frown"—who never smiled; Fahmy, who used to ride out to the fields on a sheep. I remembered them coming to visit me in the evenings, full of questions: "What do you grow in India? Do you have schools? Do you have weddings? Rain? An army?" They were very young. None of them had ever been farther than the local town. The machines with which they were most familiar were their kababis—the Persian wheels their cattle drove, round and round for ho
urs every day, to water their fields. Mabrouk had once come running to my room, hugely excited, and dragged me away to his house to see the brand-new water pump his family had bought. It was very important for him and his family that I take a look at it, for like all the pumps in the area, it was from India (the generic name for water pump was makana hindi, "the Indian machine"). No matter that I had said, time after time, that I knew nothing about water pumps, I was always asked for an opinion when somebody bought one.

  This one was exactly like the others: a big green machine with a spout and an exhaust pipe. They had hung an old shoe on the spout and stuck an incense stick in the exhaust pipe to protect it from the evil eye. I knocked on the spout with my knuckles and patted its diesel tank in a well-informed kind of way. "What do you think?" Mabrouk's father said. "Is it all right?"

  I knocked a little harder, frowning.

  He was anxious now: "So, what do you think?"

  I smiled. "It's a very good one—excellent."

  There was a sigh of relief. "Get the Indian doctor some tea."

  Mabrouk had shaken my hand. "I knew you would be able to tell..."

  And now 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 would have to pay the price of the violence that was invented in quiet, pastoral laboratories in Heidelberg and Berkeley.

  "Do you think the Americans are ever going to leave the sacred land?" a young man said at the top of his voice. People fell silent, listening. Outside, the clapping seemed suddenly louder, the girls' voices more insistent.

  "Never," he shouted. "Never—they're never going to leave the sacred places. Now that they're there, they're going to stay till the end of time. They've finally achieved what they'd never managed in a thousand years of history. And who's responsible? The Saudis—the sons of bitches."