As they passed out the gate a surge of water, a low wave, washed into them ‑waist high on her, chest high on him. When it passed the level of the flood stayed higher. They were now thigh‑deep in water. The roar was much greater than before. They couldn't hear each other. No servants were in sight.
Higher ground stood at the end of the lane leading south, and the city wall was there as well, so Kang sloshed that way, looking for ber servants. She stumbled and cursed; one of her butterfly shoes had been sucked away in the tow of water. She kicked the other one off, proceeded barefoot. Shih seemed to have fainted, or gone catatonic, and she had to put an arm under his knees, and lift him up and carry him, resting him on the top shelf of her pregnant belly. She shouted angrily for her servants, but could not‑even hear herself. She slipped once and cried out to Guanyin, She Who Hears Cries.
Then she saw Xinwu, swimming towards her like an otter with arms, serious and determined. Behind him Pao was wading towards her, and Zunli. Xinwu pulled Shih away from Kang and whacked him on his reddened car. 'That way!' Xinwu shouted loudly at Shih, pointing out the city wall. Kang was surprised to see Shih almost run towards it,
leaping out of the water time after time. Xinwu stood at her side and helped her slosh up the lane. She was like a canal barge being towed upstream, bow waves lapping at her distended waist. Pao and Zunli joined them and helped her, Pao crying and shouting 'I went ahead to check the depth, 1 came back and thought you were in the chair!' while Zunli was saying something to the effect that they thought she had gone ahead with Pao. The usual confusion.
On the city wall the other servants were urging them on, staring upstream whiteeyed with fright. Hurry! their mouths mouthed. Hurry!
At the foot of the wall the brown water was streaming hard by. Kang struggled against the flow awkwardly, slipping on her little feet. People lowered a wooden ladder from the top of the city wall, and Shih scampered up it. Kang started to climb. She had never climbed a ladder before, and Xinwu and Pao and Zunli pushing her from below did not really help. It was hard getting her feet to curl over the submerged rungs; indeed her feet were not as long as the rungs were wide. She could get no purchase. Now she could see out of the corner of her eye a big brown wave, filled with things, smashing along the wall, sweeping it clean of ladders and everything else that had been leaned against it. She pulled herself up by the arms and pegged her foot down onto a dry rung.
Pao and Zunli shoved her up from below, and she was lifted bodily onto the top of the city wall. Pao and Zunli and Xinwu shot up beside her. The ladder was pulled up after them just as the big wave swept by.
Many people had taken refuge up on the wall, as it now formed a sort of long island in the flood. People on a pagoda rooftop nearby waved to them. Everyone on the wall was staring at Kang, who rearranged her gown and pulled her hair out of her face with her fingers, checking to see that everyone from her compound was there. Briefly she smiled. It was the first time any of them had ever seen her smile.
By the time they were reunited with Ibrahim, late that same day, having been rowed to a hill to the south and above the flooded town, Kang was done with smiling. She pulled Ibrahim down next to her, and they sat there in the chaos of people. 'Listen to me,' she said, hand on her belly, 'if this is a daughter we have here
'I know,' Ibrahim said.
'‑ If this is a daughter we have been given ‑ there will be no more footbinding.'
Four. The Afterlife
Many years later, an age later, two old people sat on their verandah watching the river flow. In their time together they had discussed all things, they had even written a history of the world together, but now they seldom spoke, except to note some feature of the waning day. Very rarely did they talk about the past, and they never spoke at all of that time they had sat together in a dark room, diving into the light of the candle, and seeing there strange glimpses of former lives. It was too disturbing to recall the awe and terror of those hours. And besides the point had been made, the knowledge gained. That they had known each other ten thousand years: of course. They were an old married couple. They knew, and that was enough. There was no need to delve deeper into it.
This too is the bardo; or nirvana itself. This is the touch of the eternal.
One day, then, before going out to the verandah to enjoy the sunset hour with his partner, the old man sat before his blank page all the long afternoon, thinking, looking at the stacks of books and manuscripts that
walled his study. Finally he took up his brush and wrote, performing the strokes very slowly.
This is what his wife had taught him to see.
'Wealth and the Four Great Inequalities'
The scattered records and broken ruins of the Old World tell us that the earliest civilizations arose in China, India, Persia, Egypt, the Middle West,
and Anatolia. The first farmers in these fertile regions taught themselves farming and storage methods that created harvests beyond the needs of the day. Very quickly soldiers, supported by priests, took power in each region, and their own numbers grew, gathering these new abundant harvests largely into their own hands, by means of taxes and direct seizures. Labour divided into the groups described by Confucius and the Hindu caste system, the warriors, priests, artisans and farmers. With this division of labour the subjugation of farmers by warriors and priests was institutionalized, a subjugation that has never ended. This was the first inequality.
In this division of civilized labor, if it had not happened earlier, men established a general domination over women. It may have happened during the earlier ages of bare subsistence, but there is no way to tell; what we can see with our own eyes, is that in farming cultures women labour both at home and in the fields. In truth the farming life requires work from all. But from early on, women did as men required. And in each family, the control of legal power resembled the situation at large: the king and his heir dominated the rest. These were the second and the third inequalities, of men over women and children.
The next small age saw the beginning of trade between the first civilizations, and the silk roads connecting China, Bactria, India, Persia, the Middle West, Rome and Africa moved the surplus harvests around the Old World. Agriculture responded to the new chances to trade, and there was a great rise in the production of bulk cereals and meats, and specialized crops like olives, wine and mulberry trees. The artisans also made new tools, and with them more powerful farming implements, and ships. Trading groups and peoples began to undermine the monopoly on power of the first military‑priest empires, and money began to replace land as the source of ultimate power. All this happened much earlier than Ibn Khaldun and the Maghribi historians recognized. By the time of the classical period, around 1200 bH, the changes brought by trade had unsettled the old ways and spread and deepened the first three inequalities, raising many questions about human nature. The great classical religions came into being precisely to attempt to answer these questions ‑ Zoroastrianism in Persia, Buddhism in India, and the rationalist philosophers in Greece. But no matter their metaphysical details, each civilization was part of a world transferring wealth back and forth,
back and forth, eventually to the elite groups; these movements of wealth became the driving force of change in human affairs ‑ in other words, of history. Gathered wealth gathered more wealth.
From the classical period to the discovery of the New World (say 1200 bH to 1000 aH), trade therefore made the Middle West the focal point of the Old World, and much wealth ended up there. At about the midpoint of this period, as the dates indicate, Islam appeared, and very quickly it came to dominate the world. Very likely there were some underlying economic reasons for this phenomenon; Islam, perhaps by chance but perhaps not, appeared in the 'centre of the world', the area sometimes called the Isthmus Region, bounded by the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. All the trade routes necessarily knotted here, like dragon arteries in a feng shui analysis. So it is not particular
ly surprising that for a time Islam provided the world with a general currency, the dinar, and a generally used language, Arabic. But it was also a religion, indeed it became almost the universal religion, and we must understand that its appeal as a religion arose partly from the fact that in a world of growing inequalities, Islam spoke of a realm in which all were equal ‑ all equal before God no matter their age, gender, occupation, race or nationality. Islam's appeal lay in this, that inequality could be neutralized and done away with in the most important realm, the eternal realm of the spirit.
Meanwhile, however, trade in food and in luxury goods continued all across the Old World, from al‑Andalus to China, in animals, timber and metals, cloth, glass, writing materials, opium, medicines and, more and more as the centuries passed, in slaves. The slaves came chiefly from Africa; and they became more important because there was more labour to be done, while at the same time the mechanical improvements allowing for more powerful tools had not yet been made, so that all this new work had to be accomplished by animal and human effort alone. So, added to the subjugation of farmers, women, and the family, was this fourth inequality, of race or group, leading to the subjugation of the most powerless peoples to slavery. And the unequal accumulation of wealth by the elites continued.
The discovery of the New World has only accelerated these processes, providing both more wealth and more slaves. The trade routes themselves have moved substantially from land to sea, and Islam no longer
controls the crossroads as it did for a thousand years. The main centre of accumulation has shifted to China; indeed, China may have been the centre all along. it has always had the most people; and from ancient times people everywhere else have traded for Chinese goods. Rome's trade balance with China was so poor that it lost a million ounces of silver a year to China. Silk, porcelain, sandalwood, pepper ‑ Rome and all the rest of the world sent their gold to China for these products, and China grew rich. And now that China has taken control of the west coasts of the New World, it has also begun to enjoy a direct infusion of huge amounts of gold and silver, and slaves. This doubled gathering of wealth, both by trade of manufactured goods and by direct extraction, is something new, a kind of cumulation of accumulations.
So it seems apparent that the Chinese are the rising dominant power in the world, in competition with the previous dominant power, Dar al‑Islam, which still exerts a powerful attraction to people hoping for justice before God, if no longer much expecting it on Earth. India then exists as a third culture between the other two, a go‑between and influence on both, while also of course influenced by both. Meanwhile the primitive New World cultures, newly connected to the bulk of humanity, immediately subjugated by them, struggle to survive.
So. To a very great extent human history has been the story of the unequal accumulation of harvested wealth, shifting from one centre of power to another, while always expanding the four great inequalities. This is history. Nowhere, as far as 1 know, has there ever been a civilization or moment when the wealth of the harvests, created by all, has been equitably distributed. Power has been exerted wherever it can be, and each successful coercion has done its part to add to the general inequality, which has risen in direct proportion to the wealth gathered; for wealth and power are much the same. The possessors of the wealth in effect buy the armed power they need to enforce the growing inequality. And so the cycle continues.
The result has been that while a small percentage of human beings have lived in a wealth of food, material comfort and learning, those not so lucky have been the functional equivalent of domestic beasts, in harness to the powerful and well‑off, creating their wealth for them but not benefiting from it themselves. If you happen to be a young black farm girl, what can you say to the world, or the world to you? You exist
under all four of the great inequalities, and will live a shortened life of ignorance, hunger and fear. indeed it only takes one of the great inequalities to create such conditions.
So it must be said that the majority of humans ever to have lived, have existed in conditions of immiseration and servitude to a small minority of wealthy and powerful people. For every emperor and bureaucrat, for every caliph and qadi, for every full rich life, there have been ten thousand of these stunted, wasted lives. Even if you grant a minimal definition of a full life, and say that the strength of spirit in people, and the solidarity among people, have given many and many of the world's poor and powerless a measure of happiness and achievement amidst their struggle, still, there are so many who have lived lives destroyed by immiseration that it seems impossible to avoid concluding that there have been more lives wasted than fully lived.
All the world's various religions have attempted to explain or mitigate these inequalities, including Islam, which originated in the effort to create a realm in which all are equal; they have tried to justify the inequalities in this world. They all have failed; even Islam has failed; the Dar al‑Islam is as damaged by inequality as anywhere else. indeed I now think that the Indian and Chinese description of the afterlife, the system of the six lokas or realms of reality ‑ the devas, asuras, humans, beasts, pretas, and inhabitants of hell ‑ is in fact a metaphorical but precise description of this world and the inequalities that exist in it, with the devas sitting in luxury and judgment on the rest, the asuras fighting to keep the devas in their high position, the humans getting by as humans do, the beasts labouring as beasts do, the homeless preta suffering in fear at the edge of bell, and the inhabitants of hell enslaved to pure immiseration.
My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity's great spirit. History as a story worth telling will only begin when the whole lives outnumber the wasted ones. That means we have many generation s to go before history begins. All the inequalities must end; all the surplus wealth must be equitably distributed. Until then we are still only some kind of gibbering monkey, and humanity, as we usually like to think of it, does not yet exist.
To put it in religious terms, we are still indeed in the bardo, waiting to be born.
The old woman read the pages her husband had given her, walking up and down their long verandah, full of agitation. When she had finished, she put her hand on his shoulder. The day was coming to its end; the sky in the west was indigo, a new moon resting in it like a scythe. The black river flowed below them. She went to her own writing stand, at the far end of the verandah, and took up her brush, and in quick blind strokes filled a page.
Two wild geese fly north in the twilight. One bent lotus droops in the shallows. Near the end of this existence Something like anger fills my breast; A tiger: next time 1 will hitch it To my chariot. Then watch me fly. No more hobbling on these bad feet. Now there is nothing left to do But scribble in the dusk and watch with the beloved Peach blossoms float downstream. Looking back at all the long years All that happened this way and that 1 think I liked most the rice and the salt.
Chapter One The Fall of Konstantiniyye
The Ottoman Sultan Caliph Selim the Third's doctor, Ismail ibn Mani al‑Dir, began as an Armenian qadi who studied law and medicine in Konstantiniyye. He rose quickly through the ranks of the Ottoman bureaucracy by the efficacy of his ministrations, until eventually the Sultan required him to tend one of the women of his seraglio. The harem girl recovered under Ismail's care, and shortly thereafter Sultan Selim too was cured by Ismail, of a complaint of the skin. After that the Sultan made Ismail the chief doctor of the Sublime Porte and its seraglio.
Ismail then spent his time slipping about unobtrusively from patient to patient, continuing his medical education as doctors do, by practising. He did not attend court functions. He filled thick books with case studies, recording symptoms, medicines, treatments and results. He attended the janissaries' inquisitions as required, and kept notes there as well.
The Sultan, impressed by his doctor's dedication and skill, took an interest in his case studies. The
bodies of all the janissaries he had executed in the countercoup of the year 1202 were put at Ismail's disposal, and the religious ban on autopsy and dissection declared invalid for this case of executed criminals. A lot of work had to be completed quickly, even with the bodies on ice, and indeed the Sultan participated in several of the dissections himself, asking questions at every cut. He was quick to see and suggest the advantages of vivisection.
One night in the year 1207, the Sultan called his doctor to the palace
in the Sublime Porte. One of his old stablehands was dying, and Selim had had him made comfortable on a bed placed on one balance of a large scale, with weights of gold piled on the other balance, so that the two big pans hung level in the middle of the room.
As the old man lay on his bed wheezing, the Sultan ate a midnight meal and watched. He told the doctor that he was sure this method would allow them to determine the presence of the soul, if one existed, and its weight.
Ismail stood at the side of the stablehand's elevated bed, fingering the old man's wrist gently. The old man's breaths weakened, became gasps. The Sultan stood and pulled Ismail back, pointing to the scale's extremely fine fulcrum. Nothing was to be disturbed.
The old man stopped breathing. 'Wait,' the Sultan whispered. 'Watch.'
The Years of Rice and Salt Page 46
