In Arabian Nights

by Tahir Shah

  'But how do you know when you have found it – your story, I mean?'

  'It's a question of perception.'

  At that moment another regular of Friday afternoons came in, greeted us and took his seat. Hafad was an excitable giant with a passion for clocks. We all enjoyed his company. The only problem was that Hafad had often made clear his low opinion of anything Berber. No one dared mention the word in his presence. Eventually when he left, I coaxed the surgeon to continue.

  'I've told you,' he said, 'you have to search and when you find the story it's as if your mind lights up. You know instantly when it's the right one. After that your whole life will be one of fulfilment.'

  'But there are so many stories in the world, what's the chance of finding the one connected to you?'

  'That's the remarkable thing,' said the surgeon. 'If you search for it, the story will find you . . . by a kind of intuition.'

  'Have you found your story?' I asked.

  The doctor glanced at the table. He seemed to blush.

  'Yes, when I was about ten years old,' he said in little more than a whisper.

  'Will you tell it to me?'

  Dr Mehdi scratched a fingernail to his ear.

  'There was once a group of three dervishes who decided to have a picnic,' he said gently. 'The weather was fine and so they chose a place in the shade near the bank of a stream. As they laid out a tablecloth, with stones on the corners to keep it down should a breeze start up, a stray dog appeared. The animal sniffed around at the cloth. One of the dervishes said to the others, "Should we tell it there is no food to spare?" "No," another said, "because action is more powerful than words." So they continued to weigh down the corners of the cloth. The dog suddenly ran off, yelping. The third dervish, who had learned the language of animals, interpreted the cries. "He is saying, 'If these humans have only stones for lunch, what hope is there of tasting real food?'

  Not long after hearing Dr Mehdi's story, I visited Marrakech once again. The heat was unbearable. There were almost no tourists and the shopkeepers in the medina would flare into a rage at the slightest provocation. The combination of hot air and the dearth of visitors was too much for them. I took advantage of their hard luck and bought a large framed mirror with silver octagons etched round the edge. Then, carrying the purchase on my head as a kind of sunshade, I wandered out to look for the storytellers.

  Jemaa el Fna was all but deserted. The gnaoua musicians were sprawled in the shade, too hot to sing, their indigo robes drenched black with sweat. The travelling dentists had disappeared with their tins of second-hand teeth, as had the medicine men with their chameleons and their mice. Even the watersellers in their wide-brimmed hats were too hot to work. I trudged into the middle of the square, the brown-paper package on my head.

  There wasn't a storyteller in sight.

  As I made my way back towards the medina in search of refreshment, I noticed a tired old donkey standing outside a fundouk, a traditional caravanserai, the kind once used by travelling merchants. The donkey caught my eye because of the white blotch on its rump. It looked like the one the storyteller had lifted on to his shoulders to draw a crowd. I went into the fundouk and asked who owned the animal. Someone pointed to a ladder. 'Up there,' he said. I put down the mirror and climbed the rungs until I was on the upper level, on a balcony overflowing with rotting bread and junk.

  Again I asked about the donkey.

  'It's mine,' said a man wearing a cotton jelaba and a homemade turban. It was the storyteller. I introduced myself.

  'And I am Khalil,' he said, 'the son of Khalilullah.'

  'May I sit for a moment?'

  'Marhaba, welcome,' he replied.

  The storyteller's young son was sent scurrying down the ladder to buy a sprig of mint for tea. As I sat down on a cushion, I made out the sound of a hand rinsing a teapot behind and caught the aroma of charcoal being fanned into life.

  I told the master that I had heard one of his tales on my previous visit to Marrakech.

  'My family have told stories here for nine generations, right on the same spot in Jemaa el Fna,' he said. 'Father, son, father, son. I continue the tradition because it is that – tradition. I promised my father that I would not let the tradition die. But I don't make enough money to live. So I teach history in a school each morning and tell stories in the afternoons.'

  'What about the tourists? Don't they pay you?'

  'No, no,' said Khalil. 'My tales are in Arabic and they don't understand. Anyway, tourists don't have time to listen. They just want to take photographs.'

  'Where are you from?'

  'From the Atlas Mountains.'

  'Are you Berber?'

  Khalil the storyteller untied his turban and rewound it tighter round his head.

  'Yes, we are Berber,' he said.

  I told him what Dr Mehdi had said, that all of us are born with a story inside us, that it's our duty to discover what that story might be.

  'That's the tradition,' he replied. 'But these days people are forgetting the traditions.'

  'I want to find my story,' I said.

  Khalil looked at me, his eyes mapping my face. He pursed his lips a fraction, revealing a row of sharp, square teeth.

  'You must take care,' he said.

  'Why?'

  'Finding your story is harder than it sounds. It can be dangerous.'

  'Really?'

  'Of course. To find your story you must trust. Trust the wrong person and the consequences could be bad.'

  I asked if he could tell me the tale that lived inside me. It would save me a lot of time and trouble, and he was a storyteller after all.

  Khalil the son of Khalilullah smiled very softly.

  'I cannot do that,' he said.

  'Why not?'

  'Because the search for your story will change you.'

  Zohra urged me night and day to have my dream interpreted by her friend Sukayna who lived beyond the shantytown. She said there was probably poison inside me, a poison somehow connected to the chalk symbols on the door.

  'How would I have been poisoned?'

  'The Changed Ones.'

  'Jinns?'

  'Tsk! Don't ever say that word!'

  'It's a lot of old rubbish,' I said.

  The maid placed her right hand over her heart and spat out her favourite catchphrase: 'Believe me, I speak the truth.' Then, hoisting Timur on to her back, she climbed the stairs and was gone.

  The mother to six daughters, Zohra longed for a son. She wouldn't admit to it, but I used to get the feeling she felt the lack of male offspring to be a divine punishment. As soon as she arrived at the house each morning, she would scoop Timur up and feed him a packet of banana-flavoured chewing gum. All day long she would carry him around, whispering stories into his ear, feeding him titbits and boosting his ego with an endless stream of praise.

  Zohra spent so much time doting on Timur that we were forced to hire a second maid to do the work she had been hired to do. Rachana and I were still far too fearful to fire her and began to regard her wages as a kind of tax.

  The new maid, Fatima, who came recommended by Ariane's schoolteacher, was young and innocent. She smiled all the time and was a whirlwind of activity. Unlike Zohra, who lived in the shantytown, Fatima moved in to Dar Khalifa. She rose before dawn and started with the windows, cleaning them until they shone like cut gems. After that, she would scrub the floors on her hands and knees and then mop the ceilings and the doors.

  From the first moment Fatima arrived, Zohra stalked her through the house, gripped with psychotic rage. She took to hiding behind the curtains and jumping out, and would sprinkle dirt from the garden on the sitting-room floor, so that Fatima would have to start the mopping again.

  The situation was not satisfactory, but it became far worse one morning in mid-September. Fatima spent a few dirhams on buying Ariane and Timur candyfloss. They were both lapping greedily at the spun sugar, when Zohra burst in. She looked at my son perched on Fatima's knee, sc
owled and stormed out. Twenty minutes later she returned holding a huge bag of sweets. She presented it to Timur and kissed him on the cheek.

  The next day I found Timur playing with a miniature tinplate car. He said Fatima had given it to him. By lunchtime he had abandoned the car for a much larger die-cast vehicle from Zohra. By the afternoon he had discarded that, too, and was preoccupied with an expensive-looking spaceship with red and white stripes. When I approached him, he gloated and lisped Fatima's name.

  The next day, Timur was riding a brand-new tricycle through the house. On his arm was a silver-coloured wristwatch and over his shoulders there was a leather jacket with his name embroidered across the back. I was going to stop the reckless overspending, but Rachana stopped me. She said that with time the pressure of economy would prevail.

  After meeting Khalil the storyteller, and talking it over with Dr Mehdi, I decided to search for the story inside me. Both men assured me it was somewhere in there, deep in my heart, waiting to be heard. When I asked my Moroccan friends about searching for the tale inside, they all said it sounded crazy, that they had not heard of the tradition, that I was succumbing to the psychosis known to touch foreigners who live in Morocco too long.

  The next Friday afternoon, I asked Dr Mehdi if he had any tips.

  'You want a short cut, don't you?'

  I nodded eagerly.

  'Well, I will give you one. Although you are in Morocco,' he said, 'remember that you are in the East. That may be the Atlantic Ocean out there, but culturally it may as well be the South China Sea.'

  The battle between Fatima and Zohra continued to rage. By the next week, Timur was drowning in gifts. Both the maids had blown their monthly salaries. As a way of protecting them, I forbade either of them from going near the little boy and took him out for a haircut.

  In Morocco, henpecked husbands spend much of their time hiding from their wives in men-only cafés. The other place they go to escape are barber's shops. In the West, if you turned up at a barber's and found the place full of unshaven men, it would probably mean you had a lengthy wait ahead. But in Morocco, a crowded barber's merely means its owner has a lot of friends. They come in and lounge about, watch TV, drink tea and smoke, flick through the grubby magazines, and, occasionally, they get their hair cut.

  When I first moved to Casablanca, I began to frequent a small barbershop up the hill from the shantytown. I like to keep my hair very short and nothing gives me more pleasure than getting it trimmed with an electric razor. The barber was a quiet man with pebble-grey eyes, strong hands and an obsession with soccer. As he moved the scissors through a client's hair, or the cut-throat razor over a man's cheeks, he would be watching the game on TV from the corner of his eye.

  On the day I took Timur for a haircut, the henpecked husbands were few and far between. So I chatted to the barber about razors and soccer, and asked him if he knew the story in his heart. He was about to say something, when a tall, suave man swept through the door, sat on the chair beside mine and asked for a shave. He wore a pair of dark glasses across his slicked-back hair like a black plastic tiara.

  While the barber sharpened the cutthroat razor on a worn out leather strop, the man struck up a conversation. He asked me if I missed England.

  'How do you know I've come from England?'

  'Because you look too pale to be Moroccan and too content to be French,' he said.

  His cheeks were shaved once, then again, and were anointed with a home-brewed cologne that smelled of cherry blossom. He pressed a coin into the barber's hand, turned to the door and said to me: 'I will wait for you at the café opposite.'

  I had lived in Casablanca for three years, but was still unfamiliar with all the ins and outs of Moroccan society. I wondered if I should accept the invitation from a total stranger. Unable to resist, I crossed the street, holding Timur in my arms, and found the man, sipping a café noir topped up with milk. He said his name was Abdelmalik. We both sketched out the broad details of our lives – wives, children, hobbies and work. He expressed his passion for Arab horses and his lifelong dream of owning one. It was a love we both shared.

  We chatted about horses and life for an hour or more. Then Abdelmalik glanced at his watch.

  'We will be friends,' he said firmly as he left.

  From then on the suave, clean-shaven Moroccan swept into my life. He saw it as his duty to solve every one of my abundant problems and stressed again and again that I could ask anything of him. As my friend, it was his duty to be there for me, he said. At first I found it strange that someone would make such a point about friendship, rather than just letting it develop naturally as we do.

  We would meet every three or four days on the terrace of Café Lugano, near Casablanca's old ring road, where we always sat at the same table, just like I did on Friday's at Café Mabrook. At the other tables the same men were usually seated as well.

  Abdelmalik, a man I hardly knew, became involved in all areas of my life. When I needed a lawyer, he found me a good one; when I wanted my watch repaired, he arranged it; and when I was in urgent need of a residency permit, he handled the paperwork. He never asked for money and always insisted that my friendship was ample payment for his efforts.

  As the weeks passed, autumn arrived, and my suspicions grew that Abdelmalik was really out to line his pockets at my expense.

  Rachana's childhood in India was framed in stories. Each night before she slept, her maid would reveal another instalment from one of the great Hindu classics, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana or the Panchatantra. The length and scope of those tales defy all imagination.

  One evening in early October, Rachana heard me ranting on about the legacy of stories, about the responsibility, and the baton I felt so charged to pass on. She lit a candle and slumped down on the sofa beside me.

  'You haven't got it, have you?' she said.

  'Haven't got what?'

  'You don't understand how it works.'

  'What?'

  'The tradition of storytelling.'

  Rachana stretched back.

  'Stories touch us even before we enter this world,' she said, 'and they continue until we go to the next world. They are in the dreams of an unborn baby, in the kindergarten and school, in news reports and movies, in novels, in conversations and nightmares. We tell each other stories all our waking hours, and when our mouths are silent we are telling stories to ourselves in the secrecy of our minds. We can't help but tell stories, because they are a language in themselves.'

  'But, Rachu, things are changing,' I said. 'People are forgetting the tales they were weaned on as kids.'

  'How could you think that?' she replied sternly. 'Look at Hollywood and Bollywood: they're the greatest storytelling machines of all time. The medium may be different, but the stories are the same. They're just being regurgitated in another form.'

  'But stories are dying out.'

  'They're not dying,' Rachana said, 'but morphing into something else. Look at them carefully. The essence is the same.'

  Just then, I remembered something my father once said to me. I think we were in Andalucia, rattling south towards Morocco. We had stopped to have a picnic in a field. It was the middle of nowhere. My sisters and I had found a clump of dandelions and were blowing the fluff at one another. As we played, my father told us a story. We were only half listening.

  When he had finished, I said to him: 'Baba, what would happen if a country lost all its stories?'

  My father became quite serious, touched a hand to his face.

  'That could never happen,' he said.

  'Why not?'

  'Because stories are like a bath without a plug. You see, the bath has a tap that can never be turned off. So it will never empty. As the old water flows out, new water floods in. It's a balanced system. New stories are always pouring in; some come from near, others from far away.'

  I plucked the last dandelion and blew the seeds from the top.

  'Do you understand what I mean?'

 
'Yes, Baba, I do.'

  'But there is something else, Tahir Jan, another kind of story. It's the most powerful of all.'

  'Is it like a bath, too?'

  'No, it's not. You see, it's the kind of story that's lived in a place since the beginning of time. It's always there, buried in the culture, lying asleep. Most people don't even know it's there. But it is.'

  'When will it be told, Baba?'

  'When the time is right.'

  'When?'

  'When people are ready to understand it.'

  Winter was still a long way off, but I didn't want to be caught out as we had been the year before. Our original architect had forgotten to put a chimney in the main sitting room, despite being begged time and again to do so. My dream was to spend the long winter evenings sitting in front of a crackling fire.

  So I asked Hamza to find a mason.

  He wandered out into the bidonville and returned an hour later leading an old man. The man, who spoke no French, had a long greying beard, wire-rimmed spectacles, and was dressed in an indigo-blue laboratory coat.

  Hamza pulled my ear to the side and whispered loudly, 'Monsieur Tahir, he's a good man. He's very pious.'

  'Is that good?'

  Hamza nodded.

  'Of course,' he said. 'In Morocco you can always trust a man with a long beard.'

  I asked the mason if he could construct the fireplace. He shot out a line of Arabic.

  'What did he say?'

  Hamza rocked back on his heels confidently.

  'He says that God has sent him the perfect plan.'

  'Oh?'

  The old mason tapped his nose.

  'Two nostrils,' he said.

  'Nostrils?'

  'God created us with two tubes instead of one. That's the key. We will use God's blueprint.'

  The next night, the mason arrived along with three bags of cement, a hammer and his team of long-bearded Muslim brothers. They tiptoed into the house and laboured from dusk until dawn, only pausing to pray. The next night they toiled again, and then a third night. Hamza insisted their nocturnal shifts were because they studied the Qur'ān during every hour of daylight.