In Arabian Nights

by Tahir Shah

  Sukayna stopped because there was a commotion on the other side of the curtain. It sounded as if the owner of the double mattress was arguing about the price to repair it. When the noise had died down, I asked why Dar Khalifa was bleeding.

  The astrologer looked over at me, her eyes an ocean of green.

  'You don't understand it, do you?'

  'No, no, I don't understand.'

  'Your house is not like other houses,' she said; 'it's much more than the walls and the roof you see. There's a spirit, baraka, that touches the people inside from time to time.'

  'I don't follow.'

  'Dar Khalifa was once a long way from Casablanca,' she said. 'It was built where it is because it was so far from the town. And before the shantytown was there, you would have been able to see the ocean from the garden. It would have been tranquil.'

  'It is tranquil,' I said defensively.

  'It would have been much more tranquil.' She smiled.

  'I still don't understand what you are leading to.'

  Sukayna tightened her headscarf.

  'Dar Khalifa is not just a house,' she said.

  I looked at her, anxiously trying to work out what she meant.

  'What more can it be than that?' I asked, losing patience.

  'It's a refuge,' she said. 'The refuge of a holy man.'

  Marwan the carpenter blended in well with life at the Caliph's House. He always arrived on time for work, made everyone laugh and became great friends with Murad. The two men were so inseparable that Marwan pleaded with the blind storyteller to come and stay at his own home on the far side of the shantytown. His shack came with the added bonus that it had a small paddock beside it that could be used for nocturnal storytelling events.

  I had been anxious that Osman and the Bear would turn on the newcomer. After all, they were related to each other through marriage and, unlike them, Marwan was a Berber. In Morocco, the bond of blood is as strong as tempered steel. But to my surprise and great relief, the existing guardians welcomed Marwan as if he were a long-lost brother.

  There was something I found even more remarkable: Marwan's intelligence. On the surface he may have been an unassuming carpenter, and now a guardian, but he had a brilliant mind. He told me he had never received a formal education, had never even learned to read.

  'My grandmother was my school,' he said. 'She taught me almost everything I know.'

  'Where?'

  'At Azrou, in the cedar forest. My sisters were sent to class, but my grandmother refused to let me attend.'

  'Why?'

  'Because she said they would teach me to read.'

  'That sounds like back-to-front thinking,' I said.

  'It does because you have been to school. But, to her, reading was a curse, a way of blocking real thinking.' Marwan broke off, leaned on his rake. 'I'll tell you something,' he said.

  'What?'

  'Everything I know has come in through my ears. I've never read a word.'

  'So?'

  'So I see the world in a different way.'

  Oriental culture, of which Morocco is certainly a part, has at its root a belief in selflessness. It's a subject rarely spoken of in the West and even less frequently understood. To be selfless, you would give charity anonymously, walk softly on the earth and look out for others – even total strangers – before you look out for yourself. To the Arab mind, the self is an obstacle, an impediment, in humanity's quest for real progress. Life in Morocco introduced me time and again to people who had achieved a form of everyday selflessness. It was a quality I respected beyond any other, a goal – perhaps unattainable – I hoped one day to touch. I found myself wondering if the search for the story in my heart might be a component, an element, somehow linked to selflessness.

  As always, my teachers were the people around me.

  One morning I asked Zohra if she had seen a hundred dirhams which I remembered leaving in my trousers the night before. She looked worried, said she would search for the money, and ran off upstairs. When she came down, she was holding a crumpled hundred-dirham note.

  'Here it is, Monsieur,' she said, handing it over.

  I thanked her.

  That afternoon Rachana found the original hundred-dirham note I had 'lost'. It was on the night-stand beside my bed. Zohra had been prepared to forgo a hundred dirhams of her own money, a huge sum, more than ten dollars, to cloak my carelessness.

  Nothing was really so important to my father as the achievement of selflessness. He rarely mentioned it directly, but tried to guide us to it in a roundabout way. It was sometimes like setting out for a specific destination without a map or the name of the place you are hoping to find. With their rock-solid culture of values, stories were a way of understanding the goal.

  During one visit to Morocco, I remember travelling back up towards Tangier. I had been given a small coin for my pocket money. We stopped at a market to buy some fruit. Standing there, I saw a woman with no hands, begging at the side of the road. In front of her was a bowl. Feeling very sorry for the woman, I went over and dropped my pocket money in the bowl.

  When we got back to the car, I told my parents what I had done. I expected praise, to be told how well I had behaved. But my father's face soured.

  'Never give charity if the reason is to make yourself feel better,' he said. 'Real charity is not selfish, but selfless.'

  After his death, I began to learn of my father's own selflessness. Hearing that he had died, a number of people wrote to tell me how he had helped them anonymously and that only later had they realized he had been the benefactor.

  Perhaps his strangest act of charity involved the Queen of England.

  On a state visit through the Middle East, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth had presented an Arab head of state with her customary gift, a signed photograph of herself in a silver frame. Reading about the gift over his morning tea, my father must have balked at such a presentation. Through Arab eyes it would be regarded as a tasteless embodiment of ego. My father withdrew a large amount of money from his bank, purchased in cash a gift more appropriate to royal Arabian taste and had it sent to the head of state, on behalf of the Queen.

  One afternoon Marwan saw me reading in the garden. Unlike Osman and the Bear, he was always keen to make conversation. He came over, shook my hand and wished me peace.

  'What is your book?' he asked.

  'Folktales from Scandinavia.'

  'How does it feel?'

  'Good, it feels good.'

  Marwan touched a fingertip to his eye.

  'There,' he said. 'How does it feel there?'

  'To my eyes?'

  'Yes.'

  'It feels good.'

  'But it's different.'

  'Different from what?'

  'From a story that comes in through the ears.'

  Over the first weeks that Marwan worked for us, I found myself thinking about his situation. He was a product of a far more ancient and, in some ways, a far purer system than I. In our world we frown on the illiterate because we feel they are missing out on the wealth of information stored in books. In a way, it's true of course. The very word 'illiterate' is heavy with negative connotation.

  But at the same time we are who we are as a result of illiteracy throughout much of human history. If you have no written language, you have to commit information to memory. Instead of reading it, you rely on those with the information – the storytellers – to recount it.

  By their nature, most tribal and nomadic societies have had no writing system. And they are blessed as a result. They depend on one another for entertainment, for stimulation. Huddled round the campfire, the storytellers pass on the collective wisdom of the tribe. Their oral tradition is perfected and sleek, like stones in a river, rounded by time. The information has an extra dimension because it enters the body through the ears and not through the eyes. Listen, stare into the flames, and imagination unfolds.

  I have seen storytellers casting their magic in the depths of the Peruvian Ama
zon and in teahouses in Turkey, in India and Afghanistan. I have found them, too, in Papua New Guinea and in Patagonia, in Kenya's Rift Valley, in Namibia and Kazakhstan. Their effect is always the same. They walk a tightrope, no wider than a hair's breadth, suspended between fact and fantasy, singing to the most primitive part of our minds. We cannot help but let them in. With words they can enchant us, teach us, pass on knowledge and wisdom, as they had done to Marwan.

  Stories are a communal currency of humanity. They follow the same patterns irrespective of where they are found. And, inexplicably, the same stories appear in cultures continents apart. How is it that similar tales can be found in Iceland and in pre-Columbian America? How come Cinderella is considered European, but is also a part of the folklore of the American Algonquins?

  My father used to tell me that stories offer the listener a chance to escape but, more importantly, he said, they provide people with a chance to maximize their minds. Suspend ordinary constraints, allow the imagination to be freed, and we are charged with the capability of heightened thought.

  Learn to use your eyes as if they are your ears, he said, and you become connected with the ancient heritage of man, a dream world for the waking mind.

  TEN

  Work is not what people think it is.

  It is not just something which, when it is operating, you can see from outside.

  Jalaluddin Rumi

  THE THOUGHT OF OUR HOME BEING BUILT OVER A HOLY MAN'S grave was unsettling at first. I didn't want to tell Rachana about it, in case it proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back. During the time we had lived in Morocco, we had crossed an ocean of difficulties, ranging from locusts to overweight rats, from police raids to jinns and dismembered cats. At long last Rachana was getting used to life at the Caliph's House. Deep down I knew she regretted ever leaving the imagined tranquillity of London and wished we were living in a sleepy corner of suburbia. But, as I kept reminding her, a life without steep learning curves is no life at all. I didn't want to tip the balance with another unwelcome revelation.

  So I bit my lip.

  As so often happened, I found myself trapped by Casablanca, or, rather, by Dar Khalifa. The maids, the guardians, and the surfeit of workers, who drifted in and out like the Atlantic tide, ensnared us with demands. I longed to take to the road and go in search of the story in my heart but, each time I tried to break free, a giant wave washed me back to shore.

  Then, one morning, I received a telephone call from a stranger in Tangier. He spoke in a frail Italian voice and said he would explain who he was.

  A month before, I had been accosted by a door-to-door salesman. Somehow he had made his way through the protective barrier of the shantytown and happened upon our house. He rapped hard on the door. I went out to see who was there. The salesman had a battered vinyl case, a scruffy mauve-coloured suit and dark circles round his eyes. I guessed he was in sales before he even opened his mouth. There was something about his fingers that gave it away. They fidgeted about, as if hoping to tantalize me with a range of manufactured goods.

  The salesman lunged forward and pressed a business card on to my palm.

  'What do you need?' he asked.

  I looked at him, wondering how I could get away without being too impolite.

  'I need to go back to my work,' I said.

  The man, whose card advertised his name as Abdul Hafiz, flipped open his shabby attaché case and snatched a handful of brochures.

  'Whatever your need, I have a product,' he said confidently. 'If you have rats, blocked drains, dandruff, or boils, I can solve your problem.'

  'We did have rats,' I said, 'but they seem to have been chased away, because we rent a cat twice a week from a neighbour in the bidonville. As for blocked drains, the guardians clear those. And dandruff and boils, well . . .' I said, 'I think we have them both covered.'

  I thanked the salesman, stepped back into the house and shut the front door.

  Another member of society might have felt disheartened at having a door shut in his face. But to a salesman it's the dropping of a gauntlet.

  I turned to go back to my library and my book. There was another loud thump at the door. I am a believer that everyone deserves a certain amount of attention, even salesmen with goods no one wants. So I opened the door a second time.

  Abdul Hafiz jabbed a fidgety finger across the threshold.

  'I know,' he said menacingly, 'I have guessed it.'

  'Guessed what?'

  'What you need.'

  I took a deep breath.

  'You need an electric razor,' he said.

  'No, I don't.'

  I was about to close the door again, when the salesman slipped a pad of paper from his case.

  'Write on this what you do need,' he said.

  'But I don't need anything.'

  Abdul Hafiz brushed a hair off the lapel of his mauve jacket.

  'Everyone needs something,' he said.

  It was then I remembered. There was one thing I wanted very much to find, an original edition of Richard Burton's Arabian Nights, like the one my father had given to the guest. I wrote the title of the book and the details of the edition on the paper. Abdul Hafiz squinted at the words, took my telephone number and clicked the catches of his attaché case closed.

  He shook my hand, turned about and trudged back down the muddy track through the shantytown. I never expected to hear of him again. The chance of there being a first edition of Burton's great work in Morocco was slim; the chance of it being for sale was one in a million.

  So when the call came from Tangier, it was all the more of a surprise.

  'Monsieur Shah?' said the Italian voice on the phone.

  'Yes, I am Tahir Shah.'

  'Monsieur Shah, I have the books.'

  'Which books?'

  'The books you asked Abdul Hafiz to find.'

  Before catching the train to Tangier, I stopped in at the cobbler's shop with another pair of worn-out shoes. The ancient craftsman was huddled up against the cold, the navy wool hat pulled down low on his creased brow. He greeted me with the lengthy greeting of old friends. He asked me my name. I told him.

  'I will call you Tahir,' he said, 'and you must call me Noureddine.'

  'I am honoured to do so.'

  The cobbler licked his top lip.

  'Have you brought me another treasure?' he asked.

  I fumbled in my satchel and dug out a pair of suede brogues. The soles were completely worn through. I apologized for not having taken more care of the shoes. The old cobbler's eyes seemed to glow. He picked them up one at a time and ran a thumbnail down the stitching.

  'Your feet have known luxury,' he said.

  'I'm going to Tangier to buy some books,' I explained, 'and I'll be back in three or four days.'

  'They will be ready by then, if God wills it,' said the cobbler, nudging the shoes into one of the pigeon-holes behind him.

  I was about to leave, when the old man touched a finger to my cuff.

  'Would you bring the books to show me?' he asked.

  Tangier holds a special place in my heart. It was there that my grandfather lived, then died, knocked down outside his villa on the steep rue de la Plage by a reversing Coca-Cola truck. He was an Afghan named Ikbal Ali Shah. Much of his life was spent travelling the Middle East and Central Asia, writing books on the worlds he encountered. When his wife died of cancer before she reached sixty, he was distraught beyond words. With a sea-trunk full of books, he set sail for Morocco, because it was the one place he could think of where they had never been together.

  Whenever I visit Tangier, I can feel my grandfather's presence there. I imagine that I spot him walking up the hill to take his usual seat at Café France, or strolling down near Cecil's Hotel on the palm-fringed Corniche. His air of quiet sophistication, a bridge between East and West, matched the city in which he spent the last decade of his life.

  My grandfather had passed the baton of storytelling to my father, a baton which he had
received from his own father, the nawab Amjed Ali Shah, a century ago.

  I was only three when he was struck down and killed, but I just remember him, an elderly figure in the yellow light of afternoon, sitting on his terrace, holding court. The more time I have spent in Morocco, the more I have come to appreciate his own love of the kingdom, and have understood the way it must have reminded him of home.

  He had been raised at Sardhana, our family's principality in northern India, as well as at our ancestral lands in Afghanistan's mountain fortress, the Hindu Kush. His childhood had been tinted with the rich colours of eastern folklore, an immersion in the tales of great heroes and arch villains, a backdrop woven from the Arabian Nights.

  Like his father before him, he had been taught to think and learn through the matrix of stories. He regarded them as a repository of information, a tool for higher thought, a baton to be passed on and on.

  The train pulled into Tangier's new terminal, a mile or two from the town. It was a damp winter day, with a chilling wind ripping in from across the strait from Spain. Following the other passengers' example, I shunned the underground passage and scurried over the railway tracks despite the oncoming trains.

  No sane Moroccan would ever forgo a good short cut.

  I dialled the number to the salesman's contact, a man called Señor Benito, who was supposedly selling a first edition of Burton's A Thousand and One Nights. No reply. I tried a second time and a recorded voice revealed in French, and then Arabic, that the number had been disconnected. I hailed a taxi.

  'To the Continental,' I said.

  There can be no twentieth-century travel writer who has not been at least a little affected by the life of Richard Francis Burton. He was a polymath, a man of astonishing ability, who pushed his body and his mind to the limits of their capacity. In modern terms he was racist, a sexist, politically incorrect beyond all measure, but at the same time he was a man propelled by the devil's drive.