by Tahir Shah
By the time the little red taxi trundled down our lane, Kate was much calmer. Hakim reported the details and I thanked him for assisting a foreign lady in distress. Then I took our visitor into the salon for a cup of mint tea. She was in her forties, a little taller than average, with a mane of copper-red hair and a pair of small, delicate hands, the nails polished red. She apologized for causing a scene, but said it had all been too overwhelming for her.
'Was it the heat?'
'No, it wasn't that,' she replied. 'It was my ignorance, a sense of my own tremendous ignorance.'
I asked what she meant.
'In the United States we know the system,' she said. 'But down there at the port I felt like a dancer about to go onstage to perform a dance for which I knew none of the moves.'
'How did it make you feel?'
'It crushed me, and I always thought I was so in control,' she said.
It was then that Kate said something that interested me very greatly, something I have thought about every day since.
'When I was a child my father couldn't afford a good education,' she said. 'We went to average schools. I remember on my first day of grade school he sat me down on my bed and said he would teach me a way to understand the world, and to be wiser than almost anyone in it. He knew the secret, he said.'
I sat forward, put my glass on the table, and listened. 'What was it . . . the secret?'
Kate smiled. 'He told me to read a lot of fiction,' she said. 'Whatever problems whack you in life, he said the answer was fiction.'
'Stories?'
'Well, yes, stories, and all sorts of stuff.'
'Why fiction?'
'He said it was psychotherapy. As a child I didn't know what that meant. But I read books all the same, and I found that they worked in a silent way, balancing my mind.'
Kate told me she had never written fiction, but had become a film director and was making movies.
'I'm a believer in the idea that Hollywood's a mass psychotherapist,' she said. 'The stories go into the subconscious and work away. People don't realize it, but when they go to the movies on a Friday night they're really paying a visit to their shrink.'
We went out into the garden and watched a pair of collared doves working on their nest. Kate told me about a movie she had been making in Kansas.
'You know what's so strange to me?' she asked.
'What?'
'That as a film-maker you know the story you've created is total fiction, with actors and props, but even so you're drawn in. You find yourself suspending disbelief, slipping into the story.' Kate looked at me and frowned, as if to show she was making a very serious point. 'That's the power of fiction,' she said, 'it keeps us on track and sings to the primal creature in us all.'
One morning when I was a child, my father came out to the lawn where I was playing with my box of wooden bricks. He picked up one of the smaller bricks, a yellow one, and said: 'This brick is the house in which we live.' He picked up another, a larger, red one. 'And this brick is the village out there.' Then he took the actual box in which the bricks had come and placed it on the grass, a long way from the others. 'This box is Afghanistan,' he said. 'Do you understand?'
'Yes, Baba.'
'Are you quite sure that you understand?'
I nodded.
'Tahir Jan,' he said, 'I am showing you this because it's an important thing. I will explain it to you. If I go into the kitchen and take a dry sponge, and put it in a bowl of water, it will suck up a lot of water, won't it?'
'Yes, Baba.'
'But if I take the same sponge and put it in a bowl of ice, it won't suck up anything at all. That's because the sponge isn't designed to suck up ice. Its structure – lots of little holes – can't take in ice, only water.'
He sat down beside me, motioning with his hands.
'Ice is water, but in a different form,' he said. 'To make it into water – so we can suck it up easily – we need to change its form. The water is knowledge, Tahir Jan, and the sponge is your mind. When we hear information, a lot of it,' he said, 'sometimes it's too hard for us to suck up. It's like ice. We hear it in the same way that the sponge touches the bowl of ice, but it doesn't get inside. But as soon as you melt the ice, the water penetrates deep into the middle of the sponge. And that's what stories do.'
My father always spoke very carefully to children so that they understood. He would pause and study the feedback, making sure what he said was getting through. I wasn't quite sure what he was aiming at and was rather keen to get on playing with my bricks.
'Stories are a way of melting the ice,' he said gently, 'turning it into water. They are like repackaging something – changing its form – so that the design of the sponge can accept it.' He pointed to the bricks. 'When I told you that brick was our house, that other one was the village and that box way over there was Afghanistan, you knew what I meant, didn't you?'
'Yes, I did, Baba.'
'And you knew that they weren't really the house, the village and Afghanistan . . . but they were two bricks and a box?'
'Yes.'
'Well, that's how stories are. They are symbols. The different people and the things in stories represent other things, bigger things. In the same way that we can talk about a sponge and ice, which means something else, we can use the bricks and the box to explain in an easy way an idea that's very complicated to understand.
'Try and remember, Tahir Jan, that there are symbols all around us. Look out for them, examine them, and work out what they mean. They're a kind of code. Some people will try and tell you the symbols don't exist, or they'll say that something they do not understand is nothing more than what it first appears to be. But don't believe them.'
When Sukayna visited us and told me that the stairs and the high ceiling were symbols, I understood exactly what she meant, because I remembered sitting on the lawn with my box of bricks. The astrologer's idea, the symbols of Heaven and Hell, sounded preposterous.
But the more I turned it in my mind, the more sense it made.
In Morocco, and in the Arab world, symbols are all around, just as they are everywhere else. But the difference is that the Oriental mind can make sense of them, decipher them. People are trained to recognize symbols, to understand through a chain of transmission that stretches back centuries. The Occidental world once had the same chain but, somewhere along the line, one of the links was broken and the chain collapsed. The result is that the symbols that ornament Western society – and are quite plain to Orientals – can't be decoded any longer by the Western mind. They are regarded as nothing more than pretty decoration or, in the case of stories, as simple entertainment.
A few days after Noureddine went into hospital, I heard from Osman that a date had been given for the demolition of the bidonville. It was to take place the next month, a week after the move to newly-built tower blocks up the hill in Hay Hassani. The guardians and Zohra, who all lived in the shantytown, were unable to contain their excitement.
'We are going to have hot water in the bathroom,' said Osman, 'and special windows that do not let in the cold.'
'And there will be a lift that zooms up to the top,' said the Bear.
'And from there, we shall have a view of the whole of Morocco,' Zohra added.
'What will happen to the land on which the bidonville is built?' I asked.
Marwan swept his hand out sideways.
'Flattened,' he said. 'Then there will be buildings, lots of them.'
'What kind of buildings?'
'Villas for the rich,' said Osman.
'People with a lot of money.'
'Casa Trash,' I said.
The fact that the Caliph's House is located where it is – slap bang in the middle of the city's prime shantytown – gives us a window into a world where people are less financially fortunate. As time has passed, we have developed an abiding respect for everyone who lives in the bidonville. The people who live there may not have pockets lined with money, but their heads are screwed on
right. Their values are rock solid.
If the shantytown is at one end of the equation, then Casa Trash can be found far at the other extreme. Their lives are created from an alphabet of name brands, cosmetic surgery and monstrous black SUVs. Female Casa Trash is dressed in the latest Gucci or Chanel, is heeled in Prada and is so thin that you wonder how her organs function at all. Her vision is obscured by oversized sun goggles and her mouth is masked in lipstick of such thickness and viscosity that it hinders her speech.
She can be found in a handful of chichi haunts, such as Chez Paul, picking at platters of imported salad leaves, smoking designer cigarettes and rearranging her curls. She never looks at the friend she has come to lunch with, because she is on her phone and too preoccupied scanning the other tables, making sure she's been seen.
The male variety of Casa Trash carries at least two mobile phones and has a diamond-encrusted Rolex on his wrist. He drives a black German 4x4 with frosted windows and aromatic rawhide seats. He wears a black leather jacket, tight Levi 501s and so much aftershave that your eyes water as he passes. To show just how important he is, he speaks in little more than a whisper. His hair, weighed down with handfuls of gel, shines like a bowling ball and his teeth have been chemically whitened to create a Hollywood smile.
Casa Trash almost never come to the Caliph's House, partly because they are not normally invited, but also because, for them, the idea of fording a full-on shantytown is tantamount to committing bourgeois suicide. When they do come, we find them at the door, the women shaking in their high heels, the men inspecting the chassis of their car for damage.
On one occasion in the first week of March, a Casa Trash couple did penetrate our defences. They had seen an article about me in Time and had known a previous owner of Dar Khalifa. They drove at high speed through the bidonville, schoolchildren scattering in the nick of time before the black Porsche Cayenne crushed them into dust. The husband whispered he was an industrialist. He lit a cigar as thick as his wrist and asked me if the area was safe. Just before I answered, he pulled out a pair of mobile phones and whispered into them both at once.
His trophy wife seemed to have spent much of her adult years on a surgeon's table. The skin on her face was so tight and so loaded with Botox, I feared it might split right then. Her lips had been cosmetically edged with a dark pink line, her teeth capped, and it looked as if a pair of tennis balls had been pushed down her blouse.
The guardians were whitewashing the front of the house when the Casa Trash couple arrived. On the way into the house, the husband slipped his car key to Marwan and barked an order fast in Arabic to wash the vehicle down. I led the couple into the house for a show of forced hospitality. As we moved through the hallway, the Casa Trash wife waved a hand back towards the shantytown.
'Those poor little people,' she said, 'living in those squalid little shacks. It's a shame on our society.'
'But the homes in the bidonville are spotlessly clean inside,' I replied defensively. 'Everyone who lives there is well dressed and clean as well. Despite the lack of running water.'
The wife twisted a solitaire diamond on her finger.
'You must remember that they're not true Moroccans,' she said.
'I don't understand you,' I said, my hackles rising.
'They're thieves,' whispered the Casa Trash husband between phone calls. 'Nothing but thieves.'
Thankfully the couple left almost as soon as they had arrived. When they were gone, I went outside. The guardians were gloomy because the stork had disappeared again. As I was standing there outside the house, a little girl approached down the lane from the bidonville. She couldn't have been more than about seven. Her cheeks were rosy, her hair tied back in a ponytail. In her hand was a posy. They were not the kind of flowers you find in the fancy French florists in Maarif, but were in a way all the more beautiful. The little girl approached me, half nervous and half proud. When she was about two feet away, she motioned for me to bend down. I did so. She kissed my cheek, placed the posy on my hand and said, 'Shukran.'
I didn't understand why she had thanked me. I asked Marwan, who was standing there.
'She was thanking you, Monsieur Tahir,' he said, 'for not looking upon us with shame.'
The next afternoon, I dropped in on the hospital where the cobbler was convalescing. I made my way through the dim corridors, which echoed with the sound of bedpans and patients moaning, and traced the route back to his ward. He was lying asleep in a bed beside the door, his face grey rather than its characteristic dark brown. He was struggling to fill his lungs. An oxygen mask had been fitted to aid his strained breathing and a drip was feeding his arm.
I stood there for quite a while just looking at him.
The man in the next bed had his legs strapped and his head was bandaged tight. He seemed delirious, but his eyes managed to follow me as I crossed the room to take a chair over to the cobbler's bed. I leaned forward and held the old man's hand. It was cold and the fingers were almost purple. As I sat there, clearing my mind of the insignificant debris that tends to fill it, I remembered visiting one of Rachana's relatives in an Indian hospital some years before. The lady was in intensive care. We were permitted to go in a few minutes at a time. At the far end of the sterile room were ranged three small incubation units. Inside them were triplets, a day old – two girls and a boy. The father was there, his face ashen, dejected. The nurse said the little girls were expected to live, but the boy was so frail his chances were slim.
I visited two or three days in a row to see Rachana's relative. Every time I dropped by, I heard the babies' father talking to the boy in a whisper. He paid hardly any attention to the girls, spoke only to his son. By the end of the week the little girls were both dead. Their brother, although feeble, was expected to survive. All the while, his father continued talking to the boy. He didn't stop for a moment.
I asked one of the nurses what he was saying.
She said, 'He's telling him the epic tale of the Mahabarata.'
'But the child isn't awake.'
'It doesn't matter,' she replied. 'The words slip into the subconscious.'
Sitting at Noureddine's bedside and remembering the experience in India, I pushed a little closer to the bed. Holding his hand, I recounted a tale my father had told me as a child, when I was lying sick in my bed – the story of 'The Man Who Turned into a Mule'.
The night after visiting the cobbler, I dreamed of the magic carpet again. Weeks had passed since I had last been wafted up into the night sky, carried away to its distant kingdom. As soon as I saw the carpet lying there, laid out on the lawn, I ran to it, stepped aboard and sensed its fibres bristle with eagerness to get away. With the breeze rustling through the eucalyptus trees, we left the Caliph's House far behind and travelled out over the Atlantic, what the Arabs call Bahr Adulumat, the Sea of Darkness.
The carpet flew faster than before, pushing up higher and higher to where the air was thin. The stars above were bright like lanterns and, as we flew at great speed, I glimpsed the curve of the earth's atmosphere. Suddenly, we plunged. Spiralling down, my cheeks pinned back, like a skydiver in freefall. At first I screamed, but there was no one to hear me. No one except for the carpet. I clung on to its edge, spread-eagled, but I became too hoarse to shout. Then, gradually, our rate of descent reduced and we were flying horizontal once again.
The carpet skimmed over a thousand domed roofs, over streets and across grassland. I sat up and then a very strange thing happened. I found I could understand what the carpet was saying.
'Everything I show you has a meaning,' it said. 'Sometimes we know at once what something represents. But at other times we have to turn the signs around in our heads and decipher them. Do you understand me?'
'Is that you, the carpet, talking to me?'
'You know it's me,' said the carpet, bristling, 'and you heard what I asked.'
'I understand,' I said. 'But I don't really know what's going on.'
The carpet banked right and soare
d down a black street lined with windows, each one shrouded in gauze. In every window was a candle. It made for a chilling sight.
'What is this place?' I asked.
'You know it,' said the carpet.
'No, I don't.'
'Yes . . . remember my words, that what I show you has a meaning.'
'Well, what could this mean?'
'Think! Think!'
'I don't know!'
'Yes, you do, but you must let your imagination tell you.'
'I closed my eyes as we flew, faster and faster down the pitch-black street, each house a facsimile of the last – six windows with a solemn candle in each, the flames flickering as we passed.
'The street is Death,' I said, 'and the windows are Hope.'
'And the candles that burn in them?'
'They are . . .'
'Yes?' the carpet yelled. 'What are they?'
'They are Innocence.'
The next morning, I sat up in bed, my eyes circled with fear. All I could think of was the princess at the gallows. What did she represent? I thought hard, imagined all kinds of lunacy. Then it hit me. It was obvious, right in my face.
The girl standing at the gallows was my own ambition.
TWENTY-ONE
'The king spoke to me this morning!' exclaimed Joha at the teahouse.
'What did he say?'
'Get out of my way, you idiot!'
I RETURNED TO THE HOSPITAL A DAY LATER TO FIND THE cobbler's bed stripped of its sheets and the nightstand cleared. My stomach felt sick with bile. The man at the next bed was still there, his legs suspended with wires and weights.
I stopped a nurse and motioned to the empty bed.
'Mr Noureddine,' I said, 'has he been moved?'