by Tahir Shah
Coincidentally, it was along his stretch of track that the Maharajah Express took us first. The next morning we awoke to find ourselves in the city of Vadodara, capital of Gujarat.
Stepping down onto a red carpet once again, we were serenaded by musicians, and then led on a tour of the ancient Gaekwad culture. And with it, came the first of a royal flush of palaces – a banquet at the Jambughoda estate at lunch, and another at the awe-inspiring Laxmi Vilas Palace at dusk.
There, in the great durbar hall, the royal band was positioned on a low dais. With a full retinue of staff and factota, the Maharajah could have commanded anything in terms of musical entertainment. And so I appreciated all the more what had been laid on. A pair of musicians was strumming simple stringed instruments, with a third playing about forty soup bowls filled with varying levels of water, with the end of a spoon.
During the night the train roved northward, reaching the Rajasthani city of Udaipur as I took my last bite of toast.
One of the great treasures of India, Udaipur has palaces aplenty, each one more astounding than the next. At the centre of it all is the Lake Palace, floating like a magical marble island amid the serene waters of Lake Pichola. Famously, it featured in the 1980s James Bond film Octopussy. From a vantage point high above, we were given a private reception in the sixteenth century City Palace, in which the Maharajah and his family still reside.
On once again through the night to Jodhpur, Rajasthan’s ‘Blue City’. Set on the edge of the Great Thar Desert, Jodhpur bustles with life, with wares, and with a kaleidoscope of colour. Many of the buildings are dyed blue with indigo, signifying the homes of aristocracy.
During a famine in the 1930s, the Maharajah there commissioned the Umaid Bhavan, a vast Art Deco palace, to give the starving populace paid work. The colossal dome was only accomplished by the ingenuity of a local engineer. The stones fitted together so tightly that there was no space for them to be pushed into position by hand. The engineer came up with a brilliant solution. The giant corner stones were placed on blocks of ice. As the ice melted, the stones dropped slowly into place.
On the evening of our visit to Jodhpur, we were treated to a banquet on the battlements of the colossal Meherangarh Fort, itself one of my most memorable experiences of recent years.
Yet, on the Maharajah Express there was almost no time to stop and ponder the wonders, which were coming thick and fast.
The red carpet was awaiting us once again.
Climbing back aboard, we sped northward once more, this time to the city of Bikaner.
The next afternoon was spent touring the exquisite Lalgarh Palace, its red sandstone structure adorned with sublime filigree work. Then, just before nightfall, we mounted a convoy of camel carts and trouped into the Thar Desert. A banquet had been prepared under the stars, Rajasthani tribal dancers and campfires illuminating the night.
Another day, and another city.
This time, the crème de la crème – Jaipur. Capital of Rajasthan, it’s a raw and regal fusion of medieval and modern. One of the must-visit destinations for anyone, the ‘Pink City’ is steeped in nostalgia and in a dazzlingly vibrant charm unlike anything else.
The highlight of the entire journey came for me that afternoon. Having reached the Jai Mahal Palace, we were invited to take part in the sport of kings – a match of ‘elephant polo’.
Mahouts steer the elephants, while the riders lean down with their mallets, in a desperate attempt to knock a football into the goal. Quite unlike the rip-roaring speed of equestrian polo, the game played on elephant back is sedate to put it mildly – the overwhelming problem being that the elephants tend to burst the ball by treading on it.
After Jaipur, the Maharajah Express rumbled on to the tiger reserve at Ranthambore, one of the only sanctuaries of the noblest of cats left on the Subcontinent. And on again to the deserted Mughal city of Fatehpur Sikri. Constructed by Emperor Akbar, it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and remains as pristine as the day it was built four centuries ago.
The following morning, we reached the most famous landmark of all – the Taj Mahal. Lost in an eerie mist, the Taj is one of those buildings whose chilling beauty can grasp even the most wayward attention for hours at a time. That the Maharajah Express should deliver us so close to such a jewel of human endeavour seemed like the ultimate perfection.
Late that afternoon, the bubble of opulence that we all now regarded as our home, chugged through an eternity of slums, the lead up to any sprawling Indian city. And, eventually, we came to a halt on a platform at Delhi’s Safdarjung station just in time for the evening rush. By now, there was a definite sense that it was our train, just as the thought of leaving it was almost too much to bear.
Before stepping down onto the red carpet for the last time, my valet, Vikram, eased himself out from his cupboard in the corridor and saluted me. Then he shook me by the hand.
‘Very sad you leaving, Sahib,’ he said.
I thanked him. He shook my hand a second time, and saluted again for good measure.
A moment later, I was just another lost soul adrift on a sea of commuters. I glanced back at the platform. The Maharajah Express had vanished.
I wondered if it had ever been there at all.
TWO
A Conversation Paid for in Postage Stamps
HICHAM HARRASS LIVES in a one-room shack he built himself on the western-most edge of Casablanca.
The walls are made from third-hand breeze blocks and the roof is laid with rusting tin. His home does not have an address, but it does have a number. It is number 2043. All around it there’s a jumble of other shacks, each with their number daubed on the wall in dripping red paint. If you turned up at the bidonville, the shanty-town, you’d have no hope in finding Hicham’s place in the maze of alleyways. But ask for him by name and every man, woman and smallest child, will jab a finger towards his door.
I met Hicham because of his passion for postage stamps.
Our house is half a mile from the Atlantic. Its gardens are an oasis of date palms and mimosa trees, and are surrounded on all sides by the breeze block shanty-town. When we first moved into the house I must admit I was anxious. We had no idea how our neighbours would greet us, whether they could get used to a family of foreigners living in their midst.
One morning during our first week in Casablanca, there was a tap at the door. I went to open it, and found an elderly man standing in the frame. His skin was the colour of roasted almonds. He had a long shiny face with a scrub of white beard at the end of his chin. He wore a frayed black and white wool jelaba, and old yellow baboush slippers on his feet.
Before I could ask how I could help him, the man extended a hand, smiled, said his name was Hicham, and that he collected postage stamps.
‘Do you have any to spare?’ he enquired politely. ‘I could pay you money for them, a few dirhams.’
I thought for a moment.
‘We haven’t received any mail yet,’ I replied. ‘We’ve just arrived.’
Hicham’s smile melted. I told him to come back in a week.
‘Will you forget?’ he asked.
I promised not to.
A week later Hicham was at the door again. I had collected five British stamps, all bearing the Queen’s head. I handed them over, and a remarkable friendship began.
After that I collected all the stamps on my letters and gave them to Hicham. He was a proud man and insisted on paying me, although he had almost no money at all. I didn’t want to offend him by refusing payment, and so we came up with a solution.
We agreed to meet at his home at the same time each week. I would pass over the postage stamps and, in return, he could tell me about his life.
Hicham Harrass was born in a village three days’ walk from the southern city of Agadir. His father had been a farmer, with half an acre of dusty land. Along with five brothers and a sister, he grew up in a house made from flotsam, gleaned from the Atlantic waves.
When Hicham was seven years old
, a sehura, a witch, came to the house and declared that he would drop dead within the next cycle of the moon. The only way to avoid such a fate, she said, was for Hicham’s parents to give the boy away to a stranger. The family was very upset but, believing the witch’s prediction would come true, they gave him to the next man who came into the village. Fortunately for Hicham, that man was a trader, a man called Ayman.
‘He needed a boy to help him,’ said Hicham, ‘and so I travelled around Morocco with him and his cart, buying and selling scrap metal as we went. On the long journeys between small towns he taught me,’ Hicham continued. ‘He taught me about life, and how to live it.’
I asked what he meant.
The old man’s wife flustered over with more mint tea.
‘Ayman taught me to be selfless,’ he said. ‘That means giving more to the people you meet than you take from them. And it means walking softly on the Earth.’
As the years had passed, Ayman and the young Hicham crisscrossed the Kingdom again and again. They travelled from Agadir to Essaouira, from Marrakech to Fès, from Tangier to Casablanca, always on the donkey cart piled high with scrap metal.
‘We visited places that aren’t on any maps,’ said Hicham. ‘It was adventure. Real adventure. You can’t understand what it was like – it was like waking from a dream! Every mile that we travelled, Ayman would talk. Every mile was a lesson. He taught me about honour, and to tell the truth. It’s because of Ayman that I cannot lie. Truth is the backbone of my life. It’s my religion.’
‘But Islam is your religion,’ I said.
‘It’s the same thing,’ said Hicham. ‘Islam is Truth. It’s the truth to believe in yourself, in those around you, and in God.’
Almost every week for a year, Hicham and I met and talked and talked, in conversation paid for in postage stamps. There are so many memorable conversations in my head, but few have ever been quite so revealing as those with Hicham. Over the months, I found myself grasping the basics of what must surely be real Islam.
One afternoon, Hicham invited me in, served me a ubiquitous glass of steaming mint tea, and said:
‘You are young, your eyes are wide open, your mind is clear. But you must take care to understand.’
‘To understand what?’
‘To understand the right Path.’
Hicham called out the door to his wife, who was chatting to a neighbour in the street. He apologized.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘she forgets the duty of honouring a guest with food.’
I asked about the Path.
‘To understand the right Path,’ Hicham said, stroking his tuft of beard, ‘you must understand what it is not. It’s easy. It’s a lesson in life. Islam is not complicated, or cruel, or unfair. Anyone who cannot describe it in the most simplistic way is telling falsehoods. He’s telling lies. He’s as bad as the fanatics.’
I asked about the fanatics – about Al-Qaeda, and other radical groups.
Hicham rubbed his eyes.
‘They pretend that what they are doing is in the name of Allah, but it’s in the name of Satan,’ he said very softly. ‘They are hijacking our religion. Open your eyes and see it for yourself! Islam teaches tolerance and modesty. It doesn’t tell people to fly passenger jets into skyscrapers, or to strap plastic explosives to the waists and to slaughter innocent women and children. These people must be stopped.’
The next week, I handed over a fresh crop of postage stamps.
As always, the old man spent a few moments poring over them, commenting on each one. His favourites were from England but, ‘not those silly ones with the Queen,’ he would say. ‘I like the big, more unusual ones. They hint at the society, the tradition.’
I steered the conversation away from postage stamps, and onto the problems of the world. I asked Hicham how Islam could stop Al-Qaeda. He didn’t say anything at first; he was too busy sorting through the stamps.
‘I’ll tell you,’ he said at length. ‘You have to starve them of publicity. That’s what to do. Don’t report their misdeeds. Ignore them. Pretend they don’t exist.’
‘Won’t that just make them wilder for publicity?’
Hicham laughed. He laughed and he laughed until his old sagging cheeks were the colour of beetroot.
‘Of course it would,’ he said. ‘But it doesn’t matter how angry they get, so long as we rise up tall and spread the truth about Islam. We must tell people the facts, the real facts. That’s what I’m saying.’
‘What are the real facts?’
‘Tell them that Islam doesn’t order women to veil,’ he said. ‘The tradition was copied from the Christians of Byzantium. And tell them that Islam doesn’t say you cannot drink wine – it just says you can’t become intoxicated. And,’ Hicham went on, his voice rising in volume, ‘you can tell them that Islam says that all Muslims are equal. We are brothers. That means an imam or a religious scholar is equal to us. He can’t tell us what to do!’
Three weeks ago I flew to London for a few days, leaving my wife and the children at our oasis in the shanty-town. On the evening I returned to Casablanca, there was a knock at the door.
‘That will be Hicham,’ I said to my wife, ‘he’ll be wondering where I have been.’
I opened the door, expecting to see the old man’s face. But it wasn’t him. It was his wife, Khadija. She was crying.
‘My husband died three days ago,’ she said. ‘He told me if anything ever happened to him, that I should give you this.’
The old woman was holding a box. She held it out towards me. I thanked her. A moment later she was gone. I went inside to my desk, turned on the lamp, and opened the box.
In it were Hicham’s stamp albums. I sat down in the dim light. I was sad to have lost a wise friend, but at the same time I was happy – happy that we had found each other at all, and had so many good conversations, each one paid for in postage stamps.
THREE
A Labyrinth in Fès
THEIR HOOVES STUMBLING over the flagstones, a procession of clove-brown pack mules lurch downhill into the ancient labyrinth.
Laden with tanned sheepskins and sacks of cement, with soap powder and TV sets in crates, the mules ply a route trodden by animals and men for a thousand years and more.
The Fès medina is a vast sprawling honeycomb of interwoven lanes, many of them no wider than a barrel’s length. They form a kaleidoscope of life that’s changed little in centuries, the spiritual heart of Morocco. Wander the streets and you’re cast back in time as your senses are overpowered. The pungent scent of lamb roasting on spits, the muffled sound of hammers striking great sheets of burnished brass; the sight of camel heads hanging outside butchers’ stalls.
In recent years it’s Marrakech that’s attracted the bulk of Morocco’s tourists. But, as that city inches ever closer to becoming a Disneyland distortion of reality, it’s Fès that stands as a beacon for the genuine article – without doubt the only medieval Arab city on Earth left almost completely in tact.
Moroccans regard Fès as nothing short of a sacred treasure trove. In whispers they describe the dark authenticity which doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s true that some visitors find the medina’s labyrinth bewitching, even unsettling, but all who reach out and grasp it, are mesmerized by what they find.
Founded in the year 789 by King Idriss I, on the river whose name it bears, Fès has been a centre of culture and learning since the days of Harun ar-Rachid. Once part of a network of interconnected cities, spread throughout the Islamic world, Fès was linked by pilgrimage routes to Cordoba, Baghdad, Cairo and Samarkand. At the forefront of knowledge, and home to the greatest thinkers of its day, it was a city where breakthroughs were made – in science and technology, in literature and the arts.
But time is a great leveller.
For centuries Fès lay asleep – its palaces, fondouks, medrasas and mosaic fountains, each one a jewel of craftsmanship, hidden beneath a veil. Although proud of their city, the rich gradually moved away to the
new town, or to Casablanca – the kingdom’s economic hub – leaving the ancient medina to languish.
Only now is the veil being lifted.
And, nowhere is the change faster than on Talaa Kebir. A main thoroughfare bustling with people and animals, feet and hooves jostling for space, the street almost defies description. Angled steeply downhill, (its name translates as ‘great climb’), it snakes down all the way to the ancient Karaouiyine Mosque.
Beginning at the fabulous arched blue gate of Bab Boujloud, Talaa Kebir runs deep into the rabbit warren of alleyways and lanes, spanning centuries of life. To stroll down it is to strip away the layers of humanity towards its medieval core.
Every inch of the way, it’s packed with action.
There are street stalls heaped with melons, pomegranates and prickly pears. Fish sellers, their battered old carts serenaded by cats. Knife sharpeners grinding away at rusty blades, barbers and blind men, merchants, musicians and mendicants. Either side of the street, there are stalls piled high with ordinary wares – flour sieves, sneakers and underpants, bunches of fresh mint furled up in newspaper, loofahs and Man United football strips.
While there’s an abundance of tourist kitsch, most of the stuff on offer is aimed at ordinary Moroccans – in a way the magic of the place. And, as if the daily bustle weren’t enough, weaving through the crowds like shuttles on a loom are the pack mules. Almost everything on sale is heaved into the medina on their trusty backs.
But centuries of slumber have taken a heavy toll on Talaa Kebir, a theatre of the ordinary – and extraordinary. The wooden shop-fronts are rotting, their foundations battered by the elements – searing summer heat and austere winter cold. Most of the merchants can’t afford to make repairs. They struggle to make a living as it is.
Fortunately though, UNESCO spearheaded an international campaign, adding the ancient medina to its roll call of World Heritage sites. Although not actually paying for repairs – which were funded by the Moroccan government under the auspices of the King – UNESCO made a master plan for the old city’s revival. The first job undertaken was to erect wooden scaffolding around more than a thousand buildings regarded as in danger of collapsing.