In an Antique Land

by Amitav Ghosh

  Then he marched us off across the square again, towards the Sidi’s tomb. ‘We should see the zikr,’ he said sternly to his cousins. ‘That’s the most important part of the mowlid.’

  A group of about thirty men, of all ages, had gathered in front of the tomb. Standing in rows, with their feet apart, they were jerking their heads and their torsos from side to side while a man dressed in a white turban chanted into a microphone. They swung their bodies in time with the rhythm, only their heads and their upper bodies moving, their feet perfectly still.

  ‘They are Sûfis,’ Jabir said for my benefit. ‘They are invoking God by chanting his name.’

  Some of the men had shut their eyes, and the others looked rapt, mesmerized by the rhythm and the movement. As the singer increased the tempo, their heads began to move faster, keeping time, their eyes becoming increasingly glazed, unseeing.

  Jabir and his cousins were soon bored by the zikr. ‘Makes me dizzy,’ one of them said, and we went off to look at the stalls again.

  It was not long before Jabir had a new audience.

  ‘Doesn’t know Our Lord, doesn’t know anything … if you ask him how water-wheels are made, he’ll say: “They have babies”.’

  ‘Oh the black day!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Go on, ask him.’

  ‘Do water-wheels have babies, ya doktór?’ one of the boys said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘They lay eggs.’

  ‘Did you hear that? He thinks water-wheels lay eggs.’

  I began to yearn for the solitude of my room, and to my relief, I did not have to wait long before the boys decided to head back across the cotton fields.

  Early next morning, Jabir burst in, his face flushed with excitement. ‘Do you know what happened last night?’ he said, shaking me out of bed. ‘There was a murder—a man was murdered at the mowlid.’

  ‘What happened?’ I said confusedly.

  It had happened near the swings, Jabir said, exactly where we had been last night. The murdered man had been sitting on a swing when someone had come along and asked him to get off. He was pushed when he refused, and had fallen off and died, hitting his head on a rock.

  And now, Jabir said, drawing himself up to his full height, there would be a blood feud. That was the law of the Arabs: ‘Me and my brother against my cousin; me and my cousin against the stranger.’ This was a serious matter: if a man killed someone, then he and all his male kin on the paternal side could be killed in revenge by the dead man’s family. They would have to go and hide with their maternal relatives until their uncles and the shaikhs of the land could talk to the dead man’s family and persuade them to come to a council of reconciliation. Then, when the grief of the dead man’s family had eased a little, an amnesty would be declared. The two lineages would meet in some safe central place, and in the presence of their elders they would negotiate a blood-money payment. That was thâr, the law of feud; damm, the law of blood; the ancient, immutable law of the Arabs.

  ‘All that for pushing a man off a swing?’ I asked, bleary-eyed.

  Jabir paused to think. ‘Well, maybe a little one,’ he said wistfully. ‘Just a small feud.’

  ‘Who was the man who was killed?’

  ‘His name was Fathy,’ said Jabir, ‘but people called him “the Sparrow”. He was from the village down the road: Nashawy. Now there’ll be a feud there.’

  I was somehow very doubtful, but for all the attention Jabir paid me, I could have been a six-year-old child.

  8

  IT WAS MABROUK, Shaikh Musa’s nephew, who was responsible for improving my standing in Jabir’s eyes.

  That year Mabrouk’s father had done exceptionally well from his vegetable plot. He’d taken a risk the autumn before by planting a lot of carrots after the cotton harvest. Everyone had tried to dissuade him—his wife, his brothers (including Shaikh Musa) and most of his cousins and relatives. The carrots would have to be harvested all at the same time, they had said, and what if the prices in the market were low that week? He would end up selling a whole truckload of carrots at a loss; it was better to plant many different kinds of vegetables, less of a risk.

  Mabrouk’s father had not paid any attention. He was an obstinate sort of man, and their arguments had only served to settle his resolve. As it turned out, he had been lucky. The price of carrots happened to be exceptionally high at the time of his harvest, and he made an unexpectedly large profit.

  A few weeks later, he put all his savings together, and he and two of his brothers hired a truck and went off to Damanhour. When the truck returned, several hours later, the three brothers—all men of ample girth—were sitting in front, squeezed in beside the driver. In the back was a mysterious object, about as big as a calf but of a different shape, wrapped in several sheets of tarpaulin. The truck went quietly around to Mabrouk’s house, and the object was unloaded and carried in through a back entrance, still wrapped in its tarpaulin sheets.

  I knew nothing of this until Mabrouk burst into my room that afternoon: I heard the sound of feet flying up the stairs, and then Mabrouk threw the door open and caught hold of my arm.

  ‘Come with me, ya doktór,’ he cried. ‘You have to come with me right now, to our house. My father and my family want you.’ He was in a state of such feverish excitement that he could not bring himself to wait until I closed my notebook; he virtually dragged me out of the room right then, never letting go of my elbow.

  Abu-‘Ali and his family were astonished to see Mabrouk racing through their house, for he had always had a reputation for being unusually shy. Jabir told me once that despite being the tallest and fastest amongst the boys of their age, Mabrouk wasn’t allowed to play in the forward line of their soccer team: the sight of an open goal was sometimes enough to bring on one of his attacks of shyness.

  But now, Mabrouk was transformed; as we hurried through the lanes he talked volubly about how his father and his uncles had hired a truck and gone to Damanhour. But when I asked what exactly they had bought, he shook his head and smiled enigmatically. ‘Wait, wait,’ he said, ‘you will see.’

  By the time we got there, a crowd had collected in Mabrouk’s lane, and his house was in an uproar. His father had been waiting for me, and after a hurried exchange of greetings, he spirited me past the crowd in his guest-room and led me quickly to a walled courtyard at the back, next to the pen where the livestock was kept—the most secret, secluded part of the house, the zariba. Their acquisition was standing in the middle of the courtyard, like a newborn calf, with an old shoe hanging around it to fend off the Evil Eye.

  It was a brand-new diesel water-pump, the first of its kind to come to Lataifa. There were several such pumps in the surrounding villages: they were known generically as ‘al-makana al-Hindi’, the Indian machine, for they were all manufactured in India.

  Mabrouk, his father, his mother and several cousins and uncles, were standing around me now, in a circle, looking from me to the machine, bright-eyed and expectant.

  ‘Makana hindi!’ I said to Mabrouk’s father, with a show of enthusiasm. ‘Congratulations—you’ve bought an “Indian machine”!’

  Mabrouk’s father’s eyes went misty with pride as he gazed upon the machine. ‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘Yes, that’s why we asked you to come. You must take a look at it and tell us what you think.’

  ‘Me?’ I said. I was aghast; I knew nothing at all about water-pumps; indeed, I could not recall ever having noticed one before coming to Lataifa.

  ‘Yes!’ Mabrouk’s father clapped me on the back. ‘It’s from your country, isn’t it? I told the dealer in Damanhour, I said, “Make sure you give me one that works well, we have an Indian living in our hamlet and he’ll be able to tell whether we’ve got a good one or not.’ ”

  I hesitated, mumbling a few words of protest, but he nudged me eagerly forward. A quick look at the anxious, watchful faces around me told me that escape was impossible: I would have to pronounce an opinion, whether I liked it or not.

 
; A hush fell upon the courtyard as I walked up to the machine; a dozen heads craned forward, watching my every move. I went up to the machine’s spout, stooped beside it and peered knowledgeably into its inky interior, shutting one eye. Standing up again, I walked around the pump amidst a deathly silence, nodding to myself, occasionally tapping parts of it with my knuckles. Then, placing both hands on the diesel motor, I fell to my knees and shut my eyes. When I looked up again Mabrouk’s father was standing above me, anxiously awaiting the outcome of my silent communion with this product of my native soil.

  Reaching for his hand I gave it a vigorous shake. ‘It’s a very good makana Hindi,’ I said, patting the pump’s diesel tank. ‘Excellent! ‘Azeem! It’s an excellent machine.’

  At once a joyful hubbub broke out in the courtyard. Mabrouk’s father pumped my hand and slapped me on the back. ‘Tea,’ he called out to his wife. ‘Get the doktór al-Hindi some tea.’

  Next day Jabir came to visit me in my room, late in the evening. He seemed somehow subdued, much quieter and less cocky than usual.

  ‘I was talking to Mabrouk,’ he said, ‘I heard he took you to his house to see their new “Indian machine”.’

  I shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He did.’

  ‘And what was your opinion?’ he asked.

  ‘They’ve bought a good machine,’ I said. ‘A very good one.’

  Jabir sank into silence, nodding thoughtfully. Later, when he rose to leave, he stopped at the door and declared: ‘My father and my uncles are thinking of buying an Indian machine too, insha’allah.’

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘I hope you’ll come with us,’ he said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘When we go to Damanhour to buy it,’ he said, shyly. ‘We would profit from your opinion.’

  I stayed up a long time that night, marvelling at the respect the water-pump had earned me; I tried to imagine where I would have stood in Jabir’s eyes if mine had been a country that exported machines that were even bigger, better and more impressive—cars and tractors perhaps, not to speak of ships and planes and tanks. I began to wonder how Lataifa would have looked if I had had the privilege of floating through it, protected by the delegated power of technology, of looking out untroubled through a sheet of clear glass.

  9

  SOON THE MONTH of Ramadan arrived and I began to think of taking a holiday. First I would go to Alexandria, I decided, to talk to Doctor Issa, and to see whether I could make arrangements for moving out of Abu-‘Ali’s house. After that I would go to Cairo: I had spent one night there when I first arrived, but I had seen nothing other than the airport, and the station. Now at last, the time had come to pay the city a proper visit.

  As the days passed the thought of my trip became ever more exciting. We were then well into Ramadan, and I was one of the handful of people in the hamlet who were not fasting. I had wanted to join in the fast, but everyone insisted, ‘No, you can’t fast, you’re not Muslim—only Muslims fast at Ramadan.’ And so, being reminded of my exclusion every day by the drawn, thirsty faces around me, the thought of Cairo and Alexandria, and the proximity of others among the excluded, grew ever more attractive.

  From the very first day of the lunar month the normal routines of the village had undergone a complete change: it was as though a segment of time had been picked from the calendar and turned inside out. Early in the morning, a good while before sunrise, a few young men would go from house to house waking everyone for the suûr, the early morning meal. After that, as the day progressed, a charged lassitude would descend upon Lataifa. To ease the rigours of the fast people would try to finish all their most pressing bits of work early in the morning, while the sun was still low in the sky; it was impossible to do anything strenuous on an empty stomach and parched throat once the full heat of the day had set in. By noon the lanes of the hamlet would be still, deserted. The women would be in their kitchens and oven-rooms, getting their meals ready for the breaking of the fast at sunset. The men would sit in the shade of trees, or in their doorways, fanning themselves. Their mouths and lips would sometimes acquire thin white crusts, and often, as the hours wore on, their tempers would grow brittle.

  I often wondered whether there were any people in the village who were occasionally delinquent in their observance of the fast. It was true that the most vulnerable people—pregnant women, young children, the sick, the elderly, and so on—were exempted by religious law, but even for those of sound body the fast must have been very hard: those were long, fiercely hot summer days, and it must have been difficult indeed to last through them without food, water or tobacco. Yet I never once saw a single person in Lataifa breaking the fast, in any way: there were occasional rumours that certain people in such and such village had been seen eating or drinking, but even those were very rare.

  In every house as the sun sank slowly towards the horizon, the women would lay out their trays and serve the food they had cooked during the day. Their families would gather around, ravenous now, with cool, tall glasses of water resting in front of them. They would sit watching the lengthening shadows, tense and still, listening to their radios, waiting for the shaikhs of the mosque of al-Azhar in Cairo to announce the legal moment of sunset. It was not enough to see the sun going down with one’s eyes; the breaking of the fast was the beginning of a meal of communion that embraced millions of people and the moment had to be celebrated publicly and in unison.

  When the meal was finished and the trays had been cleared away, the men would wash and change and make their way to the mosque, talking, laughing, replete with a sense of well-being which the day’s denials had made multiply sweet. I would go up to my room alone and listen to the call of the muezzin and try to think of how it must feel to know that on that very day, as the sun travelled around the earth, millions and millions of people in every corner of the globe had turned to face the same point, and said exactly the same words of prayer, with exactly the same prostrations as oneself. A phenomenon on that scale was beyond my imagining, but the exercise helped me understand why so many people in the hamlet had told me not to fast: to belong to that immense community was a privilege which they had to re-earn every year, and the effort made them doubly conscious of the value of its boundaries.

  In the evenings, after the prayers, the hamlet would be full of life and laughter. Where at other times of the year the lanes and paths were generally empty by eight o’ clock, they were now full of bustle and activity: children going from house to house, chanting and demanding gifts, and people visiting their families and staying up late, gossiping and joking with their friends.

  The night before I left for my trip to Cairo and Alexandria, I went to see Shaikh Musa to say goodbye. He and his family were resting after breaking the day’s fast. They had eaten well and Shaikh Musa had just returned from the mosque. He was sitting on a mat in his bedroom, puffing on his shusha, a homemade hookah, making up for all the tobacco he had had to deny himself during the day.

  He was in high spirits. ‘Welcome, ya Amitab,’ he said. ‘How are you, come and sit here, beside me.’

  As soon as I’d sat down he pointed at a young man sitting across the room and said: ‘Do you know who that is?’

  The room was lit only by the glow of a single oil lamp, but I recognized the young man he had pointed to the moment I saw him. It was his younger son Hasan. He looked very much like the photograph Shaikh Musa carried in his wallet: robust, with clean, chiselled features, and a pleasant, rather shy smile. He lifted his right hand to his heart to welcome me to his house, and we shook hands and exchanged the customary greetings.

  ‘You have brought blessings.’

  ‘God bless you.’

  ‘You have brought light to our house.’

  ‘The light is yours.’

  His face was sunburnt, ruddy, and he was wearing the khaki fatigues of the Egyptian army.

  ‘He’s on leave,’ Shaikh Musa said. ‘The army let him go for a few days so he could visit h
is family.’

  Just then Sakkina appeared in the doorway and handed Hasan a tray with three glasses of tea on it. He took it from her without a word and she disappeared back into the kitchen. Neither she nor Hasan spoke to each other, but it struck me suddenly that they were probably of exactly the same age: as children they would have worked in the same groups in the cotton fields, picking weevils from the plants, and they would have played together in the hamlet’s threshing-grounds in the evenings. I could not help wondering about the nuances of their present situation, about how they dealt with each other as stepmother and stepson.

  ‘He got here this afternoon,’ Shaikh Musa said. ‘He’s been travelling all morning.’

  I asked Hasan where he had come from and he told me that he was posted in Mansourah, a small town a couple of hundred miles away, at the other end of the Delta. His voice sounded tired and when he had finished speaking he leant his head back against the wall.

  ‘He’s not well,’ Shaikh Musa explained. ‘He’s got a pain in the head.’

  I saw then that he had a bandage tied around his forehead. I had not noticed it before for it was largely hidden by his thick, dark hair.

  ‘He comes home for a day and look what happens to him,’ Shaikh Musa said in mock outrage. ‘Shouldn’t the government extend his leave, at least?’

  In a short while other people began to arrive. Some were relatives who had heard that Hasan was back on leave, and some were friends of Shaikh Musa’s from nearby villages. I soon realized that some of them were from Nashawy, and the moment there was a break in the conversation I asked if there was going to be a feud in their village. They looked at one another in puzzlement at first, and when I recounted the story that Jabir had told me they began to laugh.

  The boy had imagined it, they said. There would be no feud, even though it was true that the man called the Sparrow had died. The police had made a report, and it had been settled between the two families. The Sparrow had been a poor man, none too sound in the head, with very few relatives in the area. The man who had knocked him over was from a big and powerful family. There was no question of a feud: the elders of the two families had sat down and decided on a token payment and that was that, khalas.