In an Antique Land

by Amitav Ghosh

  The circle which the young Ben Yiju was received into in Aden was one that had place for literary talent as well as business acumen. At the time of his stay there were several gifted Hebrew poets living and writing in Aden. It was an ambience that must have been attractive in the extreme to a man of Ben Yiju’s tastes, with his inclination for poetry and his diligence in business. That, combined with the warmth of his welcome into an exclusive society, must have made Aden an extraordinarily congenial place for this young trader with a literary bent.

  Yet, curiously enough, at some point before 1132 Ben Yiju moved to the Malabar coast and did not return to Aden for nearly two decades.

  At first glance there appears to be nothing unusual about Ben Yiju’s departure, for of course, merchants involved in the eastern trade travelled frequently to India. But there are two good reasons why this particular move appears anomalous, a deviation from the usual pattern of traders’ travels.

  The first is that merchants involved in the eastern trade, like Abu Sa‘id Halfon and Abu Zikri Sijilmasi for example, generally travelled back and forth at regular intervals between the ports of the Indian Ocean and the Middle East. While there are a few other instances in the Geniza of traders living abroad for long periods of time, none of them quite matches the continuous duration of Ben Yiju’s stay—he does not seem to have travelled back to Aden or Egypt even once in the nineteen or twenty years that he was in India. Indeed, it would seem that when the need arose he preferred to send his slave—the slave of MS H.6—to Aden to transact his business there, while he himself remained in Mangalore.

  The second reason for suspecting that there may have been something out of the ordinary in Ben Yiju’s departure from Aden lies in a cryptic letter that is now in the possession of the Taylor-Schechter collection in Cambridge. This particular piece of paper is quite large, about eleven inches long and more than five inches wide, but it is still only a fragment—a scrap which Ben Yiju tore from a longer sheet so he could scribble on its back. The little that remains of the original letter is badly damaged and much of the text is difficult to decipher. Fortunately the scrap does contain the name of the letter’s sender: it is just barely legible and it serves to link the fragment with this story for it proves that the writer was none other than Madmun ibn al-Hasan ibn Bundar, of Aden.

  For most of its length, the letter is perfectly straightforward: following the conventional protocols of their correspondence Madmun refers to Ben Yiju as ‘my master’ and to himself as his ‘servant’. He begins by acknowledging a shipment of areca nuts, mentions the sale of a quantity of pepper, and lets Ben Yiju know that certain goods have been safely delivered to his two other associates in Aden.

  The puzzling part of the letter comes towards the end, and it consists of a short, six-line passage. It reads thus:

  ‘Concerning what he [my master] mentioned [in his letter]: that he has resolved to return to Aden, but that which prevents him [from returning] is the fear that it would be said that he had acted rashly. His servant spoke to [the king] al-Mâlik al-Sa‘îd concerning him … and took from him his guarantee as a safeguard against his return, insha‘allah. So he [my master] has nothing to fear: [the king] will resolve everything in his court in the country of India. And if, God forfend, he were to lose … what he has and his children were part of that [loss]…’

  The rest is lost; it was upon this tantalizingly incomplete line that Ben Yiju’s hands fell when he was tearing up the letter. No other document contains any mention of whatever matter it was that Madmun was referring to in his letter: unless the rest of the letter is discovered some day nothing more will ever be known of it.

  Despite its brevity and the suddenness of its termination, there is one fact the passage does serve to establish beyond any doubt. It proves that Ben Yiju’s departure for India was not entirely voluntary—that something had happened in Aden that made it difficult for him to remain there or to return.

  The passage provides no direct indication of what it was that had happened. The most obvious possibility is that the matter had to do with a debt or a financial irregularity. But on the other hand, it is hardly likely that the ruler of Aden would take an interest in a purely civil dispute, as the letter suggests. In any case, if it were only an unpaid debt that prevented Ben Yiju’s return to Aden, he and his friends would surely have settled the matter quickly and quietly, without recourse to the ruler.

  The passage, such as it is, provides little enough to go on, and the careful discretion of Madmun’s language has wound a further sheet of puzzles around an affair that is already shrouded in mystery. For instance, the word Madmun uses to describe the safeguard offered by the ruler of Aden is one of those Arabic terms that can spin out a giddying spiral of meanings. The word is dhimma, whose parent and sister words mean both ‘to blame’ as well as the safeguards that can be extended to protect the blameworthy.

  Used as it is here, the word could mean that the ruler of Aden had agreed not to prosecute Ben Yiju for a crime that he had committed, or been accused of. Or it could mean that he had pledged to protect him from certain people whose enmity Ben Yiju had cause to fear. By Arab tradition this was the kind of guarantee that was extended to a man who had killed someone: it was intended to protect him and his relatives from a vengeance killing so that they could raise the murdered man’s blood-money.

  That implicit suggestion, along with the hint that the matter somehow implicated Ben Yiju’s children as well as himself, is all there is to suggest that Ben Yiju may have fled to India in order to escape a blood feud.

  For all we know, it could just as well have been a matter of unpaid taxes.

  8

  SHAIKH MUSA HAD never heard of Khamees the Rat before I mentioned his name.

  He pursed his lips when I asked him, and began to finger his beads, thinking hard, but after a while, loath to admit defeat, he gave a peremptory shake of his head and exclaimed: ‘The Rat? Al-Fâr? What sort of name is that? Are you sure you heard it right?’

  It was a nickname, I said, his relations called him that because of the way he talked, because he gnawed at things with his tongue like a rat did with its teeth.

  But in fact I didn’t really know how he had got the name: for all I knew it could have been his appearance that bestowed it upon him. It was easy to imagine his thin face and bright, darting eyes putting his cousins in mind of a rodent, years ago, when he was a boy; even now, in his mid-twenties with two marriages behind him, something of that resemblance still remained, a certain quickness of movement and a ferile, beady-eyed wit.

  ‘His land is near Zaghloul the weaver’s,’ I added, for it was often details like that which helped Shaikh Musa make connections. But this time, despite his best efforts, the name eluded the tripwires of his memory.

  ‘Nashawy is a big place,’ he said at last, philosophically. ‘Which family are they from, do you know?’

  The Jammâl, I said, and when I saw the faint curl that came upon his lips it struck me suddenly that of course, that was the reason why Shaikh Musa did not know Khamees—his lineage. People like the Latifs and the Badawy tended to look down their noses at the Jammal; they were unmannerly in their ways, the Badawy would whisper, uncouth in behaviour and wild in temperament, and it was best to keep them at a distance. But they were always careful to lower their voices when they said those things: the Jammal were both very numerous and very pugnacious, and everyone knew that their men would be out in the lanes at the least provocation, eager to fight for their honour.

  It stuck in the throats of Nabeel and his Badawy kin that the Jammal had been the biggest gainers from the redistribution of land that had followed the Revolution of 1952: their hostility was now spiced with envy, because from being the poorest people in the village, mere labourers and sharecroppers, many of the Jammal had gone on to become landowning fellaheen, with several feddans of land to their name. Now the Badawy could no longer afford to be so haughty as they once were, and when they received a proposal of marria
ge from one of the more prosperous Jammal families, they were often all too quick to accept. But still, for people like Shaikh Musa the majority of the Jammal still fell outside the boundaries of respectability, despite the dramatic changes of the last few decades.

  Suddenly I recalled another, more promising detail, one that was sure to sound an echo in Shaikh Musa’s memory. ‘You may know Khamees’s sister,’ I said. ‘She was married not far from you, in Nakhlatain, but she left her husband a few months ago and moved back to Nashawy with her children.’

  ‘Oh my eyes!’ Shaikh Musa cried. ‘The tall sweet-looking one, who had two little boys—is that the woman you mean?’

  Yes, I said, exactly. That was her, tall and sweet-looking; her name was Busaina and she was Khamees’s sister.

  It was thanks to ‘Amm Taha that I knew those details about her: if it were not for him, the self-contained world of Nashawy’s women would have been even more firmly closed for me than it was for other men, since unlike them, I had no female relatives in the village to keep me abreast of that parallel history.

  I had asked ‘Amm Taha about Busaina the very first day I met her, out in the fields during the rice harvest, with Khamees and the rest of her family. I hadn’t even known who she was then, for only the mens’ names were mentioned, as always. But while we were talking, someone had pointed to the child in her arms and announced with a laugh that there was Khamees’s son. As far as I knew no one joked about things like that, so naturally I had concluded that they were married.

  ‘Amm Taha had corrected me the moment I described her. No, he had explained, with his dry, coughing laugh; that wasn’t Khamees’s wife I had seen, it couldn’t have been if she were holding a baby because Khamees didn’t have any children. He had been married off at the age of fifteen, several years ago, and having failed to father any children, he had taken a second wife recently, but with no result. The marriage had caused quite a scandal because his first wife had walked off in a rage, shouting to the world that it was his fault that he was childless, not hers. And after all that trouble, the marriage had made no difference—several of Khamees’s brothers had families now, but despite being the oldest and the longest married, he remained without child, and was often the butt of their jokes.

  ‘So that couldn’t have been his wife you saw,’ ‘Amm Taha said, wagging a finger in my direction. ‘That was probably his sister, Busaina, who’s just come back to Nashawy with her children.’

  Busaina had been married off years ago to a man from Nakhlatain, not far from Lataifa. But although she had given her husband two fine, healthy children, the two of them had never really got on. They had quarrelled all the time, over this and that, and in the end things had come to such a pass that her husband had announced that he was going to marry again. She told him plainly at the time that she’d leave him if he did, and sure enough, when she heard rumours that he’d been talking with another girl’s father, she picked up her things, her pots, pans and furniture, and moved back to Nashawy with her children. So now she was back in her father’s house, along with Khamees and all her other brothers and their children.

  ‘It was bound to happen,’ Shaikh Musa said. ‘She wouldn’t listen to anyone. She and her husband used to quarrel all day long because she had to have her way in everything.’

  He shook his head ruefully, running a hand over his white-stubbled chin.

  ‘It was because of her origins,’ he said. ‘The Jammal are all like that, difficult and quarrelsome, and it’s best to keep them at a distance.’

  He did not look at me, but there was an air of disapproval about him that warned me not to tell him about my first meeting with Khamees and his family.

  It was Zaghloul the weaver who had made the introductions. It was the time of the rice harvest, late autumn, and he had spotted me walking through the fields, notebook in hand, and had shouted across: ‘Come here, ya doktór—come and eat with us, over here.’

  He was sitting with a group of people on a tree-shaded knoll which served to house a couple of wooden water-wheels. He, and the other men in the group were seated cross-legged around a huge tin tray; I could tell from the number of dishes in front of them that they were eating a generous midday meal of the kind that always accompanied a harvest. The women who had brought the food out to the fields were squatting beside them, doling out servings of rice, cheese, salâa and fish.

  One woman had withdrawn a little from the rest of the group; she was sitting apart, leaning against a tree, with a scarf thrown carelessly over her shoulders, holding a baby to her breast. She looked up as I made my way across the newly-harvested rice fields, fixing me with a clear, inquiring gaze, and when the scarf slipped inadvertently off her breast she straightened it without the slightest show of confusion or shyness. She had a wide, oval face, with well-defined features, and eyes that were brilliantly forthright and direct.

  When I reached the knoll Zaghloul stretched out a hand to me, laughing uproariously. ‘These men were scared when they saw you walking down the path,’ he said, ‘because of that notebook in your hands. They thought you were an effendi from Damanhour who’d come to check whether anyone’s evading military service.’

  He cast a glance at the sheepish grins on the faces around him, his small wizened face crumpling up with mirth.

  ‘So I told them,’ he said, ‘why no, that’s not a military inspector; he’s not an effendi or even a veterinarian—that’s the doktór from al-Hind, where they have ghosts just like we do.’

  ‘Ahlan!’ said the man sitting next to him, a sharp-faced young fellah in a brown jallabeyya. ‘Ahlan! So you’re the doktór from al-Hind?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and you?’

  ‘He’s a rat,’ someone answered, raising a gale of laughter. ‘Don’t go anywhere near him.’

  His name was Khamees, said Zaghloul, laughing louder than the rest, Khamees the Rat, and the others sitting there were his brothers and cousins. Their land ran next to each others’, he explained, so they always worked together as a group. It was Khamees’s family’s land they were working on today; it would be his own tomorrow and so on, until they all finished harvesting their rice, in one short week of hard work and good eating.

  ‘Why are you still standing, ya doktór?’ cried Khamees. ‘You’ve come a long way and you won’t be able to get back to your country before sundown anyway, so you may as well sit with us for a while.’

  He moved up, smiling, and slapped the earth beside him. He was in his mid-twenties, about my age, scrawny, with a thin mobile face, deeply scorched by the sun. Almost in spite of myself, I felt instantly at home with him: he had that brightness of eye and the slightly sardonic turn to his mouth that I associated with coffee-houses in Delhi and Calcutta; he seemed to belong to a familiar world of lecture-rooms, late-night rehearsals and black coffee.

  He leant back to look at me now, as I seated myself, summing me up with his sharp, satirical eyes.

  ‘All right, ya doktór,’ he said, once I had settled in beside him with my legs crossed. ‘Tell me, is it true what they say, that in your country you burn your dead?’

  The moment he said it the women in the group clasped their hands to their hearts and cried in breathless horror: ‘arâm! arâm!’ and several of the men began to mutter prayers, calling upon the Lord to protect them from the devil.

  My heart sank: this was a question I encountered almost daily, and since I had not succeeded in finding a word such as ‘cremate’ in Arabic, I knew I would have to give my assent to the term that Khamees had used: the verb ‘to burn’, which was the word for what happened to firewood and straw and the eternally damned.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, knowing that I would not be able to prevent the inevitable outcome. ‘Yes, it’s true; some people in my country burn their dead.’

  ‘You mean,’ said Khamees in mock horror, ‘that you put them on heaps of firewood and just light them up?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said quickly, hoping he would tire of the subject.

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p; It was not to be. ‘Why?’ he persisted. ‘Is there a shortage of kindling in your country?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘you don’t understand.’

  There was a special word, I tried to explain, a special ceremony, certain rites and rituals—it wasn’t like lighting a bonfire with a matchstick. But for all the impression my explanation made, I may as well have been silent.

  ‘Even little children?’ said Khamees. ‘Do you burn little children?’

  Busaina spoke now, for the first time. ‘Of course not,’ she said, in disbelief, hugging her baby to her breast. ‘They wouldn’t burn little dead children—no one could do that.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, regretfully. ‘Yes, we do—we burn everyone.’

  ‘But why?’ she cried. ‘Why? Are people fish that you should fry them on a fire?’

  ‘I don’t know why,’ I said. ‘It’s the custom—that’s how it was when I came into the world. I had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be surprised at, really,’ Zaghloul said wisely, gazing at the horizon. ‘Why, in the land of Nam-Nam people even eat their dead. My uncle told me: it’s their custom—they can’t help it.’

  ‘Stop jabbering, ya Zaghloul,’ Busaina snapped at him, and then turned her attention back to me.

  ‘You must put an end to this burning business,’ she said to me firmly. ‘When you go back you should tell them about our ways and how we do these things.’

  ‘I will,’ I promised, ‘but I don’t know if they’ll listen. They’re very stubborn, they go on doing the same thing year after year.’

  Suddenly Khamees clapped his hands with an exultant cry. ‘I’ll tell you why they do it,’ he said. ‘They do it so their bodies can’t be punished upon the Day of Judgement.’

  The others keeled over with laughter while he looked around in triumph, his eyes astart with the thrill of discovery. ‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘It’s really clever—they burn the bodies so there’ll be nothing left to punish and they won’t have to answer for their sins.’