by Amitav Ghosh
In his letter to his brother he explained the matter thus:
Shaikh Khalaf [ibn Ishaq] ibn Bundâr, in Aden, [asked her hand] for his son. She had lived 3 years in their house. But I refused him when I heard of your son Surûr. I said: the brother’s son comes before foreign people. Then, when I came with her to Egypt, many people sought her hand of me. I write to you to tell you of this: to say less than this would have been enough.
But in a culture where marital negotiations can cast the whole weight of a family’s honour upon the scales of public judgement, the refusal of a proposal from an old friend, of distinguished lineage, cannot have been a simple matter. It is probably not a coincidence therefore that the Geniza contains no record of any further communication between Ben Yiju and his friends in Aden. His rejection of Khalaf’s offer may well have led to an irreversible break with him and his kinsmen, including Yusuf ibn Abraham: indeed, it may even have been the immediate cause of his departure.
Thus it was on a note of real urgency that Ben Yiju wrote to his brother upon arriving in Egypt. He had been told, he said, that Yusuf had a son, Surur, who is learned in the Torah’, and if he were to send him now to Egypt, to marry his daughter, he would have all his goods—‘and we will rejoice in her and in him, and we will wed them …’ For Ben Yiju everything now hung on a quick response from his brother. ‘Address your letters to me in Egypt, insha’allâh,’ he exhorted Yusuf, ‘let there be a letter in the hands of your son, Surûr.’
Indeed, beset by grief, disillusionment and misfortune, Ben Yiju now had no recourse other than his brother and his nephews. To the two couriers who were to carry his letter to Sicily he entrusted a confession of quiet despair.
‘Sulîmân and Abraham will tell you of the state I am in,’ Ben Yiju wrote. ‘I am sick at heart.’
5
I COULD HAVE found Nabeel’s house myself of course, but in the end I was grateful to the children who insisted on leading me there: on my own I would have been reluctant to knock on the doors of the structure that stood there now. The mud-walled rooms I so well remembered were gone and in their place stood the unfinished shell of a large new bungalow.
The door was opened by Nabeel’s sister-in-law, Fawzia. She clapped her hands to her head, laughing, when she saw me outside. The first thing she said was: ‘Nabeel’s not here—he’s not in the village, he’s gone to Iraq.’
Then, collecting herself, she ushered me in and after putting a tea-kettle on the stove, she sat me down and told me the story of how Nabeel had left for Iraq. His father, old Idris the watchman, had died the year after I left, and his wife had not long outlived him. Nabeel had been away from the village on both occasions. He was in the army then, and he hadn’t been able to return in time to see them before they died. On her deathbed his mother had called out for him, over and over again—he had always been her favourite and she had long dreamed of dancing at his wedding. On both occasions Nabeel had come down for a quick visit, to attend the ceremonies; he did not say much, either time, but it was easy to see that he had been profoundly affected.
His best friend, Fawzia’s brother Isma‘il, had long been urging him to apply for a passport so he could work in Iraq after finishing his National Service. Nabeel was not particularly receptive to the idea at first: he had always wanted a job in a government office, a respectable clerical job, and he knew that in Iraq he would probably end up doing manual labour of some kind. But the death of his parents changed his mind. He put in an application for a passport, and in 1986, soon after finishing his time in the army, he left for Iraq with Isma‘il.
Things had turned out well for him in Iraq; within a few months he had found a job as an assistant in a photographer’s shop in Baghdad. It didn’t pay as much as Isma‘il’s job, in construction, but it was a fortune compared to what he would have earned in Egypt.
Besides it was exactly the kind of job that Nabeel wanted. ‘You know him,’ Fawzia said, laughing. ‘He always wanted a job where he wouldn’t have to get his hands dirty.’
There was a telephone where he worked, she said, and the man who owned the shop didn’t mind him receiving calls every now and again. ‘We’ll give you the number,’ she told me. “Ali’s got it written down somewhere; he’ll find it for you when he gets back.’
Once every couple of months or so the whole family—she, her husband Ali and his younger brothers—made the trip to Damanhour to telephone Nabeel in Baghdad. When it was Nabeel’s turn to get in touch with them he simply spoke into a cassette-recorder and sent them the tape. In the beginning he had written letters, but everyone had agreed that it was nicer to hear his voice. He’d even sent money for a cassette-recorder, so they wouldn’t have to take the tapes to their neighbours.
Later Nabeel had sent money for a television set and a washing-machine and then, one day, on one of his tapes he had talked about building a new house. Those tumbledown old rooms they’d always lived in wouldn’t last much longer, he’d said. He would be glad to have a new house ready, when he came back to Egypt. He would be able to get married, and move in soon afterwards. His brothers were overjoyed at the suggestion: they called back immediately and within a month he had sent them the money to begin the construction.
‘He sent a new tape a few days ago,’ Fawzia said. ‘We’ll listen to it again, as soon as ‘Ali gets back.’
After we had finished our tea Fawzia showed me proudly around the house: three or four rooms had already been completed on the ground floor, including a kitchen, a bathroom and a veranda. The wiring was not complete and the walls were still unpainted, but otherwise the house was perfectly habitable.
When the ground floor had received its finishing touches, Fawzia said, the builders would start on a second floor. After his marriage, Nabeel and his wife would live upstairs, they would have the whole floor to themselves. Their other brothers could build on top of that, if they wanted to, later; it all depended on whether they went away as Nabeel had, and earned money ‘outside’.
‘How different it is,’ I said, when Fawzia took me into the new guest-room and showed me their television set and cassette-recorder. ‘The first time I came here was at the time of your wedding, when you and ‘Ali were sitting outside, with your chairs up against the mud wall.’
Fawzia smiled at the recollection. ‘The saddest thing,’ she said, ‘is that their mother and father didn’t live to see how things have changed for us.’
Her voice was soft and dreamlike, as though she were speaking of some immemorially distant epoch. I was not surprised; I knew that if my own memories had not been preserved in such artefacts as notes and diaries, the past would have had no purchase in my mind either. Even with those reminders, it was hard, looking around now, to believe how things had once stood for Nabeel and his family—indeed for all of Nashawy. It was not just that the lanes looked different; that so many of the old adobe houses had been torn down and replaced with red-brick bungalows—something more important had changed as well, the relations between different kinds of people in the village had been upturned and rearranged. Families who at that time had counted amongst the poorest in the community—Khamees’s, ‘Amm Taha’s, Nabeel’s—were now the very people who had new houses, bank accounts, gadgetry. I could not have begun to imagine a change on this scale when I left Nashawy in 1981; revisiting it now, a little less than eight years later, it looked as though the village had been drawn on to the fringes of a revolution—except that this one had happened in another country, far away.
Earlier that day, I had talked at length with Ustaz Sabry about the changes in Nashawy, the war between Iran and Iraq, and the men who’d left to go ‘outside’ (he was leaving himself soon, to take up a good job in a school in the Gulf).
‘It’s we who’ve been the real gainers in the war,’ he told me. The rich Arab countries were paying the Iraqis to break the back of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. For them it was a matter of survival, of keeping themselves in power. And in the meantime, while others were taking adva
ntage of the war to make money, it was the Iraqis who were dying on the front.
‘But it won’t last,’ he had said, ‘it’s tainted, “forbidden” money, and its price will be paid later, some day.’
It had occurred to me then that Jabir, in his exclusion, was already paying a price of one kind; now looking around the house Nabeel had built, I began to wonder whether he was paying another, living in Iraq.
‘What are things like in Iraq?’ I asked Fawzia. ‘Does Nabeel like it there?’
She nodded cheerfully. He was very happy, she said; in his tapes he always said he was doing well and that everything was fine.
‘You can hear him yourself when ‘Ali comes home,’ she said. ‘We’ll listen to his tape on the recorder.’
There was a shock in store for me when ‘Ali returned: he had one of his younger brothers with him, Hussein, who I remembered as a shy, reticent youngster, no more than twelve or thirteen years old. But now Hussein was studying in college, and he had grown to resemble Nabeel so closely in manner and bearing that I all but greeted him by that name. Later, noticing how often Nabeel’s name featured in his conversation, I realized that the resemblance was not accidental: he clearly worshipped his elder brother and had modelled himself upon him.
We listened to the tape after dinner: at first Nabeel’s voice sounded very stiff and solemn and, to my astonishment, he spoke like a townsman, as though he had forgotten the village dialect. But Fawzia was quick to come to his defence when I remarked on this. It was only on the tapes that he spoke like that, she said. On the telephone he still sounded exactly the same.
Nabeel said very little about himself and his life in Iraq; just that he was well and that his salary had recently been increased. He listed in detail the names of all the people he wanted his brothers to convey his greetings to, and he told them about various friends from Nashawy who were also in Iraq—that so and so was well, that someone had moved to another city, that someone else was about to come home and so on. Then he went through a set of instructions for his brothers, on how they were to use the money he was sending them, the additions they were to make to the house and exactly how much they were to spend. Everyone in the room listened to him rapt, all the way to the final farewells, though they had clearly heard the tape through several times before.
Later, Fawzia got Hussein to write down Nabeel’s address, and the telephone number of his shop, on a slip of paper. ‘The owner will probably answer the phone,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘You have to tell him that you want to talk to Nabeel Idris Badawy, the Egyptian. It costs a lot, but you can hear him like he was in the next room.’
Hussein took hold of my elbow and gave it a shake. ‘You must telephone him,’ he said emphatically. ‘He’ll be so pleased. Do you know, he’s kept all your letters, wrapped in a plastic bag? He still talks of you a lot. Tell me, didn’t you once say to him …’
And then, almost word for word, he recounted a conversation I had once had with Nabeel. It was about a trivial matter, something to do with my university in Delhi, but for some reason I had written it down in my diary at the end of the day, and so I knew that Hussein had repeated it, or at least a part of it, almost verbatim. I was left dumbfounded when he finished; it seemed to me that I had witnessed an impossible, deeply moving, defiance of time and the laws of hearsay.
‘You can be sure that I will telephone him,’ I said to Hussein. I explained that I was travelling to America soon, in connection with the research for the book I was writing, and I promised to call Nabeel as soon as I arrived.
‘You must tell him that we are well,’ said Hussein, ‘and that he should send another cassette.’
‘He’ll be really surprised!’ said Fawzia. ‘He’ll think someone’s playing a joke on him.’
‘We’ll write and tell him,’ said ‘Ali. ‘We’ll write tomorrow so he won’t be surprised. We’ll tell him that you’re going to phone him from America.’
For a while we talked of other things, of the state of politics in India and the Middle East and what it was like to watch the World Cup on television. It was only when it was time for me to leave that I got to ask ‘Ali whether Nabeel liked living in Iraq.
‘Ali shrugged. As far as he knew, he said, Nabeel was well enough. That was what he always said at any rate. The fact was, he didn’t know; he had never been there himself.
‘God knows,’ he added, people say life is hard out there.’
It was dark outside now and I couldn’t stay any longer. After we had said our goodbyes, Hussein insisted that he would see me to the main road. On the way, we stopped at his cousins’ house and took one of Isma‘il’s younger brothers along with us. It turned out that they, like Nabeel and Isma‘il before them, were best friends, and were studying at the same college as their brothers had.
It was eerie crossing the village with the two of them beside me. It was as though a moment in time had somehow escaped the hurricane of change that had swept Nabeel and Isma‘il away to Iraq: the two cousins so much resembled their brothers that I could have been walking with ghosts.
6
BEN YIJU’S SECOND letter, unlike his first, did eventually reach his brother Yusuf and his family. They were then resident in a small town called Mazara (Mazara del Vallo), near the western tip of Sicily, not far from Palermo. Mazara had once been a busy port, serving ships from North Africa and the Levant, but the current hostilities between Sicily and Ifriqiya had affected its traffic badly and sent it into a sharp decline. In terms of material sustenance it had little to offer Yusuf and his family, who were reduced to extremely straitened circumstances while living there. But it had other compensations: through its long trade contacts with Ifriqiya, it had imbibed something of the cultural and educational ambience of that region, and Yusuf and his sons probably felt more at home there than they would have in other, more rudely prosperous parts of the island. Still, there can be no doubt that they felt themselves to be suffering the privations of exile in their new home: looking across the sea from the shores of that provincial town, the material and scholarly riches of Egypt must have shone like a beacon in the far distance.
It is easy to imagine, then, the great tumult of hope and enthusiasm that was provoked in this dispossessed and disheartened family by the arrival of Ben Yiju’s letter. The young Surur for one clearly received his uncle’s proposal of marriage with the greatest warmth: his immediate response was to set off for Egypt to claim his bride.
The preparations for Sururs voyage threw his whole family into convulsions of excitement. The elderly Yusuf and his wife launched upon a severe regimen of fasting and prayer to ensure his safe arrival, and Surur’s brother Moshe went along to accompany him on the first leg of the journey.
To arrange Surur’s passage to Egypt, the two brothers had first to proceed to a major port, since Mazara itself no longer served large eastbound ships. In the event they decided to go to Messina on the other end of the island rather than to nearby Palermo—probably because they knew that that was where they would find the courier of their uncle’s letter, Sulîmân ibn arûn. They boarded a boat on a Friday night, having agreed upon a fare of three-eighths of a gold dinar, in exchange for being taken to a lighthouse adjoining Messina.
Arriving in Messina nine days later, they sought out their wayward uncle, Mubashshir, who was then living in that city. In this instance, Surur reported in a letter to his father, his uncle ‘did not fall short [of his family duties],’ and invited him and his brother to stay in his house. Later, the brothers sought out two friends of Ben Yiju’s, one of whom was the courier Suliman ibn Satrun. Their efforts were immediately rewarded: ‘I shall take care of your fare,’ said Ibn Satrun to Surur, and you will go up [i.e. to Egypt] with me, if God wills.’
But now, seized by a yearning for travel, young Moshe too began to insist that he wanted to go on to Egypt with Surur. Ibn Satrun and their uncle Mubashshir both counselled against it—‘they said: “There is nothing to be gained by it. He had better go bac
k to his father” ’—but Moshe was determined not to go back to Mazara ‘empty-handed’. The matter was now for their father to decide, Surur wrote, and in the meanwhile they would stay in Messina to await his instructions.
Upon receiving the letter, Yusuf must have decided against allowing Moshe to go any further, for when Surur next wrote to his parents he was already in Egypt and his brother was back in Mazara. The letter he wrote on this occasion was a short one. ‘I have sent you these few lines to tell you that I am well and at peace,’ he wrote, and then went on to convey his greetings in turn to various friends at home as well as to his parents and his brothers, Moshe and Shamwal. But Surur had yet another reason for writing home at this time: he wanted a certain legal document from his father and in the course of his letter he asked him to send it on to Palermo, possibly with Moshe, so that it could be forwarded to him in Egypt.
As it happened, the letter rekindled Moshe’s yearning for travel and prompted him to set out for Egypt himself. But the times were not propitious and the store of good fortune that had carried Surur safely to his destination ran out on his brother: Moshe’s ship was attacked on the way and he was imprisoned in the Crusader-controlled city of Tyre.
Their parents, already prostrate with anxiety, were to learn of these developments in a letter from Surur. ‘We were seized with grief when we read your letter,’ Shamwal wrote back from Sicily, ‘and we wept copiously. As for [our] father and mother they could not speak.’ But their tears were soon stemmed: later in the same letter, they discovered that matters had already taken a happier turn. Moshe had since written to Surur from Tyre to let him know that he was now ‘well and in good cheer.’