The Caliph's House

by Tahir Shah

  The moment he had finished, the wrecking crew began their horrible work. They savaged one wall after the next with their sledgehammers, their eyes glazed with indifference. I called out for them to halt, so that we could discuss the radical modifications, but no one could hear me. The architect had moved into the garden, away from the clamor of steel smashing stone. The angry voice was still berating him. I ran out and motioned for his attention. He flipped the phone shut.

  “Oui?”

  “Those madmen are breaking down the house!” I roared. “Tell them to stop.”

  The architect took a leather wallet from his breast pocket, slipped out a Cohiba cigar, and lit it. Sucking hard, he shook his head.

  “Alas, I wish I could,” he said calmly. “But once these men begin, no one can stop them.”

  THAT NIGHT THE GUARDIANS came to me to protest. They were very agitated indeed, and wanted to know why a dozen musclemen had smashed down so many walls. I described my own shock, but assured them the architect had everything under control.

  “He studied in Paris,” I said, as if it explained everything.

  “But you do not understand,” said Osman.

  “I don’t understand what?”

  “That you are upsetting Qandisha.”

  The following afternoon, Zohra spent an hour soothing the guardians’ worry. She promised them on the grave of her grandmother we would have a ceremony in honor of the Jinns. She promised, too, that we would all shout out our names when we entered a room—so that Qandisha and his fiendish kin would hear us and have a chance to move out of the way. The guardians perked up a little. They said they would be happier if we would sprinkle salt over our bedroom floor before we slept each night. Then they asked me to start leaving food out again. I told them I would see what I could do, but that there wasn’t money for extra food, as I had to pay the architect so much cold, hard cash.

  Two days passed. Work at the house began in earnest, fueled by my bank transaction to Paris. The wrecking crew ran off whooping into the dusk of the third day. They had exacted what seemed like a truly terrible toll. When the dust settled, I went to tour the destruction. Things were grim. Ten walls had been hammered down, and others were peppered with gaping holes. Ariane asked me why the bad men had caused so much damage. I told her it was for the best, so that she and Timur could one day run through the house unhindered by so many walls.

  “Baba,” she said, “you are not telling the truth.”

  AFTER THE 9/11 ATTACKS, and Casablanca’s own suicide bombings the previous May, I had been wary of patronizing outwardly American institutions. François, my French expatriate acquaintance, had warned me to stay away from McDonald’s in particular. The chain of fast-food restaurants were found all over Casablanca and were popular with young Moroccan families.

  “They’ll be hit first by the suicide squads when the meltdown comes,” he said.

  “But Ariane likes McDonald’s.”

  “If you must go to them,” François replied, “make sure you sit well inside. If a bomber strikes, he’s likely to be nervous. He’ll pull the pin when he’s just got in the door.”

  At the end of August, when it came to enrolling Ariane in school, we were uneasy about sending her to one of the three American schools. Like McDonald’s, they were potential terrorist targets. Then we heard that a new school was about to open near the house. It taught classes in English, Arabic, and French, and aimed to have all its pupils fully trilingual by the age of six. From the first moment she entered its doors, Ariane loved it. She made friends fast and developed a passion for tortoises.

  ONE EVENING IN EARLY September we invited Zohra to dinner as a way of thanks for all her work. She suggested an excellent restaurant called Sqala, set in a former Portuguese fortress on the cusp of the medina. Moroccan food tends to be as inferior in restaurants as it is superior in the home. To achieve the subtle flavors takes an astonishing amount of care and time. The ambience is important as the food itself, as is the attention lavished on a guest. As you gorge yourself on the delicacies, with your hosts whispering flattery, it’s very hard not to give in to delusion.

  The meal reintroduced me to the sensory marvels of real Moroccan cuisine. We ordered a selection of dishes. There was chicken tagine flavored with turmeric, honey, and apricots; a pair of sea bream marinated in a saffron sauce and served on a bed of couscous. After that came bistiya, a vast platter of sweet pastry, beneath which lay wafer-thin layers of pigeons, almonds, and egg.

  Zohra said the family was the center of Moroccan life, and that food was at the center of the family.

  “If only we could do everything as well as we cook,” she said with a smile, “we would be rulers of the world.”

  The conversation moved away from food and on to love.

  “When I am married to Yusuf,” Zohra said, “we will live in a little house, with small red flowers around the door. We will have two children—a boy and a girl, and . . .” she said, pausing to sip her orange juice, “and we will never be apart, not even for a night.”

  “It sounds idyllic,” I said.

  “Oh, it will be, it will be,” said Zohra dreamily.

  I asked how she felt when they met for the first time.

  “I told you,” she said, “we met on the Internet.”

  “But how was it when you first met in person, face to face?”

  Zohra swallowed hard and blushed.

  “Yusuf and I have never met,” she said.

  ARIANE WAS STILL VERY small, but she pleaded with me to buy her a tortoise. She wanted one like the tortoise at school. I fended off the request for as long as I could, as all my energy was taken up dealing with the problems brought to me morning and night by the guardians. Most of these centered around the well-being of Qandisha the Jinn and the trail of destruction left by the wrecking crew. Ariane begged and begged for the tortoise, until I could stand it no more. Hamza had got wind of her wish and insisted that nothing would bring more baraka to the house than a strong, healthy tortoise. The reptiles, he insisted, were the luckiest of all ever created by Allah. I asked Zohra to find out where to buy them. Two days later she reported. The only place to look was, she said, in Tan-Tan.

  I looked at my wall map of Morocco. I couldn’t see Tan-Tan.

  “Move your finger down,” said Zohra. “No, down much more.”

  Then I saw it.

  “But that’s way down south in the Sahara!”

  “Of course,” said Zohra.

  “Can’t you buy tortoises in Casablanca, in a pet shop?”

  Zohra scoffed at the remark. “Do you want your little daughter to have low quality?” she said. “A tortoise that’s been tortured and kept in a cage? Or do you want to be proud that you’ve given her the best, one that will really bless the house?”

  I was sick of Casablanca, of talk of tortoises, and of the Jinns, and so I packed Rachana and the children into the car. We loaded suitcases on the roof, and we headed south, in search of tortoises with divine spirit. We hadn’t left the city limits of Casablanca when Ariane threw up all over her lap. Her Moroccan childhood had begun.

  We shunned the highway and took the old, disintegrating road that ran along the coast as far as Agadir. Beyond it, we were in the desert. After many hours in the wretched butcher’s car, I swore I’d buy my own vehicle as soon as we got home. The only things to take our minds off the rotting seats were the sand and the dust, and the boys swinging squirrels. There were just one or two at first, standing on the side of the road. As soon as they saw a car, they would whip their arms up, whirling strings around their heads like lassos. At the end of each string was a terrified ball of fur. I slammed on the breaks, cursed the boys, bought their squirrels, and released them a few miles on—just in time to meet another group of boys with another clutch of squirrels. The more damn squirrels I rescued, the more there were being tortured, waiting for a stupid foreigner to save them.

  The journey revealed to Rachana, Ariane, and baby Timur the raw North Af
rican beauty I had known myself as a child. We had rumbled down the same roads then in a red Ford Cortina the fearful family gardener at the wheel. Very little had changed. The butcher’s car was built in about the same year as our Cortina and was crammed with luggage and vomiting kids. As we swerved to miss the potholes, the wild dogs, and donkey carts, I congratulated myself on coming full circle.

  After two days of driving, we arrived at Tan-Tan exhausted and shaking from the road. It was a dusty encampment of a town of very little interest, built of cinder blocks, cheap cement, and sand. I vowed I would never drive anywhere again. Ariane was still moaning about her tortoise. I rolled up to the market and quizzed the first man I saw. He was a butcher. There was blood splattered down the front of his shirt, and his mouth was filled with a big toothy grin.

  “We need to buy a tortoise,” I said angrily.

  “Why do you want it?”

  “So that we can go home.”

  The butcher asked if we were planning to eat the tortoise.

  “Certainly not!” I snapped.

  “They make good broth,” he said. “Good for lunch.”

  I covered Ariane’s ears.

  “It’s not for eating,” I mouthed. “It’s for the little girl.”

  The butcher’s expression changed. “Ah, a pet, a little pet for the little one.”

  “Yes, a little pet,” I said.

  “Not for lunch,” the butcher confirmed.

  “No, not lunch.”

  He nodded, his toothy gums grinning hard. “I will show you,” he said.

  Without another word he led the way to the far end of the bazaar, where a man with large watery eyes was holding a box. The butcher pointed to the box. The lid was removed and the contents ceremoniously displayed. Inside was a frail young tortoise. The man with watery eyes said the reptile had been savaged by a dog and should, therefore, not be eaten.

  “Oh, we don’t want to eat it,” I repeated. “It is for my daughter. She will nurse it back to health. It will bring baraka to our house.”

  I took out my wallet and asked the price. I was prepared to pay anything. The man with watery eyes squinted at Ariane and then at the tortoise.

  “It is a gift,” he said, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye, “because nothing is so sweet as to make a child happy inside.”

  HAMZA WELCOMED US BACK to Dar Khalifa and exclaimed that a dreadful new affliction had descended. I prepared myself to hear about Qandisha or another dead cat, but for once, the guardian seemed to have forgotten about the Jinns.

  “It is the bidonville,” he said, “the shantytown.”

  “What about it?”

  “The government is going to knock it down.”

  For days there had been speculation that the May 16 suicide bombers had planned their attacks in the safety of a Casablanca slum. News reports on television had featured a selection of so-called bidonvilles much like our own, with a few low stalls and rough jumbled shacks, a modest whitewashed mosque, and a wrinkly-faced imam.

  Since moving to Casablanca, I had secretly hoped that the shantytown that surrounded the oasis of Dar Khalifa would be bulldozed, and that upmarket villas would replace them. If there were villas, then there would be a new road, a supermarket, cafés, and shops. And if the shantytown vanished, so would the stagnant pools of water, the mosquitoes, the plagues of biting flies, the braying donkeys, the raw sewage, and the mountains of festering trash.

  The head guardian leaned forward and tugged at my shirtsleeve.

  “If they knock down the shantytown,” he said very softly, “then we will have nowhere to live.”

  THE DAY AFTER WE returned from Tan-Tan, I called the architect and asked when his builders would arrive.

  “Rats are running in through the holes made by your wrecking crew,” I said as politely as I could.

  “Get a dog,” he said.

  “Can you send your team over this week?”

  The architect sighed as if I were asking an impossible favor. “The builders will come,” he said.

  “When?”

  “They will come.”

  “But when will they come?” I asked again, more forcefully than before.

  “When God wills it,” he said.

  A WEEK LATER THERE was still no sign of the builders. I called the architect again and again, but his cellular phone was switched off. At the gallery, his secretary said he had gone to Paris and no one knew when he would be back.

  The problem of the rats got worse. It became so bad that they made a nest from our mattress, gnawed holes in my bookshelf, and chewed up my books. After that, they ate all the soap in the house. Rachana regarded them as a health hazard and ordered me to stop them before the children were bitten.

  I consulted Osman. He smiled broadly and gave me a double thumbs-up.

  “Don’t put poison,” I said.

  “Not poison, Monsieur Tahir.”

  “And don’t put traps!”

  “No, Monsieur Tahir, no traps.”

  He sauntered off, returning that night with a sheet of cardboard and a tube of glue. The tube featured the adhesive’s many varied applications. There was a picture of a house, a car, a boat, a child’s toy and, below it, a small indistinct image of a rat.

  Osman squeezed a quantity of the glue onto the cardboard and positioned it inside one of the holes in the wall. He gave another thumbs-up and hurried off to pray. Next morning, to my great surprise, he took me to see the haul—three good-sized rats stuck spread-eagled on the cardboard.

  DAYS CONTINUED TO PASS, and still Hamza refused me entry into the locked room at the far end of the courtyard garden. I had tried to pick the lock and had even attempted to prise the slatted shutters open. Hamza had no sympathy. He urged me to stop thinking about the room and to start the popular tradition of putting out platters of food again, for Qandisha. He repeated for the tenth time that the key was lost. I suggested bringing a locksmith.

  “He is a bad man, that locksmith!” the guardian barked.

  “There must be more than one locksmith in Casablanca.”

  Hamza screwed up his face. “They are all bad men,” he said. “They’ll make copies of all the keys and will come and rob us in the night.”

  “But we have three men protecting the house,” I said.

  Again, the guardian cursed the locksmith and his profession.

  “No locksmith can open that door,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it is locked for a reason.”

  MY FATHER NEVER SAID it, but I think he was ashamed of raising his children in a quiet English village. His own childhood had been spent in the Hindu Kush and rambling through the foothills of the Himalayas. His unconventional upbringing began early—he was born at the Indian hill station of Simla while his father was on an expedition hunting markhor. Always the trouper, his Scottish mother had agreed to tag along despite being eight months pregnant. When he eventually had children of his own, my father found that their school life was not something he could easily understand. We were, as he frequently reminded us, the first children in the family’s history ever to go to school. Every other generation had been tutored by an eclectic mix of poets, philosophers, mystics, and battle-hardened warriors. For my father, education had meant learning to ride and shoot gazelle at the same time by the age of nine, memorizing the works of Saadi, the Persian poet, by the age of twelve, and mastering championship chess. He scoffed when he heard that his only son was learning Latin, the long jump, and the flute.

  “When are you going to learn to hunt game?” he asked me on my tenth birthday.

  “But we don’t have any wild animals at school, Baba,” I replied limply.

  My father glanced down at me, his long forehead a web of frowns. “Don’t you?” he said distantly.

  Morocco was the balance that compensated for his shame. His children might have been learning useless skills at school, but he hoped that our journeys to the mountain kingdom would reveal to us the order of t
he real world. Nothing was so important to my father as mountain life. We would rove through Morocco’s fertile valleys searching for “Fantasia,” displays of tribal bravado—a dozen charging horsemen, firing their ancient weapons and whooping into the air.

  Whenever the family Ford Cortina reached a mountain village, my father would wave his arms and order the gardener to apply the brakes. He would open the doors and, like the Pied Piper, would lead my sisters and me into the nearest teahouse. His feet may have been in the Atlas Mountains, but his mind was back in the Hindu Kush. To him, the teahouse was an Afghan caravanserai, the mint tea was chai sabs, green tea, and the Berbers were shepherds from his beloved Nuristan.

  “This is the heart of Morocco!” he would exclaim. “Forget all that rubbish they teach you at school. This is the place to learn.”

  “But what can we learn here, Baba?”

  My father would pause, knock back his tea, and slam the empty glass down on the table.

  “My children,” he would say. “It is here that you can learn why the heart beats as it does.”

  ONE AFTERNOON IN EARLY September, I sent Zohra to the Land Registry to search for the missing file, and I went downtown to poke about behind Hotel Lincoln. The area felt to me like the nucleus of the city—the spot where the seed of Casablanca had fallen long ago. People there were different. The shopkeepers didn’t really care if you bought anything at all. They were in no rush for customers to leave, and liked it best if you stayed and chatted. Conversation of the old days passed the afternoons.

  I perched on a black-vinyl-covered stool in a grocer’s shop, swishing at the flies with my hand, listening to a tale of life after the war. Ottoman, the grocer, was round, white-haired, and bespectacled, with an affliction of furry brown moles all over his face. He was talking about the days when Casablanca was famous throughout the world, its name synonymous with all that was modern and exotic.