by Tahir Shah
Hicham leaned back into his comfy chair, knocked off his shoes, and called his wife to make the mint tea.
“Women don’t know, do they?” he said. “They try hard but they can’t understand the things that are important to a man. Take postage stamps,” Hicham continued. “Find me a woman who likes postage stamps!”
IN THE WEEK WE had been away, Mustapha the mime had begun the walls. His team applied the tadelakt with arched sweeping movements. The plaster itself was prepared in a vat they had built on the terrace. It was more than ten feet in length and four feet wide. As they swished the flat trowels of plaster onto the walls and arches, the team would sing very softly—tenor voices echoing through the house. They would take it in turns to chant a verse, the others filling in with the chorus. They only sang when they were actually plastering, as if the rhythm gave consistency to their work.
They would start on walls of a room only when the floor had been tiled and sprinkled with sawdust from the cedar mills. The bejmat team spent so much time at Dar Khalifa that they moved into the house. One glance at their work and I knew that I would never have to inspect again. It was faultless, created by an ancient knowledge, a fusion of mathematics, chemistry, and fine art. The bejmat masters didn’t sing. They were concentrating too hard.
The children’s playroom, off the main salon, was to be the only room with glazed tiles. That way even if they covered the place in paint and glue, it could be easily wiped clean. The craftsmen spent days laying green and white tiles in a simple checkerboard design. They reached the final line, only to find the room more irregular than they had calculated. Without a word, they lifted the entire floor and laid it again, rotating the pattern by three degrees. The second time it fitted perfectly.
Every day, Aziz would accost me, and beg me over cups of mint tea to allow him to demonstrate his skill. He said he had spent his life mastering complexity and, given the chance, he could transform the Caliph’s House into a labyrinth of design. Worn down after weeks of pleading, we agreed that he would lay patterned border tiles on the walls around the rooms.
Once the decision had been reached, Aziz put down his tea, got to his feet, and kissed me on both cheeks. There were tears in his eyes.
“You will weep when you see the beauty of the work,” he said.
The next day a new craftsman arrived at Dar Khalifa. Aziz had sent him to excise the pattern into the plain glazed border tiles. In one hand he carried a manqash, a heavy sharp-edged hammer; in the other he held a cushion. A basket of ruby red squares was brought in by an apprentice. He laid the cushion down and began to chip.
If there is any memory of the Caliph’s House I shall carry to my grave, it will not be the beaming faces of the guardians, or their constant talk of Jinns. Nor will it be the din of donkeys braying in the night, or the smell of honeysuckle at dusk. It will be the ching! ching! ching! of the master’s hammer, chipping away the cursive pattern with an accuracy only a long apprenticeship can provide.
He sat there day after day, week after week, chipping with the hammer. I would watch him, mesmerized that a man could have learned to perform such a skill with a single sharpened tool. In our world we would have dreamt up a machine to do the job. The result would be a pattern that was uniform, lifeless, devoid of any meaning. His work was fluid and animate. It had a soul.
MY CONVERSATIONS WITH HICHAM Harass calmed me down. I would arrive at his shack choking with rage at being forced to pay ten times the going rate for nails, brass hinges, or tubes of Chinese-made glue. The old stamp collector would call for tea, rub his swollen feet, and talk. Our conversations did far more than fill in the gaps of a new culture. They lowered my blood pressure and acted as a kind of therapy. After an hour of Hicham’s acumen I would float back to Dar Khalifa, my mind cleansed of its troubles.
One afternoon Rachana made chicken curry with her grandmother’s recipe. There was so much of it that I filled a serving dish and took it through the shantytown to Hicham Harass’s shack. The old man was one of the few Moroccans I have known with a taste for extremely spicy food. Two men were standing in the narrow lane outside his home. It was obvious they were not on a social call. One was waving a notebook and shouting insults. The other was holding the stamp collector’s old portable television. Hicham’s wife was pleading with them, her face blushed from tears. She ushered me inside.
“Damn them,” the old man said as soon as he saw me. “They will take the shirt off my back next.”
I offered to lend Hicham money if he needed it. He thanked me.
“The Prophet said moneylenders were lower than thieves,” he said. “They are stupid, but I am more stupid for borrowing from them.”
ONE MORNING I SAW Hamza sitting alone in the garden, near the fake well he had built. His head was in his hands, as if he were in tears. I was reluctant to disturb him and decided to leave him in peace. When I met Osman in the afternoon, I asked if there was anything wrong.
“Hamza is going to die,” he said.
“What’s wrong with him? Is he sick?”
“It’s worse than illness,” he said, sliding a finger horizontally across his throat.
“Do you mean someone’s going to kill him?”
“Perhaps.”
It was by any standards an Oriental conversation. As an outsider, I feared I had no real hope of understanding. I asked Osman if he could elaborate.
“Hamza had a dream,” he said. “He dreamt of a man riding a camel into the desert.”
“And?”
Osman looked at me quizzically.
“Isn’t that enough?”
“I’m not sure if it is.”
“Everyone knows,” said the guardian sharply, “someone who has this dream will soon breathe their last.”
The next morning I saw Hamza again. He was in the garden courtyard, raking leaves somberly. I told him I had heard about his dream.
“What will my family do without me?” he moaned. “They will starve.”
“I’m sure you are not going to die,” I said. “It’s only a dream, and most dreams don’t come true.”
The guardian swept back his hair with his hand. “I have had the same dream for seven nights,” he replied. “There is no question about it. I will die very soon. Only Allah knows the hour.”
Dar Khalifa was bathed in an air of imagined grief. It seemed ridiculous, but whenever I questioned it, the guardians waved their hands high in the air and exclaimed the dream to be an unmistakable sign. They went around the house, their heads hung low, pained expressions stretched across their faces. I asked the Bear if there was anything I could do.
“You can ask Qandisha to protect Hamza,” he said.
I didn’t understand. Qandisha supposedly hated me for living in her house.
“You can ask her,” the Bear insisted. “She may listen to you.”
I found the situation absurd, especially as it was me who didn’t believe in Jinns. But how could I ask something I couldn’t see to save Hamza’s life?
“It’s simple,” said the Bear when he had heard my question. “You go to a place where bulls are being slaughtered, and you dip your finger in warm blood. Touch it to your face, just above the nose, and Jinns will become visible,” he said.
Kamal agreed that the easiest way to see Jinns was to do as the Bear had described. He didn’t regard it as odd at all, and drove me to an abattoir on the eastern edge of Casablanca. As anyone who knows me well can vouch, I am squeamish around the dead. It was raining hard when we arrived at the slaughterhouse. The sky was so dark with storm clouds that it seemed more like night than day. We ran from the Jeep to the main entrance of the abattoir and were drenched within a second.
Inside, Kamal explained to a foreman why we had come. I found myself wondering how a British slaughterman would react if told we needed fresh blood to materialize what amounted to a ghost. The Moroccan foreman readily agreed, as if he had encountered the request often before. He led the way through the abattoir, to where the bulls
were being killed.
The place stank of death and was drenched in blood. The last cries of condemned animals were drowned out by the whir of a circular blade, spinning fast, hacking through bone. In line with Islamic tradition and the belief in halal killing, the animals were bled to death. They were brought from a holding pen one at a time. Two men stepped forward and bound the creature’s legs together. It took a few seconds. They held the neck rigid as the bull wrestled to get loose. A short knife slashed the jugular, and the process of dying commenced.
I tried to leave, but Kamal told me to stay. He said death was part of life, and it was good to witness where one ended and the other began.
The animal kicked in spasm for a long while, its eyes rolled up, mouth groaning, tongue at the side. A vast torrent of blood had poured from the wound. The spasms continued long after death. Once the bull was dead, the foreman motioned me to take all the blood I needed. I bent down, poked a finger into the pool, and wiped a single drop above my nose. I felt disgusted.
At the house, I shut myself in the room where I had seen the pink slime. It was there that Hamza had said Qandisha resided. The slime may have been a sign of baraka, but the guardians still regarded the place with fear.
I took a chair in with me and sat there for much of the afternoon. The shutters were closed. The room smelled of damp. Outside, the rain was unrelenting. I didn’t try to have a conversation with Qandisha. It seemed pointless to try speaking to something I didn’t believe in. The blood above my nose had been smudged. I might have cared, but my thoughts were on the abattoir. Like so many in our society, I am a hypocrite. I love to eat meat but I revile the business that provides it.
I reflected on Hamza, Osman, and the Bear, and about our own lives at Dar Khalifa. I thought about Ariane and Timur, and about the childhood they would have, and were having. They spent their days in innocence, lost in a land that looked upon them as kings. I had no idea how long we would live at the Caliph’s House, but at that moment I hoped it would be forever.
A FEW DAYS LATER, word came that our furniture had arrived from India and was waiting at Casablanca’s port. I had ordered it online months before. The Internet, a credit card, and a bottle of strong red wine make for a hazardous combination. One click of the mouse and you can find yourself financially destroyed. In a moment of heady enthusiasm, I had ordered six armchairs and five sofas, three king-size four-poster beds, a revolving bookcase and campaign desk, and a dining table long enough to seat a soccer team and their coach. As if this wasn’t enough, I ordered an antique mahogany door from a palace in Rajasthan and a carved wooden swing taken from a harem in Mysore.
The next morning I received the firm’s e-mail confirming my order and thanking me for submitting payment in advance. Payment in advance? My eyes jumped from my face. I fumbled with my wallet. My credit card wasn’t there. It was on the coffee table beside the empty wine glass. I spent the morning dispatching frantic messages. But there was no hope. The furniture company in Mumbai refused to cancel the order. They advised me to take more care with my clicking finger next time.
WHEN I MET HAMZA in the afternoon, he was laughing. He said the dream of the desert rider had been replaced with another, in which he had seen a snake slithering through long grass.
“Is that good?” I asked.
“Of course,” said Hamza jubilantly. “It means there is good fortune ahead.”
That afternoon when I went for lunch, I found the three guardians huddled together behind a hedge. They were talking fast in whispers. When they heard me approaching, they broke off and covered their mouths. Osman pointed at me.
“There he is,” he said.
The three men rushed over, followed by the gardener. Then the cook hurried out from the kitchen, and she called to the maid, who called to the nanny. After that, all the craftsmen from the house trouped out to see what was going on. They lined up respectfully as if they were in the presence of a saint.
“The Jinns listen to you,” said Hamza.
“You have baraka,” said Osman.
“You are blessed,” said the maid.
I shrugged them off at first, as I hadn’t even asked the Jinns to help Hamza, because I didn’t believe in them. But they declared there was no doubt. Then they thanked Allah for having blessed me. I tried to explain they were mistaken, but they would hear nothing of it. They took it in turns to laud me. They said my heart was chaste, that I was like a child who had not yet been tainted by the reality of the world. The praise felt good. It was a far cry from the low status they usually afforded me. I shouted at them. Quite the opposite was true, I said, my mind was regularly filled with the most repulsive thoughts imaginable.
“Only he who is blessed would pretend he is not,” said the Bear.
“He proves the baraka by denying it,” said the cook.
“He has power because he’s descended from the Prophet,” said Hamza.
Osman was going to say something, but instead he hurried away into the bidonville. He returned five minutes later with his baby daughter. She was about three months old and had a high fever.
“Please touch her forehead with your hand,” said Osman. “Your baraka will make her well.”
When I was a child, my father warned me to take care not to mention our lineage when in the Arab world. I asked him why. He said that being descended from the Prophet’s line was considered to be very important by very many, but it was something so gravely serious that mention of it ought never to be made.
Years later I read about the final hours of the Prophet Mohammed’s life. It is said that, lying on his deathbed, he ordered his closest followers to gather around. He said he was to soon quit the mortal world but, before he departed, he was to leave them the two most precious things in his possession. The first was the Holy Qur’an, and the second was his family.
It may have seemed like a strange request, but it is a legacy that has preoccupied Muslims ever since. The immediate family of Mohammed, often known in the East as “The People of the Cloak,” are revered by all followers of Islam. No other family commands such respect, nor has any other had such a dynamic bearing on Islamic society. The Prophet’s direct descendants have excelled as philosophers, poets, geographers, warriors, and kings.
I was touched that Osman would consider me a healer because of the blood in my veins. At the same time I was confused and a little appalled. I gave him a bottle of medicine to bring down his daughter’s fever.
“This will work better than any healing I can do,” I said.
CASABLANCA’S PORT IS THE biggest in Africa. It runs for miles along the coast, a city in itself. The perimeter is lined with razor wire, sentry posts, and armed police on patrol. There are dozens of quays crowded with hulking steel gantries, ready to unload cargo ships from every corner of the world. They come from Shanghai and São Paulo, from Helsinki, Hong Kong, Yokohama, and Vladivostok. It was impossible to say what filled the uniform steel containers. The only clue was when the inspectors from the douane, the customs, arrived, hacked off the lead seals, and emptied the contents onto the ground.
My fear of paying Moroccan import tax was very great indeed. The port was awash with horror stories. I heard of people whose goods were impounded for years, even generations. Kamal said his own father had once become so frustrated at the tax being charged, he set fire to a container full of machinery and walked away.
We spent three afternoons in a café outside the main gate. The coffee was thicker and darker there than anywhere else in Casablanca. Like everything within a mile of the docks, it smelled of rotting fish. The room was packed with rough types, all of them dressed in tattered jelabas and worn-out barboush. There wasn’t a clean-shaved jaw in the place.
Some of them played checkers with bottle caps on homemade boards. Others clustered together, swapping tall tales of their travels and misdeeds.
“They’re all liars,” said Kamal. “And they’re thieves.”
“Then what are we doing here? Why don’t w
e go straight to the customs office?”
“Research,” he said. “We’re doing research.”
On the fourth day, we stood outside the café at a cart that sold boiled snails by the cup. Kamal made small talk with the one-eyed vendor, and I tried to pretend I was having a good time. Everyone could tell I didn’t belong there. I didn’t know the rules. I feigned delight in the taste of the mollusk meal. Kamal told me to keep quiet.
“People don’t eat the snails ’cause they like them,” he said. “They eat them ’cause they’re cheap.”
The one-eyed vendor blinked slowly and refilled my cup for free. He said I appreciated his wares, that I was a good advertisement. We stood slurping snails, watching the commotion of wheeled vehicles. There were wagons laden with whole trees from Brazil, stevedores pulling carts, forklift trucks, bicycles, scooters, and rolling stock.
On the fifth day, Kamal said it was time to go into the port itself. I showed enthusiasm at the idea.
“There’s a problem,” he said. “We don’t have passes, so we can’t go in.”
“How are we going to get the container if we can’t enter the port?”
Kamal peered over at the main gate. Three policemen were standing guard. Anyone without a pass was turned back. We saw a man trying to offer a bribe. He was arrested, handcuffed, and taken away. A moment later a waiter from the café was ushered inside. He was taking a silver pot of mint tea to the officials in the customs office.
I looked round, but Kamal had disappeared. When I turned again, he was being waved in through the main gate. He was sporting a maroon waistcoat and was balancing a tray on his hand, and a glass on the tray.
For three hours I waited with the snail seller. We exchanged pleasantries and talked about snails. I had never imagined there was so much to learn about the tiny shelled creatures. The salesman said his family had sold snails at the port for a hundred years. They had been there, he said, before the French occupation, a time when Casablanca was little more than a village.