Incendiary Circumstances

by Amitav Ghosh

  The Navajo were forced to march to an "experimental" camp at the Bosque Redondo. It was soon clear, however, that the experiment was not going to work, and in 1868 a commission headed by General William T. Sherman was sent to New Mexico to decide what was to be done with the Navajo. Addressing the commission, the Navajo leader, Barboncito, said, "When the Navajo were first created, four mountains and four rivers were pointed out to us, inside of which we should live, that was to be our country and was given to us by the first woman of the Navajo tribe." Later he said to the general, "I am speaking to you now as if I was speaking to a spirit and I wish you to tell me when you are going to take us to our country." They were permitted to return later the same year. Of their return, Manuelito, the most renowned of the Navajo war chiefs, said afterward, "We felt like talking to the ground, we loved it so." They were back in Diné Bikeyah, where every butte and mesa pointed to the sacred center of Diné Tah.

  The Four Corners monument evokes a center too, in its own way. But that central point, the point from which its line of longitude takes its westerly orientation, that central zero degree from which its distance can be so exactly calculated, lies in another landscape, on another continent—far away in Greenwich, England. It is that distant place that the monument unwittingly celebrates.

  The monument itself is modest by the standards of monuments in the United States. There is a wide, paved plaza, with plenty of parking space for cars and RVs. On the peripheries there are rows of stalls, manned by people from the neighboring Ute and Navajo reservations.

  In the center of the plaza is a square cement platform fenced off by aluminum railings. There is a state flag on each side of the square and, towering above them, a flag of the United States of America, on an eagle-topped mast. Two straight lines are etched into the cement; they intersect neatly at the center of the platform. Somebody has thoughtfully provided a small observation post at one end of the square. There would be little point, after all, in taking pictures of the Four Corners if you couldn't see the two lines intersect. And to get them properly into your frame, you have to be above ground level.

  You have to queue, both for your turn at the observation post and to get into the center of the platform. If there are two of you, you have to queue twice at each end, unless you can get somebody to oblige you by taking your picture (and that is easy enough, for there are no friendlier people in the world than American tourists). But queuing is no great trial anyway, even in the desert heat, for everyone is good-humored, and it is not long before you find yourself engaged in comparing notes on campgrounds and motels with everyone around you.

  There is a good-natured spirit of competition among the people who walk into the center of the cement platform: everyone tries to be just a little original when posing for their photographs. A young couple kiss, their lips above the center and each of their feet in a different state. Another couple pose, more modestly, with one foot on each state and their arms around each other's shoulders. Six middle-aged women distribute themselves between the states, holding hands. An elderly gentleman in Bermuda shorts lets himself slowly down onto his hands and knees and poses with an extremity on each state and his belly button at the center. This sets something of a trend; a couple of middle-aged women follow suit. In the end a pretty teenage girl carries the day by striking a balletic pose on one leg, her toes dead center on the point where the lines intersect.

  Men from the reservations lounge about in the shade of the stalls, around the edges of the plaza. Some rev their cars, huge, lumbering old Chevrolets and Buicks, startling the tourists. A boy, bored, drives into the scrub, sending whirlwinds of sand shooting into the sky. Others sit behind their stalls, selling "Indian" jewelry and blankets and Navajo fry bread. When evening comes and the flow of tourists dwindles, they will pack the contents of their stalls into their cars and go home to their reservations. No one stays the night here; there is nothing to stay for—the attractions of the place are wholly unworldly.

  They will be back early next morning: the cars and RVs start arriving soon after dawn, their occupants eager to absorb what they can of the magic of the spectacle of two straight lines intersecting.

  THE IMAM AND THE INDIAN 1986

  I MET THE IMAM of the village and Khamees the Rat at about the same time. I don't exactly remember now—it happened more than six years ago—but I think I met the imam first.

  But this is not quite accurate. I didn't really "meet" the imam: I inflicted myself upon him. Perhaps that explains what happened.

  Still, there was nothing else I could have done. As the man who led the daily prayers in the mosque, he was a leading figure in the village, and since I, a foreigner, had come to live there, he may well, for all I knew, have been offended had I neglected to pay him a call. Besides, I wanted to meet him; I was intrigued by what I'd heard about him.

  People didn't often talk about the imam in the village, but when they did, they usually spoke of him somewhat dismissively, but also a little wistfully, as they might of some old, half-forgotten thing, like the annual flooding of the Nile. Listening to my friends speak of him, I had an inkling, long before I actually met him, that he already belonged, in a way, to the village's past. I thought I knew this for certain when I heard that apart from being an imam, he was also, by profession, a barber and a healer. People said he knew a great deal about herbs and poultices and the old kind of medicine. This interested me. This was Tradition: I knew that in rural Egypt, imams and other religious figures are often by custom associated with those two professions.

  The trouble was that these accomplishments bought the imam very little credit in the village. The villagers didn't any longer want an imam who was also a barber and a healer. The older people wanted someone who had studied at Al-Azhar and could quote from Jamal ad-Din Afghani and Mohammad Abduh as fluently as he could from the Hadith, and the younger men wanted a fierce, black-bearded orator, someone whose voice would thunder from the mimbar and reveal to them their destiny. No one had time for old-fashioned imams who made themselves ridiculous by boiling herbs and cutting hair.

  Yet Ustad Ahmed, who taught in the village's secondary school and was as well read a man as I have ever met, often said—and this was not something he said of many people—that the old imam read a lot. A lot of what? Politics, theology, even popular science ... that kind of thing.

  This made me all the more determined to meet him, and one evening, a few months after I first came to the village, I found my way to his house. He lived in the center of the village, on the edge of the dusty open square that had the mosque in its middle. This was the oldest part of the village, a maze of low mud huts huddled together like confectionery on a tray, each hut crowned with a billowing, tousled head of straw.

  When I knocked on the door, the imam opened it himself. He was a big man, with very bright brown eyes set deep in a wrinkled, weather-beaten face. Like the room behind him, he was distinctly untidy: his blue djellaba was mud-stained and unwashed, and his turban had been knotted anyhow around his head. But his beard, short and white and neatly trimmed, was everything a barber's beard should be. Age had been harsh on his face, but there was a certain energy in the way he arched his shoulders, in the clarity of his eyes, and in the way he fidgeted constantly, was never still: it was plain that he was a vigorous, restive kind of person.

  "Welcome," he said, courteous but unsmiling, and stood aside and waved me in. It was a long dark room, with sloping walls and a very low ceiling. There was a bed in it and a couple of mats, but little else apart from a few scattered books. Everything bore that dull patina of grime that speaks of years of neglect. Later I learned that the imam had divorced his first wife and his second had left him, so that now he lived quite alone and had his meals with his son's family, who lived across the square.

  "Welcome," he said again, formally.

  "Welcome to you," I said, giving him the formal response, and then we began on the long, reassuring litany of Arabic phrases of greeting.

  "
How are you?"

  "How are you?"

  "You have brought blessings?"

  "May God bless you."

  "Welcome."

  "Welcome to you."

  "You have brought light."

  "The light is yours."

  "How are you?"

  "How are you?"

  He was very polite, very proper. In a moment he produced a kerosene stove and began to brew tea. But even in the performance of that little ritual there was something about him that was guarded, watchful.

  "You're the doktor al-Hindi," he said to me at last, "aren't you? The Indian doctor?"

  I nodded, for that was the name the village had given me. Then I told him that I wanted to talk to him about the methods of his system of medicine.

  He looked very surprised, and for a while he was silent. Then he put his right hand to his heart and began again on the ritual of greetings and responses, but in a markedly different way this time, one that I had learned to recognize as a means of changing the subject.

  "Welcome."

  "Welcome to you."

  "You have brought light."

  "The light is yours."

  And so on.

  At the end of it I repeated what I had said.

  "Why do you want to hear about my herbs?" he retorted. "Why don't you go back to your country and find out about your own?"

  "I will," I said. "Soon. But right now..."

  "No, no," he said restlessly. "Forget about all that; I'm trying to forget about it myself."

  And then I knew that he would never talk to me about his craft, not just because he had taken a dislike to me for some reason of his own, but because his medicines were as discredited in his own eyes as they were in his clients'; because he knew as well as anybody else that the people who came to him now did so only because of old habits; because he bitterly regretted his inherited association with these relics of the past.

  "Instead," he said, "let me tell you about what I have been learning over the last few years. Then you can go back to your country and tell them all about it."

  He jumped up, his eyes shining, reached under his bed, and brought out a glistening new biscuit tin.

  "Here!" he said, opening it. "Look!"

  Inside the box was a hypodermic syringe and a couple of glass vials. This is what he had been learning, he told me: the art of mixing and giving injections. And there was a huge market for it too, in the village: everybody wanted injections, for coughs, colds, fevers, whatever. There was a good living in it. He wanted to demonstrate his skill to me right there, on my arm, and when I protested that I wasn't ill, that I didn't need an injection just then, he was offended. "All right," he said curtly, standing up. "I have to go to the mosque right now. Perhaps we can talk about this some other day."

  That was the end of my interview. I walked with him to the mosque, and there, with an air of calculated finality, he took my hand in his, gave it a perfunctory shake, and vanished up the stairs.

  Khamees the Rat I met one morning when I was walking through the rice fields that lay behind the village, watching people transplant their seedlings. Everybody I met was cheerful and busy, and the flooded rice fields were sparkling in the clear sunlight. If I shut my ears to the language, I thought, and stretch the date palms a bit and give them a few coconuts, I could easily be back somewhere in Bengal.

  I was a long way from the village and not quite sure of my bearings when I spotted a group of people who had finished their work and were sitting on the path, passing around a hookah.

  "Ahlan!" a man in a brown djellaba called out to me. "Hullo! Aren't you the Indian doktor?"

  "Yes," I called back. "And who're you?"

  "He's a rat," someone answered, raising a gale of laughter.

  "Don't go anywhere near him."

  "Tell me, ya doktor," the Rat said, "if I get onto my donkey and ride steadily for thirty days, will I make it to India?"

  "No," I said. "You wouldn't make it in thirty months."

  "Thirty months!" he said. "You must have come a long way."

  "Yes."

  "As for me," he declared, "I've never even been as far as Alexandria, and if I can help it I never will."

  I laughed; it did not occur to me to believe him.

  When I first went to that quiet corner of the Nile Delta, I had expected to find on that most ancient and most settled of soils a settled and restful people. I couldn't have been more wrong.

  The men of the village had all the busy restlessness of airline passengers in a transit lounge. Many of them had worked and traveled in the sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf, others had been in Libya and Jordan and Syria, some had been to the Yemen as soldiers, others to Saudi Arabia as pilgrims, a few had visited Europe: some of them had passports so thick they opened out like ink-blackened concertinas. And none of this was new; their grandparents and ancestors and relatives had traveled and migrated too, in much the same way as mine had in the Indian subcontinent—because of wars, or for money and jobs, or perhaps simply because they got tired of living always in one place. You could read the history of this restlessness in the villagers' surnames: they had names that derived from cities in the Levant, from Turkey, from faraway towns in Nubia; it was as though people had drifted here from every corner of the Middle East. The wanderlust of its founders had been plowed into the soil of the village; it seemed to me sometimes that every man in it was a traveler. Everyone, that is, except Khamees the Rat, and even his surname, as I discovered later, meant "of Sudan."

  "Well, never mind, ya doktor," Khamees said to me now. "Since you're not going to make it back to your country by sundown anyway, why don't you come and sit with us for a while?" He smiled and moved up to make room for me.

  I liked him at once. He was about my age, in the early twenties, scrawny, with a thin, mobile face deeply scorched by the sun. He had that brightness of eye and the quick, slightly sardonic turn to his mouth that I associated with faces in the coffeehouses of universities in Delhi and Calcutta; he seemed to belong to a world of late-night rehearsals and black coffee and lecture rooms, even though, in fact, unlike most people in the village, he was completely illiterate. Later I learned that he was called the Rat—Khamees the Rat—because he was said to gnaw away at things with his tongue, like a rat did with its teeth. He laughed at everything, people said—at his father, the village's patron saint, the village elders, the imam, everything.

  That day he decided to laugh at me.

  "All right, ya doktor," he said to me as soon as I had seated myself. "Tell me, is it true what they say, that in your country you burn your dead?"

  No sooner had he said it than the women of the group clasped their hands to their hearts and muttered in breathless horror, "Haram! Haram!"

  My heart sank. This was a conversation I usually went through at least once a day, and I was desperately tired of it. "Yes," I said, "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 wood and just light them up?"

  "Yes," I said, hoping that he would tire of this sport if I humored him.

  "Why?" he said. "Is there a shortage of kindling in your country?"

  "No," I said helplessly, "you don't understand." Somewhere in the limitless riches of the Arabic language a word such as "cremate" must exist, but if it does, I never succeeded in finding it. Instead, for lack of any other, I had to use the word "burn." That was unfortunate, for "burn" was the word for what happened to wood and straw and the eternally damned.

  Khamees the Rat turned to his spellbound listeners. "I'll tell you why they do it," he said. "They do it so that their bodies can't be punished after the Day of Judgment."

  Everybody burst into wonderstruck laughter. "Why, how clever," cried one of the younger girls. "What a good idea! We ought to start doing it ourselves. That way we can do exactly what we like, and when we die and the Day of Judgment comes, there'll be nothing there to judge."

  Khamees had go
t his laugh. Now he gestured to them to be quiet again.

  "All right then, ya doktor," he said. "Tell me something else: is it true that you are a Magian? That in your country everybody worships cows? Is it true that the other day when you were walking through the fields you saw a man beating a cow and you were so upset that you burst into tears and ran back to your room?"

  "No, it's not true," I said, but without much hope. I had heard this story before and knew that there was nothing I could say which would effectively give it the lie. "You're wrong. In my country people beat their cows all the time, I promise you."

  I could see that no one believed me.

  "Everything's upside-down in their country," said a dark, aquiline young woman, who, I was told later, was Khamees's wife. "Tell us, ya doktor, in your country, do you have crops and fields and canals like we do?"

  "Yes," I said, "we have crops and fields, but we don't always have canals. In some parts of my country they aren't needed because it rains all the year round."

  "Ya salám," she cried, striking her forehead with the heel of her palm. "Do you hear that, o you people? Oh, the Protector, oh, the Lord! It rains all the year round in his country."