The Circle of Reason

by Amitav Ghosh

  The blood rushed into Karthamma’s eyes. She lunged at Zindi, but Abu Fahl caught her around the waist. Zindi stalked into her room, and the slam of her door set the geese hissing in the courtyard.

  By midday the house was awash with stories. Zaghloul went out to buy a cigarette and came back with a story he had heard on the way: the policemen who had surrounded the Star soon after the collapse had seen a hazy figure in the wreckage at night. Two of them went into the ruins to investigate. They spotted the figure a number of times, always a little way ahead of them. After stumbling about for hours on piles of steel and broken glass, their hands torn and bleeding, their expensive new uniforms in shreds, they were about to turn back when they saw the figure waving in the distance. They hurried after it, but when they got there it had disappeared. Instead they found a body – Alu’s body – since there were no others there. They pulled and tugged at the corpse, but try as they might they couldn’t shift it, not by so much as a hair’s breadth. They ran screaming out of the ruins.

  Rakesh had spent the morning tossing restlessly on his mattress. The men had no work for the day, for Abu Fahl had decided that the collapse had cancelled his agreement with the contractor. Rakesh heard Zaghloul through, lying on his mattress. When he had finished, he jumped to his feet and began to pull on his trousers. We have to go, Abu Fahl, he said. We have to look for ourselves. I’m almost sure I heard Alu in the ruins yesterday, even though Zindi thinks it was all just imagined. But now there are all these stories, too. Anything might have happened; he may still be there.

  Still be there? Abu Fahl snorted contemptuously. Are you mad or dreaming? I saw the whole thing with my own eyes, and I’ve had years of experience of these things. Do you know, I saw the collapse of the huge cinema hall near Sadiq Square? There were six men working in the building then and not one survived. And that was a much smaller building than the Star. Yesterday I saw five storeys of concrete fall on the basement, and then I saw the basement’s ceiling collapse. I don’t want to say it, but Alu’s as dead as a skeleton in a graveyard, God have mercy on him. It would be madness to go to that place now and be taken for thieves by the police.

  All right, said Rakesh quietly, buttoning his shirt. If you won’t go, I’ll go myself.

  Zaghloul stood up: I’ll come with you.

  Abu Fahl was thrown into a quandary. A police cordon had been thrown around the Star soon after the collapse to guard what could be salvaged of the stocks in the wrecked shops. If Rakesh and Zaghloul went, they would be caught and arrested; there could be few doubts about that. They would be no more able to slip through a police cordon than they would be able to break into a bank.

  Abu Fahl stopped them at the door. He would go, he told them, but he had a few conditions: only he and Rakesh would go – the police were more likely to notice three men than two – and they would leave only after he had had time to make a few inquiries.

  Elated, Rakesh pushed open the door to Zindi’s room and shouted: Zindi, we’re going to the Star after all.

  Zindi was abstractedly rocking Boss to sleep. What? she said.

  We’re going to the Star to see if Alu’s alive.

  Yes, said Zindi, without interest. Maybe you should go, since everyone says … Her voice trailed off.

  She looked up suddenly as Rakesh, offended by her lack of enthusiasm, turned to go. Wait, she called after him. Come here. I want you to do something.

  When Rakesh was squatting beside her on the mat she whispered: Go to Romy Abu Tolba’s shop. Tolba, Romy’s boy, goes to the Souq at this time to buy things for the shop. Tell him to give a message to Forid Mian, who works in the Durban Tailoring House in the second lane. Tell him to say this: Forid Mian, Zindi wonders why you haven’t been to her house for so long. Is there something wrong with the tea? This evening she’s going to make some very good tea.

  Zindi broke off and scratched her mole. And then, she added, tell him to say: Jeevanbhai is usually away in the evenings.

  She met Rakesh’s curious glance with a finger on her lips. Now, listen, she said, don’t tell anyone about this. No one – not Abu Fahl, not Zaghloul, no one. Just go.

  When he returned Rakesh went straight to her room. She was pacing the floor, with Boss cradled in her arms. Did you tell him? she asked eagerly.

  Yes, said Rakesh, seating himself on a mat. He looked expectantly at her.

  You want to know about the message? Zindi asked. Rakesh said nothing. Zindi shut the door and seated herself beside him. She leant towards him until her black scarf was almost touching his face, and only then did Rakesh notice how anxiety had changed the pattern of lines on her massive jowls.

  A shop! she whistled into his ear. That’s my plan: a shop!

  Rakesh, in surprise, belched in a huge, rumbling gurgle. Zindi, looking straight at his averted eyes, ignored it. Don’t you understand? she appealed, and Rakesh sensed a wall within her beginning to crumble. I know where I’ve gone wrong now. Here I am with this house full of people. I make a good enough living from them most of the time – they give me a bit of money, it’s hardly enough, but still … I can look after them while they’re in the house. But where does the money come from? It doesn’t come from the house; it comes from the outside. It’s not like having land. It’s taken me all these years really to understand that. I knew it, but I didn’t understand it. While everything is all right outside, things seem fine in the house – money keeps coming in and I can manage. But let something happen outside, and that’s the end – there’s nothing I can do. Why? Because I can give them food, I can give them a roof, but I can’t give them work. When it comes to work, this house is like an empty crate – people can kick it here, kick it there, and I’m helpless. That’s why all this has happened – Mast Ram and Abusa; Professor Samuel and Kulfi losing their jobs. Everything else. The house is almost empty now and the work’s gone. It doesn’t matter to you; you can always go back home. Where can I go? Do you think Abu Fahl would stay if there was no money in the house? He’s my cousin and he’s not a bad man, but he has to live. I have to stay here, and if the house stops bringing in money one day I’ll be found floating on the beach with all that shit. I’m not young. I have to do something now. It’s my last chance. And now I know what the answer is: a shop. We have the people; we could run it. It’ll give work to everyone, if it goes well, and we’ll be safe.

  What kind of shop? asked Rakesh.

  At that, Zindi’s vision of the Durban Tailoring House came pouring out of her. It was only an ordinary tailor’s shop really – one which hadn’t kept up too well with al-Ghazira – familiar, unsurprising. And yet she hadn’t known it at all, never really seen it or understood its promise and its possibilities, till that morning when the Star fell; while she was wandering through the Souq, her head aching with fear and worry for her crumbling house. Suddenly that morning it wasn’t a shop at all, not a simple room of bricks and cement, not a thing which could be touched and felt, but a promise, a future: its dusty, be-calendared walls had grown heavy with shelves and bright with cloth, the cobwebbed ceiling was glowing with neon lights, and the empty echoing interior was suddenly full of people – people flowing in and out, their hands digging into bags full of money, looking, choosing, buying, asking her, enthroned behind the cash-desk, what’s the best? what’s the cheapest? what’s the newest? what’s from America? from Singapore? – and she, gracious, benign, inclining her head and passing them on to Abu Fahl, sleek in his new suit, or Kulfi or Karthamma or Chunni floating by in nylons and chiffons; and advertisements, too, everywhere, coloured lights winking all over al-Ghazira on the Corniche, in Hurreyya; queues stretching out of the shop and through the Souq, crowds rioting to get in …

  Isn’t it possible? she asked Rakesh. Does it seem too much?

  Rakesh shook his head in doubt, but his eyes were shining with excitement: all the clothes, think of all the clothes!

  He hesitated. But how will you get the shop, Zindi? he asked.

  Ah! Zindi’s eyes narr
owed. That’s what the plan is about …

  The Durban Tailoring House belonged to Jeevanbhai Patel. It was his beginning in al-Ghazira. He had acquired it when he first arrived, years and years ago, after his parents, in distant Durban in South Africa, discovered his secret marriage to a Bohra Muslim girl (and he a Gujarati Hindu!) and expelled him from their home and family. Jeevanbhai knew then that he must leave the town his family had lived in for a generation, the only home he had ever known. And he knew, too, that he had to act fast, before the wind carried the news along the coast. So his wife hid her few bits of jewellery in her bodice and they tied everything they had into a bundle and waited for the chain of Indian merchants along the coast to pull them northwards like a bucket from a well. First they went to Mozambique, then Dar es Salaam, then Zanzibar, Djibouti, Perim and Aden. Everywhere he met with all the hospitality due to a son of his father, and he for his part took care to keep his bride hidden and stay at least two days ahead of the news. In Aden he looked up and down the coast, sniffed the breeze and tasted the currents and decided, decided with an absolute certainty, that al-Ghazira was where he would go. He bought himself a ticket on a rusty British-blessed steamer run by an enterprising Parsi in Bombay, and soon Jeevanbhai, with his spade teeth and bundled-up wife, was standing in al-Ghazira’s harbour, looking past the booms and sambuqs anchored in the little muddy inlet, at the steaming, dusty township beyond. Al-Ghazira was small then, an intimate little place, half market-town perched on the edge of the great hungry desert beyond, half pearling-port fattening on the lustrous jeevan pearls in its bay. It was a merchant’s paradise, right in the centre of the world, conceived and nourished by the flow of centuries of trade. Persians, Iraqis, Zanzibari Arabs, Omanis and Indians fattened upon it and grew rich, and the Malik, fast in his mud-walled fort on the Great Hill behind the town, smiled upon them, took his dues and disbursed a part of them in turn when British gunboats paid their visits to the little harbour.

  The Indian merchants of al-Ghazira, some of whom had been settled there for generations, never quite knew what to make of Jeevanbhai. Soon after his arrival, for some reason, they had decided not to drive him out. But they had never accepted him and never let him into their houses. All his life Jeevanbhai circled just beyond the thresholds of respectability. So, when his wife died and his businesses began to fail and his money disappear, he had turned instinctively towards the Severed Head, and not to the Indians of the city.

  In those early days, with the last bit of his wife’s gold, Jeevanbhai had bought himself a shop in the Souq ash-Sharji. The shop was to pass through a progression of avatars; it started as a cloth-shop, switched to dates and general groceries, then changed to hardware and later to carpets – in its first decade it changed almost every year. It didn’t matter; none of the shop’s incarnations ever made much money. That was not the intention. All through those years, it was in a little room behind the shop that Jeevanbhai’s real business lay.

  One day, in his first year in al-Ghazira, Jeevanbhai was sitting in his empty cloth-shop wondering how he was going to buy the day’s food, when a rich Sindhi pearl merchant dropped by for a cup of tea. Within moments he was pouring his heart out, laying bare his shame as he never would have to anyone but an outcast: he had a daughter, still unmarried at twenty-five, and he was at his wits’ end.

  Jeevanbhai had not been idle on his journey from Durban; his instinct had driven him to ferret out names all along the coast, and his memory had clung on to them more successfully than his wallet had held on to money. That morning, providentially, his mind disgorged a suitable name in distant Zanzibar. The marriage came about and spread happiness in waves across the ocean. He was asked for a few more names, and his memory proved its worth every time. His reputation was soon established; families which would not have let him cross their courtyards flocked to his back room from all the kingdoms around al-Ghazira and from places as distant as Socotra and Khartoum, and none of them was ashamed to ask help from Jeevanbhai, for there was nothing to be feared from such a shadowy, harmless creature.

  In his little back room Jeevanbhai spun out his web, spanning oceans and continents, and such are the ironies of fortune that he, whose marriage had cast him out of his family, found fame as the most successful marriage-broker in the Indian Ocean. As his ‘marriages’ blossomed and grew rich in progeny, Jeevanbhai grew rich with his bridal pairs, for he had another talent – he had learnt the secret of spinning gold from love.

  He went into the ‘gold trade’ between India, al-Ghazira and Africa. Within months he had almost eliminated the competition, for in all the ports around the Indian Ocean grateful husbands and eager grooms stood by to receive his consignments and hurry them across borders (and of course they were none the poorer for it). Soon he began to diversify, first into silver, then a few guns. That was when, they said, he first began making his trips to the Old Fort …

  Jeevanbhai grew rich. In gratitude he founded the New Life Marriage Bureau, for he never forgot that his money had come from marriages. And, besides, there were the commissions, and nothing is as good as the account-books of a marriage bureau for throwing a pleasing fog of confusion over inexplicable flows of money. Soon his business had grown so large that he had to move out of the Souq ash-Sharji into an office near the harbour. Looking around for someone to run his shop in the Souq he came across Forid Mian, then a sailor on a British line. In his childhood Forid Mian had learnt tailoring in his native Chittagong (in what was then East Bengal), but circumstances had forced him to go to sea. Jeevanbhai learnt of his trade somehow and persuaded him to leave his ship. Ever since, Forid Mian had worked for a monthly wage in the newly named Durban Tailoring House. Usually the shop lost money, and in the best of years it just about managed to balance its books with a few tricks, but Jeevanbhai wouldn’t part with it, despite his steadily lightening purse. He clung to it; it was his talisman, the only thing left to him of his best years.

  But, then, said Rakesh, perplexed, why that shop? Why not some other shop?

  Zindi smiled: Do you know of any other shop? Do you know of anybody in the Souq who’d sell, especially now with so much money coming in? That’s the important thing – Jeevanbhai doesn’t make money from that shop; it’s just sentiment. He’s a practical man. If something went wrong, if it became too much trouble to keep that shop … Suppose Forid Mian decides to leave. I’m not saying he will, but just suppose. Then what would that shop be worth to Jeevanbhai? He has enough to worry about at the moment – would he still want that shop? It’s just a question, no one can answer it yet, but maybe then he might want to sell. Who knows? And, besides, it’s a lucky shop. It brought Jeevanbhai luck once, only he didn’t know how to hold on to it – he meddles too much. It ought to go to someone who knows how to use it. Maybe …

  Why not just ask him to sell it, Zindi?

  That’s the trouble, Zindi said angrily. People like you have no experience of practical things. Do you think one can just ask a man like Jeevanbhai something like that? There has to be a situation, some possibilities, something that might help him make up his mind. You see, you have to be practical, like me, and not spend your time brooding uselessly about the Star. It’s only when you learn to accept that what’s happened has happened that you can use your knowledge of the past to cheat the future. That is what practical life is.

  Abu Fahl’s inquiries yielded the information that the guard around the ruins was changed three times a day: in the morning, at dusk and at midnight. He found out that at dusk, because the change coincided with the evening prayers, the relieving detachment sometimes arrived a little late. So, for about half an hour after dusk, the Star was usually unguarded. He decided that he and Rakesh would leave the house a little before dusk.

  Before leaving, they told Zindi of their plans. She listened absent-mindedly. Yes, go, she said. Allah yigawwikum, and God give you strength.

  Her mind was elsewhere. Rakesh could see that her anxiety was not caused by their enterprise. Before they l
eft, she took him aside and whispered: Rakesh, do you think he’ll come?

  Who?

  Forid Mian, of course, she said impatiently. Rakesh shrugged and combed his hair. As they walked out of the house towards the embankment, they saw her looking worriedly up and down the lane.

  Soon after they had left there was a knock on the door. Zindi leapt to open it. An elderly man in a blue jallabeyya and skullcap stood outside, a wan smile wrinkling his square, good-humoured face. How are you, Zindi? he said.

  Zindi covered her disappointment with a shower of greetings: Come in, come in, Hajj Fahmy, welcome, ya marhaban, you have brought blessings, welcome ya, Hajj Fahmy, you have brought light, how are you? Come in, have some tea.

  Hajj Fahmy seated himself ceremoniously on a mat and placed his hands on his folded knees. Zindi, he said, as she pumped her stove, where’s my son Isma’in?

  Isma’il? said Zindi, surprised. He hasn’t been here.

  But I sent him here. We heard the rumours, you see, and I wanted to find out. He didn’t come so I was worried.

  Zindi clicked her tongue in sympathy. How you’ve aged, she said, since Mohammad’s accident, God have mercy on him. She threw an extra handful of tea and mint into the pot. Hajj Fahmy was the house’s oldest friend and he had a right to its best tea.

  Hajj Fahmy’s family was said to have been founded, several generations ago, by a weaver called Musa, who had fled his village in the far south of Egypt after a blood feud. He escaped to Sudan and the Red Sea coast with his child bride, and there, penniless and starving, he had entered himself and his bride into servitude.

  After innumerable adventures in Ethiopia, Somalia and the Yemeni coast, Musa had found his way somehow to al-Ghazira with his no-longer-young wife and many children. The Malik of the time took them into his service, and Musa and his still growing family lived in the Old Fort and wove their cloth in peace. Eventually Musa and his family came to be known as the Malik’s dependants, his Mawali. His descendants were known forever afterwards by that name, even when they depended on no one but themselves.