‘Okay. You’re tired. We can go back upstairs.’ He had merely wanted to see me relax in a hotel lobby without the fear his father had, and which I suspect he had too. ‘No. I am listening. Keep talking.’
‘Get your rest. We will have to do a lot of walking tomorrow. And out in the heat too.’
* * *
I assumed I would have no problem sleeping. I took a blast of water vapour from the nightstand and thought about calling my wife. Maybe even Dad. I got up and walked towards the window. It was three a.m. and the floodlights were still illuminating the shrine.
‘You can’t sleep?’ Jidu chuckled.
I waited in the darkness for his next line. For a moment it didn’t seem to come.
‘My father couldn’t sleep on his first night in Najaf.’
‘There it is.’
‘There what is? Anyway, my father had food poisoning from a kebab he’d eaten and it kept him up all night vomiting. Biba had to sit beside him all night—a man in his late thirties, reduced to a crumpled mess on the bathroom floor, needing his mother.’
‘So he went to Najaf to connect to his Iraqi roots, and all he came back with were some Iraqi viruses.’
‘Funny.’
‘He went to Iraq to look after his parents. But his mom ended up looking after him.’
Jidu fell silent.
‘So she gave him Prilosec for the stomach acid in his throat?’
‘Very impressive. They taught you early twenty-first-century drugs in medical school then. Yes, Biba famously kept a stash of every medicine known to man in her handbag, at all times. And that night, Biba and Morteza argued into the small hours about what medicine they should give poor Ibrahim. It’s convenient having one parent as a doctor, my father used to say, but a disaster having two.’
I stared at the ceiling. ‘How do you know all this, in such detail, Jidu? It wasn’t you that made these trips!’
‘I’ve told you. The casts my father, Ibrahim, recorded, before he got ill. He made dozens of them back in the seventies, when he had this mad scheme to publish a bio-blog. I found them a few years ago and got a friend to convert them all to optic files. I listened to them all the time now. Here,’ he sat up suddenly. ‘Let me play you the bit about the night he was sick.’ He tapped his forehead three times, and mumbled a series of prompt words, like quiet grunts to himself: ‘Archive’, ‘Ibrahim’, ‘Najaf’, ‘2010’, ‘Keyword “plastic gun”’, ‘Play paragraph’.
Suddenly the air in the room was alive, crackling with the strange, amplified background noises and a voice so formal it was like being at mosque.
‘It was barely three in the morning,’ the voice croaked. ‘I had returned to bed, and lay there listening to mother and father arguing, staring out the window. The entire façade of the hotel seemed to be made out of glass, you understand, and my bed was right up against it; the whole wall as a window. So I was lying on my side, watching the nocturnal world below. We were only on the third floor, and I could clearly see a policeman standing at a checkpoint, holding something in his hand. It was an odd looking device—like a plastic gun with a silver antenna coming out the top. I presumed it was for detecting car bombs. It scanned for a kind of wiring apparently only used in explosive devices. I must have seen other detectors before, but as I lay there I couldn’t stop staring at the contraption, and wondering what the procedure was exactly, if the light on the top flashed on. Shoot to kill instantly, I presume. Hope it wasn’t a faulty reading.’
The call to prayer could be clearly heard, starting up in the background.
‘There was no traffic, of course,’ the voice continued. ‘And only official vehicles were allowed that far into town. But he still stood there, like a statue, pointing that machine down an empty street. I later learned those devices never actually worked. Some British guy made millions selling the Iraqi government those things, and they became standard issue at every checkpoint. It later turned out he had just repurposed a metal-detector mechanism, set to never pick up anything.’
‘How things have changed,’ Jidu said, double-tapping his head to pause the tape, before muttering, ‘Play.’
‘After the introduction of military droids in the mid twenties, the Iraqi government brought in an army of robots to replace policemen at checkpoints. Their sensors were actually able to detect things this time—Semtex, nitroglycerene, napalm—and at a distance of half a kilometre. Car bombs became a thing of the past. And so did the culture of fear and suspicion. During the Sectarian Wars, police at the checkpoints had asked to see every driver’s ID, and from their last name, they could tell if they were Shi’a or Sunni. If you were Sunni, you weren’t allowed to enter. Shi’a areas began to develop their own autonomy, like Muhafazat al-Sadr, which grew out of what was once “Sadr City”, a sprawling Baghdad slum; they became independent provinces, connected by a network of Shi’a-only tunnels. In the darkest days of the Wars, you could be killed at a checkpoint any day of the week, just for belonging to the wrong sect. The droids, by contrast, were like guardian angels. They were only interested in detectable chemicals, not family histories or possible allegiances. Droids didn’t ask you for an ID card. Suddenly, the Iraqi people felt free again.
‘Anyway, I was lying in my bed, staring at this policeman, for what must have been hours. I was imagining what would happen if a car were to appear at the end of that empty road, speeding towards us, and if the policeman wasn’t a good shot. The explosion would shatter the glass of this wall-high window and obliterate the three of us. I had a very strong sense, all of a sudden, of what it would be like to bleed to death, dismembered. Different parts of myself, in different parts of the room.’
Jidu and I lay there in the dark. The background noises continued, but the voice had paused. It occurred to me that pilgrimages were supposed to be journeys of the spirit, but for Jidu, this was a journey of the macabre, a rendezvous with ghosts. Was this the turning point in my great-grandfather’s life?
I commanded the blankets to cover me again and resolved to sleep. But Jidu wasn’t finished.
‘There’s something about that phrase,’ Jidu said, clearly to himself now, ‘that haunts me: “different parts of myself”.’
‘Go to sleep, Jidu,’ I grunted. ‘Go to sleep.’
The following morning we were back down in the lobby, asking the breakfast-droids for top-ups of coffee vapour, breathing them in with slow, satisfied delight. ‘Ah, that’s better,’ my grandfather sighed—his first fully formed sentence of the day. He then muttered something to the droid who returned with a bowl of what looked like white cream. ‘Now, this is gaymer,’ Jidu said, excitedly. ‘Originally gaymer was made from fresh goat’s milk, mixed with a form of glucose made by insects—by insects can you believe! They called it “honey”. And then there was the bread, the samun—delivered fresh from the baker that morning, made from wheat fresh from the fields that summer.’
I tried a spoonful of the substance, and responded with my mouth still full: ‘I know, I know, nothing is how it was in your day.’
Jidu paused for a moment and then asked, ‘Did you call your father to let him know you arrived?’
We ate in silence. Half an hour later, Abbas R-12 and Zaynab C-12 entered the lobby and informed us that we were to finish our breakfast quickly as the shrine of Imam Ali tour was about to leave.
As we stepped out into the heat, we tried to imagine how hot it would be if the street-level air-conditioning wasn’t working. As the walkway conveyed us toward the shrine, vendors stepped on and off, trying to sell us anything from hovering prayer rugs and turquoise Teflon jewellery, to bootleg neural implants. None of us could be tempted and each of the vendors politely stepped off, before their allotted two minutes had elapsed. The shrine of Imam Ali was now in front of us. At the landing platform, a large crowd had gathered already, and our guide-droids had to snake a path through it for us to follow. As we walked, I tapped my forehead: ‘Reference: What is Najufa’s current population?’ The implant sear
ch-engine pulled up the result. ‘Three million, five hundred and seventy two thousand, eight hundred and thirty four, excluding visitors.’ Thousands of visitors added to this, of course, arriving by train from Baghdad and Tehran every day.
‘Najaf was only half a million in 2003,’ my grandfather chipped in.
After giving me his estimate on what proportion of the local population was made up of people on temporary contracts, and therefore ‘not permanent,’ he fell silent again. He must have been slightly overwhelmed by the range of languages being spoken around him as we walked the avenue leading into the shrine. In his day there was standard Arabic, or fusha, and the Iraqi amiyah or dialect, which differed slightly from city to city. But here there was a cacophony of dialect amalgams: Sorani-Dari, Franco-Farsi, Kumanji-Turkmen. People seemed thoroughly promiscuous with what they chose to mix with what.
As we entered into the shrine, three election-droids approached us, noting our accents. Since Iraqis in the diaspora could now vote in national elections, we had been targeted for slogans and manifesto promises on behalf of the State of Technology Coalition Party.
‘There was something called an “election” the year my father came here,’ Jidu started up again, somewhat inevitably. ‘In those days, the politicians were merely tribal leaders, religious figures, or militiamen wanting to widen their power. Ordinary, decent people attempted to form a coalition, but their innocence was the reason they lost.’
‘But modern elections are just as corrupt,’ I suggested, as we approached the shrine’s sahn.9 Today’s human politicians never set foot among ordinary people to deliver their message, and the most successful parties were simply those that struck the sweetest deals with the search-engine corps. In Jidu’s father’s time, people had voted for a party’s political or religious program. Now all that counted was its digital affiliations. All of them claimed to represent both man and mechanoid equally, but in reality it was still a small number of exclusively human shareholders that were striking the search-engine deals, behind closed doors.
As our hamla filed into the sahn, the women split off toward their section, led by Zaynab, while we followed Abbas. Two guard-droids stood at the door, scanning us closely to see if anyone’s body language triggered their ‘threat’ algorithms; excessive sweating, shaking, twitching, vocal tension, and so on. Eight years ago, a sleeper takfiri, had posted an encrypted ‘allegiance blog’ to the long dormant ISJISL, before kidnapping a chay-droid and hacking it. Packed with explosives, all undetectable beneath a lead-lined chasis, the chay-droid had approached a popular mosque in Karbalafor. It could not have known that the garbage collectors in the street outside were actually undercover mukhabarat-droids. Detecting a closed safety-loop in its command code, the mukhabarat fired a Tau beam into its legs, disabling it. To make an example of it, to other droids, it was put on trial, found guilty, and disassembled slowly, in full power mode, live on public-access holo-TV.
Since then, people have been nervous about making pilgrimages. Some package tours even included a ‘Quick Will’ service, just in case.
‘It is so strange to just enter the hadhra like this,’ I said, as we simply walked through the courtyard towards the ablutions fountain.
‘Why is it strange?’ Jidu replied.
As we reached the fountain, a wudhu-droid approached me. I unzipped the arms and feet of my one-suit, and stood in front of him as he sprinkled salty water vapour into my hands. It must have been desalinated, piped in from the Gulf via the Fourth and Fifth Canals, as it was completely odourless. I washed both sides of my face, and then my arms, and feet. I was ready to pray.
‘It looks exactly the same,’ my jidu was saying. ‘Exactly how it was in all those photos!’
He was kind of right. The actual shrine covering Imam Ali’s body probably hadn’t changed. But the complex itself had undergone numerous expansions to accommodate the growth in pilgrims.
I doubled-tapped to zoom my retinas, so that I could scan the whole complex: the crystal chandeliers, the high glass walls, the blue crystal tiles, reflecting the sky, the jade marble archways, and finally the great cube-like structure encasing Imam Ali’s body itself, with its latticework of silver and gold. It was surrounded by a throng of pilgrims, and I, like everyone else, pushed forward to touch it.
‘Careful Muhammad. Don’t push others. Be patient. Don’t be like my father when he first saw this shrine.’
I grabbed the silver mesh with my right hand, and with my left beckoned my grandfather toward me to touch it also. All the time, he whispered a prayer. There were so many pilgrims trying to touch the shrine that we could barely stand there a minute before the guard-droids moved us on.
We found an empty space a few metres away and sat down on the carpeted floor, looking back at the shrine and the pilgrims gathering around it.
‘You know, my father had memories of seeing this shrine when he was just five years old. All that crystal, it stuck with him. He told me he had a Lone Ranger mask in his pocket. It was what he called a “cowboy”—some kind of mythical hero-character from two centuries back. This character used to wear a black mask just around his eyes. My father, casually put this mask on, only to be screamed at by his mother: “You can’t be the Lone Ranger in the hadhra!”’
We both smiled. ‘When they came again in 2010, my father and grandfather sat down—who knows, maybe even on this very spot,’ Jidu continued. ‘But within minutes of them getting comfortable my grandfather suddenly jumped up again: “We should go and find your mum!” My father protested, “Baba! We just got here. Can’t we just enjoy this?” But my grandfather had barely been separated from Bibi for five minutes, and he needed to be with her again. They were in the presence of their revered Imam Ali, who they hadn’t seen since 1979, and all his grandfather could think about was getting back to Bibi. It wasn’t enough to be there with his only son. So they packed up and went looking for her. She was still in the women’s section, and they had to wait at the entrance for her, for more than an hour before she emerged. And that was it. Then they left.’
‘I don’t get it.’ I finally broke. ‘I don’t get it, Jidu. What was so important about this trip? Why have you spent years obsessing over it? This trip that was their story, not yours?’
Hearing the tone of my voice, three guard-droids and a muezzin-droid simultaneously stopped in their tracks and turned towards us.
‘I’m getting to it, Muhammed. Even those five minutes sitting in the presence of the shrine was enough to change my father’s life. Sitting in front of Imam Ali’s body, he realised this wasn’t just a Shi’a place, this wasn’t even just a Muslim place, this was a place special to all people, of all religions, and those without religion too. This was a place for reconnecting. That’s what Baba hated so much about the 2003 War, and the Sectarian Wars that followed. Before 2003, he never thought about which of his Muslim friends were Sunni and which Shi’a. It occurred to him, afterwards, that most of them had actually been Sunnis, before the invasion. But after 2003, he could think of nothing else. Baba’s uncle was kidnapped and killed in 2007, igniting a hatred that was already roaring within him by then. For three further years, it raged in him, darkening his eyes. He used to say to me, “In my heart. I was as bad as them.” But then in 2010, just five minutes of sitting here made him realise there are no Sunnis and Shi’as, just brothers and sisters—this wasn’t just a Shia place, but the resting place of a great common ancestor, the Imam Ali. That’s why we’re called “sayyids”, Muhammed. We can trace our descent to him. And at that moment, sitting here, Baba thought to himself: “What would Ali, our ancestor think of the person I have become, so consumed by hate and vengeance. What would he think of me judging an entire people based on what a few criminals have done?” And just as his father was fussing over finding Bibi, my father, Ibrahim, was suddenly feeling all his hate being released.’
He saw I was looking down, and paused.
‘My father said that being here made him think of his other ances
tors. When he touched that silver mesh in 2010, he knew he was touching something that his father, and his father’s father had touched many times themselves. Something, for instance, that his great-grandfather Hassan must have touched in 1920, before fleeing the city with his family, having fought in the Great Revolt that year against the British. And when Hassan tried to make his way back from Zanzibar in 1960, via mainland Africa, he got as far as Arusha, in Tanzania, and was buried in the foothills of Kilimanjaro. He died before my father was born, of course.’
‘What I can’t understand,’ I began cautiously, ‘is why you never came here before? You talked about this pilgrimage of your father’s for years, but you never came here yourself!’
Jidu was quiet. ‘I went on another pilgrimage once,’ he began eventually. ‘I went with my father, Ibrahim, in the seventies, after Mum died. We went to Zanzibar. To stand on the island in the hope that he could reconnect with the landscape of his father’s childhood. That was the plan, at least. But nothing looked the same as the old photos. It was just desert by then. But while we were there, we managed to hop over to Arusha to visit his grandfather Hassan’s grave.’
‘You never told me this, Jidu.’
‘That was my greatest pilgrimage, Muhammad. Until today.’
I smiled up at him.
‘And my father was almost as annoying as you to travel with!’ he laughed.
‘So you have a great-great-grandfather buried under a mountain in Africa? And your great-grandfather?’
‘Beside a freeway in northern California.’
‘I wish I could have met them both. But why did you never come here?’
‘I’m trying to tell you. You see, in my own troubles with my father, I idolised his predecessors instead, people like Hassan. I think you are doing the same with me … Don’t be angry with your father for wishing to end my life. Seeing me transition to a singularity has been hard for him. Knowing, I’m first part-machine and then, soon, will be all-machine troubles him, more than it does me.’ Jidu’s blue eyes glinted in the sunlight. ‘Who’d have thought he would turn out to be the old-fashioned one, not me? I was happy to go quietly into the organic night as well, but then you came along.’
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