Amitav Ghosh - Incendiary Circumstances - A Chronicle of the Turmoil of Our Times

Later Aly wrote down Nabeel's address for me. It consisted of a number on a numbered street in "New Baghdad." I pictured to myself an urban development project of the kind that flourishes in the arid hinterlands of Cairo and New Delhi — straight, treeless streets and blocks of yellow buildings divided into "Pockets," "Phases," and "Zones."

"You must telephone him," one of Nabeel's younger brothers said. "He'll be so pleased. Do you know, he's kept all your letters, wrapped in a plastic bag? He still talks of you, a lot. Tell me, didn't you once say to him…"

And then he recounted, almost word for word, a conversation I had once had with Nabeel. It was about something trivial, about my college in Delhi, but for some reason I had written it down in my diary that very day, while it was still fresh in memory. I had read through my diaries of that time again recently. That was why I knew that Nabeel's brother had repeated that conversation, or at least a part of it, almost verbatim, in near exact detail. I was amazed. It seemed to me an impossible, deeply moving defiance of time and the laws of hearsay and memory.

"You can be sure that I will telephone him," I said to Nabeel's brother. "I'll telephone him soon, from America."

"You must tell him that we are well and that he should send another cassette."

"Won't he be surprised," said Fawzia, "when he hears Amitab's voice on the phone? He'll think someone's playing a joke on him."

"We'll write and tell him," said Aly. "We'll write tomorrow so he won't be surprised. We'll tell him that you're going to phone him from America."

But they hadn't written: the surprise in Nabeel's voice as he greeted me over the phone was proof of that. And I, for my part, even though I had the advantage, was almost as amazed as Nabeel, though for a different reason. When I was living in their village, in 1980 and '81, Nabeel and Ismail had had very definite plans for their immediate future: they wanted salaried jobs in the Agriculture Ministry. It would not have occurred to any of us then to think that within a few years they would both be abroad and that I would be able to speak to them on the phone from thousands of miles away.

There was only one telephone in the village then. It had never worked, as far as anyone knew. It was not meant to — it was really a badge of office, a scepter. It belonged to the government, and it resided in the house of the village headman. When a headman was voted out in the local elections, the telephone was ritually removed from his house and taken to the victor's. It was carried at the head of a procession, accompanied by drums and gunshots, as though it were a saint's relics. "We carried the telephone that year," people would say, meaning "We swept the elections."

Nabeel's family was one of the poorest in the village — and the village was not by any means prosperous. Few families in the village had more than five feddans of land, but most had one or two. Nabeel's family had none at all. That was one of the reasons that he and his brothers had all got an education: schools and colleges were free, and they had no land to claim their time.

Nabeel lived with his parents in a three-room adobe hut, along with Aly and Fawzia and their three other brothers. Aly worked in the fields for a daily wage when there was work to be had; their father carried a tiny salary as a village watchman. He was a small, frail man with sunken cheeks and watery gray eyes. As a watchman he had the possession of a gun, an ancient Enfield, that was kept in a locked chest under his bed. He said that he'd last had occasion to use it some fifteen years ago, when somebody spotted a gang of thieves running through Hassan Bassiuni's cornfields. The thieves had escaped, but the gun had mowed down half the field — it was really very much like a blunderbuss. He was very proud of it. Once when a fire broke out in Shahata Hammoudah's house and everyone was busy doing what they could, I noticed Nabeel's father running in the opposite direction. When I next looked around, he was standing at attention in front of the burning house, holding his gun, smiling benignly.

Nabeel's mother, a dark, fine-boned woman, secretly despaired of her husband. "He's been defeated by the world," she would say sometimes. "There's no one to stand beside Nabeel and his brothers except themselves."

Now, eight years later, Nabeel's father and mother were both dead. "And the saddest thing," Fawzia said to me, "is that they didn't live to see how things have changed for us."

The three mud-walled rooms were gone now. In their place was a bungalow, or at least its skeleton — four or five rooms, in a largely unfinished state but built of brick and cement and entirely habitable. There was provision for a bathroom, a kitchen, a living room, as well as another entire apartment upstairs, exactly like the one below. That was where Nabeel would live once he was married, Fawzia said to me. She, for her part, was content; in her house she now had a television set, a cassette recorder, and a washing machine.

It wasn't just her life that had changed. When I first came to the village, in 1980, there were only three or four television sets there, and they belonged to the handful of men who owned fifteen to twenty feddans of land, the richest men in the village. Those men still had their fifteen to twenty feddans of land and their black-and-white television sets. It was the families who had once been thought of as the poor folk of the village whose homes were now full of all the best-known brand names in Japan — television sets, washing machines, kitchen appliances, cameras… I could not have begun to imagine a change on this scale when I left the village in 1981. If I had not witnessed it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it possible.

It was a kind of revolution, but it had happened a long way away. It had been created entirely by the young men who had gone to work in Iraq, once that country began to experience severe labor shortages because of its war with Iran. They were carried along by a great wave of migration. In the late 1980s there were estimated to be between two and three million Egyptians in Iraq. Nobody knew for sure: the wave had surged out of the country too quickly to be measured. All of Nabeel's contemporaries were gone now — all the young men with high school educations and no jobs and no land and nothing to do but play football and lounge around the water taps when the girls went to fetch water in the evenings. Some of the old men used to say that they would all go to the bad. But in the end it was they who had transformed the village.

"It's we who've been the real gainers in the war," one of the village schoolteachers said to me while I was walking down the lanes, gaping at all the newly built houses and buildings. "The Iraqis are doing all the fighting, it's they who're dying. The Arab countries are paying them to break the back of Khomeini's Islamic revolution. For them it's a matter of survival. But in the meantime, while Iraqis are dying, others are making money. But it won't last — that money's tainted, and the price is going to be paid later, someday."

The young men who'd left were paying a price already. "Life is really hard there," their families said. "You never know what's going to happen from day to day." And they would tell stories about fights, about lone Egyptians being attacked on the streets, about men being forced to work inhuman hours, about how the Iraqi women would look at Egyptian men from their windows, because so many of their own men were dead, and how it always led to trouble, because the Iraqis would find out and kill both the woman and the Egyptian.

"How does Nabeel like it in Iraq?" I asked his brother Aly.

"He's fine," said Aly. "He's all right."

"How do you know?"