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

"That's what he says on the cassettes," he said. "I'm sure he's all right."

"I hope so," I said.

He was frowning now. "God knows," he said. "People say life is hard out there."

Nabeel could not tell me as much over the telephone, with his boss listening. But he was well, he said, and so was his cousin Ismail, and they were managing fine, living with their relatives and friends from back home. In turn he asked me about India, my job, my family. Then I heard a noise down the line; it sounded like another voice in the same room. Nabeel broke off to say, "Coming, just a moment."

I said quickly, "I'm going back to India soon. I'll try and visit you on the way."

"We'll be expecting you," he said. In the background I could hear the voice again, louder now.

"You'd better go now," I said.

"I'll tell Ismail you're coming," he said hurriedly. "We'll wait for you."

But the year passed and the visit eluded me.

2

It was exactly three weeks since Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and miraculously, Abu-Ali, the old shopkeeper, was on his feet. That was how he happened to see me as I walked down the road past his window.

Nabeel's village was just a mile and a half away, and I was on my way there when Abu-Ali sent a child running after me. Abu-Ali's house was where the asphalt road ended and the dirt track began. Taxi drivers would not go any farther.

Abu-Ali was standing by the window again cradling a radio, twiddling the knob. He had always behaved as though all the village's worries had fallen on his shoulders. Now it looked as though he had taken on all of Egypt's.

The radio was a big one, with a built-in cassette recorder, but in Abu-Ali's huge, swollen hands it seemed as slim and fragile as an advanced model of a calculator. It spat out a medley of electronic sounds as the pointer flashed across its face. But the sounds were lost; the noise in the room was already deafening. Abu-Ali's cousin's daughter was getting married next door. A crowd of women and children had gathered in the lane outside their house. A boy was beating a tin washbasin with a spoon, and the women and children were clapping in time and chanting, " Ya rumman, ya rumman, " singing of the bride as the bloom of a pomegranate.

At intervals Abu-Ali rose from his bed, went to the window, glared at the women and children outside, shuffled back, and collapsed onto his bed again. This was an astonishing feat. When I first knew him years ago, he was already so fat that he found it nearly impossible to leave his bed. Now he was fatter still. Every time he stood up, his belly surged away from him like backwash leaving a beach. It was pure greed, his neighbors had always said; he ate the way other people force-fed geese — he could eat two chickens and a pot of rice at one sitting. And now that there was all this Iraqi money in his house, that was exactly what he did sometimes — ate two whole chickens and a pot of rice, right after the midday prayers.

"Ate it," muttered Abu-Ali, shuffling across the room yet again. "The son of a bitch just ate it like it was a chicken's liver. Saw a tasty little morsel and just swallowed it."

He sounded envious: an appetite was something he could understand.

"So what do you expect?" someone said. The room was quite full now: several men had stopped by to see Abu-Ali on their way to the wedding. "What was Kuwait but a tasty little morsel cooked up by the British and sucked dry by the Americans?"

"Just ate it!" Abu-Ali twirled the knob of the radio, sending the pointer screeching through a succession of stations. "BBC, BBC," he muttered, "where's that son-of-a-bitch BBC?"

A distant, haranguing voice suddenly burst out of the radio, screaming shrilly. Abu-Ali started back in surprise, almost dropping the radio. "Who's this son of a bitch now?"

"That's Damascus," said someone.

"No, it's those son-of-a-bitch Americans broadcasting in Arabic," said someone else.

"No, it's Riyadh," said Abu-Ali. "It sounds like a Saudi."

"Riyadh is where he should have gone," said another man. "But he didn't — stopped too soon. It's those Saudi sons of bitches who should have been fixed."

I jogged the elbow of the man sitting next to me. I knew him well once; he used to teach in a nearby school. Now he was teaching in the Yemen; he'd come home on a visit, intending to leave once the summer holidays ended. But his wife wouldn't let him go; she had four children to bring up, and she was not going to let him vanish into a war zone.

"Do you know if Nabeel Badawy is back from Iraq yet?" I asked him.

"Nabeel?" he said. He'd been looking distracted, anxious, ever since he came into the room. Now he looked as though he'd been dazed by the noise and the cigarette smoke. The man next to him had his arm firmly in his grasp; he was shouting into his other ear, his voice hoarse.

"The worst sons of bitches, the most ungrateful, do you know who they are?" he shouted.

"Nabeel Idris Badawy," I said insistently. "You remember him?"

"The Palestinians," shouted the man hoarsely. "The worst sons of bitches."

"Nabeel Idris Badawy," I repeated. "From Nashawy?"

"From Nashawy?" said the schoolteacher. "How many wars have we fought for them, you tell me? Haven't I lost my own brother?"

"Nabeel Idris Mustafa Badawy," said the schoolteacher jubilantly, his voice rising to a shout. "He was in Iraq — my nephew told me."

"Them and the Israelis, God forsake them, the sons of bitches. In the end they're always at the bottom of everything."

"I know Nabeel's in Iraq," I shouted back. "But do you know if he's back yet?"

He thought for a moment and then shook his head. "No," he said, "I can't tell you. There are so many boys over there, you know, it's impossible to keep track. Mabrouk Hussein is still there, you know, my own nephew. You remember him? And there are others from this village — there's Fahmy and Abusa and…"

He began to repeat the names, as everyone else who had come into the room had done. The village was a very small one, no more than 350 souls, just a hamlet really. I knew it well when I lived in the area. At that time only one man from the village was abroad; he taught Arabic in a school in Zaire. But over the past few years more than a dozen of its young men had left. Most had gone to Iraq, a couple to Jordan (it was almost the same thing). Several had returned since the beginning of the year, but five still remained, trapped in Iraq. People said their names over and over again, as though to conjure them out of Iraq, back to the village: Mabrouk, who used to keep goal; Abusa—"the Frown" — who never smiled; Fahmy, who used to ride out to the fields on a sheep. I remembered them coming to visit me in the evenings, full of questions: "What do you grow in India? Do you have schools? Do you have weddings? Rain? An army?" They were very young. None of them had ever been farther than the local town. The machines with which they were most familiar were their kababis —the Persian wheels their cattle drove, round and round for hours every day, to water their fields. Mabrouk had once come running to my room, hugely excited, and dragged me away to his house to see the brand-new water pump his family had bought. It was very important for him and his family that I take a look at it, for like all the pumps in the area, it was from India (the generic name for water pump was makana hindi, "the Indian machine"). No matter that I had said, time after time, that I knew nothing about water pumps, I was always asked for an opinion when somebody bought one.

This one was exactly like the others: a big green machine with a spout and an exhaust pipe. They had hung an old shoe on the spout and stuck an incense stick in the exhaust pipe to protect it from the evil eye. I knocked on the spout with my knuckles and patted its diesel tank in a well-informed kind of way. "What do you think?" Mabrouk's father said. "Is it all right?"