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

I knocked a little harder, frowning.

He was anxious now: "So, what do you think?"

I smiled. "It's a very good one — excellent."

There was a sigh of relief. "Get the Indian doctor some tea."

Mabrouk had shaken my hand. "I knew you would be able to tell…"

And now Mabrouk was in the immediate vicinity of chemical and nuclear weapons, within a few minutes' striking distance of the world's most advanced machinery. It would be he who would have to pay the price of the violence that was invented in quiet, pastoral laboratories in Heidelberg and Berkeley.

"Do you think the Americans are ever going to leave the sacred land?" a young man said at the top of his voice. People fell silent, listening. Outside, the clapping seemed suddenly louder, the girls' voices more insistent.

"Never," he shouted. "Never — they're never going to leave the sacred places. Now that they're there, they're going to stay till the end of time. They've finally achieved what they'd never managed in a thousand years of history. And who's responsible? The Saudis — the sons of bitches."

" Ya rumman, ya rumman! " The beat was growing faster; the spoons were drumming out a crescendo on the washbasins. Glancing out of the window, I saw three young men walking down the lane. They had all recently returned from Iraq. Abu-Ali's youngest son was among them. The girls stole looks at them as they walked past, singing at the tops of their voices. They were hoping perhaps that they'd stop and join in the singing and dancing, as young men used to. But these three youths walked straight past them. They had small, derisory smiles under their clipped mustaches. They were embarrassed at the sight of their sisters and cousins drumming out a beat on washbasins while waiting for a groom who was going to arrive in a pickup truck. They had grown accustomed to seeing weddings with big bands and hired BMWs. They were savvy, street-smart in some ways — some of them could recite the prices of the best brand-name goods as though they'd memorized a catalogue. They could tell you what counted as a good price for anything ranging from a pair of Nike shoes to a video camera. If you'd paid a piaster more, you'd been had, someone had "laughed at you." The girls were going to be disappointed. These young men were not going to tie up their jallabeyyas and dance to the rhythm of dented washbasins.

"Why'd you think the Americans and the British have always supported those son-of-a-bitch sheiks?" my friend the schoolteacher said. "Why do you think? Because it was the easiest way to get back all the money they spent on oil — it all went straight back to their casinos and hotels. And they knew someday they would be able to get back here through those sheiks, the sons of bitches."

The girls were beginning to irritate Abu-Ali. He shuffled up to the window and yelled, "Will you stop that noise? Can't you see we're trying to listen to the news on the radio?"

His voice was legendary: it shook the mud floor. The girls stopped their singing for a moment, taken by surprise. But soon they started again, softly at first and then louder, gradually. The wedding had been planned a year ago, long before the invasion. They'd been looking forward to it for a long time; they had no wish whatever to forgo one of their few diversions.

"Didn't I tell you to stop that noise?" Abu-Ali ran out of breath, mopped his forehead.

"He's been like this ever since the invasion," the schoolteacher whispered to me. "Taken it personally."

In fact Abu-Ali had been lucky. His three sons, who'd all spent long periods of time in Iraq, were back in Egypt now. The youngest had returned just a month before the invasion. "People say that God was watching over him," his mother had said to me when I went into the house to see her. "They say, 'You should praise God for bringing him back in time'—as though I didn't know it."

Abu-Ali had bought a Datsun pickup truck with his sons' earnings. It was making good money now, ferrying goods between the nearby towns and villages. He had also built apartments for his sons, all of them expensively furnished with the heavy, gilded furniture that was favored in rural Egypt. Still, there was one more thing he wanted: a car. He had been just about ready to send two of his sons back to Iraq when the war broke out. He'd even bought the tickets.

"That Saddam Hussein," he said. "How could anyone know he'd do this?"

I could have told him of a conversation I'd recorded in my diary on September 30, 1980, when I was living down the road in Nashawy. It was a conversation with one of Nabeel's cousins, a bright young medical student, about the Iran-Iraq war:

I asked him whether he thought that after the war Saddam Hussein was going to emerge as the strong man of the Middle East. He said no, he never would, because Egypt's army was the strongest in the Middle East, and perhaps in the world; because Egypt's soldiers were the best in the world!

I could still remember thinking about that exclamation mark.

"That Saddam Hussein," snarled Abu-Ali. "I want to kill him."

His youngest son came into the room and was amazed to see me. After the greetings were over, he said, "Do you know, I used to work for Indians in Iraq? But they were a different kind of Indian — Shia Muslims, Bohras. I used to work in a hotel they ran in Karbala. It's a great pilgrimage center, you know."

I was startled: I had only very recently met a group of Bohra Muslims. On my way to Cairo from Calcutta, I'd had to stop at Amman airport to catch a connecting flight. I'd met them at the airport. They'd been stranded in Karbala for several days after the invasion. They'd been very worried, because some members of their party had American and British passports. But when they got to the border, it had been all right; the guards had let them through without a word. "We're Muslims," they said, "so it didn't matter." In Karbala they'd stayed in a Bohra hotel, they'd said — very well run, clean, comfortable. It was an odd coincidence.

"Why did you come through Jordan at a time like this?" he asked. I explained that the trip had been arranged a long time back.

"I traveled through Jordan too once," he said. "It was a nice place then. But look at it now. Have you seen the pictures on the TV news? They're frightening. That man…"

"I want to kill that Saddam Hussein," bellowed his father. "He's spoiled everything." The thought of that lost car was sawing into his flesh.

"This war's going to be a disaster," said his son, shaking his head. But he had a look of relief on his face: at least his father wouldn't be able to send him back there now.

"Did you ever come across Nabeel in Iraq?" I asked.

"Nabeel?" he repeated after me. "Nabeel who?"

"Nabeel Idris Mustafa Badawy," I said. "From Nashawy."

He thought for a moment and shook his head. "No. I didn't even know he was there. It's a big country, and there are so many Egyptians there…"

A pickup truck drew up outside in a flurry of horns. The washbasins began to crash together, the women began to ululate. The groom had arrived. Abu-Ali paid no notice. He was shouting: "…he doesn't know how much harm he's doing to his country…"

Many of the men in the room went rushing out to receive the groom. I slipped out with them, unnoticed. Abu-Ali was still shouting: "He has to be killed, as soon as possible."

Everywhere in Egypt people seemed to be talking of killing. In the taxi out from Cairo, the six passengers had all agreed that Saddam had to be killed. But then somebody had added, "And what about the Man here? Hasn't he got to go first?" This met with a chorus of approval: "He's going to die, the Man"; "…and if someone wants to kill him, he can count on me for help."

Never before in Egypt had I heard ordinary people so much as criticize their president in public, among strangers, far less talk of killing him, even if only metaphorically. I looked out the window, half expecting the driver to stop the taxi. But soon enough he too was talking of killing — the Iraqis, the Americans, Palestinians, Israelis, Saudis…