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

"He doesn't like me either," I said.

"Never mind," Khamees insisted. "He'll come if you ask him — he knows you're a foreigner. He'll listen to you."

While Khamees waited on the edge of the square with his brothers, I went across to the imam. I could tell that he had seen me — and Khamees — from a long way off, that he knew I was crossing the square to talk to him. But he would not look in my direction. Instead, he pretended to be deep in conversation with a man who was sitting beside him, an elderly and pious shopkeeper whom I knew slightly.

When I reached them, I said "Good evening" very pointedly to the imam. He could not ignore me any longer then, but his response was short and curt, and he turned back at once to resume his conversation.

The old shopkeeper was embarrassed now, for he was a courteous, gracious man in the way that seemed to come so naturally to the elders of the village. "Please sit down," he said to me. "Do sit. Shall we get you a chair?"

Then he turned to the imam and said, slightly puzzled, "You know the Indian doktor, don't you? He's come all the way from India to be a student at the University of Alexandria."

"I know him," said the imam. "He came around to ask me questions. But as for this student business, I don't know. What's he going to study? He doesn't even write in Arabic."

"Well," said the shopkeeper judiciously, "that's true, but after all, he writes his own languages and he knows English."

"Oh, those," said the imam. "What's the use of those languages? They're the easiest languages in the world. Anyone can write those."

He turned to face me for the first time. His eyes were very bright, and his mouth was twitching with anger. "Tell me," he said, "why do you worship cows?"

I was so taken aback that I began to stammer. The imam ignored me. He turned to the old shopkeeper and said, "That's what they do in his country — did you know? They worship cows."

He shot me a glance from the corner of his eyes. "And shall I tell you what else they do?" he said to the shopkeeper.

He let the question hang for a moment. And then, very loudly, he hissed, "They burn their dead."

The shopkeeper recoiled as though he had been slapped. His hands flew to his mouth. "Oh God!" he muttered. " Ya Allah. "

"That's what they do," said the imam. "They burn their dead."

Then suddenly he turned to me and said, very rapidly, "Why do you allow it? Can't you see that it's a primitive and backward custom? Are you savages that you permit something like that? Look at you — you've had some kind of education; you should know better. How will your country ever progress if you carry on doing these things? You've even been to the West; you've seen how advanced they are. Now tell me, have you ever seen them burning their dead?"

The imam was shouting now, and a circle of young men and boys had gathered around us. Under the pressure of their interested eyes my tongue began to trip, even on syllables I thought I had mastered. I found myself growing angry — as much with my own incompetence as with the imam.

"Yes, they do burn their dead in the West," I managed to say somehow. I raised my voice too now. "They have special electric furnaces meant just for that."

The imam could see that he had stung me. He turned away and laughed. "He's lying," he said to the crowd. "They don't burn their dead in the West. They're not an ignorant people. They're advanced, they're educated, they have science, they have guns and tanks and bombs."

"We have them too!" I shouted back at him. I was as confused now as I was angry. "In my country we have all those things too," I said to the crowd. "We have guns and tanks and bombs. And they're better than anything you have — we're way ahead of you."

The imam could no longer disguise his anger. "I tell you, he's lying," he said. "Our guns and bombs are much better than theirs. Ours are second only to the West's."

"It's you who's lying," I said. "You know nothing about this. Ours are much better. Why, in my country we've even had a nuclear explosion. You won't be able to match that in a hundred years."

So there we were, the imam and I, delegates from two superseded civilizations vying with each other to lay claim to the violence of the West.

At that moment, despite the vast gap that lay between us, we understood each other perfectly. We were both traveling, he and I: we were traveling in the West. The only difference was that I had actually been there, in person: I could have told him about the ancient English university I had won a scholarship to, about punk dons with safety pins in their mortarboards, about superhighways and sex shops and Picasso. But none of it would have mattered. We would have known, both of us, that all that was mere fluff: at the bottom, for him as for me and millions and millions of people on the landmasses around us, the West meant only this — science and tanks and guns and bombs.

And we recognized too the inescapability of these things, their strength, their power — evident in nothing so much as this: that even for him, a man of God, and for me, a student of the "humane" sciences, they had usurped the place of all other languages of argument. He knew, just as I did, that he could no longer say to me, as Ibn Battuta might have when he traveled to India in the fourteenth century, "You should do this or that because it is right or good, or because God wills it so." He could not have said it because that language is dead: those things are no longer sayable; they sound absurd. Instead he had had, of necessity, to use that other language, so universal that it extended equally to him, an old-fashioned village imam, and to great leaders at SALT conferences. He had had to say to me, "You ought not to do this because otherwise you will not have guns and tanks and bombs."

Since he was a man of God, his was the greater defeat.

For a moment then I was desperately envious. The imam would not have said any of those things to me had I been a Westerner. He would not have dared. Whether I wanted it or not, I would have had around me the protective aura of an inherited expertise in the technology of violence. That aura would have surrounded me, I thought, with a sheet of clear glass, like a bulletproof screen; or perhaps it would have worked as a talisman, like a press card, armed with which I could have gone off to what were said to be the most terrible places in the world that month, to gaze and wonder. And then perhaps I too would one day have had enough material for a book which would have had for its epigraph the line The horror! The horror! — for the virtue of a sheet of glass is that it does not require one to look within.

But that still leaves Khamees the Rat waiting on the edge of the square.

In the end it was he and his brothers who led me away from the imam. They took me home with them, and there, while Kha-mees's wife cooked dinner for us — she was not so ill after all — Khamees said to me, "Do not be upset, ya doktor. Forget about all those guns and things. I'll tell you what: I'll come to visit you in your country, even though I've never been anywhere. I'll come all the way."

He slipped a finger under his skullcap and scratched his head, thinking hard.

Then he added, "But if I die, you must bury me."

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THE GREATEST SORROW

[>] Nessun maggior dolore: Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans R. & J. Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2000), Canto V, lines 121–23.

[>] The last Sinhala word: Michael Ondaatje, "Wells," in Handwriting (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 50.

[>] I will die, in autumn: Agha Shahid Ali, "The Last Saffron," in The Country Without a Post Office (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 27–29.