Amitav Ghosh - In an Antique Land - History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale

‘You were watching like it was a film, ya Amitab,’ he said, laughing. ‘Haven’t you seen ducks do that before?’

‘No,’ I said.

His laughter was infectious; I found myself laughing with him.

He came into the room and seated himself on the chair, taking care to keep his clean jallabeyya from touching the floor.

‘So tell me then,’ he said, throwing me a glance of interested inquiry. ‘What do you know on the subject of …?’

He used a word I had not heard before. I must have looked puzzled, for he gave an incredulous gasp and said: ‘You mean you’ve never heard of …?’

It was the same word again.

I shook my head and he sank back in the chair, knocking his head with his fist, nearly dislodging his white skull-cap.

‘Ya Amitab,’ he said in mock despair. ‘What are you going to do in life if you don’t know about that?’

‘About what?’ I said.

This only made him laugh. ‘If you don’t know you don’t know,’ he muttered mysteriously.

‘Don’t know about what?’ I said, in exasperation.

‘It’s not important,’ he said, grinning, elliptical. ‘It’s good to put a distance between your thoughts and things like that. But tell me this — of course you have circumcision where you come from, just like we do? Isn’t that so, mush kida?’

I had long been dreading this line of questioning, knowing exactly where it would lead.

‘Some people do,’ I said. ‘And some people don’t.’

‘You mean,’ he said in rising disbelief, ‘there are people in your country who are not circumcised?’

In Arabic the word ‘circumcise’ derives from a root that means ‘to purify’: to say of someone that they are ‘uncircumcised’ is more or less to call them impure.

‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘yes, many people in my country are “impure”.’ I had no alternative; I was trapped by language.

‘But not you …’ He could not bring himself to finish the sentence.

‘Yes,’ I said. My face was hot with embarrassment and my throat had gone dry: ‘Yes, me too.’

He gasped and his incredulous eyes skimmed over the front of my trousers. For a moment he stared in disbelieving curiosity, and then, with an effort, he said: ‘And when you go to the barber to have your hair cut, do you not shave your armpits like we do?’

‘No,’ I said.

He leant forward, frowning intently. ‘So tell me then,’ he said, pointing a finger at my crotch. ‘Don’t you shave there either?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘But then,’ he cried, ‘doesn’t the hair grow longer and longer until …’

Inadvertently his eyes dropped and he stole a quick look at my ankles. I am convinced, to this day, that he fully expected to see the ends of two long, curly braids peeping out from the ends of my trousers.

That evening, towards sunset, I went for a walk in the fields. A fair distance from the hamlet I came upon Jabir and some other boys of his age, sitting beside a small canal. They had their textbooks with them and they were taking advantage of the comparative quiet of the fields to catch up with their schoolwork. I stopped dead when I saw Jabir; I was not sure whether we were still on speaking terms. But to my relief he waved cheerfully when he saw me coming, and then he and his friends jumped to their feet and fell in beside me.

‘You should go on with your studies,’ I said. ‘There’s still plenty of light.’

‘We should be returning now,’ Jabir said, ‘it will soon be time for the evening prayers. Look — the moon is already up.’

I looked up and saw a full moon, brilliant against the fading purple of the evening sky. It was very quiet, except for the creak of distant water-wheels; in Lataifa, far away, the first lamps were beginning to shine.

Jabir had his arms around the shoulders of the other boys. ‘Do you want to hear something?’ he said. He was whispering but I could hear him clearly in the sunset hush.

‘I was talking to him this afternoon,’ he said, gesturing at me with his chin. ‘And do you know, he doesn’t know what sex is?’

I had checked in the dictionary as soon as he’d left: he was using the same word he’d used that afternoon.

‘What’s this you’re saying, ya Jabir?’ one of the boys exclaimed. ‘He doesn’t know what sex is?’

‘What am I telling you?’ Jabir retorted. ‘He doesn’t know. I asked him.’

‘And he looks so grown up and all.’

‘But he doesn’t know a thing,’ said Jabir. ‘Not religion, not politics, not sex, just like a child.’

There was an awed silence. ‘Do you think he doesn’t know about “beating the ten” either?’ one of the boys whispered. I was not familiar with this expression at the time, but the gesture of the fist that accompanied it gave me a fair idea of its meaning.

‘No,’ said Jabir, ‘he’s like a child, I told you. That’s why he’s always asking questions.’

‘Shouldn’t we tell him?’ one of the boys said. ‘How’s he going to grow up if he doesn’t beat the ten?’

‘It’s no use,’ said Jabir. ‘He won’t understand; he doesn’t know a thing. Look, I’ll show you.’

He detached himself from the others and called out to me: ‘Ya Amitab — stop, wait a minute.’

Taking hold of my elbow he led me to the edge of the canal. ‘Look at that,’ he said, pointing at the reflection of the full moon on the water. ‘What is it? Do you know?’

‘Of course I know,’ I scoffed. ‘It’s Ahmed, Shaikh Musas son, shining his torch on the water.’

There was a hushed silence and Jabir turned to cast the others a triumphant look while I walked on quickly.

‘No, ya Amitab,’ one of the boys said, running after me, his voice hoarse with concern. ‘That’s not so. It’s not Ahmed shining his torch in the water — that’s a reflection of the full moon.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re absolutely wrong. Ahmed told me he would be going out for a walk today with his torch.’

‘But if it’s Ahmed how is it that we didn’t see him?’

‘We didn’t see him because he was a long way off. His torch is very powerful. It works on four batteries. He’s just bought new batteries — yesterday in Damanhour.’

And thus we argued, back and forth, and by the time we reached Lataifa I had nearly won the argument.

7

FOR A LONG time afterwards, I remained a child in Jabir’s eyes.

One evening, shortly after the start of Ramadan (which stretched over July and August that year), Jabir took me to a mowlid, a fair in honour of a saint’s birthday, in a village that lay across the fields. Several other boys from Lataifa went with us, among them Jabir’s younger brother, Mohammad, and a nephew of Shaikh Musa’s, a shy, quiet boy of fifteen, called Mabrouk.

As we walked across the fields towards the distant lights of the mowlid, Jabir and the other boys told me about the legend of Sidi ‘Abbas of Nakhlatain, in whose honour the mowlid was being celebrated.

Sidi ‘Abbas had lived in Nakhlatain long, long ago, long before anyone could remember, and he had been famous throughout the region for his godliness and piety: people had said of him that he was a ‘good man’, gifted with ‘baraka’, the power of conferring blessings. Such was his fame that a large crowd gathered in his village when he died, and so many people were witness to the miraculous events that graced his funeral. Trying to lift the Sidi’s bier, the men of the village found, to their amazement, that they couldn’t move it at all; dozens of them tried, only to find that they could not so much as budge it. It was only when the Sidi’s son lent a hand that the body began to move, but even then, it was not he who moved the body: the Sidi had moved of his own volition.