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

Being the kindest and most generous of men, Doctor Issa had all too easily allowed himself to take Abu-‘Ali at his word. It had been agreed upon very quickly — all except how much I was to pay. The Professor had brushed aside my anxiety on that score: ‘That will be easily settled, I will write him a letter — don’t worry about it.’

And so he had, but Abu-‘Ali had seen little merit in Doctor Issa’s letter. Now, having settled himself on my bed, he took the dog-eared letter out of the pocket of his jallabeyya once again, and read it through, clicking his tongue and frowning.

‘Tell me,’ he said at last, ‘where did you stay while you were in Alexandria?’

‘A small hotel,’ I answered.

‘And how much did it cost?’

‘Two pounds a night.’

He gave a little nod of satisfaction and put the letter away. ‘Hotels are expensive,’ he said, ‘you’re lucky to be staying here with us. We will cook for you, wash your clothes for you, provide you with anything you need. You must ask for whatever you want whenever you want it. To us you are just like our sons — why we will even give you our own money if you like.’

He reached into his pocket for his wallet and held it out to me, smiling, his eyes vanishing into the folds of his immense, fleshy face. ‘You can take this,’ he said. ‘You can have our money.’

I stared at the wallet, mesmerized, wondering whether custom demanded that I touch it or make some other symbolic gesture of acceptance or obeisance, like falling at his feet. I saw myself shrinking, dwindling away into one of those tiny, terrified foreigners whom Pharaohs hold up by their hair in New Kingdom bas-reliefs.

But the wallet vanished back into his pocket in a flash, before I had time to respond. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘that is how much we love you.’

‘I was just thinking,’ I stammered, at last, maybe I could buy my own food.’

‘How can you do that?’ he responded indignantly. ‘The shops are far away, and you know it would cost you at least a pound a day if you were to buy your food in town. No, no, you must eat with us.’

‘No, I meant, I could give you the money …’ My Arabic had begun to falter now under the strain of bargaining, and I was slowly sinking into a tongue-tied silence.

‘No, no, it’s not a question of money. You are our honoured guest. You can see that I don’t care for money. I have a big shop downstairs, and I sell many things there. Next year I will add a second floor to my house, insha’allah. You know I have sent my sons to school and college; you can see that I don’t care for money at all.’

‘Please tell me,’ I said, ‘how much do you think I should pay?’

He sighed thoughtfully, rubbing his moustache.

‘No,’ he said, ‘you must tell us how much you would like to give us.’

And so it went on for a good hour or so, before he would allow himself to be cajoled into naming a sum.

That evening, at sunset, I was standing on the roof, looking out over the tranquil, twilit cottonfields, when Abu-‘Ali’s voice exploded out of the porch below, roaring abuse at his wife. I went back into my room and in an effort to shut out the noise, I began to turn the dial on my radio, scanning the waves for the sound of a familiar language, listening for words that would make me feel a little less alone. As the night wore on, the thought of hearing Abu-‘Ali’s voice for months on end, perhaps years, began to seem utterly intolerable.

It was on nights like that that my dreams of Cairo were most vivid.

2

CAIRO IS EGYPT’S own metaphor for itself.

Everywhere in the country except the city itself, Cairo is Egypt. They are both spoken of by the same name, Ma r, a name that is appropriate as well as ancient, a derivative of a root that means ‘to settle’ or ‘to civilize’. The word has a long history in Arabic; it occurs in the Qur’ân but was in use even before the advent of Islam. It is the name by which the country has been known, in its own language, for at least a millennium, and most of the cultures and civilizations with which it has old connections have accepted its own self-definition. The languages of India, for example, know Masr by variations of its Arabic name: ‘Mishor’ in Bengali, ‘Misar’ in Hindi and Urdu. Only Europe has always insisted on knowing the country not on its own terms, but as a dark mirror for itself. ‘Egyptian darkness,’ says the Oxford English Dictionary, quoting the Bible, ‘intense darkness (see Exodus x.22).’ Or ‘Egyptian days: the two days in each month which were believed to be unlucky’; and: ‘Egyptian bondage: bondage like that of the Israelites in Egypt.’

Like English, every major European language derives its name for Egypt from the Greek Ægyptos, a term that is related to the word ‘Copt’, the name generally used for Egypt’s indigenous Christians. Thus German has its Ägypten, Dutch Egypte, Polish and Estonian Egipt: old resonant words, with connotations and histories far in excess of those that usually attach to the names of countries. A seventeenth-century English law, for example, states: ‘If any transport into England or Wales, any lewd people calling themselves Egyptians, they forfeit 40 £’—a reminder that words like ‘gypsy and ‘gitano’ derived from ‘Egyptian’.

Europe’s apparently innocent ‘Egypt’ is therefore as much a metaphor as ‘Masr’, but a less benign one, almost as much a weapon as a word. Egypt’s own metaphor for itself, on the other hand, renders the city indistinguishable from the country; a usage that brims with pleasing and unexpected symmetries.

Like Egypt, Cairo dwindles into a thin ribbon of settlements at its southern extremity; towards the north it gradually broadens, like the country itself, into a wide, densely populated funnel. To the south lies Upper Egypt, the , a long thin carpet of green that flanks the Nile on both sides; to the north is the triangle created by the river, as perfect as any in Nature, the Delta. Egypt’s metaphor, Egypt itself, sits in between like a hinge, straddling the imaginary line that since the beginning of human history has divided the country into two parts, each distinct and at the same time perfectly complementary.

To most Egyptians outside Cairo, their metaphor stands for the entire city: the whole of it is known as Masr — the city’s formal name al-Qâhira is infrequently used. But Cairo, like Delhi or Rome, is actually not so much a single city as an archipelago of townships, founded on neighbouring sites, by various different dynasties and rulers.

When the people of Cairo speak of Masr, they often have a particular district of the city in mind. It lies towards the south, and it goes by several names. Sometimes it is spoken of as Old Cairo, Masr al-Qadîma or Ma r al-‘Atîqa, sometimes as Mari Gargis, but most often as Fus â Ma r, or simply Fus â . On a map, the quarter seems very small, far too small to be so rich in names. But in fact, small as it is, the area is not a single island within Cairo, but rather a second archipelago within the first.