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

Yet, since Ben Yiju chose, despite the obvious alternative, to marry a woman born outside his faith, it can only have been because of another overriding and more important consideration.

If I hesitate to call it love it is only because the documents offer no certain proof.

17

EVEN THOUGH KHAMEES never mentioned the subject himself, everyone around him seemed to know that he was haunted by his childlessness.

Once, on a cold winter’s day, I dropped in to see him and found him sitting with his father in the guest-room of their house — one of the shabbiest and most derelict in the village. His father was sitting in a corner, huddled in a blanket, hugging his knees and shivering whenever a draught whistled in through the crumbling walls. He smiled when I stepped in, and motioned to me to sit beside him — a thin, frail old man with absent, wandering eyes. He had worked as a labourer in Alexandria during the Second World War, and he had met many Indians among the soldiers who had passed through the city at the start of the North African campaign. They had made a deep impression on his memory and at our first meeting he had greeted me as though he was resuming an interrupted friendship.

Now, after I had seated myself beside him, he leant towards me and ran his hands over my wool sweater, examining it closely, rubbing the material carefully between finger and thumb.

‘That’s the right thing to wear in winter,’ he said. ‘It must be really warm.’

‘Not as warm as your blanket,’ interjected Khamees.

His father pretended not to hear. ‘I’ve heard you can get sweaters like that in Damanhour,’ he said to me.

‘You can get anything if you have the money,’ said Khamees. ‘It’s getting the money that’s the problem.’

Paying him no attention, his father patted my arm. ‘I remember the Indian soldiers,’ he said. ‘They were so tall and dark that many of us Egyptians were afraid of them. But if you talked to them they were the most generous of all the soldiers; if you asked for a cigarette they gave you a whole packet.’

‘That was then,’ Khamees said, grinning at me. ‘Now things have changed.’

‘Do you see what my children are like?’ his father said to me. ‘They won’t even get me a sweater from Damanhour so I can think of the winter without fear.’

At that Khamees rose abruptly to his feet and walked out of the room. His father watched him go with an unblinking stare.

‘What am I to do with my children?’ he muttered, under his breath. ‘Look at them; look at Busaina, trying to rear her two sons on her own; look at Khamees, you can’t talk to him any more, can’t say a thing, neither me, nor his brothers, nor his wife. And every year he gets worse.’

He pulled his blanket over his ears, shivering spasmodically. ‘Perhaps I’m the one who’s to blame,’ he said. ‘I married him off early and I told him we wanted to see his children before we died. But that didn’t work, so he married again. Now the one thought in his head is children — that’s all he thinks about, nothing else.’

A few months later, in the spring, after nearly a year had passed and the time for my departure from Egypt was not far distant, I was walking back from the fields with Khamees and ‘Eid one evening, when we spotted Imam Ibrahim sitting on the steps of the mosque.

Khamees stopped short, and with an uncharacteristic urgency in his voice he said: ‘Listen, you know Imam Ibrahim, don’t you? I’ve seen you greeting him.’

I made a noncommittal answer, although the truth was that ever after that ill-fated meal at Yasir’s house the Imam had scarcely deigned to acknowledge my greetings when we passed each other in the village’s narrow lanes.

‘My wife’s ill,’ said Khamees. ‘I want the Imam to come to my house and give her an injection.’

His answer surprised me, and I quickly repeated what Nabeel and his friends had said about the Imam’s blunt needles, and told him that if his wife needed an injection there were many other people in the village who could do the job much better. But Khamees was insistent: it was not just the injection, he said — he had heard that Imam Ibrahim knew a lot about remedies and medicines and things like that, and people had told him that maybe he would be able to do something for him and his wife.

I understood then what sort of medicine he was hoping the Imam would give him.

‘Khamees, he can’t help in matters like that,’ I said, ‘and anyway he’s stopped doing remedies now. He only does those injections.’

But Khamees had grown impatient by this time. ‘Go and ask him,’ he said, ‘he won’t come if I ask; he doesn’t like us.’

‘He doesn’t like me either,’ I said.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Khamees. ‘He’ll come if you ask him — he knows you’re a foreigner. He’ll listen to you.’

It was clear that he had made up his mind, so I left him waiting at the edge of the square, and went across, towards the mosque. I could tell that the Imam had seen me — and Khamees — from a long way off, but he betrayed no sign of recognition and carefully kept his eyes from straying in my direction. Instead, he pretended to be deep in conversation with a man who was sitting beside him, an elderly shopkeeper with whom I had a slight acquaintance.

I was still a few steps away from them when I said ‘good evening to the Imam, pointedly, so he could no longer ignore me. He paused to acknowledge the greeting, but his response was short and curt, and he turned back at once to resume his conversation.

The old shopkeeper was taken aback at the Imam’s manner; he was a pleasant man, and had often exchanged cordial salutes with me in the lanes of the village.

‘Please sit down,’ he said to me, in embarrassment. ‘Do sit. Shall we get you a chair?’

Without waiting for an answer, he glanced at the Imam, frowning in puzzlement. ‘You know the Indian doktór, don’t you?’ he said. ‘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.’

‘That’s true,’ said the shopkeeper judiciously, ‘but after all, he writes his own languages and he knows English.’

‘Oh those,’ said the Imam scornfully. ‘What’s the use of those languages? They’re the easiest languages in the world. Anyone can write those.’

He turned to face me now, and I saw that his mouth was twitching with anger and his eyes were shining with a startling brightness.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘why do you worship cows?’

Taken by surprise I began to stammer, and he cut me short by turning his shoulder on me.

‘That’s what they do in his country,’ he said to the old shopkeeper. ‘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. He let the question hang in the air for a moment, and then announced, in a dramatic hiss: ‘They burn their dead.’

The shopkeeper recoiled as though he had been slapped, and his hands flew to his mouth. ‘Ya Allah!’ he muttered.

‘That’s what they do,’ said the Imam. ‘They burn their dead.’

Then suddenly he spun around to face me and cried: ‘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 education; you should know better. How will your country ever progress if you carry on doing these things? You’ve even been to Europe; you’ve seen how advanced they are. Now tell me: have you ever seen them burning their dead?’