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

From what I knew of Abu-‘Ali, I was fairly sure that his fortunes had more than kept pace with his neighbours’, but I was still taken by surprise when I entered his compound. A large soaring new carapace had sprouted upon the dilapidated, low-slung house of my memories: the room on the roof, where I had gone to live, years ago, was now a part of a brightly-painted, three-storeyed mansion. The spindly old moped that had so miraculously borne Abu-‘Ali to and from Damanhour had vanished, and in its place was a gleaming new Toyota pick-up truck.

But Abu-‘Ali himself was exactly where he had always been, stationed at a vantage point overlooking the road. The moment we stepped into his compound, he thrust his head out of a window, sidewise, like the MGM lion. ‘Come in, come in,’ he roared. ‘Where have you been all these years, my son? Come in, come in and bring blessings upon my house.’

At the sound of his voice his wife rushed out to the veranda to greet us, followed closely by several new additions to her family. Smiling warmly, sweet-natured as ever, she welcomed me into the house, and after we had gone through a long list of salutations, she introduced me to three recently-recruited daughters-in-law, pointing out each of their children, one by one.

I had half-expected, from the unforeseen vigour of Abu-‘Ali’s roar of welcome, that he too would come hurrying out to the veranda to greet us; in my imagination I had already pictured our meeting, quailing at the thought of exchanging hugs and kisses across the billowing expanse of his stomach. But although Abu-‘Ali’s roars continued unabated, he failed to materialize in person. I discovered why when his wife led us to him. He had grown even fatter than I remembered; the image of an engorged python that I had carried away with me seemed pitifully inadequate for the sight I was now confronted with: his stomach now soared above him like a dirigible in flight as he lay on his back, intermittently flapping his hands and feet as though to propel himself through the air.

His voice had not been diminished by his body’s spectacular enlargement however, and as soon as we were seated he began to chronicle the growth of his family’s fortunes in an earth-shaking roar. Much as I had expected, he had been one of the first people in the area to become aware of the opportunities that were opening up in Iraq, during the war with Iran. He had sent his eldest son there soon after I left, and the others had followed, one by one. He had taken care, however, to make sure that they were never all away at the same time; he needed at least one of them at home, to help with the running of his business in Lataifa. There was a lot to take care of, for he was no longer just a shopkeeper now — with the money his sons had sent back from Iraq, he had bought two pick-up trucks and gone into transportation. So successful had the venture been that he was now thinking of setting up yet another business, a flour-mill, or maybe even a modern poultry-farm.

While telling us the story, Abu-‘Ali broke off from time to time to order his daughters-in-law and grandchildren to fetch some of the things his sons had brought back from Iraq. Following his instructions, they filed obediently through the guest-room, carrying by turns a TV set, a food processor, a handful of calculators, a transistor radio, a couple of cassette-players, a pen that was also a flashlight, a watch that could play tunes, a key-ring that answered to a handclap and several other such objects. Shaikh Musa and I stared awestruck as these possessions floated past us like helots gazing at the spoils of Pharaoh.

When the parade was complete, at Abu-‘Ali’s instructions his wife led us upstairs to show us their newly built apartments. Following her up the staircase I was assaulted by a sudden sensation of dislocation, as though I had vaulted between different epochs. The dirt and chaos of the ground floor, where Abu-‘Ali and his wife lived, the flies, the grime, and the scattered goats’ droppings, stopped abruptly halfway up the staircase: above that point the floors were meticulously clean, covered in mosaic tiles. Where my room, the old chicken-coop, had once stood, there was now a large kitchen, adjoining an opulently furnished bedroom. It had been incorporated into a complex of four apartments, one for each of Abu-‘Ali’s sons. The three who were married had already moved in, but the youngest, a bachelor, still lived downstairs whenever he came home on visits from Iraq.

We visited the apartments of her three married sons in turn. They were very alike, each with a drawing-room appointed with ornate furnishings of a kind often seen in the windows of shops in Cairo and Alexandria. It was evident that the drawing-rooms were rarely used, and even Abu-‘Ali’s wife seemed hesitant to step past their curtained doorways. Neither Shaikh Musa nor I could bring ourselves to go in, despite her repeated urgings: it was clear that Abu-‘Ali had now risen to an estate where neither his family nor his neighbours were fit to use his furniture.

Such were his gleanings from that distant war.

2

IT WAS PROBABLY in the mid-1140s or so that Ben Yiju began to think seriously of returning to the Middle East. At about that time, after many years of silence, he finally received news about a member of his family — his younger brother Mubashshir, who as far as he knew was still living in their homeland, Ifriqiya.

The news probably arrived in the wake of a long series of distressing reports from Ifriqiya: travelling merchants and friends had probably kept Ben Yiju informed of how the region had been laid waste by Sicilian armies over the last several years, and of how its people had been stricken by famine and disease. Thus Ben Yiju was probably already in a state of severe anxiety when his friend Khalaf wrote to him from Aden, relaying a brief message from his brother.

‘Shaikh Abû Is q ibn Yûsuf arrived here this year,’ wrote Khalaf. ‘He reports that your brother Mubashshir has arrived in Egypt. He has asked for passage to join you: you should know this.’

Ben Yiju’s papers provide only indirect signs of the impact this message had on him. His immediate response was probably to write to his friends to beg for more news, and to ask them to make arrangements for the payment of his brother’s onward passage to India. As it turned out, however, his efforts were to no avail: his brother proved more elusive than he had expected and his inquiries met with nothing more than comforting generalities. ‘Concerning the news of your brother Mubashshir,’ Khalaf wrote back, ‘he is well, but he has not arrived here [in Aden] yet.’

But Ben Yiju must have continued to write to his friends at regular intervals, asking them to persist in their inquiries, and to do what they could to send Mubashshir on to Mangalore. For their part, they appear to have exerted themselves on both counts, but despite their efforts Mubashshir continued to absent himself from Aden. Eventually, despairing of success, Yusuf ibn Abraham wrote back to say: ‘My master [Ben Yijû] mentioned Mubashshir, his brother [in his letter]: he has not arrived here in all this time, and nor have I seen a letter for my master from Egypt. If such a letter for my master appears his servant will send it to him.’ Later in the same letter he added the ominous comment: ‘As for the news of Egypt, my master will hear it from the traders …’

Such news as Ben Yiju received from the Middle East could only have given him further cause for anxiety. From 1143 onwards, for several successive years, his homeland, Ifriqiya, had been the target of attacks launched by King Roger II of Sicily. Disease and famine had followed upon these raids and large numbers of people fled the region. Along with a substantial section of the Jewish population of Ifriqiya, the Ben Yiju family was swept away from Mahdia at about this time and deposited in Sicily — unbeknownst to their brother Abraham, living in quiet, untroubled prosperity in distant Mangalore.