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

Things had turned out well for him in Iraq; within a few months he had found a job as an assistant in a photographer’s shop in Baghdad. It didn’t pay as much as Isma‘il’s job, in construction, but it was a fortune compared to what he would have earned in Egypt.

Besides it was exactly the kind of job that Nabeel wanted. ‘You know him,’ Fawzia said, laughing. ‘He always wanted a job where he wouldn’t have to get his hands dirty.’

There was a telephone where he worked, she said, and the man who owned the shop didn’t mind him receiving calls every now and again. ‘We’ll give you the number,’ she told me. “Ali’s got it written down somewhere; he’ll find it for you when he gets back.’

Once every couple of months or so the whole family — she, her husband Ali and his younger brothers — made the trip to Damanhour to telephone Nabeel in Baghdad. When it was Nabeel’s turn to get in touch with them he simply spoke into a cassette-recorder and sent them the tape. In the beginning he had written letters, but everyone had agreed that it was nicer to hear his voice. He’d even sent money for a cassette-recorder, so they wouldn’t have to take the tapes to their neighbours.

Later Nabeel had sent money for a television set and a washing-machine and then, one day, on one of his tapes he had talked about building a new house. Those tumbledown old rooms they’d always lived in wouldn’t last much longer, he’d said. He would be glad to have a new house ready, when he came back to Egypt. He would be able to get married, and move in soon afterwards. His brothers were overjoyed at the suggestion: they called back immediately and within a month he had sent them the money to begin the construction.

‘He sent a new tape a few days ago,’ Fawzia said. ‘We’ll listen to it again, as soon as ‘Ali gets back.’

After we had finished our tea Fawzia showed me proudly around the house: three or four rooms had already been completed on the ground floor, including a kitchen, a bathroom and a veranda. The wiring was not complete and the walls were still unpainted, but otherwise the house was perfectly habitable.

When the ground floor had received its finishing touches, Fawzia said, the builders would start on a second floor. After his marriage, Nabeel and his wife would live upstairs, they would have the whole floor to themselves. Their other brothers could build on top of that, if they wanted to, later; it all depended on whether they went away as Nabeel had, and earned money ‘outside’.

‘How different it is,’ I said, when Fawzia took me into the new guest-room and showed me their television set and cassette-recorder. ‘The first time I came here was at the time of your wedding, when you and ‘Ali were sitting outside, with your chairs up against the mud wall.’

Fawzia smiled at the recollection. ‘The saddest thing,’ she said, ‘is that their mother and father didn’t live to see how things have changed for us.’

Her voice was soft and dreamlike, as though she were speaking of some immemorially distant epoch. I was not surprised; I knew that if my own memories had not been preserved in such artefacts as notes and diaries, the past would have had no purchase in my mind either. Even with those reminders, it was hard, looking around now, to believe how things had once stood for Nabeel and his family — indeed for all of Nashawy. It was not just that the lanes looked different; that so many of the old adobe houses had been torn down and replaced with red-brick bungalows — something more important had changed as well, the relations between different kinds of people in the village had been upturned and rearranged. Families who at that time had counted amongst the poorest in the community — Khamees’s, ‘Amm Taha’s, Nabeel’s — were now the very people who had new houses, bank accounts, gadgetry. I could not have begun to imagine a change on this scale when I left Nashawy in 1981; revisiting it now, a little less than eight years later, it looked as though the village had been drawn on to the fringes of a revolution — except that this one had happened in another country, far away.

Earlier that day, I had talked at length with Ustaz Sabry about the changes in Nashawy, the war between Iran and Iraq, and the men who’d left to go ‘outside’ (he was leaving himself soon, to take up a good job in a school in the Gulf).

‘It’s we who’ve been the real gainers in the war,’ he told me. The rich Arab countries were paying the Iraqis to break the back of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. For them it was a matter of survival, of keeping themselves in power. And in the meantime, while others were taking advantage of the war to make money, it was the Iraqis who were dying on the front.

‘But it won’t last,’ he had said, ‘it’s tainted, “forbidden” money, and its price will be paid later, some day.’

It had occurred to me then that Jabir, in his exclusion, was already paying a price of one kind; now looking around the house Nabeel had built, I began to wonder whether he was paying another, living in Iraq.

‘What are things like in Iraq?’ I asked Fawzia. ‘Does Nabeel like it there?’

She nodded cheerfully. He was very happy, she said; in his tapes he always said he was doing well and that everything was fine.

‘You can hear him yourself when ‘Ali comes home,’ she said. ‘We’ll listen to his tape on the recorder.’

There was a shock in store for me when ‘Ali returned: he had one of his younger brothers with him, Hussein, who I remembered as a shy, reticent youngster, no more than twelve or thirteen years old. But now Hussein was studying in college, and he had grown to resemble Nabeel so closely in manner and bearing that I all but greeted him by that name. Later, noticing how often Nabeel’s name featured in his conversation, I realized that the resemblance was not accidental: he clearly worshipped his elder brother and had modelled himself upon him.

We listened to the tape after dinner: at first Nabeel’s voice sounded very stiff and solemn and, to my astonishment, he spoke like a townsman, as though he had forgotten the village dialect. But Fawzia was quick to come to his defence when I remarked on this. It was only on the tapes that he spoke like that, she said. On the telephone he still sounded exactly the same.

Nabeel said very little about himself and his life in Iraq; just that he was well and that his salary had recently been increased. He listed in detail the names of all the people he wanted his brothers to convey his greetings to, and he told them about various friends from Nashawy who were also in Iraq — that so and so was well, that someone had moved to another city, that someone else was about to come home and so on. Then he went through a set of instructions for his brothers, on how they were to use the money he was sending them, the additions they were to make to the house and exactly how much they were to spend. Everyone in the room listened to him rapt, all the way to the final farewells, though they had clearly heard the tape through several times before.

Later, Fawzia got Hussein to write down Nabeel’s address, and the telephone number of his shop, on a slip of paper. ‘The owner will probably answer the phone,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘You have to tell him that you want to talk to Nabeel Idris Badawy, the Egyptian. It costs a lot, but you can hear him like he was in the next room.’

Hussein took hold of my elbow and gave it a shake. ‘You must telephone him,’ he said emphatically. ‘He’ll be so pleased. Do you know, he’s kept all your letters, wrapped in a plastic bag? He still talks of you a lot. Tell me, didn’t you once say to him …’

And then, almost word for word, he recounted a conversation I had once had with Nabeel. It was about a trivial matter, something to do with my university in Delhi, but for some reason I had written it down in my diary at the end of the day, and so I knew that Hussein had repeated it, or at least a part of it, almost verbatim. I was left dumbfounded when he finished; it seemed to me that I had witnessed an impossible, deeply moving, defiance of time and the laws of hearsay.