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

I went down to the platform to wait for my train.

Over the next few months, in America, I learnt a new respect for the man who had interrogated me that morning in Damanhour: I discovered that his understanding of the map of modern knowledge was much more thorough than mine. Looking through libraries, in search of material on Sidi Abu-Hasira, I wasted a great deal of time in looking under subject headings such as ‘religion’ and ‘Judaism’—but of course that tomb, and others like it, had long ago been wished away from those shelves, in the process of shaping them to suit the patterns of the Western academy. Then, recollecting what my interrogator had said about the difference between religion and superstition, it occurred to me to turn to the shelves marked ‘anthropology’ and ‘folklore’. Sure enough, it was in those regions that my efforts met with their first rewards.

I discovered that the name Abu-Hasira, or Abou-Hadzeira, as it is spelt when transcribed from Hebrew, belongs to a famous line of zeddikim — the Jewish counterparts of Islamic marabouts and Sufi saints, many of whom had once been equally venerated by Jews and Muslims alike. Ya’akov Abou-Hadzeira of Damanhour, I discovered, was one of the most renowned of his line, a cabbalist and mystic, who had gained great fame for his miracles in his lifetime, and still had a large following among Jews of North African and Egyptian origin. ‘The tomb of Rabbi Abû- a îra of Morocco [in Damanhour] attracted large numbers of pilgrims,’ I learnt, ‘both Jewish and non-Jewish, and the festivities marking the pilgrimage closely resembled the birthday of Muslim saints …’

It seemed uncanny that I had never known all those years that in defiance of the enforcers of History, a small remnant of Bomma’s world had survived, not far from where I had been living.

SOON AFTER I arrived in New York I tried to call Nabeel in Baghdad. It wasn’t easy getting through. The directory listed a code for Iraq, but after days of trying all I got was a recorded message telling me that the number I had dialled didn’t exist.

In the end I had to book a call with the operator. She took a while to put it through, but then the phone began to ring and a short while later I heard a voice at the other end, speaking in the blunt, rounded Arabic of Iraq.

‘Ai-wah?’ he said, stretching out the syllables. ‘Yes? Who is it?’

I knew at once I was speaking to Nabeel’s boss. I imagined him to be a big, paunchy man, sitting at the end of a counter, behind a cash-box, with the telephone beside him and a Kodacolor poster of a snow-clad mountain on the wall above. He was wearing a jallabeyya and a white lace cap; he had a pair of sunglasses in his breast pocket and a carefully trimmed moustache. The telephone beside him was of the old-fashioned kind, black and heavy, and it had a brass lock fastened in its dial. The boss kept the key, and Nabeel and the other assistants had to ask for it when they wanted to make a call.

It was late at night in New York so it had to be morning in Baghdad. The shop must have just opened; they probably had no customers yet.

‘Is Nabeel there?’ I asked.

‘Who?’ said the voice.

‘Nabeel Idris Badawy,’ I said. ‘The Egyptian.’

He grunted. ‘And who’re you?’ he said. ‘Wa mîn inta?’

‘I’m a friend of his,’ I said. ‘Tell him it’s his friend from India. He’ll know.’

‘What’s that?’ he said. ‘From where?’

‘From India, ya raiyis,’ I said. ‘Could you tell him? And quickly if you please, for I’m calling from America.’

‘From America?’ he shouted down the line. ‘But you said you were Indian?’

‘Yes, I am — I’m just in America on a visit. Nabeel quickly, if you please, ya raiyis …’

I heard him shout across the room: ‘Ya Nabeel, somebody wants to talk to you, some Indian or something.’

I could tell from Nabeel’s first words that my call had taken him completely by surprise. He was incredulous in the beginning, unwilling to believe that it was really me at the other end of the line, speaking from America. I was almost as amazed as he was: it would never have occurred to me, when I first knew him, that we would one day be able to speak to each other on the phone, thousands of miles apart.

I explained how I had recently been to Egypt and visited Nashawy, and how his family had given me his telephone number and told me to call him, in Baghdad. Suddenly, he gave a shout of recognition.

‘Ya Amitab,’ he cried. ‘How are you? Zayyak? Where were you? Where have you been all these years?’

I gave him a quick report on how I had spent the last several years, and then it was my turn to ask: ‘What about you? Zayyak inta?’

‘Kullu ‘âl,’ he said, mouthing a customary response. Everything was well; he and his cousin Isma‘il were managing fine, sharing rooms with friends from back home. Then he asked me about India, about each member of my family, my job, my books. When I had finished giving him my news, I told him about his own family in Nashawy, and about my visit to their new house. He was eager to hear about them, asking question after question, but in a voice that seemed to grow progressively more quiet.

‘What about you, ya Nabeel?’ I said at last. ‘How do you like Iraq? What is the country like?’

‘Kullu ‘âl,’ he said — everything was fine.

I wanted him to talk about Iraq, but of course he would not have been able to say much within earshot of his boss. Then I heard a noise down the line; it sounded as though someone was calling to him from across the room. He broke off to say, ‘Coming, just one minute,’ and I added hurriedly, ‘I’m going back to India soon — I’ll try to stop by and visit you on the way, in Baghdad.’

‘We’ll be expecting you,’ he said. ‘You must come.’

‘I’ll do my best,’ I said.

‘I’ll tell Isma‘il you’re coming,’ he said hurriedly. ‘We’ll wait for you.’

I heard his boss’s voice again, shouting in the background. ‘I’ll come,’ I promised. ‘I’ll certainly come.’

But as it turned out I was not able to keep my word: for a variety of reasons it proved impossible to stop in Baghdad on the way back to India. My breaking of that promise made me all the more determined to keep another: I resolved that I would do everything I could to return to Egypt in 1990, the following year. I had given my word to Shaikh Musa that I would.

I was certain that by then Nabeel would be back in Nashawy.

BOMMA’S STORY ENDS in Philadelphia.

At the corner of 4th and Walnut, in the heart of downtown Philadelphia, stands a sleek modern building, an imposing structure that could easily be mistaken for the headquarters of a great multinational corporation. In fact, it is the Annenberg Research Institute, a centre for social and historical research: it owes its creation to the vast fortune generated by the first and most popular of Americas television magazines, ‘TV Guide’.

Housed within the Institute’s resplendent premises is a remarkable collection of Judaica, including manuscripts of many different kinds. Among them is a set of Geniza documents that was once in the possession of Philadelphia’s Dropsie College.

The documents are kept in the Institute’s rare book room, a great vault in the bowels of the building, steel-sealed and laser-beamed, equipped with alarms that need no more than seconds to mobilize whole fleets of helicopters and police cars. Within the sealed interior of this vault are two cabinets that rise out of the floor like catafalques. The documents lie inside them, encased in sheets of clear plastic, within exquisitely crafted covers.