Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

Six months after Mariamma arrived in al-Ghazira, Alu was buried in the collapse of an immense new building. The building was at one end of the Corniche which swept around al-Ghazira’s little bay in a blaze of tarmac. Though it was not quite finished, it had a name: it was called an-Najma, the Star, because of the five pointed arms that angled out from its domed centre. People said later that the fall shook the whole of al-Ghazira, like an emptying wave shakes a boat. A tornado of dust swirled out of the debris while the rubble was still shuddering and heaving like a labouring beast, and for a few moments the whole city was wrapped in darkness, despite the full mid-afternoon brilliance of the desert sun. It was, after all, the Star, one of the largest buildings ever built in al-Ghazira; not as long as the concrete tents of the airport, nor half as high as the tallest bulb on the desalination towers, but larger than both of them put together. When it fell it was in an avalanche of thousands and thousands of tons of bricks and concrete and cement, and Alu was almost exactly in its centre.

When the first rumbles of the collapse started Zindi was standing transfixed in the murky twilight of one of the Souq ash-Sharji’s tunnel-like lanes, her eyes flickering between a shop and the flaking signboard above it. ‘Durban Tailoring House,’ the sign read, in Hindi, Arabic and English, and Zindi spelt the letters to herself over and over again as though she had never seen them before.

The momentary darkening of al-Ghazira’s skies after the collapse passed unnoticed in the Souq ash-Sharji, for even during the day the gloom in the old bazaar’s honeycomb of passageways was a live thing, coiling through the tunnels, obscuring every trace of the world outside. The bright lights of the rows of shops in the passageways merely chipped at its flanks. Inside the Souq the passing of the day was marked only by the innumerable clocks and watches in shop windows, and the computerized system of loudspeakers that ran through the whole complex of passages and corridors and punctually relayed the call to prayer five times a day (even at dawn, when the only people in the Souq were a few soundly sleeping vagrants).

Nor did any but the most alert in the Souq feel the soil of al-Ghazira tremble when the Star fell, for its thick mud walls reached deep into the earth, and they reduced the shock to a barely perceptible tremor. In any case the Souq was a long way from the Star. Its squat main gateway, the Bab al-Asli, with its two horn-like towers, looked out into a crowded, dusty square known as the Maidan al-Jami‘i, cuckolded of pre-eminence by the newly painted façade of the Old Mosque opposite. The square was the heart of the old town. The Star was almost another country. It stood at the farthest end of the bay, where the Corniche turned inland towards the straight roads of the new city. It was minutes away from the border, within shouting distance of the rival airport in the neighbouring kingdom.

Zindi noticed nothing, not even when the news of the collapse was broadcast over the radio after the midday prayers, for the Durban Tailoring House still absorbed her wholly. The muted swell of celebration which rose soon afterwards in the shops around her welled out and trickled down the corridors, leaving her untouched.

In the many years she had spent in al-Ghazira Zindi had passed that shop at least twice a week, often more, but that afternoon she stood in the passage forgetful of time and everything around her, as though she were seeing it for the first time. She stared at the dusty panes of the display window, at the long-collared shirts on their hangers, folded blouses, pajamas; and shimmering satin petticoats; she gazed at the few grimy lengths of cloth on the tottering shelves, at flapping calendars on the walls and pictures of men in suits, cut out of Italian magazines and pasted on the window. When at last Forid Mian, the old tailor, whom she had known since her first days in al-Ghazira, saw her standing outside and came out of the shop squinting, she looked blandly into his shrivelled, pock-marked face with its sinister trails of moustache and beard, and let herself be led in as though she were in a trance. Inside, she stood marooned among the snippets of cloth that carpeted the shop and swivelled about, sniffing the pungent sharpness of terylenes and rayons and the mustiness of cottons with their blue factory marks still fresh on them. She fingered through the piles of clothes Forid Mian had finished. He had always drawn his custom mainly from the women in the old Indian merchants’ quarter of the city so there were petticoats, and blouses, and frocks for girls not old enough for saris. She nodded and grunted as Forid Mian told her stories about his customers. But she heard very little. She had to hold on to the counter to steady herself, for the shop was dancing around her as he spoke, spinning, dissolving, transfiguring itself.

It was a long time before she heard Forid Mian asking her whether she was feeling quite well, and when she did she laughed and wandered out of the shop leaving her glass of tea untouched. Forid Mian followed her out and stood staring after her as she swayed slowly down the passageway and disappeared into the brilliant pool of sunlight at the foot of the Bab al-Asli.

Zindi crossed the road into the dusty square and found a bench. She sat prodding at a struggling tuft of grass with her toes, absently gazing at the digital figures on the tiled clock-tower in the centre of the square. A boy in buttonless trousers, with key-rings and nail-clippers on chains draped over his arms, came up to her. He laid his chains out on the bench and tugged at her elbow: Libnak , for your son, and this one for your daughter, or another for your daughter-in-law …

He turned around and shouted across the square. Another boy came running up, shaking yellow packets of dehydrated soup: Just try one; see how you’ll like it … Zindi sat unmoved, staring ahead of her. One of the boys leant over and tweaked her plastic bag open. Zindi, suddenly alert, snatched her bag away. She rose with a howl and sent the boy staggering with a blow of her open hand: Get away from me, you son of a bitch, ibn kelb .

She walked across the square flailing her bag and rolling her eyes: Yalla, yalla , out of my way, sons of bitches, can’t sit a minute anywhere any longer, crowd around your feet like shit on a beach.

Crossing the road, she stood on the pavement, panting and wiping her forehead. Then something in one of the cavernous shops that ringed the square caught her eye and she went inside. She pointed it out to the shopkeeper, nestling between piles of aluminium pots and plastic buckets. It was a baby’s comforter. Holding it like a talisman before her, she went across the square to her bus-stop, deaf to the suppressed excitement that was now rippling through the whole square.

She had a long way to walk after she got off her bus. By the time she was struggling up the side of a long, high embankment, every layer of her black dress was soaked in sweat. Once she had scrambled up to the road which ran along the embankment she stopped to catch her breath, shielding her face from the sun with her bag. On the far side, a finger of land, invisible from the other side of the embankment, jutted out into the sea, bordered on one flank by a narrow inlet. Far away, at the end of the inlet, was the old harbour, crowded with sambuqs and motor-boats. That narrow spit was known as the Ras al-Maqtu‘, the Severed Head, a sandbar garotted by the road on the embankment.

The Ras shimmered and blurred in the heat of the afternoon as Zindi looked confusedly about — at a group of neat whitewashed houses in a corner by the sea, at the jostling, crowded walls of wooden planks and broken crates which covered the rest of the spit, all but a narrow strip of beach. She looked over the roofs of corrugated iron and halved oil-drums, with their crazily angled wooden platforms and tracery of pumpkin vines, and at last, led by a strip where the dense patchwork was cut through by charred, blackened frames of shacks, her eyes found her own house, solid and thick-walled, its brick-and-cement permanence setting it apart from the others, a reef in a shifting tide.