Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

Zindi broke off and scratched her mole. And then, she added, tell him to say: Jeevanbhai is usually away in the evenings.

She met Rakesh’s curious glance with a finger on her lips. Now, listen, she said, don’t tell anyone about this. No one — not Abu Fahl, not Zaghloul, no one. Just go.

When he returned Rakesh went straight to her room. She was pacing the floor, with Boss cradled in her arms. Did you tell him? she asked eagerly.

Yes, said Rakesh, seating himself on a mat. He looked expectantly at her.

You want to know about the message? Zindi asked. Rakesh said nothing. Zindi shut the door and seated herself beside him. She leant towards him until her black scarf was almost touching his face, and only then did Rakesh notice how anxiety had changed the pattern of lines on her massive jowls.

A shop! she whistled into his ear. That’s my plan: a shop!

Rakesh, in surprise, belched in a huge, rumbling gurgle. Zindi, looking straight at his averted eyes, ignored it. Don’t you understand? she appealed, and Rakesh sensed a wall within her beginning to crumble. I know where I’ve gone wrong now. Here I am with this house full of people. I make a good enough living from them most of the time — they give me a bit of money, it’s hardly enough, but still … I can look after them while they’re in the house. But where does the money come from? It doesn’t come from the house; it comes from the outside. It’s not like having land. It’s taken me all these years really to understand that. I knew it, but I didn’t understand it. While everything is all right outside, things seem fine in the house — money keeps coming in and I can manage. But let something happen outside, and that’s the end — there’s nothing I can do. Why? Because I can give them food, I can give them a roof, but I can’t give them work. When it comes to work, this house is like an empty crate — people can kick it here, kick it there, and I’m helpless. That’s why all this has happened — Mast Ram and Abusa; Professor Samuel and Kulfi losing their jobs. Everything else. The house is almost empty now and the work’s gone. It doesn’t matter to you; you can always go back home. Where can I go? Do you think Abu Fahl would stay if there was no money in the house? He’s my cousin and he’s not a bad man, but he has to live. I have to stay here, and if the house stops bringing in money one day I’ll be found floating on the beach with all that shit. I’m not young. I have to do something now. It’s my last chance. And now I know what the answer is: a shop. We have the people; we could run it. It’ll give work to everyone, if it goes well, and we’ll be safe.

What kind of shop? asked Rakesh.

At that, Zindi’s vision of the Durban Tailoring House came pouring out of her. It was only an ordinary tailor’s shop really — one which hadn’t kept up too well with al-Ghazira — familiar, unsurprising. And yet she hadn’t known it at all, never really seen it or understood its promise and its possibilities, till that morning when the Star fell; while she was wandering through the Souq, her head aching with fear and worry for her crumbling house. Suddenly that morning it wasn’t a shop at all, not a simple room of bricks and cement, not a thing which could be touched and felt, but a promise, a future: its dusty, be-calendared walls had grown heavy with shelves and bright with cloth, the cobwebbed ceiling was glowing with neon lights, and the empty echoing interior was suddenly full of people — people flowing in and out, their hands digging into bags full of money, looking, choosing, buying, asking her, enthroned behind the cash-desk, what’s the best? what’s the cheapest? what’s the newest? what’s from America? from Singapore? — and she, gracious, benign, inclining her head and passing them on to Abu Fahl, sleek in his new suit, or Kulfi or Karthamma or Chunni floating by in nylons and chiffons; and advertisements, too, everywhere, coloured lights winking all over al-Ghazira on the Corniche, in Hurreyya; queues stretching out of the shop and through the Souq, crowds rioting to get in …

Isn’t it possible? she asked Rakesh. Does it seem too much?

Rakesh shook his head in doubt, but his eyes were shining with excitement: all the clothes, think of all the clothes!

He hesitated. But how will you get the shop, Zindi? he asked.

Ah! Zindi’s eyes narrowed. That’s what the plan is about …

The Durban Tailoring House belonged to Jeevanbhai Patel. It was his beginning in al-Ghazira. He had acquired it when he first arrived, years and years ago, after his parents, in distant Durban in South Africa, discovered his secret marriage to a Bohra Muslim girl (and he a Gujarati Hindu!) and expelled him from their home and family. Jeevanbhai knew then that he must leave the town his family had lived in for a generation, the only home he had ever known. And he knew, too, that he had to act fast, before the wind carried the news along the coast. So his wife hid her few bits of jewellery in her bodice and they tied everything they had into a bundle and waited for the chain of Indian merchants along the coast to pull them northwards like a bucket from a well. First they went to Mozambique, then Dar es Salaam, then Zanzibar, Djibouti, Perim and Aden. Everywhere he met with all the hospitality due to a son of his father, and he for his part took care to keep his bride hidden and stay at least two days ahead of the news. In Aden he looked up and down the coast, sniffed the breeze and tasted the currents and decided, decided with an absolute certainty, that al-Ghazira was where he would go. He bought himself a ticket on a rusty British-blessed steamer run by an enterprising Parsi in Bombay, and soon Jeevanbhai, with his spade teeth and bundled-up wife, was standing in al-Ghazira’s harbour, looking past the booms and sambuqs anchored in the little muddy inlet, at the steaming, dusty township beyond. Al-Ghazira was small then, an intimate little place, half market-town perched on the edge of the great hungry desert beyond, half pearling-port fattening on the lustrous jeevan pearls in its bay. It was a merchant’s paradise, right in the centre of the world, conceived and nourished by the flow of centuries of trade. Persians, Iraqis, Zanzibari Arabs, Omanis and Indians fattened upon it and grew rich, and the Malik, fast in his mud-walled fort on the Great Hill behind the town, smiled upon them, took his dues and disbursed a part of them in turn when British gunboats paid their visits to the little harbour.

The Indian merchants of al-Ghazira, some of whom had been settled there for generations, never quite knew what to make of Jeevanbhai. Soon after his arrival, for some reason, they had decided not to drive him out. But they had never accepted him and never let him into their houses. All his life Jeevanbhai circled just beyond the thresholds of respectability. So, when his wife died and his businesses began to fail and his money disappear, he had turned instinctively towards the Severed Head, and not to the Indians of the city.

In those early days, with the last bit of his wife’s gold, Jeevanbhai had bought himself a shop in the Souq ash-Sharji. The shop was to pass through a progression of avatars; it started as a cloth-shop, switched to dates and general groceries, then changed to hardware and later to carpets — in its first decade it changed almost every year. It didn’t matter; none of the shop’s incarnations ever made much money. That was not the intention. All through those years, it was in a little room behind the shop that Jeevanbhai’s real business lay.

One day, in his first year in al-Ghazira, Jeevanbhai was sitting in his empty cloth-shop wondering how he was going to buy the day’s food, when a rich Sindhi pearl merchant dropped by for a cup of tea. Within moments he was pouring his heart out, laying bare his shame as he never would have to anyone but an outcast: he had a daughter, still unmarried at twenty-five, and he was at his wits’ end.