Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

Jeevanbhai had not been idle on his journey from Durban; his instinct had driven him to ferret out names all along the coast, and his memory had clung on to them more successfully than his wallet had held on to money. That morning, providentially, his mind disgorged a suitable name in distant Zanzibar. The marriage came about and spread happiness in waves across the ocean. He was asked for a few more names, and his memory proved its worth every time. His reputation was soon established; families which would not have let him cross their courtyards flocked to his back room from all the kingdoms around al-Ghazira and from places as distant as Socotra and Khartoum, and none of them was ashamed to ask help from Jeevanbhai, for there was nothing to be feared from such a shadowy, harmless creature.

In his little back room Jeevanbhai spun out his web, spanning oceans and continents, and such are the ironies of fortune that he, whose marriage had cast him out of his family, found fame as the most successful marriage-broker in the Indian Ocean. As his ‘marriages’ blossomed and grew rich in progeny, Jeevanbhai grew rich with his bridal pairs, for he had another talent — he had learnt the secret of spinning gold from love.

He went into the ‘gold trade’ between India, al-Ghazira and Africa. Within months he had almost eliminated the competition, for in all the ports around the Indian Ocean grateful husbands and eager grooms stood by to receive his consignments and hurry them across borders (and of course they were none the poorer for it). Soon he began to diversify, first into silver, then a few guns. That was when, they said, he first began making his trips to the Old Fort …

Jeevanbhai grew rich. In gratitude he founded the New Life Marriage Bureau, for he never forgot that his money had come from marriages. And, besides, there were the commissions, and nothing is as good as the account-books of a marriage bureau for throwing a pleasing fog of confusion over inexplicable flows of money. Soon his business had grown so large that he had to move out of the Souq ash-Sharji into an office near the harbour. Looking around for someone to run his shop in the Souq he came across Forid Mian, then a sailor on a British line. In his childhood Forid Mian had learnt tailoring in his native Chittagong (in what was then East Bengal), but circumstances had forced him to go to sea. Jeevanbhai learnt of his trade somehow and persuaded him to leave his ship. Ever since, Forid Mian had worked for a monthly wage in the newly named Durban Tailoring House. Usually the shop lost money, and in the best of years it just about managed to balance its books with a few tricks, but Jeevanbhai wouldn’t part with it, despite his steadily lightening purse. He clung to it; it was his talisman, the only thing left to him of his best years.

But, then, said Rakesh, perplexed, why that shop? Why not some other shop?

Zindi smiled: Do you know of any other shop? Do you know of anybody in the Souq who’d sell, especially now with so much money coming in? That’s the important thing — Jeevanbhai doesn’t make money from that shop; it’s just sentiment. He’s a practical man. If something went wrong, if it became too much trouble to keep that shop … Suppose Forid Mian decides to leave. I’m not saying he will, but just suppose. Then what would that shop be worth to Jeevanbhai? He has enough to worry about at the moment — would he still want that shop? It’s just a question, no one can answer it yet, but maybe then he might want to sell. Who knows? And, besides, it’s a lucky shop. It brought Jeevanbhai luck once, only he didn’t know how to hold on to it — he meddles too much. It ought to go to someone who knows how to use it. Maybe …

Why not just ask him to sell it, Zindi?

That’s the trouble, Zindi said angrily. People like you have no experience of practical things. Do you think one can just ask a man like Jeevanbhai something like that? There has to be a situation, some possibilities, something that might help him make up his mind. You see, you have to be practical, like me, and not spend your time brooding uselessly about the Star. It’s only when you learn to accept that what’s happened has happened that you can use your knowledge of the past to cheat the future. That is what practical life is.

Abu Fahl’s inquiries yielded the information that the guard around the ruins was changed three times a day: in the morning, at dusk and at midnight. He found out that at dusk, because the change coincided with the evening prayers, the relieving detachment sometimes arrived a little late. So, for about half an hour after dusk, the Star was usually unguarded. He decided that he and Rakesh would leave the house a little before dusk.

Before leaving, they told Zindi of their plans. She listened absent-mindedly. Yes, go, she said. Allah yigawwikum , and God give you strength.

Her mind was elsewhere. Rakesh could see that her anxiety was not caused by their enterprise. Before they left, she took him aside and whispered: Rakesh, do you think he’ll come?

Who?

Forid Mian, of course, she said impatiently. Rakesh shrugged and combed his hair. As they walked out of the house towards the embankment, they saw her looking worriedly up and down the lane.

Soon after they had left there was a knock on the door. Zindi leapt to open it. An elderly man in a blue jallabeyya and skullcap stood outside, a wan smile wrinkling his square, good-humoured face. How are you, Zindi? he said.

Zindi covered her disappointment with a shower of greetings: Come in, come in, Hajj Fahmy, welcome, ya marhaban , you have brought blessings, welcome ya , Hajj Fahmy, you have brought light, how are you? Come in, have some tea.

Hajj Fahmy seated himself ceremoniously on a mat and placed his hands on his folded knees. Zindi, he said, as she pumped her stove, where’s my son Isma’in?

Isma’il? said Zindi, surprised. He hasn’t been here.

But I sent him here. We heard the rumours, you see, and I wanted to find out. He didn’t come so I was worried.

Zindi clicked her tongue in sympathy. How you’ve aged, she said, since Mohammad’s accident, God have mercy on him. She threw an extra handful of tea and mint into the pot. Hajj Fahmy was the house’s oldest friend and he had a right to its best tea.

Hajj Fahmy’s family was said to have been founded, several generations ago, by a weaver called Musa, who had fled his village in the far south of Egypt after a blood feud. He escaped to Sudan and the Red Sea coast with his child bride, and there, penniless and starving, he had entered himself and his bride into servitude.

After innumerable adventures in Ethiopia, Somalia and the Yemeni coast, Musa had found his way somehow to al-Ghazira with his no-longer-young wife and many children. The Malik of the time took them into his service, and Musa and his still growing family lived in the Old Fort and wove their cloth in peace. Eventually Musa and his family came to be known as the Malik’s dependants, his Mawali. His descendants were known forever afterwards by that name, even when they depended on no one but themselves.

Then the old Malik died and Musa died, and one day the Mawali found themselves not quite as welcome in the Fort as they had been in the past. So they moved, not into the town, because the townspeople still looked on them with suspicion as strangers of uncertain provenance, but into an empty sandflat which people called the Severed Head. They built themselves barasti huts, spacious airy dwellings, built with palm fronds and wooden stakes, and they installed their looms and lived and worked in proud penury.

It was Hajj Fahmy who changed all that. He saw the first oilmen coming into al-Ghazira, and he knew at once that the Mawali could profit from the future. Against all his instincts, he stopped teaching his craft to his sons and his kinsmen, and told them to be ready to learn other trades. When the oil began to gush, Hajj Fahmy was the only man in al-Ghazira who was ready for it. Within a few years one of his sons was in the construction business and making more money than he could count; another had three Datsun trucks which were never short of work (it was he who died when he drove one of his trucks off the embankment); a third had filled every Mawali with pride by going to Alexandria to study medicine.