In an Antique Land (17 page)

‘Do you know who it was who envied you?' I asked.

They exchanged a knowing glance, but neither of them would tell me who it was. ‘God is the Protector,' ‘Amm Taha said piously. ‘It doesn't matter who it was—the envy's been undone and I'm fine now.'

The next morning, sure enough, he was back at work, collecting eggs and driving his cart to Damanhour.

Having known of ‘Amm Taha's gifts for a while now, I was confident that he would be able to tell me exactly when Ustaz Sabry would be at home.

I was not disappointed.

‘Go there this evening,' he said. ‘An hour or so after the sunset prayers, and you can be sure you'll find him in.'

S
URE
ENOUGH
, U
STAZ
Sabry was at home when I went to his house that evening: he was sitting in his guest-room surrounded by some half-dozen visitors. He was talking in his clear, powerful voice, holding a shusha in his hands, while the others sat around the room in a circle. A couple of the visitors were dressed in shirts and trousers and looked like college students while the others were fellaheen who had dropped by to spend
some time talking at the end of the day.

Ustaz Sabry exclaimed loudly when he saw me at the door, and asked me why I hadn't come earlier, he had been expecting me several days ago. Since his mother had clearly failed to mention my earlier visit, I began to tell him myself, but I had already forfeited Ustaz Sabry's attention: he had launched upon an introduction for the benefit of his visitors.

I was a student from India, he told them, a guest who had come to Egypt to do research. It was their duty to welcome me into their midst and make me feel at home because of the long traditions of friendship between India and Egypt. Our countries were very similar, for India, like Egypt, was largely an agricultural nation, and the majority of its people lived in villages, like the Egyptian fellaheen, and ploughed their land with cattle. Our countries were poor, for they had both been ransacked by imperialists, and now they were both trying, in very similar ways, to cope with poverty and all the other problems that had been bequeathed to them by their troubled histories. It was a difficult task and our two countries had always supported each other in the past: Mahatma Gandhi had come to Egypt to consult Sa‘ad Zaghloul Pasha, the leader of the Egyptian nationalist movement, and later Nehru and Nasser had forged a close alliance. No Egyptian could ever forget the support that his country had received from India during the Suez crisis of 1956, when Egypt had been subjected to an unprovoked attack by the British and the French.

One of the men sitting across the room had been shifting impatiently in his seat while Ustaz Sabry made his speech; a small, wizened, prematurely aged man, with a faraway look in his deeply-lined eyes. His name was Zaghloul, I later learnt, and he was a self-taught weaver, who spun his own woollen yarn
and wove it on a rudimentary loom.

Now, Zaghloul had a question to ask, and as soon as he found an opportunity he said, in a breathless rush: ‘And in his country do they have ghosts like we do?'

‘Allah!' Ustaz Sabry exclaimed. ‘You could ask him about so many useful and important things—religion or politics—and instead you ask him about ghosts! What will he think of you?'

‘I don't know about all that,' Zaghloul said stubbornly. ‘What I want to know is whether they have ghosts in his country like we do.'

‘What ghosts?' Ustaz Sabry exploded. ‘These ghosts you talk about, these ‘afârît, they're just products of your own imagination. There are no such things, can't you see? What's the use of asking him about ghosts, what can he tell you? People imagine these things everywhere; in India just as here, there are people who think they see ghosts, and in England and Europe too there are people who point to certain houses and say, “This house is haunted, the ghost of Lord So-and-So walks here at night.” But all these things are purely imaginary—no such beings exist.'

‘Imaginary!' cried the weaver. ‘What do you mean imaginary? How can something be imaginary if someone sees it with his own eyes, right in front of his face?'

‘Have you ever seen such a thing?' Ustaz Sabry shot back.

A dreamy look came into the weaver's faraway eyes. ‘No,' he said, ‘but listen to me, I'll tell you something: my father saw a female ghost once, an ‘afrîta, at night as he was walking past the graveyard. He never went that way at night again, by God. Why, and just the other day my neighbour's wife saw a ghost running down the road near the canal, wrapped in a blanket. I can even tell you whose ghost it was; but only if you want to know.'

‘Who was it?' someone asked.

‘It was Fathy, the Sparrow,' he announced triumphantly. At once, two of the men sitting next to him recoiled in horror, and began to whisper the Fatiha and other protective prayers.

‘Do you mean,' I said, ‘the man who was killed at the mowlid in Nakhlatain—a few months ago?'

‘Yes,' said Zaghloul, ‘on God's name, it was him, the Sparrow, who was knocked off a swing and killed at the mowlid. They're saying his ghost has come back to haunt us because his kinsmen were too weak to start a feud or to get the murderer's lineage to pay the proper blood-money.'

At this Ustaz Sabry and one of the college students immediately took issue with him. There was no question of a blood feud, Ustaz Sabry said. The man's death had been proved to be accidental—there had been a police inquiry and the matter had been settled. Feuds and vengeance killings were things of the past; nowadays it was the government's job to deal with crimes and murders.

‘The world is wide,' said Zaghloul, ‘and with prayers to the Prophet, God have mercy on him, I'll tell you something and you give it mind: something wasn't right about how the whole business of the Sparrow's death was handled. The elders of the killer's family should have gone to the elders of the Sparrow's family, and said to them: Let us sit together and read the Quran and reach an agreement, insha‘allah. And while they were sorting things out, the killer should have sought sanctuary somewhere else. But instead there he was, walking freely about, showing no respect for the dead man's rights.'

‘But it was an accident,' said Ustaz Sabry. ‘The matter went to the police and it was settled, and that was that, khalas.'

‘God fortify you, ya Ustaz,' the weaver said, deferential but obstinate. ‘You know many things we don't, but something
must be wrong, otherwise why is the Sparrow's ghost appearing to so many people?'

Ustaz Sabry clapped his hands to his temples in despair.

‘This happens every time,' he said to me. ‘Whenever there's an accidental death the talk turns to ghosts and jinns. A few years ago the whole village was gripped by a panic when a boy fell off a roof and died, during the Nashawy mowlid.'

‘Does the doktór al-Hindi know about our mowlid?' Zaghloul said eagerly, with a glance in my direction. ‘That is a story he should be told.'

Later, when I got to know Zaghloul better, I discovered that besides being very fond of stories, he had a manner of telling them that was marvellously faithful to the metaphorical resonances of his chosen craft. I would often come upon him out in the fields, squatting on his haunches, with his eyes fixed on his hands in an absent, oddly melancholy gaze, spinning yarn, and waiting for someone to talk to. He was, in fact, much better at telling stories than at weaving, for the products of his loom tended to look a bit like sackcloth and never earned him anything more than a generous measure of ridicule. Zaghloul himself had no illusions about the quality of his cloth: he was overcome with shock, for instance, when I asked him to make me a couple of scarves to take back as mementoes. ‘You're laughing at me,' he said, ‘you want to use my cloth to show your people that the fellaheen of Egypt are backward and primitive.'

His wife was even more astonished than he, especially when she discovered that I intended to pay for the scarves. ‘Can't you take him too?' she said, bursting into laughter. ‘To show him off to your people?' Later, I discovered that there was a festering bitterness between them that sometimes exploded into ugly
quarrels; Zaghloul would threaten to divorce her and marry again, while she retaliated with the taunt—‘Do you think anyone would marry you, you shrivelled old man? You're the old man of the village, the ‘ajûz al-balad, no one will have you.' It was probably because of these scenes that Zaghloul spent an inordinate amount of time out on the fields, and was always glad to have an audience for his stories.

‘The doktór doesn't know the story of Sidi Abu-Kanaka,' Zaghloul announced to the room, and then, leaning back on the divan he took a deep, satisfied puff of his shusha and began at the beginning.

The story was an old one, he said; even when he was a child there were very few people alive who had witnessed the events of that time, and they too had never seen Sidi Abu-Kanaka in the flesh: he had died long before they were born. But everyone knew of him of course, for he had achieved great renown in his lifetime. He was universally mourned when he died and the villagers had even built him a special grave in their cemetery.

Many years later, long after Sidi Abu-Kanaka's death, when the land around Nashawy had become green and thickly populated, the government decided that the time had come to build a canal to serve the farmers of the area. The work began soon enough and the canal proceeded quickly, past Lataifa, all the way down the road, and everyone was glad, for the area had long needed better irrigation. But when the canal reached Nashawy the villagers discovered that a calamity was in the offing, for if it went ahead as the engineers had planned, it would go directly through their cemetery. Everybody was horrified at the thought of disturbing the dead and the elders of the village went to see the government authorities to beg them to change the route. But their complaints only made the
effendis impatient; they shut their doors upon the village shaikhs, saying that the canal would have to go on in a straight line, just as it was drawn in the plan.

So the villagers had watched with heavy hearts as the canal ploughed through their graveyard. Then one morning the workmen, to their utter astonishment, came upon a grave that would not yield to their spades; they hammered at it, for days and days, all of them together, but the grave had turned to rock, and no matter how hard they tried they couldn't make the slightest dent in it. When all their efforts failed, the engineers and the big effendis tried to do what they could, but it was to no purpose—they still weren't able to make the least impression on the tomb. At last, realizing that their efforts were in vain, they spoke to the village shaikhs, and upon learning that it was the tomb of Sidi Abu-Kanaka that had thwarted them, they went to his descendants and begged them to open the vault if they could.

‘By all means,' the Sidi's grandson said, ‘we are at your service,' and at his touch the tomb opened quite easily. Then all the people who had gathered there saw for themselves, what they would never have believed otherwise: that the Sidi's body was still whole and incorrupt, and that instead of being affected by the decay of time, it was giving off a beautiful, perfumed smell.

Everyone who was there was witness to the event and nobody, not even the effendis, could deny the miracle that Sidi Abu-Kanaka had wrought. And so it happened that the canal was made to take a slight diversion there, and on that plot of land the people of the village built a maqâm for the Sidi. The Sidi, in turn, extended his protection over Nashawy and kept its people from harm. Once, for instance, when a gang of armed thieves
set out to attack Nashawy the Sidi summoned up a miracle and surrounded the village with a deep, impassable moat. In the years that followed, time and time again, he gave the villagers proof of his benevolence with miracles and acts of grace.

‘This is the story that people tell here,' Ustaz Sabry said to me, as I scribbled furiously in my notebook. ‘You see how the fellaheen can thwart the government when they choose …'

Yet, although everyone in the village revered the Sidi, there was no mowlid to honour his name; Nashawy's annual mowlid commemorated a saint from the settlement's parent village, far in the interior. Then one year there was a terrible accident at the Nashawy mowlid. A boy who had climbed on to the roof of a house to get a better view of the chanting of the zikr, lost his footing on the straw and fell off, breaking his neck. The people of the village were so horrified that they ran back and shut their doors, and the streets of the village were deserted, night after night, while everyone cowered at home. There were many who interpreted these events as a sign that the village ought to begin celebrating a mowlid in honour of Sidi Abu-Kanaka.

There was so much fear in Nashawy in those days, said Ustaz Sabry, that one night he and some of the other teachers decided that they ought to do something to counter the panic that had overtaken the village. What they did was this: they formed small groups, together with the other educated people in the village, and every night after the sunset prayers they walked through the lanes crying the name of God out loud, and calling upon the fellaheen to come out of their houses. Nobody joined them the first night, but over the next few days more and more people came out, until finally every man was out in the lanes shouting ‘Allahu Akbar'. Thus the villagers got over their fear and Nashawy slowly returned to normal.

Later the teachers got together and decided that the time had come to call a halt to the extravagances of the mowlid. The celebration of mowlids for local saints was not a part of the true practice of Islam, Ustaz Sabry argued; such customs only served to encourage superstition and religious laxity. Besides, the fellaheen wasted a lot of money on the mowlid each year, money they had worked hard to earn, and which they would have done better to spend on fertilizers and insecticides.