In an Antique Land (34 page)

Then, one day, quite unexpectedly, I was presented with an opportunity to visit a shrine when a taxi I was travelling in stopped beside one, on the outskirts of the city. The driver apologized for the delay and said it would only be a matter of minutes: it was just that he always made it a point to stop there, when he was passing by, to say a quick prayer and make an offering. The shrine was a very famous one, he explained, and visitors were always welcome.

The shrine stood on top of a mound, a small tiled enclosure surrounded by ricefields, with the sand-dunes of the coastline visible in the near distance. The image inside was a very simple one, a white, circular mask with an emblematic face depicted on it in bold black lines: a pair of curling moustaches were its most
striking features. On either side of the mask was a sword, propped upright against the wall.

The spot was tended by a Pujari, a large, friendly man with gold rings in his ears, who touched our foreheads with sandalwood and gave us handfuls of prasad. He explained, through the taxi-driver, who translated into Hindi for my benefit, that once every year the Bhuta who dwelt in the shrine emerged to take possession of him. A great festival was held then, and after a long cycle of dances and rituals the spirit was ceremonially restored to its proper place within the shrine.

It was an extraordinary experience, the Pujari said, to feel the Bhuta within him, for the spirit of that shrine was greatly renowned for his powers. Many stories surrounded the shrine, he said, and one of them had become famous throughout the region. Years ago, when Mangalore's new port was completed, the government's engineers had started building a road to connect it with the city, some fifteen miles to the south. But soon, to general consternation, it was discovered that if the work were to go ahead as planned, the road would cut straight through the shrine. The people of the area had protested mightily, but the government had ignored them and sent out notices of eviction to all the farmers who owned land in the area. Sure enough, one day, the engineers arrived with their machines to begin the work of demolition. But then there was a miracle: their bulldozers were immobilized soon after they had begun to move; they were frozen to the ground before they could touch the shrine's walls. Completely confounded, the engineers called in high-ranking government officers, and technicians with yard-long degrees. But there was nothing anyone could do and eventually, admitting defeat, they agreed to divert the road so that it skirted around the shrine.

This was a story everyone knew, said the Pujari, and every year at the time of the festival, people would tell it over and over again.

Later, when we got back into the car, the driver asked me to look through the rear window. I watched the road carefully as we drove away, and from the angle of its curve it did indeed look as though it had made a loop to spare the shrine.

Smiling, the driver said: ‘Have you ever heard of anything like that?'

A recollection suddenly stirred in my mind.

‘Yes,' I said, ‘I heard a very similar story once. In Egypt.'

He nodded politely, but disbelief was written all over his face.

B
OMMA WAS NOT
to remain long in Aden: he came back carrying the very letter in which Madmun described his drunken revelries to Ben Yiju. Madmun's complaints, however, do not appear to have excited an excess of wrath in Ben Yiju, and nor did Madmun himself bear a grudge for long—in his later letters he was always careful to include a word of friendly greeting for Bomma.
Over the years, as Bomma's role as business agent grew in importance, Ben Yiju's friends in Aden came to regard him with increasing respect, and in time Khalaf ibn Ishaq even began to prefix his name with the title of ‘Shaikh'.

Ben Yiju, for his part, seems to have reposed a great deal of Crust in Bomma from the very beginning of their association.
When Bomma went to Aden in 1135, for example, he was responsible not only for delivering a quantity of merchandise, but also for bringing back a large shipment of goods for Ben Yiju and his household.
Among the items he brought back were four
a
îra-s or mats from Berbera (in modern Somaliland), a leather table cloth of a special kind on which chess and other games could be played, an iron frying-pan, a sieve, a large quantity of soap, two Egyptian gowns, and several presents from Madmun, such as sugar, raisins, ‘a quire of white paper', as well as a piece of coral for Ben Yiju's son, Surur.

The two ‘gowns' that Bomma brought back with him were almost certainly intended for Ben Yiju himself, because it is clear from other references in his correspondence that he, like his fellow expatriates, continued to wear the customary garments of the Middle East—robes, turbans and the like—all the while that he was in India. The people of Malabar, on the other hand, generally left the upper parts of their bodies bare, men and women alike—their preferred markers of class distinction being ornaments and jewellery rather than articles of clothing. ‘
They wear only bandages around the middle,' wrote ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Samarqandi, ‘[garments] called lankoutah, which descend from the navel to above the knee.'

To Middle Eastern merchants like Ben Yiju, on the other hand, being properly dressed meant wearing a double layer of clothing, first a loose undergarment and over that a robe, a garment that covered the covering, so to speak, of the body's nakedness and rendered it fit to be seen in public: anything less they would have considered immodest.

Ben Yiju, for one, was clearly fastidious about his clothing. Several of his letters and accounts
mention imported Egyptian robes and fine Alexandrian cloaks, while others refer to lengths
of cloth and kerchiefs that may have served as turbans. He clearly had a reputation as a careful dresser amongst his friends; Madmun, for instance, when sending him a shawl once, thought it prudent to extol its qualities: ‘
I have also for my own part, sent for you … a fine new Dîbîqî shawl, with nicely worked borders—an appropriate garment for men of eminence.'

The most important of his imports, as far as Ben Yiju was concerned, was paper. In the Malabar, as in most parts of India, the material most commonly used for writing at that time was the palm-leaf—paper appears to have been rare and difficult to obtain.
In the Middle East, on the other hand, paper was being produced on a large scale by the eleventh century, and like most of his contemporaries Ben Yiju must have grown accustomed to it in his youth. Once he moved to India his friends went to great pains to keep him well-supplied and packages of paper were included in virtually every shipment sent to him from Aden.

Ben Yiju's friends evidently knew of the great importance that writing played in his life, and they often showed a touching concern for the quality of the paper they bought on his behalf. Madmun, for example, once assured him that the Egyptian
al
î paper he had acquired for him was
‘the best available', and on another occasion he proudly assured him that his two large quires of Sul
ânî paper were so fine that
‘no one has its like'. Madmun was not exaggerating: the paper he and his friends sent to Ben Yiju was of so matchless a quality that even today, eight hundred years later, a surprising number of those sheets are still marvellously well-preserved, despite the heat and humidity they have endured in the course of their travels between Egypt and India.

That Ben Yiju was a man with a taste for good living is also
evident in many of his household purchases.
Much of his kitchenware for instance, was imported from Aden—even such things as frying-pans and sieves—and he also regularly had crockery, soap, goblets and glasses sent out from the Middle East.
For his mats he looked to the Horn of Africa, and he is known to have purchased at least one velvet-like carpet, made in Gujarat.

Ben Yiju also seems to have had something of a sweet tooth.
His friends often sent him raisins and other delicacies such as nougat and dates.
The various kinds of palm-sugar that were in use in Malabar were clearly not to his taste, and his friends seem to have had standing instructions to dispatch Middle Eastern cane-sugar with every consignment of goods.

If it seems curious today that somebody should import sugar into sweet-besotted India, it would not have appeared so in Ben Yiju's time.
In the Middle Ages, it was Egypt that pioneered the large-scale production of cane-sugar and its exports of that commodity were such that in many parts of Asia to this day some sugar products bear names that link them to an Egyptian source. No matter that the Arabic word sukkar (hence the English ‘sugar') is itself ultimately derived from a Sanskrit source: today, throughout north India, crystallized sugar is still known as misri in commemoration of traders like Ben Yiju and the tastes they imported from Masr.

I
HAD NOT
been in Mangalore long when Bomma provided me with an insight into the uses of History.

Among the many castes and religious communities of the Malabar coast few have a past as interesting as that of a small group of fisher-folk, known variously by the name of ‘Magavîra' or ‘Mogêra'. The sixteenth-century Portuguese traveller, Duarte Barbosa, left a brief description of them in his account of his travels on the Malabar coast. He referred to them as ‘another sect of people still lower [than the others] … which they call moguer … These people for the most part get their living at sea, they are mariners and fishermen.' But although the Magavira were traditionally linked with fishing, Barbosa notes that many amongst the group had also prospered in trade: ‘They are some of them very rich men who have got ships with which they navigate, for they gain much money with the Moors.'