In an Antique Land (42 page)

Upon receiving
the letter, Yusuf must have decided against allowing Moshe to go any further, for when Surur next wrote to his parents he was already in Egypt and his brother was back in Mazara. The letter he wrote on this occasion was a short one. ‘I have sent you these few lines to tell you that I am well and at peace,' he wrote, and then went on to convey his greetings in turn to various friends at home as well as to his parents and his brothers, Moshe and Shamwal.
But Surur had yet another reason for writing home at this time: he wanted a certain legal
document from his father and in the course of his letter he asked him to send it on to Palermo, possibly with Moshe, so that it could be forwarded to him in Egypt.

As it happened, the letter rekindled Moshe's yearning for travel and prompted him to set out for Egypt himself. But the times were not propitious and the store of good fortune that had carried Surur safely to his destination ran out on his brother: Moshe's ship was attacked on the way and he was imprisoned in the Crusader-controlled city of Tyre.

Their parents, already prostrate with anxiety, were to learn of these developments in a letter from Surur.
‘We were seized with grief when we read your letter,' Shamwal wrote back from Sicily, ‘and we wept copiously. As for [our] father and mother
they could not speak.'
But their tears were soon stemmed: later in the same letter, they discovered that matters had already taken a happier turn. Moshe had since written to Surur from Tyre to let him know that he was now ‘
well and in good cheer.'

At home in Sicily meanwhile, things had got steadily worse.
Food was short, the price of wheat had risen and the family had already spent most of its money. ‘
If you saw [our] father,' wrote Shamwal, ‘you would not know him, for he weeps all day and night … As for [our] mother, if you saw her, you would not recognize her [so changed is she] by her longing for you, and by her grief. God knows what our state has been after you left … Know that all we have is emptiness since God emptied [our house]. Do not forget us, oh my brothers; to visit us and to write to us. You must know that those of your letters that reached us conjured up your two noble faces [for us]. Send us letters telling us your news, the least important and the most; do not scorn to tell us the smallest thing, till we know everything.'

But gradually things improved. The brothers were reunited in
Egypt, and Surur must have announced his wedding to his cousin shortly afterwards. His father, overwhelmed, wrote back to say: ‘
Come quickly home to us, you and your uncle's daughter … and [we shall] prepare a couple of rooms for her, and we shall celebrate [the wedding] …'

The marriage did indeed take place: a list recording Sitt al-Dar's wedding trousseau, now preserved in St. Petersburg, is proof that this child of a Nair woman from the Malabar was wedded in 1156 to her Sicilian cousin, in Fustat.

Both Surur and Moshe went on to become judges in rabbinical courts in Egypt, where they were probably later joined by their parents and Shamwal.

As for Ashu, neither Ben Yiju nor his nephews mention her in their letters. In all likelihood she never left India but remained in Mangalore after Ben Yiju's departure.

Ben Yiju himself disappears from the records after his daughter's marriage. His son-in-law and his other nephews do not mention him in their later correspondence, and nor, as far as I know, is his death referred to in any other document in the Cairo Geniza. There are many conceivable endings to Ben Yiju's story and if the most pleasing amongst them is one which has him returning to Ashu, in the Malabar, the most likely, on the other hand, is a version in which he dies in Egypt, soon after his daughter's wedding, and is buried somewhere in the vicinity of Fustat.

As for Bomma, there is no mention of him either, in Ben Yiju's correspondence with his brothers. But his story is not ended yet: one last journey remains.

M
Y RETURN TO
Nashawy and Lataifa culminated in an unforeseen ending.

It so happened that my visit coincided with one of the regions annual events, a mowlid dedicated to the memory of a saintly figure known as Sidi Abu-Hasira, whose tomb lies on the outskirts of Damanhour.

As with all mowlids, a buzz of anticipation preceded the start of this one, and over a period of a few days I had the story of Sidi Abu-Hasira repeated to me over and over again. Except for a few unexpected twists, it was very similar to the legends that surrounded other local holy men such as those of Nashawy and Nakhlatain: like those other legends, it was set in a distant past, and it recounted the miracles wrought by a man of exemplary piety and goodness. The Sidi had been born into a Jewish family in the Maghreb, it was said, but he had transported himself to Egypt through a miracle that later found commemoration in his name: he had crossed the Mediterranean on a rush mat, which was why he was called ‘Sîdî Abû-
a
ra', ‘the Saint of the Mat'.

After arriving in Egypt, the story went, he had converted to Islam and had soon come to be recognized as a ‘good man', endowed with the blessed and miraculous gift of ‘baraka'. Eventually the Sidi had settled in Damanhour, where a large group of disciples and followers had gathered around him. Upon his death, they had built a tomb for him, on the outskirts of Damanhour, and it was there that his mowlid was now celebrated. Because of his Jewish origins, I was told, the Sidi still had many followers in Israel and ever since the opening of the borders they came to Damanhour in large numbers every year.
Indeed so many tourists came to attend the mowlid nowadays, and recently a large new memorial had been built on the site of Sidi Abu-Hasira's tomb.

I had missed the mowlid while living in Nashawy, because I had happened to be away in Cairo over the week when it was celebrated; now it seemed as though everyone I knew was determined to prevent my missing it again. The mowlid was a wonderful spectacle, I was told; there would be lights everywhere, stalls with pistols and airguns, swings and carousels; the streets would be lined with kebab-shops and vendors' carts and thronged with crowds of sightseers. The tourists alone were a good reason to go, they said, it was not often that one got to see foreigners in a place like Damanhour.

I was persuaded easily enough, but I had so much to catch up with in Lataifa and Nashawy after my long absence that I didn't have time to think of much else. The mowlid began towards the end of my visit, and my time seemed so pitifully short that I let it pass with no particular sense of regret. A couple of days before my departure I was told that the mowlid was over: that would have been the end of the story had it not been for Mohsin the taxi-driver.

Mohsin was from a hamlet near Nashawy, a corpulent youth in his mid-twenties or so. He had a little brisding moustache, and he always wore freshly laundered white jallabeyyas—great, dazzling garments that billowed around him like parachutes. Mohsin was a good talker, full of self-confidence, and amazingly knowledgeable about such things as the exchange rates of various kinds of dinars and the prices of Nikons and Seikos. He had acquired this stock of information while living in the Gulf where he had spent a couple of years working in construction. He hadn't cared much for his work however; climbing scaffolding didn't
suit him. Eventually he had succeeded in persuading two of his brothers, who had jobs in Iraq, to join him in investing in a second-hand van, and for the last several months he had been ferrying passengers back and forth between the towns and villages of the district.

The day before my departure Mohsin drove me to the railway station in Damanhour to buy a ticket for Cairo, and on the way he explained that he was growing tired of spending his days on those dusty rural roads. Lately, seeing so many tourists coming into Damanhour for the mowlid, he had begun to think along a different track. It had occurred to him that it would be nice to have a permit that would let him take tourists back and forth from Alexandria and Cairo and places like that.

That was how the idea of our paying a visit to the tomb of Sidi Abu-Hasira came to be mooted. He had never been there himself, said Mohsin, but he had always wanted to go, and he would be glad to take me there next morning, on the way to the station. It was no matter that the mowlid was already over—the stalls and lights would probably be there still, and we would be able to get a good whiff of the atmosphere. And so it was agreed that we would stop by at the tomb when he picked me up at Lataifa next morning, to take me to the station.

I spent the rest of the day making a last round of Nashawy, saying good-bye to my friends and their families: to Khamees, now a prosperous landowner with two healthy children; to Busaina, who had recently bought a house with her own earnings, in the centre of the village; to their brother ‘Eid, newly-returned from Saudi Arabia, and soon to be married to the girl to whom he had lost his heart, years ago; to Zaghloul, miraculously unaffected by the storm of change that was whirling through the village; to ‘Amm Taha, whose business in
eggs had now expanded into a minor industry and made him a man of considerable wealth; even, inadvertently, to Imam Ibrahim, who greeted me civilly enough, when we ran into each other in the village square. Finally I said goodbye to Fawzia, ‘Ali and Hussein, who made me promise, once again, that I would soon telephone Nabeel in Iraq.

When Mohsin arrived in Lataifa next morning, I was taking my leave of Shaikh Musa, Jabir, and several others who had gathered in his guest-room. The leavetaking proved even harder than I had imagined and in one way or another my farewells lasted a great deal longer than I had expected.

In the meanwhile Mohsin had busied himself in preparing an appropriate accompaniment for the moment of my departure: a cassette of Umm Kolthums had been cued and held ready, and the moment I climbed into the van a piercing lament filled the lanes of Lataifa. We began to roll forward in time with the tune, and after a final round of handshakes, Mohsin sounded a majestic blast on his horn. The younger boys ran along while the van picked up speed, and then suddenly Lataifa vanished behind us into a cloud of dust.

We stopped to ask directions on the borders of Damanhour, and then turned on to a narrow road that skirted around a crowded, working-class area. Nutshells and scraps of coloured papers lay scattered everywhere now, and it was easy to tell that the road had recently been teeming with festive crowds. Mohsin had never been to this part of the city before but he was confident that we were headed in the right direction. When next we stopped to ask for the tomb of Sidi Abu-Hasira, we were immediately pointed to a large structure half-hidden behind a row of date palms, a little further down the road.

I was taken by surprise at my first glimpse of the building; it
looked nothing like the saints' tombs I had seen before. It was a sleek, concrete structure of a kind that one might expect to see in the newer and more expensive parts of Alexandria and Cairo: in that poor quarter of Damanhour, it was not merely incongruous—its presence seemed almost an act of defiance.

A long, narrow driveway led from the entrance of the compound to a covered porch adjoining the tomb. The grounds seemed deserted when we turned in at the gate, and it was not till we were halfway down the drive that we noticed a handful of men lounging around a desk, in the shade of the porch. One of them was dressed in a blue jallabeyya; the rest were armed and in uniform.

At the sight of those uniforms Mohsin suddenly became tense and apprehensive. Like me, he had expected to see a domed tomb, with some candles burning outside perhaps, and a few people gathered around a grave: the uniforms instantly aroused that deep mistrust of officialdom that had been bred into him by generations of fellah forefathers. I could tell that his every instinct was crying out to him to turn the van around and speed away. But it was already too late: the men were on their feet now, watching us, and some of them were fingering their guns.

The van was surrounded the moment we drew up under the porch. Reaching in through my window, a hand undid the lock and jerked the door open. I stepped out to find myself face to face with a ruddy, pink-cheeked man, dressed in a blue jallabeyya. He was holding the door open for me, and with a deep bow and a smile he gestured towards a police officer seated at the desk under the porch.