Incendiary Circumstances (41 page)

No sooner had he said it than the women of the group clasped their hands to their hearts and muttered in breathless horror, "
Haram! Haram!
"

My heart sank. This was a conversation I usually went through at least once a day, and I was desperately tired of it. "Yes," I said, "it's true; some people in my country burn their dead."

"You mean," said Khamees in mock horror, "that you put them on heaps of wood and just light them up?"

"Yes," I said, hoping that he would tire of this sport if I humored him.

"Why?" he said. "Is there a shortage of kindling in your country?"

"No," I said helplessly, "you don't understand." Somewhere in the limitless riches of the Arabic language a word such as "cremate" must exist, but if it does, I never succeeded in finding it. Instead, for lack of any other, I had to use the word "burn." That was unfortunate, for "burn" was the word for what happened to wood and straw and the eternally damned.

Khamees the Rat turned to his spellbound listeners. "I'll tell you why they do it," he said. "They do it so that their bodies can't be punished after the Day of Judgment."

Everybody burst into wonderstruck laughter. "Why, how clever," cried one of the younger girls. "What a good idea! We ought to start doing it ourselves. That way we can do exactly what we like, and when we die and the Day of Judgment comes, there'll be nothing there to judge."

Khamees had got his laugh. Now he gestured to them to be quiet again.

"All right then,
ya doktor,
" he said. "Tell me something else: is it true that you are a Magian? That in your country everybody worships cows? Is it true that the other day when you were walking through the fields you saw a man beating a cow and you were so upset that you burst into tears and ran back to your room?"

"No, it's not true," I said, but without much hope. I had heard this story before and knew that there was nothing I could say which would effectively give it the lie. "You're wrong. In my country people beat their cows all the time, I promise you."

I could see that no one believed me.

"Everything's upside-down in their country," said a dark, aquiline young woman, who, I was told later, was Khamees's wife.
"Tell us,
ya doktor,
in your country, do you have crops and fields and canals like we do?"

"Yes," I said, "we have crops and fields, but we don't always have canals. In some parts of my country they aren't needed because it rains all the year round."

"
Ya salám,
" she cried, striking her forehead with the heel of her palm. "Do you hear that, o you people? Oh, the Protector, oh, the Lord! It rains all the year round in his country."

She had gone pale with amazement. "So tell us then," she demanded, "do you have night and day like we do?"

"Shut up, woman," said Khamees. "Of course they don't. It's day all the time over there, didn't you know? They arranged it like that so that they wouldn't have to spend any money on lamps."

We all laughed, and then someone pointed to a baby lying in the shade of a tree, swaddled in a sheet of cloth. "That's Khamees's baby," I was told. "He was born last month."

"That's wonderful," I said. "Khamees must be very happy."

Khamees gave a cry of delight. "The Indian knows I'm happy because I've had a son," he said to the others. "He understands that people are happy when they have children. He's not as upside-down as we thought."

He slapped me on the knee and lit up the hookah, and from that moment we were friends.

 

One evening, perhaps a month or so after I first met Khamees, he and his brothers and I were walking back to the village from the fields when he spotted the old imam sitting on the steps that led to the mosque.

"Listen," he said to me, "you know the old imam, don't you? I saw you talking to him once."

"Yes," I said, "I talked to him once."

"My wife's ill," Khamees said. "I want the imam to come to my house to give her an injection. He won't come if I ask him, he doesn't like me. You go and ask."

"He doesn't like me either," I said.

"Never mind," Khamees insisted. "He'll come if you ask him—he knows you're a foreigner. He'll listen to you."

While Khamees waited on the edge of the square with his brothers, I went across to the imam. I could tell that he had seen me—and Khamees—from a long way off, that he knew I was crossing the square to talk to him. But he would not look in my direction. Instead, he pretended to be deep in conversation with a man who was sitting beside him, an elderly and pious shopkeeper whom I knew slightly.

When I reached them, I said "Good evening" very pointedly to the imam. He could not ignore me any longer then, but his response was short and curt, and he turned back at once to resume his conversation.

The old shopkeeper was embarrassed now, for he was a courteous, gracious man in the way that seemed to come so naturally to the elders of the village. "Please sit down," he said to me. "Do sit. Shall we get you a chair?"

Then he turned to the imam and said, slightly puzzled, "You know the Indian
doktor,
don't you? He's come all the way from India to be a student at the University of Alexandria."

"I know him," said the imam. "He came around to ask me questions. But as for this student business, I don't know. What's he going to study? He doesn't even write in Arabic."

"Well," said the shopkeeper judiciously, "that's true, but after all, he writes his own languages and he knows English."

"Oh, those," said the imam. "What's the use of
those
languages? They're the easiest languages in the world. Anyone can write those."

He turned to face me for the first time. His eyes were very bright, and his mouth was twitching with anger. "Tell me," he said, "why do you worship cows?"

I was so taken aback that I began to stammer. The imam ignored me. He turned to the old shopkeeper and said, "That's what they do in his country—did you know? They worship cows."

He shot me a glance from the corner of his eyes. "And shall I tell you what else they do?" he said to the shopkeeper.

He let the question hang for a moment. And then, very loudly, he hissed, "They burn their dead."

The shopkeeper recoiled as though he had been slapped. His hands flew to his mouth. "Oh God!" he muttered. "
Ya Allah.
"

"That's what they do," said the imam. "They burn their dead."

Then suddenly he turned to me and said, very rapidly, "Why do you allow it? Can't you see that it's a primitive and backward custom? Are you savages that you permit something like that? Look at you—you've had some kind of education; you should know better. How will your country ever progress if you carry on doing these things? You've even been to the West; you've seen how advanced they are. Now tell me, have you ever seen them burning their dead?"

The imam was shouting now, and a circle of young men and boys had gathered around us. Under the pressure of their interested eyes my tongue began to trip, even on syllables I thought I had mastered. I found myself growing angry—as much with my own incompetence as with the imam.

"Yes, they do burn their dead in the West," I managed to say somehow. I raised my voice too now. "They have special electric furnaces meant just for that."

The imam could see that he had stung me. He turned away and laughed. "He's lying," he said to the crowd. "They don't burn their dead in the West. They're not an ignorant people. They're advanced, they're educated, they have science, they have guns and tanks and bombs."

"We have them too!" I shouted back at him. I was as confused now as I was angry. "In my country we have all those things too," I said to the crowd. "We have guns and tanks and bombs. And they're better than anything you have—we're way ahead of you."

The imam could no longer disguise his anger. "I tell you, he's lying," he said. "Our guns and bombs are much better than theirs. Ours are second only to the West's."

"It's you who's lying," I said. "You know nothing about this. Ours are much better. Why, in my country we've even had a nuclear explosion. You won't be able to match that in a hundred years."

So there we were, the imam and I, delegates from two superseded civilizations vying with each other to lay claim to the violence of the West.

At that moment, despite the vast gap that lay between us, we understood each other perfectly. We were both traveling, he and I: we were traveling in the West. The only difference was that I had actually been there, in person: I could have told him about the ancient English university I had won a scholarship to, about punk dons with safety pins in their mortarboards, about superhighways and sex shops and Picasso. But none of it would have mattered. We would have known, both of us, that all that was mere fluff: at the bottom, for him as for me and millions and millions of people on the landmasses around us, the West meant only this—science and tanks and guns and bombs.

And we recognized too the inescapability of these things, their strength, their power—evident in nothing so much as this: that even for him, a man of God, and for me, a student of the "humane" sciences, they had usurped the place of all other languages of argument. He knew, just as I did, that he could no longer say to me, as Ibn Battuta might have when he traveled to India in the fourteenth century, "You should do this or that because it is right or good, or because God wills it so." He could not have said it because that language is dead: those things are no longer sayable; they sound absurd. Instead he had had, of necessity, to use that other language, so universal that it extended equally to him, an old-fashioned village imam, and to great leaders at SALT conferences. He had had to say to me, "You ought not to do this because otherwise you will not have guns and tanks and bombs."

Since he was a man of God, his was the greater defeat.

For a moment then I was desperately envious. The imam would not have said any of those things to me had I been a Westerner. He would not have dared. Whether I wanted it or not, I would have had around me the protective aura of an inherited expertise in the technology of violence. That aura would have surrounded me, I thought, with a sheet of clear glass, like a bulletproof screen; or perhaps it would have worked as a talisman, like a press card, armed with which I could have gone off to what were said to be the most terrible places in the world that month, to gaze and wonder. And then perhaps I too would one day have had enough material for a book which would have had for its epigraph the line
The horror! The horror!
—for the virtue of a sheet of glass is that it does not require one to look within.

But that still leaves Khamees the Rat waiting on the edge of the square.

In the end it was he and his brothers who led me away from the imam. They took me home with them, and there, while Kha-mees's wife cooked dinner for us—she was not so ill after all—Khamees said to me, "Do not be upset,
ya doktor.
Forget about all those guns and things. I'll tell you what:
I'll
come to visit you in your country, even though I've never been anywhere. I'll come all the way."

He slipped a finger under his skullcap and scratched his head, thinking hard.

Then he added, "But if I die, you must bury me."

page

 

THE GREATEST SORROW

[>]
 
Nessun maggior dolore:
Dante Alighieri,
The Inferno,
trans R. & J. Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2000), Canto V, lines 121–23.

[>]
 The last Sinhala word: Michael Ondaatje, "Wells," in
Handwriting
(New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 50.

[>]
 I will die, in autumn: Agha Shahid Ali, "The Last Saffron," in
The Country Without a Post Office
(New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 27–29.

[>]
 We know: The lines of Dante's from which the title of this essay is taken are thought to be based on a passage from Boethius's
The Consolation of Philosophy:
"Among fortune's many adversities the most unhappy kind is once to have been happy" (Dante,
The Inferno,
p. 99).
At a certain point: Agha Shahid Ali, "Farewell," in
The Country Without a Post Office,
pp. 22–23.

[>]
 At the heart of the book: I have described this event in detail in my book
In an Antique Land
(New York: Vintage, 1994), pp. 204–10.

[>]
 Ranajit Guha: Ranajit Guha,
History at the Limit of World History
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), lecture III.

[>]
 It is for this reason: It is not without interest that the corresponding administrative term—handed down from the Raj—is "civil disturbance." "Everything is finished": "The Country Without a Post Office," in
The Country Without a Post Office,
pp. 49–50.
"For his first forty days": Ondaatje, "The Story," in
Handwriting.

[>]
 "With all the swerves": Ibid.

 

"
THE GHAT OF THE ONLY WORLD
"

[>]
 At a certain point: Agha Shahid Ali, "Farewell," in
The Country Without a Post Office
(New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 22–23.

[>]
 "Imagine me at a writer's conference":
Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals
in English,
ed. Agha Shahid Ali (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), pp. 1, 3, 13.

[>]
 "A night of ghazals": Agha Shahid Ali, "I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World," in
Rooms Are Never Finished
(New York: Norton, 2001), p. 97. It was Shahid's mother: Ibid., p. 99.
"I am not born": Agha Shahid Ali, "A Lost Memory of Delhi," in
The Half-Inch Himalayas
(Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), p. 5. I would like to thank Daniel Hall for bringing this poem to my attention.

[>]
 "I always move": "I Dream I Am at the Ghat," p. 101.
"It was '89": "Summers of Translation," in
Rooms Are Never Finished,
p. 30.