The Circle of Reason

Chapter Ten. Falling Star

Six months after Mariamma arrived in al-Ghazira, Alu was buried in the collapse of an immense new building. The building was at one end of the Corniche which swept around al-Ghazira’s little bay in a blaze of tarmac. Though it was not quite finished, it had a name: it was called an-Najma, the Star, because of the five pointed arms that angled out from its domed centre. People said later that the fall shook the whole of al-Ghazira, like an emptying wave shakes a boat. A tornado of dust swirled out of the debris while the rubble was still shuddering and heaving like a labouring beast, and for a few moments the whole city was wrapped in darkness, despite the full mid-afternoon brilliance of the desert sun. It was, after all, the Star, one of the largest buildings ever built in al-Ghazira; not as long as the concrete tents of the airport, nor half as high as the tallest bulb on the desalination towers, but larger than both of them put together. When it fell it was in an avalanche of thousands and thousands of tons of bricks and concrete and cement, and Alu was almost exactly in its centre.

When the first rumbles of the collapse started Zindi was standing transfixed in the murky twilight of one of the Souq ash-Sharji’s tunnel-like lanes, her eyes flickering between a shop and the flaking signboard above it. ‘Durban Tailoring House,’ the sign read, in Hindi, Arabic and English, and Zindi spelt the letters to herself over and over again as though she had never seen them before.

The momentary darkening of al-Ghazira’s skies after the collapse passed unnoticed in the Souq ash-Sharji, for even during the day the gloom in the old bazaar’s honeycomb of passageways was a live thing, coiling through the tunnels, obscuring every trace of the world outside. The bright lights of the rows of shops in the passageways merely chipped at its flanks. Inside the Souq the passing of the day was marked only by the innumerable clocks and watches in shop windows, and the computerized system of loudspeakers that ran through the whole complex of passages and corridors and punctually relayed the call to prayer five times a day (even at dawn, when the only people in the Souq were a few soundly sleeping vagrants).

Nor did any but the most alert in the Souq feel the soil of al-Ghazira tremble when the Star fell, for its thick mud walls reached deep into the earth, and they reduced the shock to a barely perceptible tremor. In any case the Souq was a long way from the Star. Its squat main gateway, the Bab al-Asli, with its two horn-like towers, looked out into a crowded, dusty square known as the Maidan al-Jami‘i, cuckolded of pre-eminence by the newly painted façade of the Old Mosque opposite. The square was the heart of the old town. The Star was almost another country. It stood at the farthest end of the bay, where the Corniche turned inland towards the straight roads of the new city. It was minutes away from the border, within shouting distance of the rival airport in the neighbouring kingdom.

Zindi noticed nothing, not even when the news of the collapse was broadcast over the radio after the midday prayers, for the Durban Tailoring House still absorbed her wholly. The muted swell of celebration which rose soon afterwards in the shops around her welled out and trickled down the corridors, leaving her untouched.

In the many years she had spent in al-Ghazira Zindi had passed that shop at least twice a week, often more, but that afternoon she stood in the passage forgetful of time and everything around her, as though she were seeing it for the first time. She stared at the dusty panes of the display window, at the long-collared shirts on their hangers, folded blouses, pajamas; and shimmering satin petticoats; she gazed at the few grimy lengths of cloth on the tottering shelves, at flapping calendars on the walls and pictures of men in suits, cut out of Italian magazines and pasted on the window. When at last Forid Mian, the old tailor, whom she had known since her first days in al-Ghazira, saw her standing outside and came out of the shop squinting, she looked blandly into his shrivelled, pock-marked face with its sinister trails of moustache and beard, and let herself be led in as though she were in a trance. Inside, she stood marooned among the snippets of cloth that carpeted the shop and swivelled about, sniffing the pungent sharpness of terylenes and rayons and the mustiness of cottons with their blue factory marks still fresh on them. She fingered through the piles of clothes Forid Mian had finished. He had always drawn his custom mainly from the women in the old Indian merchants’ quarter of the city so there were petticoats, and blouses, and frocks for girls not old enough for saris. She nodded and grunted as Forid Mian told her stories about his customers. But she heard very little. She had to hold on to the counter to steady herself, for the shop was dancing around her as he spoke, spinning, dissolving, transfiguring itself.

It was a long time before she heard Forid Mian asking her whether she was feeling quite well, and when she did she laughed and wandered out of the shop leaving her glass of tea untouched. Forid Mian followed her out and stood staring after her as she swayed slowly down the passageway and disappeared into the brilliant pool of sunlight at the foot of the Bab al-Asli.

Zindi crossed the road into the dusty square and found a bench. She sat prodding at a struggling tuft of grass with her toes, absently gazing at the digital figures on the tiled clock-tower in the centre of the square. A boy in buttonless trousers, with key-rings and nail-clippers on chains draped over his arms, came up to her. He laid his chains out on the bench and tugged at her elbow: Libnak, for your son, and this one for your daughter, or another for your daughter-in-law …

He turned around and shouted across the square. Another boy came running up, shaking yellow packets of dehydrated soup: Just try one; see how you’ll like it … Zindi sat unmoved, staring ahead of her. One of the boys leant over and tweaked her plastic bag open. Zindi, suddenly alert, snatched her bag away. She rose with a howl and sent the boy staggering with a blow of her open hand: Get away from me, you son of a bitch, ibn kelb.

She walked across the square flailing her bag and rolling her eyes: Yalla, yalla, out of my way, sons of bitches, can’t sit a minute anywhere any longer, crowd around your feet like shit on a beach.

Crossing the road, she stood on the pavement, panting and wiping her forehead. Then something in one of the cavernous shops that ringed the square caught her eye and she went inside. She pointed it out to the shopkeeper, nestling between piles of aluminium pots and plastic buckets. It was a baby’s comforter. Holding it like a talisman before her, she went across the square to her bus-stop, deaf to the suppressed excitement that was now rippling through the whole square.

She had a long way to walk after she got off her bus. By the time she was struggling up the side of a long, high embankment, every layer of her black dress was soaked in sweat. Once she had scrambled up to the road which ran along the embankment she stopped to catch her breath, shielding her face from the sun with her bag. On the far side, a finger of land, invisible from the other side of the embankment, jutted out into the sea, bordered on one flank by a narrow inlet. Far away, at the end of the inlet, was the old harbour, crowded with sambuqs and motor-boats. That narrow spit was known as the Ras al-Maqtu‘, the Severed Head, a sandbar garotted by the road on the embankment.

The Ras shimmered and blurred in the heat of the afternoon as Zindi looked confusedly about — at a group of neat whitewashed houses in a corner by the sea, at the jostling, crowded walls of wooden planks and broken crates which covered the rest of the spit, all but a narrow strip of beach. She looked over the roofs of corrugated iron and halved oil-drums, with their crazily angled wooden platforms and tracery of pumpkin vines, and at last, led by a strip where the dense patchwork was cut through by charred, blackened frames of shacks, her eyes found her own house, solid and thick-walled, its brick-and-cement permanence setting it apart from the others, a reef in a shifting tide.

She stopped when she reached the house, for she sensed something amiss. She looked down the narrow lane, at the blackened stubs of wooden planks and collapsed, soot-covered sheets of corrugated iron which lay all around the house. Then she pushed against the heavy wooden door of her house and almost fell in, for, to her surprise, the door was open. The door opened into a short, dark corridor, which ended in an open courtyard. There was a room on either side of the corridor and more around the courtyard.

Zindi stood in the corridor and shouted: Karthamma … Abu Fahl … The only sound that answered her was the cooing of pigeons in the courtyard. Frowning, she went into the room to her right and hung her plastic bag on a nail in the wall. The room’s complement of mats stood rolled in a corner as she had left them. A kerosene-stove lay beside them. She picked it up, held it to her ear and shook it. She knew by the sound that it had not been used since she left. She looked into a biscuit-tin and saw that none of the tea inside it had been used, either.

She hurried out into the courtyard and shouted again: Professor … Kulfi … Alu … Once again there was no answer. Turning, she threw open the door of the room opposite her own. It was the door to the room in which the men of the house lived. Mattresses were spread neatly on the floor. Trousers, lungis and jallabeyyas hung from pegs on the wall and wet clothes dripped on a line which ran from one barred window to another. The windows were shut as they always were during the day: that was one of Zindi’s rules.

Suddenly uneasy, she dug into her petticoats, pulled out a bunch of keys and hurriedly opened a steel cupboard which stood in one corner of the room. The cupboard was tidy, as it always was; Rakesh’s pile of shirts and printed T-shirts lay stacked in a neat pile, beside Professor Samuel’s bulging wallet; cassette recorders and transistors stood in a row on the bottom shelf, undisturbed. Sighing with relief, Zindi locked the cupboard.

Back in her own room Zindi unlocked her wooden provisions chest and went through it carefully. The sacks of wheat, rice and sugar and the packets of tea lay untouched. Breathing hard, she went down the corridor, into the courtyard, shading her eyes from the sudden brightness of the sun.

A storm of cackles greeted her. Several plump chickens flapped out of her way, and in a wired pen in a corner a long-necked gander hissed and spread its wings protectively across its flock of geese. The sides of the roof above were lined with grey pigeons looking down into the courtyard, their heads cocked. Zindi saw that the birds had not been fed and she fetched corn and wheat and half a cabbage for two rabbits in a wire-covered wooden crate.

Then she crossed the courtyard and unlocked the door to the women’s room. The room was divided into cubicles by lengths of cloth nailed into the walls and ceiling. She went around the room, pulling the makeshift curtains apart. The room was undisturbed and empty. Experimentally, she tried the heavy brass lock on the door of the next room. It was firmly locked, and that was the one lock in the house to which she had no key.

Zindi went back to her room, the heavy folds of her face knotted into a scowl, her jowls dripping sweat. She spread a mat on the floor and sat down to wait.

It was sundown when she heard the knocks she had been waiting for. She switched on the naked bulb in the corridor and stood there for a moment, her hands on her hips, shaking with anger. The rapping grew louder, and she flung the door open. Karthamma, Professor Samuel and Rakesh stood outside. Rakesh held Boss, the baby, cradled in his arms. Behind them, dimly outlined in the darkness was a man in a jallabeyya, stocky, dark and powerfully built, the texture of his face that of supple leather. He had only one eye; the other was an even grey, glowing dully beneath a half-closed lid.

Zindi’s eyes fastened on him. When the first wave of her roar broke it sent them all staggering backwards into the shadows: So it’s you, Abu Fahl, you bastard, you son of a bitch. It’s you who’s been behind everything all along? So this is your plan, is it? Lure the others out of the house like cattle, in the middle of the day, and leave it open for half the world to come in and take what it likes? You know what we’ve been through and now you plan this? This is the way you’re setting about it? Wallahi, wallahi, you don’t have to wait any longer. As God is my witness, you can have all your things and wander off for ever to eat out of a ditch. That’s where you were born, that’s where you’ll end. Wait.

Zindi ran into her room. An instant later a tin case flew out of the door and crashed on the wall opposite with such force that its hinges fell apart, spilling clothes, money, cassettes. Then she heaved one of the two mattresses in her room to the door and threw it out. There, she shouted, that comes to an end now, and I’m happy at last.

Abu Fahl pushed Professor Samuel aside, jumped over the mattress and leapt at Zindi. Wrenching her arms behind her, he pushed her down on to the mattress. He knelt beside her and put a hand, as large and horny as a goat’s head, on her heaving shoulder. Zindi, he said softly. Zindi, calm yourself. Calm yourself. Haven’t you heard?

Zindi rolled her eyes at Karthamma and Rakesh. I’ve heard enough, she growled deep in her throat. I’ll give you something to hear about.

Abu Fahl looked up at the others and rubbed his wrist on his blind eye. She doesn’t know, he said. God the Living, she doesn’t know.

Zindi was suddenly still. She looked at Karthamma and saw the tear-clotted smudges of dirt on her face. She saw the rents in Rakesh’s clothes and the gash of dried blood on his shirt. Ya satir! she whispered, looking from one to the other. What? Tell me.

The Star collapsed today, said Professor Samuel. Abu Fahl and the others were meant to be painting the basement. But when it happened only Alu was inside. He was trapped in the basement, right in the middle of the building. Abu Fahl saw the whole thing. And all the others. There wasn’t a wall left standing. Tons and tons of concrete. All of it right on him. But we have to be grateful. It was only him, just one man, while it could have been everyone.

The lines and ridges on Zindi’s cheeks seemed to sink deeper. Her jowls trembled and then the whole of her face collapsed inwards. She struck her forehead with the heel of her palm. Him, too! she cried, and her voice rasped like sandpaper on lead. All the others and now him!

Zindi rose and went to Karthamma. Putting her arms around her, she pulled her head on to her shoulders and for a long while the two women held each other in a firm, consoling embrace, until Zindi took her hand away and stroked Karthamma’s head in recognition of the especial poignancy of her grief. Then Zindi took her by the arm and led her towards the women’s room. At the end of the corridor Zindi turned to the men and said, in a voice taut with determination: All the others and now him. But he’ll be the last. No more weeping! The time has come to do something.

It was a long time before Zindi came out of the room. She went straight to Rakesh, took Boss from him and carried him into her own room. The men straggled aimlessly in behind her. She found the comforter she had bought for Boss, washed it and put it in his mouth. Then she seated herself on a mat at one end of the room with the baby on her crossed legs. She sat stiffly upright, her face grimly set. When Zindi sat like that the massive stillness of her presence reached into every corner of the room and patterned everything, every object, every person around her like iron filings around a magnet. She gestured to the men to unroll mats and seat themselves. Then she pulled a brass kerosene-stove before her, pumped it till it hissed and lit it. Carefully placing half a cob of corn, scraped clean of its seeds, on the flame, she asked: Where are the others?

Still there, said Professor Samuel. I went as soon as I heard, and so did everyone else. We came to take you.

No, said Zindi. I’m not going. There’s nothing to be done there, God knows. It was here that the whole business started and it’s here that we’ll fight it. God give me strength, he will be the last.

What are you talking about? A note of pleading had crept into the Professor’s voice. What do you mean, ‘it started here’?

Zindi’s eyes narrowed into sharp, brilliant points and bore into the Professor’s. You know very well what I mean, she said. You’ve heard it before. You’re not a child. Frowning Abusa was the first. Then Mast Ram. Then the others, and now this. Are they accidents?

Professor Samuel dropped his head. In the silence Karthamma slipped into the room. At length Abu Fahl gripped his knees and leant forward: So what is it, then, Zindi? Tell us. We want to hear it again.

Zindi pressed damp tobacco into an earthen cup with her thumb. The cup was part of a narjila made from a glass bottle, a length of rubber tubing and two bits of hollow bamboo. She stuck the cup on one of the bamboo tubes and gingerly flicked the glowing corncob on to the tobacco. Abu Fahl took the narjila from her and pulled hard on the rubber tube. The corncob glowed and smoke bubbled through the water in the bottle.

In the fog of silence hanging in the room, the gurgling of the narjila echoed eerily, like waves on a distant cliff. Karthamma shivered and shifted closer to Zindi. The hairs prickled on their necks and stood in runnels on their arms as they waited for Zindi to begin, yet again, on her terrible litany of calamities.

Perhaps Abusa the Frown was the beginning, even though he wasn’t the first. In a way, it was his goodness, his good fortune, his gentleness and the love everyone had for him that lay behind it all: Frowning Abusa, cousin to Abu Fahl’s mother, Zaghloul the Pigeon’s brother-in-law (and cousin as well), raised to manhood with them in the same village in the Nile Delta; named by the whole village the moment he was born, for he was taken from his mother with his face bent and a frown carved for ever into his forehead because his mother had dreamt of barbed wire the night before. He could have had no better name, for he was always apart, frowning and silent — at home, when he walked to the fields, even when the cousins and uncles who grew like grass in his village played and sang all around him — and strangely everyone loved him for it.

He came to the house as soon as he arrived in al-Ghazira, and he lived in it for a year and a half, frowning silently in a corner, seldom speaking. Every last dirham he earned he sent back to the village; his only clothes were his one good jallabeyya and the grey fellah’s cap his grandfather had made him for his first frowning visit to Alexandria to get his passport. He rarely spoke, but no one ever forgot him. It was to him that everyone turned when there was trouble. Mariamma’s last voyage brought a good time. There had never been so much money in the house. Everyone had a good regular job, everyone was bringing in good money. And then, as though that weren’t enough, Jeevanbhai Patel appeared. That was soon after his wife died. He was too old to look after his tottering house near the Souq, so he begged to rent a room — it was all he could ask for: food on time, people around him to help him forget his loneliness and all that had happened to him. So he was given the corner room, next to the women. And since he paid double no one minded his sad, wizened monkey’s face, nor the red pan-stained teeth sticking out of his mouth like mudguards, nor the huge lock he put on his door. Soon there were television sets in the house, transistors, washing machines even — the best you could find in the shops in Hurreyya — the courtyard was bursting with poultry, and there was a goose or chicken for dinner every night. That was sign enough, though nobody saw it then, for the whole of the Ras and everybody in al-Ghazira looked at Zindi’s house and saw it prospering and too much good fortune invites its own end.

Late one night — it was a Thursday night and everybody had been paid for the week — when everyone was sitting on the roof, drinking tea and talking, there were knocks on the door, soft but unmistakable. Zaghloul the Pigeon, always eager, ran down and opened the door.

A boy lay on the path outside squirming like a wounded rat, with blood pouring from his head. That was how Mast Ram came into the house.

Somehow, from some remote part of the north Indian hills, Mast Ram had trickled into the plains, where a relative put him into the hands of a labour contractor. Once they were in al-Ghazira, Mast Ram found himself with only a third part of the wage that he had been promised in his pocket, for the contractor took all the rest. Mast Ram was young enough to burn at the injustice of it. One night he found something to drink, and his rage grew too large for him to hold. In front of all the others he flew at the contractor’s throat.

That was how he found himself with his skull split half-open, without a job, without a place to stay, and blood all over his clothes.

All he could think of then was a certain house his relative had told him about. So somehow he wrapped a pajama around his head and dragged himself across al-Ghazira to the Severed Head, trailing blood, and crawled into the house, blood, wounds, injustices and all.

He couldn’t be turned away — his relative had stayed in the house once, and he was a good enough man. Besides, somehow, despite the state he was in, Mast Ram had managed to bring his papers with him. Still, the moment he came under the light in the corridor everybody shivered and nobody knew why. He was ugly, there could be no doubt about that — his face was so closely covered with pock-marks and holes it looked as though it had been dug up to lay the foundations for something better. But it wasn’t just his ugliness — Abusa was uglier, with his barbed-wire face, and Abu Fahl, and Alu with his potato head. Of the lot only Rakesh wasn’t ugly; and Zaghloul, of course, is any girl’s dream. But with Mast Ram it was something more than just ugliness: it was the way his eyes darted about, like a snake’s, always open, never missing the slightest movement.

But, still, Professor Samuel tied a bandage around his head and a mattress was put out for him in the corridor (for the house had never been so full). He lay on his mattress all through the next day. The day after that everybody could see there was nothing wrong with him any more, so Abu Fahl told him to go out to work with the others. Mast Ram didn’t move. They left him alone that day, and the next day everybody forgot about him because that was the day Kulfi came home crying.

At the time Kulfi used to cook in a rich Ghaziri’s house. The pay was good, the work simple, and the whole house was air-conditioned. It was a small family and they liked Kulfi, so she was happy there and everybody envied her. But there was a daughter in the family and that was where the trouble started, for she was fat and very ugly. She couldn’t keep her hands away from ghee and butter, and so on some days her face was covered with so many bursting pimples it could have been taken for a pot of boiling water. Her parents had done everything they could to marry her off, but nothing worked. Then one day they heard of a boy. His family was poor, but he’d worked hard, got a scholarship, gone to America and come back with a suitcase-ful of degrees. Now he wanted to go into business and he needed capital. Of that the girl’s father had plenty. So they came to an understanding, and it was decided that the boy would come to their house to meet the girl.

There was turmoil in the house: great preparations. The girl’s mother, half-crazy with worry, ran about roasting chickens, boiling legs of lamb, pouring buckets of saffron into every pot of rice. The father went to the Swiss shop in Hurreyya and bought so many sweets and cakes they had to close down for the whole day. All Kulfi had to do was cook a couple of vegetables and heat the food.

It looked very simple. The car arrived. The boy got out, his mother got out, and there were little cries of joy in the house for they couldn’t have wished for nicer people. Then they saw his grandmother, and suddenly everyone was nervous, for despite her burqa they could see that she was as thin as a whip, with fangs and a moustache.

All went well for an hour or so: though the grandmother’s voice shrilled through the house, the boy and the girl talked prettily to each other through her mother. When it was evening the men said their prayers and afterwards they asked for dinner.

All this while the grandmother had been peering suspiciously at all the signs of wealth around her. When the talk of dinner came up, she said: So you have someone to cook for you?

The girl’s mother, wanting to impress her, said: Oh, yes. An Indian woman.

At that the grandmother rose and said to the boy: Come on, let’s go. (Later they found out that she’d been against the marriage from the start — didn’t want another woman in the house.)

His mother was furious. Why? she said. Why now? Before dinner and everything? Think of your indigestion.

No, we’re going, said the grandmother. I’m not going to eat food cooked by an Indian. Don’t you remember how your uncle told us that these Indian women spit into the food because they like the flavour?

Commotion. The girl’s mother pleaded with her, told her it wasn’t true, Kulfi was a good clean girl who never spat into the food or anything like that, but the grandmother wouldn’t budge. Not a bit.

Almost in tears now, the girl’s mother pleaded with them and said: Come into the kitchen and right in front of you I’ll ask Kulfi whether she spits into the food.

The boy frowned at his grandmother (he was very eager to get his capital), so she had to agree. They all went to the kitchen — the grandmother, the boy, the girl, almost everyone in the house — and crowded around to watch.

At that time Kulfi knew very little Arabic. She knew simple things like ‘too hot’ and ‘more salt’, but little else. The girl’s mother remembered this with foreboding once she was in the kitchen but it was already too late.

She gestured to Kulfi to watch and leant over a pot and made little spitting noises. Then she screwed up her face and gestured as though to say: Do you do this?

Kulfi was already very nervous. She saw the woman bending over the pot, spitting and gesturing, so she thought to herself, Why, here’s something new — and as helpfully as she could she made a sign to the woman to wait. For a moment she blew and puffed, and when at last she had worked up a good mouthful of spit she bent over the pot and spat right into it. Then she looked up and smiled at the woman. There, she thought, you can’t do better than that and I’m not going to eat it anyway.

Pandemonium. Kulfi was out on the street in a minute. It was a pity, for the family was a nice one. But in the end the girl’s mother had to promise that she would never again have an Indian in the house, before the marriage could go ahead.

But Kulfi was without a job, and what with hearing the story over and over again nobody noticed Mast Ram. Then one day Abu Fahl remembered him and took him out with the others to teach him how to paint houses. It was the simplest job in the world, even for someone who was just a boy like Mast Ram. But he wouldn’t work. He’d sit by himself, smoke cigarettes and do nothing, nothing at all. Far from doing any painting, he wouldn’t even scrape the floor afterwards to take off the stains.

One day Abu Fahl said: Enough. If he won’t work, he’ll have to leave. So they tied his things together and threw them out of the house. But Mast Ram wouldn’t go. He sat in a corner and held on to the bars in the window, while his eyes ran around the room like spiders. He made Abu Fahl mad with anger. He got his crowbar, stood with his legs apart, towering over Mast Ram, and raised it above his head to break his skull again, where the crack still showed.

When Mast Ram saw Abu Fahl, with his bull’s shoulders, standing over him, holding the crowbar with both hands and glaring with his one, red eye, fear began to steam off his skin. For once his eyes were still. He cowered against the wall and began to weep.

It was Frowning Abusa who stopped Abu Fahl. Wait, he said. Maybe he’ll be able to do some other kind of job.

At that time Abusa was working in a rich sheikh’s house as a gardener. The sheikh was one of the brave ones who had bought land on the outskirts of the town. He had built himself a palace there but he could do nothing about the land, which stayed desert, despite all his efforts.

Now, Abusa had one great gift: all living things grew under his fingers as though to please him alone. In his village ever since he started working on his father’s land, their cotton grew longer and heavier than anybody else’s. In years when the whole village’s fields lay devastated by worms their crops threw off insects at will as though they found strength in Abusa’s very presence. Within a month of taking the job with the sheikh he made grass push through the sand. The sheikh, in his gratitude, doubled Abusa’s wage within the year and soon Abusa was earning a lot of money. Abusa knew the sheikh would listen to whatever he said, so no one doubted he would find Mast Ram a job there.

Abusa never talked about his work (or much else), so no one knew how Mast Ram was faring in his new job. No one gave it much thought, either, then suddenly some odd things began to happen. First, four men from one of the construction gangs in the Ras died, when a high-tension cable fell right on them. They died in agony, thrashing about on the ground. That was the first time such a thing had happened. Then one of Hajj Fahmy’s sons drove his truck right off the embankment at a hundred kilometres an hour. It was impossible to explain, for he had driven along that road for years. By the time they found him they couldn’t pick his body out of the wreckage. Soon after, fever hit the first few shacks on the outskirts of the Ras.

In the middle of all that stories about Mast Ram began to reach the Ras: how a live flowering bush had withered and died moments after Mast Ram touched it; how Abusa’s famous pumpkins, each one the size of a fattened sheep, were opened and found to be as hollow as footballs after Mast Ram had watered them.

None of it was Mast Ram’s fault. He was as bewildered as everyone else by the death which surrounded him. In the end Abusa, fearing for his job, had to put him to laying paving stones so that the garden would be safe from his hands.

Then people began to notice a change in Mast Ram. He saw how every living thing flourished and grew under Abusa’s hands and he was filled with admiration, even love. He took to following Abusa wherever he went, inside the house and outside, staring up at him with dog’s eyes. Abusa for his part was always kind to him, like a stern brother.

Mast Ram began to do everything he could to earn Abusa’s respect. Abusa had a few rabbits which he kept in a cage in the courtyard. He looked after them well and they bred faster than they could be eaten. One day Mast Ram decided to feed the rabbits. Next morning there was a dead rabbit in the cage. Everybody in the house saw it, but nobody said a word, not even Abusa. The next day Mast Ram fed the rabbits again. Again, the morning after, they found a dead rabbit. That evening, when Mast Ram went to feed the rabbits yet again, Abusa stopped him and quietly, in their own language, half signs, half words, he told him not to feed the rabbits again.

Mast Ram said nothing, but there were tears in his eyes.

After that Mast Ram’s behaviour became even stranger. At that time Abusa had taken a great liking to Kulfi. He spent a lot of time looking at her and sometimes he even bought her presents. Kulfi used to toss her head and pretend not to care, but of course she was pleased, for like everyone else she liked Abusa.

Then one morning Chunni said: Mast Ram has fallen in love with Kulfi. And soon it was clear that she was right. He was just a boy after all. His eyes never left Kulfi. He took to sitting in the courtyard, waiting for her to pass by. He even tried to talk to her, but Kulfi, like most people, shuddered whenever she saw him and ran into her room.

And then one morning Mast Ram rose very early and hid himself in the courtyard. He knew Kulfi was the first to get up in the morning. He lay flat behind the rabbits’ cage and when she came out of the room he leapt out. In his hands he held half of all the money he had saved in his time in al-Ghazira. That was how desperate he was.

Think of Kulfi: on her way to her morning shit, half-awake, when this man with snake’s eyes jumps out from behind the rabbits and flings money at her feet. She screamed and flung her tin of water right into his face and, while he was still hopping around spitting out water, she locked herself safely into the shithouse.

After that there was no sleep for Mast Ram. He spent his nights squatting in a corner, brooding. Abu Fahl said he should be watched, so for a while he was never left alone; but then people forgot him again, for that was when the Professor was arrested.

The day we heard everyone was stunned. How? How did it happen? Had he talked about queues again, at his new job, even after everyone had sat around him at night and told him not to, at least a hundred times?

No. It was something else altogether.

The Professor had a fine job in those days: the best in the house, and one of the best anyone in the Ras could hope for. He was a manager’s assistant in a huge supermarket in Hurreyya Avenue. He spent his days wrapped in air-conditioning and the smells of freshly frozen Australian lamb and Danish mutton, French cauliflowers and Egyptian cabbages, Thai rice and Canadian wheat, English cod and Japanese sardines, prawns and shrimps and lobster from the world over … All that and nothing to do but sit at a desk and add up numbers. It was just luck, getting that job. Of course, it made good sense for them, for they paid him less than they should have because he had no work permit.

The morning he was arrested the Professor left the house in a great hurry. He had been told to get to the shop early, but when he woke up he found that he had no clean trousers to wear. So, neat as ever, he tied on a starched white lungi and went off. Nobody noticed on the bus and, since he was early that day, no one saw him go into the shop. Once he was behind his desk all they could see of him was his spotless white shirt.

At about eleven o’clock, when most of the other people in the shop were drinking tea in a back room, a rich and beautiful Ghaziri woman came into the shop. Seeing no one, she wandered about until she spotted Professor Samuel at his desk at the far end and she went up to him and asked in Arabic: Please, can you tell me where the prawns are kept?

Now, the Professor had been working hard since morning, staring at figures, adding them, dividing them, and he was just a little confused. The moment he saw her he stood up. She was very beautiful: no burqa for her; she was dressed in the most expensive of European clothes and her hair was piled high on her head.

She asked him again, and this time he was even more confused. He heard the word gambari and knew that he had heard it before but couldn’t remember what it meant. Scratching his head, blinking distractedly, he stared straight into her face and tried to speak.

The woman had been just a little alarmed when the Professor first stood up. Now, with him staring at her, mouth open, a tiny chill of fright crept up her spine. She looked quickly over her shoulder, wondering whether to call out. As it happened, the Professor’s desk was at one end of a long, deserted corridor of shelves. It was the darkest and gloomiest part of the shop. When she saw that she was really scared.

The Professor was still thinking, half about gambari and half about his accounts and figures, so absent-mindedly he did something he would never otherwise have done in public: he reached down, pulled his lungi up over his knees and tied it up at his waist, as people do when they’re at home.

The rich woman saw this blinking, staring man suddenly pulling his clothes up. She saw him baring his stout, hairy legs, and in terror she cowered back into the shelves.

Just then the Professor remembered. Gambari! Oh, gambari! he cried, flinging his arms open and rushing towards her. Come, Madam, come, I will show you gambaris like you’ve never seen …

The woman leapt backwards with the strength of the terror-stricken, right into the shelves. The Professor shrieked — No, Madam, that’s the tomato sauce! — and lunged forward to save her. She swooned into the shelves, the Professor fell upon her and five hundred bottles of American tomato sauce fell upon them.

When the other attendants arrived after the crash they saw the Professor sprawled on an unconscious rich lady, lying in a small blood-red lake. When the Professor stood up and tried to explain they fled, too, right into the street, where they screamed and screamed till the police arrived.

Abu Fahl and Alu had to spend a lot of money to get him out of gaol, and there’s at least one shop in Hurreyya now which will never hire an Indian again. After that the Professor had to be content with the job Jeevanbhai gave him, so that was another person in the house who’d lost a good job.

Again, in the telling of that story Mast Ram was forgotten. But he had forgotten nothing: not his broken skull, or the contractor, or Kulfi, or the shrivelled flowers and the dead rabbits. He crouched in a corner and brooded and brooded on the whole of his life and fate until jealousy and hate were pouring from his body like sweat in the midday sun and he was no longer a man but an animal, beyond reason and sanity. One night he roused himself from his corner and prowled around the house until he found Abu Fahl’s crowbar. In the dead of night, while the whole house slept, he fell upon the locked door to the women’s room with the crowbar. He attacked it as though it were a wild animal, and while he beat upon it he screamed, in his nasal, mountain Hindi: Why not me, you cunt? You’d fuck a dog if it had money, why not me?

By the time Abu Fahl got to him he had almost battered the door down and the women inside were cold with fear. And then for the first time in his life Mast Ram fought. Even Abu Fahl couldn’t hold him down, and Alu and Zaghloul had to help.

And still we couldn’t rid ourselves of him, for by then he had grown into us like a curse. The others would have been willing to forget the past, but it was no use; Mast Ram’s half-crazy head was a storm of love and hate and envy, and Abusa the Frown was at the centre of it.

Soon after that the fever hit the house, and one day while Rakesh, Zaghloul and Chunni were lying in bed, half-delirious, Mast Ram slipped out with his passport and his papers and went straight to the police and told them how Abusa’s work permit had lapsed a year ago. They caught Abusa next morning, on his way to the sheikh’s garden. They lay in wait for him in a car and Mast Ram pointed him out.

When they caught him Abusa lost his head. He fought, and he fought so well he cracked a policeman’s jaw. If it weren’t for that, perhaps it would have been all right; a little money in a few places would have got him out in a matter of days. But after that nothing could save him.

Abu Fahl and the others did everything they could, but it all came to nothing. Nobody could tell them when they would see Abusa again.

At first Abu Fahl wept. Abusa was dearer to him than any of his own brothers. Then he put his revolver in his pocket and set out to scour the town for Mast Ram.

In the house everyone waited, aching with fear. It was certain that if Mast Ram were found the courtyard would become an abattoir that night. Abu Fahl would smash his teeth first, then dig his eyes out with the crowbar and break the bones in his body on the paving stones till they were like links in a chain. And only then would he leave the body on the beach for the tides to wash away. Mast Ram would not be the first man Abu Fahl had killed, and previously Abu Fahl had not killed in anger.

But none of it came to pass, for there was no trace of Mast Ram; he had vanished like a ghost in a graveyard. That night Abu Fahl came back to the house alone and sat drinking tea with everyone else in silence, while Zaghloul wept like a baby. Everyone’s mind was full of Abusa’s goodness and Mast Ram’s treachery.

It was then, while they were sitting there, empty-eyed and silent, that the first barks sounded, far away, at the edges of the Ras, somewhere near the embankment. Suddenly, like the beginning of a storm, the noise grew until every stray dog in the Ras seemed to be howling together. It was all over and around us, like waves, crashing and breaking on the house. Then Boss began to cry in terrible strangled sobs and a moment later the whole courtyard seemed to explode; every animal in it went into a frenzy, geese honking, chickens screeching … Inside, nobody moved. Everyone was absolutely still, staring at the windows. You could feel your bowels growing cold. There are few things more frightening than the midnight frenzy of animals.

Then there were voices, shouts, far away, pricking through that curtain of sound like needles. The noise seemed to gather itself together in the distance, near the embankment, and suddenly it was moving, moving straight towards the house. Faintly you could hear the drumbeat of feet echoing in the lanes; running towards the house, panic-stricken screams and pounding feet, dogs howling after them.

And then a hammering on the window and screams tearing through the house: Ya khalg gum — rise, you created! — gum ya khalg.

Abu Fahl and Zaghloul sprang up like deer, for since their childhood they had seen those dreaded words send their parents and relatives pouring into the village lanes. And no sooner were they on their feet than we saw the first wisps of smoke curling down, through the courtyard and the corridor, into the room.

Abu Fahl was the first one up on the roof — by some miracle the ladder still stood, though the fire was all around it. When he saw what he did he tried to push the others back, but there were too many of them and they shouldered past him.

There were flames everywhere. But Mast Ram’s head and his face were untouched and unblackened. His eyes were closed and at peace, while the rest of his body was burning so hard it couldn’t be told apart from the straw and wood of his pyre. Lying beside him, away from the flames, were the matches and the tin of kerosene he must have stolen from the courtyard, whenever it was that he slipped back into the house and up to the roof to put an end to his love and his remorse, his treachery and his hate, in the only honourable way he knew.

By that time the fire had leapt to the neighbouring shacks and barastis. They were like matchsticks — gone in minutes. Though every man and woman in the Ras helped to carry water, at least fifty shacks were burnt to the ground. It was a miracle the whole of the Ras didn’t go up in flames. The house was saved by its cement and bricks, but only after a battle which lasted through the night.

The others had trickled back: Zaghloul the Pigeon, barely twenty, his handsome, friendly face, with its cleft chin and sharp, straight nose, tired after the day; Chunni and Kulfi, exhausted by their long vigil at the ruins of the Star. They crouched on mats around Zindi, listening intently to every word. They had lived through everything Zindi spoke of and had heard her talk of it time and time again; yet it was only in her telling that it took shape; changed from mere incidents to a palpable thing, a block of time which was not hours or minutes or days, but something corporeal, with its own malevolent wilfulness. That was Zindi’s power: she could bring together empty air and give it a body just by talking of it. They could never tire of listening to her speak, in her welter of languages, though they knew every word, just as well as they knew lines of songs. And when sometimes she chose a different word or a new phrase it was like the pressure of a potter’s thumb on clay — changing the thing itself and their knowledge of it.

Zindi looked around the room at the circle of frowning, intent faces. All that, she said, and now this. The house already empty and without work, and then still another accident. Is it going to end or is it going to take everyone?

Abu Fahl leant forward. He pulled his grey taqeyya off his head and ran his fingers through his short, wiry hair. So what are we to do, Zindi? he said, looking straight at her.

Zindi rose briskly to her feet. I’m thinking of something, she said. Maybe I’ll even tell you about it some day. But not today, not now after all that’s happened, with Alu lying dead under tons of rubble.

Professor Samuel rose to go and the others shuffled out after him. Only Rakesh hung back, nervously flipping through the leaves of a calendar on the wall. Twice he turned, bit his lip, and turned back again. Then he could no longer contain himself. Listen, Zindi, he burst out. Alu isn’t dead. At least I don’t think so. He’s alive. I heard his voice under the rubble.

Zindi stared at him, speechless.

Yes, he said, it’s true. I’m almost sure I heard him.

Go to sleep now, Zindi said. The collapse has been too much for you.

Chapter Eleven. A Voice in the Ruins

Next morning Professor Samuel came back from his morning visit to the beach (he preferred sand and the clean sea breeze, he said, to the evil-smelling darkness of the lavatory in the house) looking very bemused. Chunni, who had made him a glass of tea, found him sitting on his mattress staring blankly at a wall.

What’s the matter, Samuel? she asked him. Are you unwell?

The Professor shook his head. So, then? she snapped. Why’re you sitting here like a wet cat? Do you know what the time is? Do you want to lose this job, too?

The Professor hesitated and threw a glance around the room. Except for Zaghloul snoring in a corner, it was empty. He patted the floor beside him. Sit down, he said. I’ll tell you. It’s nothing really. Just a foolish story Bhaskaran told me on the beach.

Outside, in the courtyard, Kulfi and Karthamma were cooking their usual morning meal of rice and fried potatoes on a mud oven. When the rice was done they carried the pots into Zindi’s room and called out to the others. The women ate at one end of the room and the men at the other. While they were eating, Chunni said loudly: Samuel heard a strange story on the beach this morning.

Professor Samuel frowned at her across the room. He shook his head as the others looked at him curiously. It was nothing, he said dismissively. Just a foolish story.

Abu Fahl banged his tin plate on the mat and shook the Professor’s knee. Tell us what you heard, Samuel, he said. I don’t like secrets. What did you hear?

All right, said the Professor, irritated. If you want to waste your time. You know Bhaskaran from Kerala, who lives down by the beach with all the others? In their house they’re saying Alu was seen in the ruins of the Star last night. The story is that he’s not dead at all, but just hiding in the ruins. I asked Bhaskaran: why should he hide in the ruins in all that dirt when he has a bed to come back to? It would be irrational. He had no answer, of course. All he could say is that everyone in the Ras knows that Alu survived by some miraculous chance, and now he’s hiding in the ruins.

Karthamma rose eagerly to her feet: What else did you hear?

Allah il-’Azim! Zindi exclaimed. Sit down, Karthamma; you’re not a child. You know whenever anything happens people think of a thousand stories. This is just the beginning. Alu’s alive, Alu’s hiding — there’ll be no end to the tales people will think up now.

Zindi’s sentence died away as Jeevanbhai Patel came into the room. Karthamma settled reluctantly back on the mat.

Jeevanbhai smiled vaguely around the room. His eyes were heavy with sleep; he had come back to the house very late the night before. He was a short, slight man, neatly dressed in a white shirt and grey trousers. A few grey strands of hair were combed carefully across his head. He would have had a gift for inconspicuousness if it were not for his teeth. They protruded like fingers from his thin, deeply lined face: great, chipped, triangular teeth, stained blood red by the pan he incessantly chewed.

’Aish Halak? How are you? he said politely to Zindi in Ghaziri-accented Arabic.

How are you? she answered, looking away. She frowned at Professor Samuel, biting her lip.

Jeevanbhai lowered himself on to a mat. His tongue flickered delicately over his teeth. Were you saying something about Alu? he asked softly. I thought he died in the collapse of that big building on the Corniche.

Yes, yes, said Zindi. That’s what I was trying to explain to Karthamma here. We would give anything to save his life, but he’s beyond that now.

Does someone say he’s alive? said Jeevanbhai.

No. How could they? Zindi began to collect the plates, banging them together till their ringing filled the room.

Later, she managed to find Professor Samuel before he left with Jeevanbhai for his office near the harbour. Don’t tell him anything, she whispered urgently, taking him aside. Not a word of all the nonsense you heard this morning. You don’t know him. He spreads even the most foolish stories all over al-Ghazira, and God knows who they get to.

Jeevanbhai appeared at the end of the corridor, and Zindi hurried into her room. Leave me alone this morning, she shouted into the courtyard. I’ve got things to do. The door closed upon her with solemn finality.

But soon she had to open it again. Kulfi, sent out with an empty bottle on a string to buy two days’ supply of cooking oil, came running back to the house. She stood in the courtyard and shouted, her pale cheeks pink with excitement, her voice girlishly high: Alu was seen getting into the plane for America this morning; he didn’t die in the collapse, though he was pale and ghost-like and covered in dust. He discovered a huge store of gold in the wreckage of one of the Star’s jewellery-shops.

They crowded around her — all but Zindi, who stood apart, only half-listening. At least, Kulfi said breathlessly, he’s alive. Maybe he’ll be back someday, with all his money.

Who told you all this? Abu Fahl demanded.

Kulfi had gone to a shop near the embankment that was owned by an Egyptian from the Fayyum called Romy. There she had met a woman who had heard from someone else …

Abu Fahl caught Kulfi by the shoulder and shook her. You can’t believe these stories, he said. Someone heard from someone who heard from someone. They’re just wild fancies. I was there. I saw it all. I know what the truth is.

Karthamma pushed past Abu Fahl and Kulfi. She was halfway down the corridor when Zindi said sharply: Karthamma, where are you going?

I’m going to look for him, Karthamma said.

Karthamma, don’t forget yourself, Zindi said. We know what there was between you and Alu, but don’t display it before the whole world like this. Where’s your shame that you’re running about like a bitch on heat, and you with a son? Do you think, if there was a chance of his being alive, Abu Fahl wouldn’t have gone himself? Get back into the courtyard.

The blood rushed into Karthamma’s eyes. She lunged at Zindi, but Abu Fahl caught her around the waist. Zindi stalked into her room, and the slam of her door set the geese hissing in the courtyard.

By midday the house was awash with stories. Zaghloul went out to buy a cigarette and came back with a story he had heard on the way: the policemen who had surrounded the Star soon after the collapse had seen a hazy figure in the wreckage at night. Two of them went into the ruins to investigate. They spotted the figure a number of times, always a little way ahead of them. After stumbling about for hours on piles of steel and broken glass, their hands torn and bleeding, their expensive new uniforms in shreds, they were about to turn back when they saw the figure waving in the distance. They hurried after it, but when they got there it had disappeared. Instead they found a body — Alu’s body — since there were no others there. They pulled and tugged at the corpse, but try as they might they couldn’t shift it, not by so much as a hair’s breadth. They ran screaming out of the ruins.

Rakesh had spent the morning tossing restlessly on his mattress. The men had no work for the day, for Abu Fahl had decided that the collapse had cancelled his agreement with the contractor. Rakesh heard Zaghloul through, lying on his mattress. When he had finished, he jumped to his feet and began to pull on his trousers. We have to go, Abu Fahl, he said. We have to look for ourselves. I’m almost sure I heard Alu in the ruins yesterday, even though Zindi thinks it was all just imagined. But now there are all these stories, too. Anything might have happened; he may still be there.

Still be there? Abu Fahl snorted contemptuously. Are you mad or dreaming? I saw the whole thing with my own eyes, and I’ve had years of experience of these things. Do you know, I saw the collapse of the huge cinema hall near Sadiq Square? There were six men working in the building then and not one survived. And that was a much smaller building than the Star. Yesterday I saw five storeys of concrete fall on the basement, and then I saw the basement’s ceiling collapse. I don’t want to say it, but Alu’s as dead as a skeleton in a graveyard, God have mercy on him. It would be madness to go to that place now and be taken for thieves by the police.

All right, said Rakesh quietly, buttoning his shirt. If you won’t go, I’ll go myself.

Zaghloul stood up: I’ll come with you.

Abu Fahl was thrown into a quandary. A police cordon had been thrown around the Star soon after the collapse to guard what could be salvaged of the stocks in the wrecked shops. If Rakesh and Zaghloul went, they would be caught and arrested; there could be few doubts about that. They would be no more able to slip through a police cordon than they would be able to break into a bank.

Abu Fahl stopped them at the door. He would go, he told them, but he had a few conditions: only he and Rakesh would go — the police were more likely to notice three men than two — and they would leave only after he had had time to make a few inquiries.

Elated, Rakesh pushed open the door to Zindi’s room and shouted: Zindi, we’re going to the Star after all.

Zindi was abstractedly rocking Boss to sleep. What? she said.

We’re going to the Star to see if Alu’s alive.

Yes, said Zindi, without interest. Maybe you should go, since everyone says … Her voice trailed off.

She looked up suddenly as Rakesh, offended by her lack of enthusiasm, turned to go. Wait, she called after him. Come here. I want you to do something.

When Rakesh was squatting beside her on the mat she whispered: Go to Romy Abu Tolba’s shop. Tolba, Romy’s boy, goes to the Souq at this time to buy things for the shop. Tell him to give a message to Forid Mian, who works in the Durban Tailoring House in the second lane. Tell him to say this: Forid Mian, Zindi wonders why you haven’t been to her house for so long. Is there something wrong with the tea? This evening she’s going to make some very good tea.

Zindi broke off and scratched her mole. And then, she added, tell him to say: Jeevanbhai is usually away in the evenings.

She met Rakesh’s curious glance with a finger on her lips. Now, listen, she said, don’t tell anyone about this. No one — not Abu Fahl, not Zaghloul, no one. Just go.

When he returned Rakesh went straight to her room. She was pacing the floor, with Boss cradled in her arms. Did you tell him? she asked eagerly.

Yes, said Rakesh, seating himself on a mat. He looked expectantly at her.

You want to know about the message? Zindi asked. Rakesh said nothing. Zindi shut the door and seated herself beside him. She leant towards him until her black scarf was almost touching his face, and only then did Rakesh notice how anxiety had changed the pattern of lines on her massive jowls.

A shop! she whistled into his ear. That’s my plan: a shop!

Rakesh, in surprise, belched in a huge, rumbling gurgle. Zindi, looking straight at his averted eyes, ignored it. Don’t you understand? she appealed, and Rakesh sensed a wall within her beginning to crumble. I know where I’ve gone wrong now. Here I am with this house full of people. I make a good enough living from them most of the time — they give me a bit of money, it’s hardly enough, but still … I can look after them while they’re in the house. But where does the money come from? It doesn’t come from the house; it comes from the outside. It’s not like having land. It’s taken me all these years really to understand that. I knew it, but I didn’t understand it. While everything is all right outside, things seem fine in the house — money keeps coming in and I can manage. But let something happen outside, and that’s the end — there’s nothing I can do. Why? Because I can give them food, I can give them a roof, but I can’t give them work. When it comes to work, this house is like an empty crate — people can kick it here, kick it there, and I’m helpless. That’s why all this has happened — Mast Ram and Abusa; Professor Samuel and Kulfi losing their jobs. Everything else. The house is almost empty now and the work’s gone. It doesn’t matter to you; you can always go back home. Where can I go? Do you think Abu Fahl would stay if there was no money in the house? He’s my cousin and he’s not a bad man, but he has to live. I have to stay here, and if the house stops bringing in money one day I’ll be found floating on the beach with all that shit. I’m not young. I have to do something now. It’s my last chance. And now I know what the answer is: a shop. We have the people; we could run it. It’ll give work to everyone, if it goes well, and we’ll be safe.

What kind of shop? asked Rakesh.

At that, Zindi’s vision of the Durban Tailoring House came pouring out of her. It was only an ordinary tailor’s shop really — one which hadn’t kept up too well with al-Ghazira — familiar, unsurprising. And yet she hadn’t known it at all, never really seen it or understood its promise and its possibilities, till that morning when the Star fell; while she was wandering through the Souq, her head aching with fear and worry for her crumbling house. Suddenly that morning it wasn’t a shop at all, not a simple room of bricks and cement, not a thing which could be touched and felt, but a promise, a future: its dusty, be-calendared walls had grown heavy with shelves and bright with cloth, the cobwebbed ceiling was glowing with neon lights, and the empty echoing interior was suddenly full of people — people flowing in and out, their hands digging into bags full of money, looking, choosing, buying, asking her, enthroned behind the cash-desk, what’s the best? what’s the cheapest? what’s the newest? what’s from America? from Singapore? — and she, gracious, benign, inclining her head and passing them on to Abu Fahl, sleek in his new suit, or Kulfi or Karthamma or Chunni floating by in nylons and chiffons; and advertisements, too, everywhere, coloured lights winking all over al-Ghazira on the Corniche, in Hurreyya; queues stretching out of the shop and through the Souq, crowds rioting to get in …

Isn’t it possible? she asked Rakesh. Does it seem too much?

Rakesh shook his head in doubt, but his eyes were shining with excitement: all the clothes, think of all the clothes!

He hesitated. But how will you get the shop, Zindi? he asked.

Ah! Zindi’s eyes narrowed. That’s what the plan is about …

The Durban Tailoring House belonged to Jeevanbhai Patel. It was his beginning in al-Ghazira. He had acquired it when he first arrived, years and years ago, after his parents, in distant Durban in South Africa, discovered his secret marriage to a Bohra Muslim girl (and he a Gujarati Hindu!) and expelled him from their home and family. Jeevanbhai knew then that he must leave the town his family had lived in for a generation, the only home he had ever known. And he knew, too, that he had to act fast, before the wind carried the news along the coast. So his wife hid her few bits of jewellery in her bodice and they tied everything they had into a bundle and waited for the chain of Indian merchants along the coast to pull them northwards like a bucket from a well. First they went to Mozambique, then Dar es Salaam, then Zanzibar, Djibouti, Perim and Aden. Everywhere he met with all the hospitality due to a son of his father, and he for his part took care to keep his bride hidden and stay at least two days ahead of the news. In Aden he looked up and down the coast, sniffed the breeze and tasted the currents and decided, decided with an absolute certainty, that al-Ghazira was where he would go. He bought himself a ticket on a rusty British-blessed steamer run by an enterprising Parsi in Bombay, and soon Jeevanbhai, with his spade teeth and bundled-up wife, was standing in al-Ghazira’s harbour, looking past the booms and sambuqs anchored in the little muddy inlet, at the steaming, dusty township beyond. Al-Ghazira was small then, an intimate little place, half market-town perched on the edge of the great hungry desert beyond, half pearling-port fattening on the lustrous jeevan pearls in its bay. It was a merchant’s paradise, right in the centre of the world, conceived and nourished by the flow of centuries of trade. Persians, Iraqis, Zanzibari Arabs, Omanis and Indians fattened upon it and grew rich, and the Malik, fast in his mud-walled fort on the Great Hill behind the town, smiled upon them, took his dues and disbursed a part of them in turn when British gunboats paid their visits to the little harbour.

The Indian merchants of al-Ghazira, some of whom had been settled there for generations, never quite knew what to make of Jeevanbhai. Soon after his arrival, for some reason, they had decided not to drive him out. But they had never accepted him and never let him into their houses. All his life Jeevanbhai circled just beyond the thresholds of respectability. So, when his wife died and his businesses began to fail and his money disappear, he had turned instinctively towards the Severed Head, and not to the Indians of the city.

In those early days, with the last bit of his wife’s gold, Jeevanbhai had bought himself a shop in the Souq ash-Sharji. The shop was to pass through a progression of avatars; it started as a cloth-shop, switched to dates and general groceries, then changed to hardware and later to carpets — in its first decade it changed almost every year. It didn’t matter; none of the shop’s incarnations ever made much money. That was not the intention. All through those years, it was in a little room behind the shop that Jeevanbhai’s real business lay.

One day, in his first year in al-Ghazira, Jeevanbhai was sitting in his empty cloth-shop wondering how he was going to buy the day’s food, when a rich Sindhi pearl merchant dropped by for a cup of tea. Within moments he was pouring his heart out, laying bare his shame as he never would have to anyone but an outcast: he had a daughter, still unmarried at twenty-five, and he was at his wits’ end.

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.

But Isma’il, Hajj Fahmy’s fourth son, did nothing at all. He had no skill at weaving, and though he talked occasionally of learning plumbing no one took him seriously. He was known to be unusually dim-witted, more or less an idiot. He spent his days wandering about the Ras, talking to people and wandering into whichever shack took his fancy for his meals. Yet, of all his sons, Isma’il was the dearest to Hajj Fahmy. He wouldn’t hear of his wife’s plans to push him into a trade. We have enough, he said. Isma’il helps us live with it in peace.

Soon after Hajj Fahmy and the other Mawali families began to make money, they tore down their barasti huts and built themselves large, strong houses of brick and cement. At the time, some of the Mawali had said to Hajj Fahmy: Why don’t we leave the Ras and its stinking beaches, and go into the city?

Never, Hajj Fahmy had answered. In al-Ghazira the Ras is where we belong. Still, some of the Mawali left. But most of them stayed, for they knew instinctively that Hajj Fahmy was right — the Mawali had always kept to themselves in al-Ghazira. Old Musa had fetched wives for his sons from his own village in Egypt. After that the Mawali had always married amongst themselves. They spoke the Arabic of Musa’s village with each other. They even wore its dress — jallabeyyas and woollen caps. Often, the men wore shirts and trousers, but never the flowing robes of the Ghaziris. Why this should be, no one knew. It was just so.

When the Ras began to fill up with shacks and people from all the corners of the world, the Mawali were alarmed. They went to Hajj Fahmy and said: What shall we do now? Soon our houses will be pushed into the sea.

Hajj Fahmy had laughed: How will they push our houses into the sea, when ours are the only solid houses in the Ras? Let them come to the Ras if they keep out of our way. The Ras gave us shelter; let it give them shelter. Besides, think of the business they’ll bring.

One of his cousins opened a grocery-shop at one end of the Ras and within months he was rich. After that the Mawali never again worried about the crowds in the Ras. And the others in the Ras, for their part, left the Mawali alone and never encroached on their houses.

It was only natural that there should be a close link between the Mawali and the inhabitants of the only other permanent house in the Ras — Zindi’s. No one knew how long back the connection stretched, but it was said that when Zindi first came to al-Ghazira from Egypt, as a young and buxom beauty, it was Hajj Fahmy who first found her a place and cared for her, almost as he did for his own wife. Zindi’s house grew and she found other friends, but nothing ever interfered in her friendship with Hajj Fahmy. Zindi and her house kept his interest in the world alive, Hajj Fahmy would say, and he was always one of the first to visit her house when she returned from one of her trips to Egypt or India. It was inevitable that he would meet Alu sooner or later. But, as it happened, when Mariamma arrived the Hajj did not hear of it for a few days. Instead, one evening a young, lumpy-headed man whom he had never seen before was led into the room in which he received guests.

He had heard, Hajj Fahmy said, that we have a loom in the house. Of course no one uses it now but me, and that rarely. When I do I think myself a fool, because in the past I wove because I needed the money, and now I weave because I have nothing else to do. Anyway I showed it to him. He walked around it, looking at it carefully, but he didn’t touch it. He was thinking. Who knows what he was thinking? We couldn’t ask him because then he didn’t know any Arabic, and all we had to talk in was signs. Next day he was back, with yarn. He set about warping the loom and a week later he was weaving. He was a little clumsy in the beginning. He said the loom wasn’t like those he knew. But after a few days his hands were flying over it, and everyone in the house used to gather around to marvel at his skill. After that he used to come in the evenings, when he had finished the day’s work with Abu Fahl and the others. He said it made him feel well again after a day of painting walls. He wove cloth for the whole house — soft, fine cloth (of course, we gave him a little money) — cloth of that kind is beyond my skill, Zindi, really. To tell you the truth, I often thought to myself: Why, I could start a business with the cloth this boy makes. If he could work on that loom all day long, instead of painting houses, Allahu yia’alam, God knows how much money he could make. I tell you, I often thought of setting up a business with that boy, often … Anyway, my heart was glad to see that loom being used at last, and my father would have been glad, too. And once Alu began to talk Arabic like any of us everyone in the house came to love him, though he wasn’t a Muslim. I myself, I loved him like a grandson. Yesterday, when we heard about the collapse, my house wept. I wept. Then today we heard rumour after rumour. Of course, the women in the house started talking about the Sheikh …

What sheikh? Zindi broke in.

Oh, no one — an odd idea some of the Mawali women have. Anyway, as soon as I heard the rumours I sent Isma’il to your house to find out. He didn’t come back, and only our Lord knows where he is. So then I set out myself. I said: I must find out from Zindi herself what’s become of Alu.

Zindi stiffened suddenly, alerted by a noise in the lane outside. She was at the door before the first knock. She flung the door open, throwing her tarha askew in her haste. There were half a dozen men outside, some of them Mawali, some Indian and some Egyptian. Forid Mian was not among them.

Zindi, tell us the truth, one of them said. What’s happened to Alu?

I don’t know, Zindi said abruptly. Abu Fahl has gone to find out.

What about some tea, then, Zindi? someone else called out.

Reluctantly Zindi let them in. For many years the men of the Ras had gathered at Zindi’s house in the evenings to talk and drink tea. There were no cafés or tea-shops in the Ras or even near it, so Zindi’s house had become a surrogate. Zindi usually made a fair profit, for she charged much more for tobacco and tea than any café would have dared. People complained, but not much. They knew no café could match the stories and the tea that were to be had at Zindi’s. It was said that a man learnt more about the Ras and al-Ghazira and even the world in one evening at Zindi’s than from a month’s television.

As the evening wore on, the knocks on the door grew increasingly frequent. Every time she heard a knock Zindi jumped, with the surprising agility she could sometimes command, to open the door. Each time she was disappointed. As the news of Abu Fahl and Rakesh’s expedition spread around the Ras, the curious crowd in Zindi’s house grew. But of Forid Mian there was no sign.

Slowly, as the rooms filled, the heat and tension grew. Zindi had to open the windows, much as she disliked it, for the room had become a steaming oven, and everybody was drenched in sweat. The whole of Zindi’s attention was concentrated on the door and Forid Mian. Her hands began to shake and she could no longer bring herself to make tea, so Zaghloul had to do it, while she stared out into the lane.

Soon conversation in the room faltered and died away. Two men began to argue about a narjila. The argument grew into a quarrel, and suddenly the room was divided. Zaghloul nudged Zindi. She took one look and she was worried — usually Abu Fahl handled these situations. One of the men reached for the neck of the other man’s jallabeyya, and at that moment Isma’il burst into the room, his jallabeyya torn, his plump, pink cheeks and light brown hair smudged with dust.

Where have you been, Isma’in? his father said gravely.

Isma’il smiled happily and his blue-grey eyes shone as he went around the room shaking hands. I was with Abu Fahl and Rakesh, he said. We went to the Star.

Then Rakesh and Abu Fahl came into the room, their clothes ragged and dishevelled, their faces ghostly, pale with dust. They sank into a corner, and Abu Fahl ran his glazed eyes over the room. Everyone was leaning forward, staring intently at the two men.

What happened? Hajj Fahmy asked.

Abu Fahl mumbled: Wait. Some tea first. His head dropped and he ran his hands over his face. Suddenly he hugged himself and shuddered. As though in response, an involuntary shiver rippled around the room. Abu Fahl smiled.

Soon after we left the house, Abu Fahl said, we met Isma’il. He followed us, asking question after question — What’s happened to Alu? Where are you going? We answered him, but at the embankment I waved him away and told him to go home or his mother would worry. Yet when we were halfway down the Corniche he was still behind us. I shouted and showed him my fist. He stopped then, and we went on.

We must have been walking faster than we knew, for we turned a bend and there was the Star, before us. It was only an outline, black against the purple sky. I stopped Rakesh and went ahead alone, trying to keep to the shadows of the rocks beside the road. There were no policemen, not one.

When Rakesh came up beside me he stopped and stared, as I was staring. It looks bigger than it did, he said to me, and I saw him shiver a little. So I said loudly: Things change when you see them from different places. And sometimes the light plays tricks.

It was twilight, the last red light before darkness, and even your own face looks different then. But still it was a strange thing, for the Star did look bigger, much bigger. Those concrete pillars and steel girders reached above us like eucalyptus trees; we could hardly see where they ended. There seemed to be no end to the rubble and the wreckage. It towered above us. It was like the pyramids at Giza; small mountains with jagged edges and dust blowing into spirals off the sides. We heard the muezzins calling, somewhere far away in the city, but then the crashing of the waves killed the cry and we were as alone as two men on a rock in the sea.

I said to myself as we walked closer: Why, we were working here only yesterday, and when we’re closer it’ll seem all right. But even when we were standing at the foot of the first slope of rubble it seemed no smaller. And then we heard it whining, eerily, in a strange whistle. It rose and died away and rose again, blowing straight out of the centre of the ruins.

I caught Rakesh by the hand, for I know what he is. And if I’d left it a moment later, for all that it was he who took me there, I know he’d have turned and bolted like a rabbit, for the hairs were standing all along his arm. So to give him strength I shouted: It’s only the wind whistling. Come on, be a man. At that he took heart, and even tried to smile.

But that smile never stretched very far, for the very next moment there was a flash of white beside him as someone pushed past him and sprang on to the rubble. Rakesh had turned to stone, his mouth open, as he gazed at that figure, waving at us. I shook him hard and shouted into his ear until he heard: It’s only Isma’il. He must have followed us. Nothing to worry about.

So we went on again, following Isma’il. Right before us was a gentle slope of rubble, about ten feet high. We climbed it, but very slowly, for there was broken glass and bits of torn steel, like razor blades, lying everywhere.

At the top it was I who lost heart, for everywhere, all around us, as far as we could see, there were hills of shattered concrete. The slopes and tips were just visible in the last light, and the black darkness was climbing fast. Isma’il had disappeared.

I could see no sign of him, so I gave up looking and hit my head with my hands. There was a lavatory bowl behind me, protruding through the rubble; a very beautiful thing, gleaming new, painted all over with flowers. I sat down on it, for I saw no hope in going on. Rakesh sat down, too, leaning against a slab of wall. I said to him: Let’s go back. We’ll never find him. There could be a fleet of trucks in here and we wouldn’t see it for days.

Then it was Rakesh who gave me courage. A little before the Star collapsed Rakesh and some of the others were working with Alu in the basement, directly in the centre of the building. That part of the building was, in a way, hollow, for above it there was only an empty space topped by a glass dome. That space was a five-storey greenhouse, for inside it thousands of plants grew in pots hanging on chains. The contractor said that people would flock to the Star simply to marvel at the hanging plants. Because that part was hollow, when the Star fell and its five pointed arms became towering mounds of rubble, its centre settled into a low valley. Rakesh had been there soon after the collapse. So at that moment, when I had lost hope and wanted to turn back, he pointed to a distant dip in the rubble and said: That’s where we have to go, I think, though it’s difficult to tell in the darkness.

Like the eager boy that he is, he jumped to his feet and, clear as the light of day, he saw and I saw a dark shape springing up with him, inches from his face. Rakesh would have screamed or shouted if he could, but all he could do was fall sideways, gasping for breath, his eyes starting from his head.

Even before he was down, a chunk of rubble was in my hand, and I threw it with all my strength.

It was just a mirror, but Rakesh was still holding his throat, sobbing and gasping, when it shattered and the glass fell at his feet.

Maybe when the Star still stood that place was a great gilded bathroom, hanging high in the sky, looking out to sea.

When Rakesh had stopped trembling I took my torch from my pocket and we went on. What a journey it was; Sitt Zeynab grant that I never have to do anything like that again. Every yard seemed to take hours. We had to slide our feet forward, picking our way through the glass and steel. Sometimes the rubble would slide away from under our feet. Our legs and feet were cut open so often there must be a trail of blood across those ruins. And again at times the wind would whine within the ruins and rise to a howl, and we would have to stand and wait for it to die away again. All around us shadows leapt behind the light of my torch, flickering this way and that. But of Isma’il there was not the slightest trace.

At last we reached the edges of the mound and the valley was before us. It was like the handiwork of a madman — immense steel girders leaning crazily, whole sections of the glass dome scattered about like eggshells, and all over, everywhere, thousands of decaying plants.

Still, we sighed with relief when we saw that valley at last.

I turned sideways and began edging down the slope, towards the valley. Rakesh was close behind me. Halfway down, my foot caught on something in the rubble. I heard glass cracking, and a moment before it rolled away I saw a television set. As it fell, the rubble began to slide with it, more and more of it, until it was a landslide. We would have been at the bottom of it if Rakesh had not managed to hold on to a girder that was still upright. I caught his leg and somehow we managed to keep ourselves safe as the rubble fell past us.

When the dust and the wreckage settled we heard a noise. It was a voice of some kind — of that there could be no doubt — muffled but steady, somewhere under the rubble. He’s there, Rakesh shouted. He slithered and stumbled down the slope to the spot and began to dig with his hands. Wait, we’re coming! he shouted, but the voice underneath carried on without a break.

We cleared away the rubble until we reached an opening. At once I reached down, for I knew what it was. I found it, groping about, and gave it to Rakesh. It was a transistor. The falling rubble must have switched it on somehow.

Rakesh would not take it at first. He just stood there and glared. But there were three more, and eventually we tucked them into our trousers and went on.

What wonders there were in that valley! For a long time we stood and marvelled. We found the head of a coconut palm which had snapped off the trunk. It was heavy with fresh, tender coconuts. Right there we broke open six of them with a bit of steel and drank their water. There were roses still blooming, and clouds of wilting magnolias.

But it was when we reached the basement that we stood gaping with astonishment — even Rakesh, who had seen it before. The basement’s ceiling had collapsed as I thought, but miraculously a massive slab of concrete had fallen across the opening, sheltering it from the storm of wreckage that must have come after the collapse. Even more amazing, it had not sealed the basement completely. It lay at a steep angle, held up on one side by a bent girder, so all the wreckage had slid off it, and no rubble blocked the hole in the basement’s ceiling.

Still, it was tricky there, for we were standing on a part of the basement’s ceiling that might collapse at any moment. We lay flat on our stomachs and crawled forward. I looked up, but I had to look quickly away again for there were immense girders and huge slabs of concrete poised over us, hanging, as though they were waiting to fall. Once my elbow broke something, and at once there was a smell, so strong and so sweet, it sent us reeling. I shone my torch down and we saw hundreds of tiny bottles of perfume, strewn all around us. Near the edge of the basement we were hardly breathing, for the slightest slip could have sent us straight into that hole. At the lip we stopped and looked into the still blackness beneath.

As soon as I shone my torch down we both exclaimed, for we could hardly believe the depth of that room. We talked about it for a while, but in the end there could be no doubt that it was the same room we had been working in that day. I shone my torch all around it, but it was like using a pin to cut a bale of cloth. We could only see a thing at a time — overturned sewing machines, ovens with their doors thrown open, like huge laughing mouths, all kinds of things. We worked the torch all over that room, but all we could see was machinery strewn about the place, and rubble. There was no sign of Alu.

We should go down, Rakesh whispered, maybe he’s unconscious. And I said: How? We’d need ropes and many more men. We have to come back tomorrow.

Then Rakesh said: We should call the police or the contractor and tell them to get him out. And I said to him: What would happen then? Maybe they’d get him or his corpse out, but the first thing they’d discover after that is that he has no work permit and no passport. He’d go straight into gaol. Then they’d find out who he was working with. And then we’d follow him into gaol. We have to leave that to the last — only if we can’t get him out ourselves.

Suddenly, behind us: Phow! Like a revolver. I turned around as quick as a thought, my hands ready.

Phow! again. It was Isma’il, standing on a girder, pointing an electric hair-dryer at us and pretending to shoot. He called out to us, happily, as though we were at a wedding: He’s there. Haven’t you found him yet?

Then Isma’il went to the edge of that black hole and shouted down: Alu? His shout grew inside that huge pit, echoing and booming until the rubble behind us started to slide. I clapped a hand on his mouth and pulled him back before he could do it again. Then the echoes died away, and quite distinctly we heard Alu’s voice.

All right, all right, Hajj Fahmy smiled across the steaming, smoke-filled room at Abu Fahl. Was he there or not? What did he say? Just tell us.

Yes, said Abu Fahl. He was there, but we couldn’t see him. He was under a heap of rubble, broken machinery and pots of paint. There were two massive concrete beams projecting out of the heap. We couldn’t believe that anyone could be alive under all that. It seemed impossible. Then he said he was trapped under the heap, but there was a steel girder across him holding up the beams.

Was he hurt? Hajj Fahmy asked.

No, he said he wasn’t hurt at all. He was perfectly all right.

Did you see him?

No, we couldn’t. I told you. But that’s what he said. We asked him if he needed food or water and he said: No.

That was a strange thing. He said: No, I’m all right, I don’t need anything. We told him we would be back tomorrow and he laughed. Yes, he laughed. He said: It’s all right. Come when you can. And while he was speaking your son Isma’il shouted down to him: Alu, have you seen the Sheikh of the Mawali?

Abu Fahl broke off and looked curiously across at Hajj Fahmy: Who is this sheikh?

Hajj Fahmy looked away, embarrassed, and twisted the hem of his jallabeyya around his fingers. Before he could say anything, Isma’il broke in: He’s Sheikh Musa the Mawali. He was buried there and he protects everyone who passes by.

Hajj Fahmy clapped a hand on his shoulder. Be quiet, Isma’in, he said sharply. He turned to the others: It’s just a bit of harmless nonsense the Mawali women believe. It’s blasphemous, and I’ve argued with them a thousand times, but they believe it. Never mind. Carry on. Did he say anything else?

Yes, said Abu Fahl hesitantly. He took off his cap and ran his hands through his hair. He turned and called out: Zindi, are you listening?

Zindi was staring out of the door, biting her lip, her face screwed small with worry. She started and turned to Abu Fahl: Yes, yes, of course I’m listening. Go on.

Abu Fahl said: For a while he was quiet. Then he told us that he was thinking. We said: What are you thinking about? And he answered: I’m thinking about dirt and cleanliness. I’m thinking and I’m making plans.

Dirt and cleanliness? Hajj Fahmy’s voice rose in incredulity.

Yes, that’s what he said. He said: I’m thinking about cleanliness and dirt and the Infinitely Small.

Chapter Twelve. From an Egg-Seller’s End

Abu Fahl woke early next morning, worrying. It was taken for granted that, if there was to be another expedition to the Star, Abu Fahl would be its leader. So, as if by right, it fell to Abu Fahl to worry.

First, there was the problem of finding men to go with them to the Star. And where were they to find the men? They would probably have to hire them from one of the construction gangs in the Ras. But they would almost certainly expect to be paid (for they would be losing the day’s wages). In all likelihood they would have to be paid extra because of the risks. Where was the money to come from? And tools: they’d need shovels for the rubble; ropes; maybe ladders as well, to lower themselves to the basement; perhaps even blowtorches for the steel girders. Where was he to get the tools? And, even if he found some, how were they to carry them through a cordon of policemen?

Abu Fahl shook Zindi, asleep beside him: What are we to do, Zindi? Can you think of a plan? Zindi grunted, pushed a leg between his and shut her eyes again. Abu Fahl taxed her later: You don’t care whether that boy you brought into this house — you, yourself — you don’t care whether he lives or dies.

Zindi gave him a drowsy answer: I know he’s alive and I know you’ll get him out somehow. What more is there to say? In the meanwhile someone has to think of the future and other things, too. We still have to go on living.

Abu Fahl fell silent: the beginnings of a plan were already stirring in his mind. He and Rakesh would visit the two construction gangs in the Ras before they left for work, and explain the situation. Some of the men might agree to work free. After all, it could happen to anyone — that was the point to press home.

So planned Abu Fahl, the organizer, at dawn, complaining but with secret relish, for in his instincts Abu Fahl was a storyteller and plans are the fantasies of the practical life.

Before Abu Fahl’s plans were ready there was a sharp, insistent hammering on the door to the lane. Abu Fahl opened it. Isma’il stood outside, a hacksaw in his hands. Behind him, in the lane, there was a large group of men. Some of them were brandishing axes, some crowbars, and others shovels.

Once or twice Abu Fahl, too, had visited a house or a shack with a crowbar in his hands. He smelt a threat the moment he saw the men crowding into the lane. Without flinching, betraying nothing, he parted his legs and planted them squarely in the doorway. Folding his arms across his chest, he clamped his one, red eye on Isma’il: What is this?

This? said Isma’il, surprised. This is a kind of saw. In demonstration he sawed a groove into the wooden door-post.

Abu Fahl caught his wrist. No! Not that, this. He waved a hand at the crowded lane.

Ya salaam! Isma’il exclaimed, turning. Are there so many now? You see, I was coming to help you get Alu out of the Star. I brought this saw with me, for I thought you might need it. On the way I met some people, and they said: Where are you going, ya Isma’il? And I said: I’m going to get Alu out of the Star; he’s been buried three days and he’s still alive, and they say he has something to tell us. But there was no need for all that; they already knew about Alu and they all said: Wait, Isma’il, we’ll come with you. Everyone wants to know what a man can have to say after being buried alive for three days.

Isma’il scratched his head and smiled at Abu Fahl. The next moment Abu Fahl found himself overwhelmed with shouted offers of help.

There were too many men, far too many. Abu Fahl soon realized that he could only take a small group safely into the Star. But then there was a new problem — the men would not leave. Some even tried to force their way into the house, and Abu Fahl barely kept his temper.

Abu Fahl’s problems grew through the morning. People began to arrive from every part of the Ras, virtually from every shack. A whole construction gang arrived, determined to get Alu out of the Star before going to work. They wanted to set out at once, and Abu Fahl had to quarrel with them to keep them from doing so.

Soon the house was in turmoil: Abu Fahl shouting, astonished, gratitude turned to exasperation; Professor Samuel, loudly complaining until Jeevanbhai Patel led him away to his office; Karthamma and Chunni racing from the courtyard to Zindi’s room with glasses of tea; Isma’il fighting the geese with Kulfi-didi’s newly washed sari.

Only Zindi sat through it all unmoved. She greeted the men who flooded in and out of her room politely enough, but when they began to talk she turned silently away. Soon she was forgotten, left to herself, in her corner. She was grateful, for later, when she caught Rakesh’s arm and whispered into his ear, nobody noticed her. Go one last time, she said, just one more time. Go to Romy Abu Tolba’s shop and tell Tolba to give Forid Mian another message — Zindi will be waiting for you this evening. Just that.

Rakesh did not see at first that she was begging. When he did, he put his arm around her and squeezed her shoulder. Much later, he slipped out of the house and was back again before anyone missed him.

Abu Fahl was still under siege. He decided finally that he would go to the Star with perhaps five men, and only a few tools: some crowbars, ropes and torches, nothing else. The others resisted at first, but Abu Fahl cajoled, argued and shouted, and in the end he had his way. Only Isma’il, who appeared to know the way to the basement in the dark, Rakesh, and three other men, all of them experienced construction hands, were to go with him.

At dusk, when the six men were to set off, the crowd, swollen by people on their way back from work, had spilled out of Zindi’s house into the lane and beyond. The six men were pushed along the lanes of the Ras with cheers and shouts of encouragement. At the embankment Abu Fahl stopped and shouted into the crowd. If there was a crowd on the road the police would notice, and that would be the end of it all; they would just have to go back to their houses and wait till Alu was brought back.

The crowd watched the six men till they disappeared. Then some people wandered back to their shacks and some trickled back to Zindi’s house. As the evening wore on the trickle grew, and before long Zindi’s house was crammed with people again.

Zindi, frustrated and angry, her nerves worn by two days of waiting, doubled the rates for her tea, but still people called for more, faster than she and Karthamma could make it. They ran out of tea altogether, and Kulfi had to be sent to Romy Abu Tolba’s shop to buy more. She came back frightened. She had never seen the Ras so empty before; everyone who could walk was waiting at Zindi’s house, for Alu’s return. Once, Zindi left her room to go to the lavatory. She found her courtyard packed coffee-pot full and boiling over. Karthamma had prudently moved the geese, the rabbits and the chickens to the roof. Amazed, Zindi picked her way through a group of squatting Mawali women: the Mawali women rarely left their quarter and they had never been in her house before.

Then suddenly the excitement mounted. They heard a boy running and a shout: They’re coming, they’re coming. The younger men ran out of the house, pushing their way through the lane. After that word came in relays: Only Isma’il’s back. No, they’re all back, Isma’il’s running ahead. What about Alu? Have they got Alu?

Uncertain murmurs ran around the room and the courtyard: They’re leading someone; there’s a seventh person with them. And then voices somewhere in the lane: No, that’s a shadow — it’s just the five of them and Isma’il.

What about Alu? Is he dead? Has the Star killed him at last?

Abu Fahl stepped into a crackling silence. The crowd in the courtyard stirred and rose; people shoved and elbowed each other, straining for a glimpse of the men. And then it was certain — the only men with Abu Fahl were those who had gone with him. No Alu.

At once Abu Fahl was struck by a thunderclap of questions. The crowd surged towards him, jostling and pushing. He stumbled, fell, picked himself up again and shouted. He shouted again, and again, but even his bull’s bellow was lost in the commotion. Then Rakesh began beating an empty kerosene-tin, and slowly the metallic clanging prevailed and the shouts died away. Rakesh upturned the kerosene-tin on the floor and pushed Abu Fahl on to it.

Abu Fahl stood precariously still on the tin for a moment, rubbing his blind eye and looking at the faces that were raised towards him. He saw Hajj Fahmy’s wife, a lean string of a woman, and he heard her rumble: So tell us, Abu Fahl, is he dead at last?

No, said Abu Fahl. He isn’t dead. He’s as alive as you or me.

A long sigh blew through the courtyard, stirring up a volley of angry questions: Then, why isn’t he here? Why didn’t you get him out?

Abu Fahl held up his hand: There was nothing we could do; there were too few of us. He’s lying under a pile of rubble, and do you know how large that pile is? It’s a mountain. Even after we managed to get down to the basement, it was a long time before we could so much as see him. He’s right at the bottom of that mountain.

But just above him was a concrete slab, almost flat on the ground. At first we thought there couldn’t possibly be any living thing under that slab.

Then we saw that the slab was inclined very slightly. At one end it was about a foot or two off the floor. In the beginning we couldn’t see what lay under it there, for there’s a tangle of webbed steel blocking it at that end. And then, when we managed to look through, we saw him there, right in front of us, lying flat on his back, with that huge slab of concrete so close to his nose he could have touched it with his eyelashes. Another hair’s breadth and he would have been a dead man.

How did it happen? Why did that block of concrete stop there, just a hair away from his nose? Do you know why? Because beside him, on either side, were two sewing machines, of the old kind, of black solid steel. They must be the only ones of their kind in al-Ghazira now, real antiques, probably kept for display. But, if it weren’t for them, our friend Alu would have been flattened days ago.

He was lying right in front of us, but there was nothing we could do. We’d have had to cut through the steel mesh, move the rubble and shift the concrete slab to get him out. That slab’s two feet thick, two feet of ground rock and sand held together by steel. It’s so strong it could hold up a shopful of cars. And the girders fallen around it are as thick as tree-trunks and a thousand times stronger. On girders like that you could hang the whole of the Ras. It would have taken dozens of men with a truckload of equipment to move them, and we were just six.

We didn’t dare move a thing: the slightest slip, and who was to know? Perhaps the whole mountain of rubble would come down on him. We had to stand there and stare at this man, hardly more than a boy, buried alive under a hill of rubble, with death barely an inch from his chest, and miraculously still alive. All we could do was marvel; all of us, we marvelled, for there was not a man amongst us who had seen a thing like that before.

I could hardly speak. I remember at last I laughed, to make the whole business seem ordinary, and though we had taken nothing with us I said to Alu, Do you need food or water? — and he said simply, No, I’m all right.

I tried to think of something else, but nothing would come to me, so I asked him, Alu, how are your boils? — and he answered, They’re gone. So then, trying to laugh again, I said: Alu, do you want to come out now, or do you still want to lie there and think about dirt and cleanliness and your Infinitely Small?

He said: Take me out of here, Abu Fahl. I have been here long enough, I have thought enough, and now I know what we must do …

Abu Fahl stopped and glanced over the courtyard. The whole crowd was staring intently up at him. He drew a deep breath.

I asked him: Alu, what must we do?

And he said: We must have a war.

Abu Fahl beat down the stifled gasps and murmurs that rose all around him: I said to him, What kind of war?

And Alu said: We shall war on money, where it all begins.

After that Abu Fahl would say no more: he waved the crowd out, telling them to go home and think about what he had said. Then he went into Zindi’s room and demanded tea from Karthamma.

Zindi set about the business of clearing the house with energetic enthusiasm. Her insults soon emptied the courtyard and the lane outside. But there was nothing she could do about her own room, which was so crowded there was barely room for the smoke. She saw from the way Hajj Fahmy was sitting, with his hands planted firmly on his crossed legs, that it was likely to remain so, for it was always he who gave the lead to the others.

In despair, she tucked Boss under her arm and went to sit on the doorstep. And there she found Forid Mian, waiting timidly in the shadows of the lane, inconspicuous in his usual starched shirt and checked green lungi. For an instant she gaped at his long parched face and his ragged beard. Then her surprise was swept away by waves of relief and hope, and all at once she was babbling strings of phrases of welcome, squeezing his twig fingers, and pushing him through the door.

Forid Mian drew back when he saw the crowd in her room, but she tightened her grip on his arm and led him in. Once he was inside, he straightened his shoulders with an effort and worked his way slowly around the room, shaking hands and whispering Salaams. Everybody was listening to Abu Fahl telling the story of his journey to the Star again, and only Hajj Fahmy held Forid Mian’s hand long enough to talk to him. You’re here after a long time, Forid, he said curiously. But, before he could answer, Zindi appeared at his elbow and led him away.

Zindi cleared a space in a corner near the stove by pushing two men aside and sat Forid Mian down. She settled Boss on her lap and lit the stove. So how are you, Forid Mian? she said softly in Hindi. It’s a long time since you drank tea with us. Hajj Fahmy is right.

Forid Mian combed his beard with his fingers. Not so long, he said. You know there’s a lot of work in the shop. And now you have Jeevanbhai staying here. I’d feel strange sitting with him in the evenings.

Zindi smelt a promising spoor and leapt: Why? Then she checked herself. No, she said gently, I only meant … There hasn’t been trouble, I hope?

No, said Forid Mian. No trouble. Not really trouble. But you know how prices are going up and what rice costs. What can a poor man do? So when I see Jeevanbhai I ask him for some more money. And he says, where will the money come from? and he looks at my accounts and he doesn’t seem happy. That happens every other day. It would be too much if it were to happen in the evenings as well.

Zindi nodded: Yes, but we’ve been missing you. We all wonder where Forid Mian is. Tell me, Forid Mian, how many years is it since you’ve been working in al-Ghazira?

Forid Mian sighed and counted on his fingers. Must be fifteen, he said. Fifteen years!

Fifteen years! Zindi clicked her tongue. That’s a long time. Chittagong in Bangladesh, wasn’t it?

Forid Mian stared into space. Yes, he said, Chittagong, Chatgan, where the Karnophuli pours into the sea, almost Burma …

Hah! Zindi squeezed his bony thigh. So, Forid Mian, tell me, how many wives and how many children have you got hidden away in your Chatgan by the Karnophuli?

Forid Mian brushed her hand away. You’re laughing at me, Zindi, he said sharply. You know quite well I don’t have a family or a wife or children. I was too young when I left, and there was no money in the house anyway. Then I was at sea, and there was no time. And then here in al-Ghazira …

Zindi raised a hand to cover her mouth: No wife, no children! Nothing? What are you going to do? Are you going to stay here for ever, in the Souq? Until your fingers are too stiff to hold a needle?

What can I do? Forid Mian’s head fell until he was staring at his crossed feet. I have some money saved, I could afford to get married now, even start a small shop of my own. But I have no family left there now. Who would find me a wife? I’m afraid, Zindi: going back to a place alone, starting again, a man can’t do that at my age.

How old are you, Forid Mian? Zindi asked.

Fifty? Sixty? Something like that.

Forid Mian shrugged.

Zindi gurgled with laughter: Just the right age to get married. Something will have to be done for you, Forid Mian.

She tweaked his bottom, and Forid Mian broke into laughter: Zindi, you don’t know, you can’t imagine, how I long for a wife. I’ve spent too many nights thrashing about on dry sheets. You don’t know how it hurts. You wake up in the morning and you’re bleeding, but you can’t stop …

Zindi laughed with him, her huge shoulders rolling like round-bottomed pots. But Forid Mian noticed people turning to look at them, and he frowned in embarrassment. Zindi tapped him on the knee and said: Forid Mian. But he shook his head and pointed across the room, at Hajj Fahmy. The Hajj was holding his hand up and waiting for silence. Zindi decided to say no more; she had said enough for one day.

Hajj Fahmy, eyes shining, smiled across the room at Abu Fahl. I have a question for Abu Fahl, he said to the room. Let us see if Abu Fahl can answer it. I’ve understood what Abu Fahl has said — why he couldn’t get Alu out today, and so on and fulan — I’ve understood it all, but for one thing, and this thing troubles me. Abu Fahl talks of how strong the concrete and the steel in the Star was, and how that concrete can hold up a mountain of rubble and a shopful of cars, and how you could hang the whole of the Ras on one of those girders. But here is my question: if that concrete and steel was so strong, why did the Star fall?

Abu Fahl slid a finger under his cap and scratched his head. It wasn’t strong all over, he said, only in parts. He stopped, flustered.

If it was strong only in parts, why did the whole of it fall?

Abu Fahl recovered himself. It’s quite simple, he said confidently. Everyone knows that the contractors and architects put too much sand in the cement. They’ve been doing it for years. A cement shortage, they say. But actually they’re busy putting up palaces with the money they make from that cement — for themselves at home in England, or India or Egypt, America, Korea, Pakistan, who knows where? The cement they were using for the Star was nothing but sand. Not all of it, of course. For those parts of the building which were going to bear really heavy weights they cast very strong concrete. It’s one of those parts that Alu is lying under. The rest of that building was like straw. Anybody who had any experience of construction at all knew that it wouldn’t last. I wasn’t surprised when it fell; I’d been expecting it. That day I actually saw the whole thing begin, and I knew at once what was going to happen. Rakesh, Alu and some of the others were the only people working at the time. It was lunchtime, just before the afternoon prayers, and everybody else had stopped work. Our people had something to finish, so they were still inside. I was sitting outside talking to some people and suddenly a piece of plaster fell right beside me. I looked up and I distinctly saw the whole building beginning to shake, and somewhere, deep inside the Star, I heard rumbles. I knew at once what was going to happen, so I raced in and called out to Rakesh and the others to run, for the Star was going to fall. Ask them. If it weren’t for me, they wouldn’t be alive today. They all ran, except Alu, and that was because Alu has no experience; he knows nothing of buildings and construction. But let that be. The Hajj asks why did the Star fall. The answer is this: because, though parts of it were strong, the whole of it was weak because of bad cement and sandy concrete.

Abu Fahl sat back, assured and commanding, accepting the thoughtful silence that had fallen on the room as a tribute to his good sense. Hajj Fahmy was the first to speak, smiling, teasing him: You’re wrong, Abu Fahl.

Abu Fahl frowned: What do you mean, I’m wrong?

Just that. I know you’re wrong.

How?

Because I know the real story; the true story.

If it’s true, how’s it a story?

All right, then, it’s a story.

Abu Fahl challenged the old man: If you’re so sure, ya Hajj, why don’t you tell us?

Hajj Fahmy looked around him: Are you sure everyone wants to hear it?

Voices rose: Yes, there’s tea, there’s tobacco and what else have we got to do?

Hajj Fahmy inclined his head, smiling.

It’s just a story.

Once many, many years ago, so long ago that the time is of no significance, an odd-looking man, a very odd-looking man, appeared suddenly one day in al-Ghazira. Thin and small he was, of course, as people often were in those days, though his wasn’t the thinness of hunger so much as that of the mangled rag: he looked as though he had been twisted and pulled inside out, for his colour was a strange yellowish brown, as though he were carrying his bile on his skin. At first people would have nothing to do with him; he upset everyone he met, because when one of his eyes looked this way the other looked that. He was so painfully cross-eyed it was said of him that when other people only saw Cairo he could see Bombay as well. And, in addition, one of his eyes was always half-shut, as though his eyelid had been torn off its hinges. That was the deceptive one; it roamed about, taking everything in, while the other acted as a decoy.

No one knew anything about him. He didn’t even have a name for a long time. But then someone discovered that he was from northern Egypt, from the town of Damanhour, and so of course he was named Nury — Nury the Damanhouri. Soon he was found to be a quiet man, always willing to laugh, and never any trouble to anyone, so people grew to like him.

It’s true; he was a quiet man, but in his quiet way he changed things while nobody noticed. Take his trade, for example — he brought something altogether new to al-Ghazira. But that’s a story in itself.

Now, no one ever really knew why Nury had left Damanhour and come to al-Ghazira; in those days Damanhour was probably a better place to make a living than al-Ghazira. But a few months after he arrived a rumour went around al-Ghazira. People whispered that Nury had tried to divorce his wife because she had borne him no children. But when the council of elders was called they said everything was turned upside down — it was she who accused him of being as impotent as a wet rag, and challenged him to prove otherwise. They said he had fled Egypt in shame.

People were curious, of course, but it wasn’t known for certain whether the story was true. Here, Nury married a widowed Mawali woman decades older than himself and they were happy together, for she never once talked of how they spent their nights. It didn’t matter. Nury was a philosopher; he knew that people always believe the worst. Though nobody knew for certain, there wasn’t a man in al-Ghazira who didn’t, at heart, believe the rumour to be true. No one ever stopped to ask where the story came from; no one ever imagined that perhaps it came from Nury himself. Once it began to be whispered, people believed it absolutely, indisputably.

In his own small way Nury was a great man; he had the wisdom to see the world clearly. And like a logician he drew clear conclusions from what he saw.

Here is a lesson: all trade is founded on reputation.

Nury’s trade was selling eggs.

Nobody had ever sold eggs in al-Ghazira before. Not in a properly organized way, at least. In those days, everyone in the town had a few chickens in their houses, and when they laid they ate eggs, when they didn’t they didn’t. No one would have thought of buying or selling eggs, except perhaps from a neighbour.

Nury changed all that. He found out who had chickens and whose chickens laid when. Every morning he would set out with his basket beside him and go from house to house, buying eggs from some and persuading others to buy a few on the days their chickens weren’t laying. He was successful, but none of it would have been possible but for one thing, and Nury had thought of it. That was the sign of his genius.

Selling eggs is a trade like no other. Who looks after the chickens in a house? Who sells their eggs? Everyone knows the answer: the women of the house. Nury’s trade was founded on dealing with women. There was not another man in al-Ghazira who could have gone from house to house talking to the women and been left alive for a week. But no one so much as asked a question about Nury the cross-eyed Damanhouri, for everyone had heard his story. Nury was safe and his trade prospered. Nury, harmless and ageless, went from house to house buying and selling, talking of God knows what.

Nury built a trade on a story. Soon people were used to eating eggs every day, or whenever they wanted to, and people began to count on the extra money they made from selling eggs. Nury did quite well out of it all; soon he even built himself a little house. Nury’s trade was a work of craftsmanship; a masterpiece in the art of staying alive. Nury’s crossed eyes had the gift of looking, not just ahead, but up and down, right into the heart of things.

But here is another lesson: Blindness comes first to the clear-sighted.

Never mind. Most people in Nury’s place would have been happy merely to carry on with their trade. Not Nury. Nury the Damanhouri was an artist. For him every egg was an epic, a thousand-page song of love, death and betrayal. By looking at an egg Nury could tell what the chicken had been fed; from that he knew whether the house he had bought it from was close to starvation or had finally found a pot of gold. If one day a house had no eggs to sell, Nury would wonder why and ask a few questions and discover that they’d killed their chickens to feed a man who had a son who was the right age for their daughter. If a poor man’s house suddenly began to buy eggs, Nury would be the only man in al-Ghazira to know that they’d found a pearl the size of a football. Nury had imagination. But, more important, Nury was the only man in al-Ghazira who went from house to house every day, talking to people, even going into courtyards, taking in, in one glance, as much as other people take in in ten. Not a leaf fell, not a sheep shat in al-Ghazira without Nury’s knowing of it. But all this he did quietly, for silence was in his nature.

There is a moral in this: an eye in a courtyard is worth a hundred guns.

Inevitably, Jeevanbhai Patel was the first man to see what Nury was worth. Patel was already a well-to-do man then, and he gave Nury some pointless job to do in the evenings, when he wasn’t doing anything else. The job was unimportant. What Patel wanted was his knowledge, for he saw power in knowledge, and for him power meant money. In barely a month Patel’s investment paid off.

At that time the Malik — this very same Malik who lives shut away in the Old Fort now — was a young man, recently returned from a school for princes in India, where the British had sent him. He had become Malik after his father’s death, only a year before, but already people knew that here was a man very different from the senile and foolish old Malik, his father. This new Malik was a storm of energy. No one met him who did not come away reeling. People said that it was impossible even to look at the Malik for more than a minute at a time — his whole face was blood red like the setting sun. They said he had secret ways of making the blood rush to his face to terrify people. He never laughed, never smiled, and such was his temper that much of the time people were grateful to leave the Fort alive.

At that time something happened which made his temper worse than ever. A few years ago the British had found oil in some of the kingdoms around al-Ghazira, and already there were rumours that al-Ghazira was just a speck of sand floating on a sea of oil. So the British, for the first time, sent a resident to al-Ghazira, to make the Malik sign a treaty which would let the British dig for oil.

With great fanfare the Resident arrived, in a battleship. People liked him: he was a fat, round little man who laughed a lot and slept a lot. He liked fancy clothes and pomp and ceremony and parading soldiers. Everywhere he went in al-Ghazira hundreds of people followed him, because whenever he spoke he made his lips into a circle of such perfection that everyone who saw him held their breath waiting for a black, wonderfully rounded goat’s turd to fall out. And so it was that he came to be known as Goat’s Arse.

Once every week Goat’s Arse would go to the Old Fort and plead and argue, trying to persuade the Malik to sign the treaty, but the Malik wouldn’t hear of it. He had seen what had happened to the princes of India and he had sworn he would never let himself be reduced to their state. So, inevitably, the day came when — much against his will, for he was a peaceable man — Goat’s Arse began to talk of calling for battleships and the Malik began to despair.

The Malik used to read a lot, and at that time, in his worry, he began to spend whole days reading until it became a kind of madness — histories of the great Baghdadi and Cairene dynasties, lives of the caliphs and the kings and so on. From one of these he got an idea. In his madness he decided he would teach the British a lesson.

He decided to fry Goat’s Arse.

Carefully the Malik made his plans. He invited Goat’s Arse to a private dinner to celebrate, he said, his birthday. Goat’s Arse was delighted; he thought the Malik had finally decided to sign the treaty. It was a special occasion, he thought, and ought to be treated with proper ceremony. When the day came he dressed himself in his best uniform, all scarlet and black, and mounted his great white charger. Before him, with their lances and flags and raised pennants, rode his small squadron of Indian cavalry, and ahead of them marched four Sikhs, immense men in turbans, playing bagpipes and kettledrums. It was something to see: plump little Goat’s Arse on his white horse, with all those troops, turbaned and bearded, sashed and sabred, parading through the town, past the harbour, into the Maidan al-Jami‘i, straight through towards the Fort on the hill. The whole town came running out of their houses to follow them. At the foot of the hill the crowd was stopped by the Malik’s Bedouin guards, for the Malik had given them strict orders that nobody was to be allowed near the Fort but Goat’s Arse and his entourage. So the crowd stopped at the foot of the hill and watched Goat’s Arse and his troops till they disappeared.

Outside the Fort, Goat’s Arse’s troops presented arms and blew their bugles and did many other things of that kind, until the great old gates swung slowly open. Then Goat’s Arse rode majestically to the head of his squadron, stately and erect on his white charger, and led them towards the gate …

How was Goat’s Arse to know that right above that gate the Malik had stationed the man he most trusted — a eunuch, ebony-black and so enormously fat he had come to be known universally as Jabal the Mountainous Eunuch — with a vat of boiling oil, or that in seven kingdoms Jabal was renowned for his cowardice, and at that very moment, waiting for the Malik to fire the flare which was to be his signal to tip the oil over, he was a quaking heap of flesh almost ready to jump into the oil himself?

Goat’s Arse rode serenely on, the plumes in his helmet nodding in the wind, his squadron trotting behind him, on and on; and at the right moment, just when the charger’s head entered the shadow of the gate, the Malik fired his flare and Jabal the Eunuch, in one shivering rush, heaved at the vat of boiling oil.

The trouble was, something went wrong with the flaregun. The flare looped into the courtyard and burst into light about a foot from the horse’s nose. The horse reared, whinnying, throwing Goat’s Arse wide of the gate, and charged straight into the Fort. There was a waterfall of oil, but all that was fried was the end of the horse’s tail, only a few hairs, which were of no use to anyone.

In a flash Goat’s Arse’s soldiers had him off the ground — bruised but very alive — and galloping through the city. What they were going to do was no mystery: they were going to radio their warships to bombard al-Ghazira. The streets emptied behind them until in moments the city was midnight-still, every door locked and every last grain of gold hidden away under secret bricks. At the Fort the Bedouin were trying to hurry the Malik into the desert. Even there they could hear the wails of the women rising above the town, already lamenting the sack of al-Ghazira.

But there was one thing no one knew; only one townsman had been in the Fort at the time of the Bloody Fry-day as it came to be called — only one who had seen precisely what had happened — and naturally that was Nury the sharp-eyed Damanhouri, who had heard of the feast and raced to the Fort with a donkey-load of eggs. He was coming out of the kitchen when the flare exploded, and no sooner had the first drop of oil sizzled on to the horse’s tail than Nury was on his donkey, heading straight for the Souq, for he knew that here at last was something Jeevanbhai would value.

Till then Jeevanbhai had had a few dealings with the Malik. The Malik spoke to him in Urdu, which he had learnt in India, and they dealt well together, but not as well as Jeevanbhai would have wished. On the Fry-day, Jeevanbhai saw his chance. He raced to the Fort on Nury’s donkey and set about persuading the Malik that to escape would be to admit guilt. No, he argued, the only wise thing to do was to counter Goat’s Arse’s moves before he made them.

At once Jeevanbhai drew up a message for the British Viceroy in India, Goat’s Arse’s boss, a man famous for his enthusiasm for local customs and suchlike (so Jeevanbhai said). Goat’s Arse, the message said, had broken into and disrupted the most ancient of Ghaziri ceremonies, one that took place only once every seven years, on the reigning Malik’s birthday. This was the ceremony of the Ant-Frying, when the Ants under the Fort’s south gate, a most ancient line of ants, were cooked in a shower of boiling oil. The desecration of the Ant-Frying had placed the timeless traditions of the Ghaziri monarchy, and thus the prestige of the whole British Empire, in, yes, in jeopardy. If Goat’s Arse were taxed with this, the message warned, he would probably deny everything. In all likelihood he didn’t even know of the ceremony; such was his contempt for the customs of al-Ghazira, he had not made even the smallest effort to acquaint himself with them … And so on and so on.

It worked. They sent the message on the Malik’s new radio set; two warships stopped on the horizon and turned back; and within a week Goat’s Arse was recalled.

Two warships, or a good eye and a quick mind?

But still the Malik had to pay a price. Back in his own country Goat’s Arse made a tremendous noise and wrote a book about how close he had come to being a deep-fried fritter in his king’s service. Eventually they sent out a new resident known for his toughness; a thin-lipped fish of a man who arrived with a whole regiment of Indian soldiers. He left the Malik in the Fort, but posted a guard outside and exiled his Bedouin tribesmen. After a few months the Malik was forced to sign the oil treaty. Even at that stage, he tried to keep a hold on things by insisting that only Ghaziris would work in the Oiltown. But Thin Lips wouldn’t hear of it; he wanted only his own men, men he could control. Finally, the Malik signed when warships appeared again, but on one condition: that the Oilmen never leave the Oiltown and never enter al-Ghazira.

For many years things went on, uneasily but peacefully: the Oilmen stayed inside the Oiltown with their hirelings; the Malik was more or less a prisoner in the Old Fort, allowed out only on state occasions; Thin Lips virtually ran the town; and every seven years the Ant-Frying was ritually performed. One man did well out of it all, and that was Jeevanbhai Patel. He posed as the Malik’s accountant, and Thin Lips could think of no reason to keep a harmless old man like him out of the Fort, so he became one of the Malik’s few contacts with the outside world. Jeevanbhai went in and out of the Fort running the Malik’s errands, and the Malik used the influence he still had to get Jeevanbhai the contract for the customs. So Jeevanbhai turned his links with the Fort to good use and made money. The Malik had use for him, too: he was making his own plans for the future, and Jeevanbhai’s dhows, which at that time were sailing all over the Indian Ocean, often came back lying deep in the water. They were weighed down, people said, with guns and ammunition which somehow found their way into the Old Fort.

So things went on.

The Oiltown prospered and grew, and the time came when they wanted more space. They took permission and went around al-Ghazira looking for some more land, and eventually they decided on a few acres at the far end of al-Ghazira, almost on the border with the next kingdom. It was a marshy, sandy bit of land by the sea. To them it looked unused, and they assumed that they would have no trouble buying it — for more than it was worth, if need be.

But actually that was a very special piece of land. It was special for the Mawali because old Sheikh Musa was said to be buried there; it was special for the shopkeepers of the Souq because they held fairs there on all the great feast-days, and in those times, before borders had guards, thousands of people flocked to them from all the neighbouring kingdoms and the shopkeepers grew richer every year; the Malik loved that bit of land, too, for twice every year thousands of birds flew over it, and on those days the Malik was allowed out of the Fort, for there was no better place in the world for falconry.

So, when the Oilmen went blithely up to the Fort to buy that piece of land, the blood almost burst from the Malik’s face. Something terrible might have happened again if Nury the Damanhouri hadn’t seen them going in and told Patel. Patel ran to the Fort and calmed the Malik down. Of course, he had a plan. He went around the Souq, got the shopkeepers together, and they met Thin Lips and told him that if that bit of land were sold they would all shut down the Souq and emigrate to Zanzibar.

The Oilmen had one last try. They went to the Malik with a new treaty, and offered to double his share of the oil money if he sold them that land.

Later, people said that the Malik spat on the treaty and drove them out of the Fort with a whip.

No more was heard of buying land for a while: the Oilmen went back to the Oiltown; the Malik stayed in his fort; and Jeevanbhai continued to prosper. But that was when the world first heard rumours about the Mad Malik of al-Ghazira, and soon after Thin Lips took the Malik’s half-brother, the Amir, whom the Malik hated more than anyone else in the world, even more than his father, out of the Fort and sent him to England or America or somewhere, to study. By then Thin Lips had his own friends in the town, none of them very fond of the Malik, and he sent their sons with the Amir as well. The families who were loyal to the Malik — and there were many — complained, but there was nothing anyone could do, and soon things were quiet again.

Years passed: the Malik stayed in his fort, the Amir and his friends stayed abroad, and all was quiet in al-Ghazira. We heard of wars, then the British left, and Thin Lips with them. The Malik was free again, but by that time he had lost his old fire, and already a new embassy with a new Thin Lips was on the ascendant, so all was still quiet in al-Ghazira.

Then one day the oil company changed, and at once the whole of al-Ghazira was agog. New men arrived. They looked over the Oiltown, and it was as clear as daylight they weren’t happy with it. They surveyed al-Ghazira for a few weeks and eventually they found a new, better site for an Oiltown. You don’t have to wonder where that site was.

Soon after the Oilmen were seen going into the Old Fort, with a carload of money to buy the land, people said — but after barely ten minutes shots were heard in the Fort and the cars came hurtling out. No one was hurt, but the Malik had made a mistake. These men weren’t lightly to be shot at. For them life was a war. Nothing was going to stop them getting what they wanted; certainly not the Mad Malik of al-Ghazira. The battle for the site was no longer a game. It had become a feud, like the old desert feuds: a battle of honour.

The first move came soon after. One night a helicopter landed in the desert, far outside the city, and Nury the Damanhouri, who happened to be chasing a chicken, saw the Amir, the Malik’s almost-forgotten half-brother, and his friends step out. The Oilmen’s cars were waiting for them, and they were whisked away to a huge glittering new palace which had sprung up overnight on the far side of the city.

Who can describe the excitement, the near-frenzy of curiosity which gripped al-Ghazira then? People crowded into mosques and cafés, talking feverishly through the night; rumours blew like hurricanes through the Souq and you had to pay to stand under the Bab al-Asli. We heard stories of strings of pearls being given away for one little driblet of news. But there was no news to be had. The ornate silver doors of the New Palace stayed firmly shut, the Malik stayed in the Old Fort and the Oilmen in the Oiltown.

That was when Nury made his fortune. Inevitably, he was the only man in al-Ghazira to go freely in and out of the New Palace — it turned out that in his years away our Amir had developed a terrible weakness for boiled eggs.

In a matter of days Nury was a celebrated man: the café he went to had to build an extension over the road; the mosque he prayed at was always full to bursting; and soon we saw a new floor rising on Nury’s little house. Nury’s name became a byword, for he was always truthful and always right. When he said the Amir had been appointed Oil Minister, people laughed at him, for no one had heard of an Oil Minister before. But in a week there was a proclamation and Nury was proved right. It was Nury who first said that one of the Amir’s friends was going to become Defence Minister, and he was right. He was right about the Education Minister, the Culture Minister and the Foreign Minister as well. But, still, when Nury said the Amir would soon become Public Works Minister, doubt was born again. Why would the Amir want to be Public Works Minister as well as Oil Minister? It seemed meaningless, so we assumed it to be untrue, and suddenly Nury found himself alone in his café again.

Meanings are never apparent.

Late one night, when the whole town was asleep, Nury galloped out of the road to the New Palace on his donkey, hoofs flying, eggs scattering, dogs barking, through the harbour, straight towards the Maidan al-Jami‘i, past the Souq, heading directly for Jeevanbhai’s house. There, without so much as tethering his donkey, he flung himself on the door and hammered with all his feeble strength.

But no one can reckon for chance. Unusually for a man so quick and alert Jeevanbhai sleeps like a dead man, and it so happened that just a few days earlier his wife had gone to India on a visit. She was a rather suspicious woman, so before leaving she had gone around al-Ghazira looking for a woman of suitable age and decrepitude to work in the house while she was away. She found Saneyya, grandmother of Ali the taxi-driver and Nasser of the blue café, then a woman of seventy-five, famed in all the kingdoms for her astonishing ugliness, much loved of the pearl divers and boatmen because she could scare sharks into tearing out their own entrails simply by grinning into the water; widowed at sixteen, on the dawn after her wedding, when, after the darkness of a night in which she conceived her son, her bridegroom rose eagerly to lift the veils from her face and died at once, of shock (blinded, some say). For Jeevanbhai’s wife, Saneyya seemed God’s gift. Poor woman: little did she know what fires smouldered in Saneyya.

On that night when Nury hammered on the door, with fate hanging in the balance, the only person in the house apart from Jeevanbhai was Saneyya, and it was she who awoke and came to the door, creaking and complaining, it was she who whispered, hoarse and suspicious: Who’s there?

It’s me, Saneyya, Nury answered, I have something terribly important to say, can’t wait another moment. Open the door a crack, ya Saneyya, and as God is Great let me in.

There was something in those words, some hint of a memory, which played havoc in Saneyya’s heart. Trembling with disbelief, her voice shaking with eagerness, Saneyya whispered: At last, at last, Nury, you dilatory Damanhouri. At last after all these years. Say it again, ya Nury, let me hear you again.

And Nury, as though he were reciting a poem, whispered: Quick, Saneyya, quick, I can’t wait any longer. Open up, open, let me in.

At that Saneyya could not keep herself from giggling, and giggling she said: Wait, ya Nury, there’s no hurry. We have the whole night.

Outside, Nury was beside himself: Saneyya, there’s no time to waste. Open up. I tell you, you’ll be well rewarded.

Talk of rewards already, ya Nury? Do you think I need a reward? Your heart’s enough, no less than the other things. Hold tight and wait a little. What can I do with my petticoats all tied up?

Nury was desperate; his eyes had gone wild and sweat was streaming from his face. He started to explain what he had overheard at the New Palace, but then he stopped himself, for there was no telling who might overhear him. Instead he spoke in riddles: Listen carefully, Saneyya, and use your mind. What happens when you have a pot of rice about to boil over and somebody calls you to the door? Do you stand there chattering? No, you run back because you have to stir your pot. It’s like that, Saneyya. Now, stop talking, open this door and let me in.

Like a whip Saneyya’s hand flashed through the door, slapped him and shut the door again. For shame, Nury, she cackled. Why all this dirt? Boiling or not, you’ll have to wait.

Then Nury understood, and he understood, too, that if Saneyya were denied she would drive him from the house and make sure he didn’t meet Jeevanbhai for as long as she could. There was no escape for Nury. When Saneyya opened the door at last, he screwed his courage together and resigned himself to his fate.

What had to happen happened: Nury the Cross-Eyed Damanhouri and Saneyya, Terror of the Deep, coupled. It was no ordinary coupling: after a little awkwardness in the beginning, during which Saneyya learnt not to look into his eyes, and he got used to the gaps in her teeth, they so lost themselves in ecstasy that people say they shook the whole of the Souq, and Nury almost forgot his errand.

Some things happen for the best even though it doesn’t seem so at the time. Even if things had taken a different turn later, Nury was a ruined man, a beggar, egg-less for life, because Saneyya was not the woman to be silent about a conquest so long in the coming.

When Nury recovered from his raptures he woke Patel and told him what he had overheard at the New Palace. Years after, people often spent whole days talking about what he said that night, but still nobody knows exactly what it was; most of it is just guesses and conjecture. Some say it was this: that night the Oilmen were planning to fly in two aeroplanes full of specially grown date palms; unique palms, which could thrive on any soil, however inhospitable. The Amir’s part was to rush the palms to that empty bit of land by the sea and plant them there, all in one night. Then in the morning he was to make proclamations in all the squares of the city inviting the townspeople to witness the near-miracle; to have a glimpse of the things the world could do for the forgotten land of al-Ghazira. Then, as the Public Works Minister, he was to lay claim to that empty bit of land and fence it off. The Malik was bound to resist, they calculated, perhaps by force. But by then the townspeople, so long loyal to the Malik, would hesitate, dazzled by their glimpse of the Amir’s power to turn the desert green, and in the end would rally to his side. And then together, with a little help from the Amir’s bodyguards and the Oilmen, they would storm the Old Fort, banish the Malik and the past, and install the Amir and the future.

That was the plan, some say, but nobody knows for sure. What is sure is that, within minutes of hearing what Nury had to say, Jeevanbhai was on his donkey flying towards the Old Fort. What happened there nobody knows. Some say that Jeevanbhai had to lock the Malik into a room to keep him from attacking the New Palace at that very moment with all his hidden arms. What is sure is that Jeevanbhai found some way to stop him, for of course he had his own plan. Within an hour he was back in the town, with Jabal the Eunuch and a wad of letters from the Malik.

Feverishly Jeevanbhai, Jabal and Nury raced around the old city, waking up certain shopkeepers known for their loyalty to the Malik and showing them the Malik’s letters. They worked like madmen, for they knew, each one of them, that they were fighting for their survival (though already, unknown to the others, in one of those heads, ripples of doubt about the future were spreading).

Then a large group of shopkeepers led by Jeevanbhai, Jabal and Nury vanished into the Souq. When they came out again they were carrying and pushing barrels and tins of oil — mainly kerosene, but all kinds of other oils as well, mustard oil, cottonseed oil, linseed oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, even ghee. The oil was taken down to the harbour in carts and loaded on to a flat-bottomed boat. When that was done Patel, Jabal, Nury and a couple of boatmen climbed into the boat and rowed down the inlet towards the sea until they disappeared into the blackness of the night.

The next anyone saw of them, Jeevanbhai, naked except for his long white shirt, and Nury were clinging to an enormous horse, white-eyed with fear, galloping crazily up the dirt track which later became the Corniche, towards the harbour. A whole platoon of the Amir’s guards, huge bandoliered Pathans from the Khyber, were chasing them on foot, almost as fast as the horse could run, whooping and pot-shotting.

As it was reconstructed in the cafés, Jeevanbhai’s plan was to row silently along the coast to the site. The Amir’s men, he reasoned, would probably guard the dirt tracks along the road, and turn their backs to the sea. Once there, he planned to soak the whole place in oil, step back into the boat and toss a lighted rag behind him, sending the Amir’s dreams up in flames.

Jeevanbhai was too subtle a man to think of acts as important in themselves; that was why he stopped the Malik from attacking the New Palace, even though, with the townspeople behind him, he may well have won the day. But for Jeevanbhai it is not acts, but warnings, meanings, those delicate shades which remove an act from mere adventure and place it in history, which are important. Jeevanbhai didn’t simply want to burn the date palms. What would be the use of that? For him the date palms were to be words, to tell the Amir that dreams collapse from the inside, of themselves.

That was the irony of it.

The first part of Jeevanbhai’s plan went off perfectly: the palms had already been planted, and the Amir’s guards, posted to guard the track to the city, were snoring behind a sand-dune, a long way from the site, while their horses were tethered under the palms. The three of them soaked the place in oil without so much as a sound. In less than an hour they were ready, and not one of the guards had noticed.

Already smiling in triumph, Jeevanbhai reached out for the rag which he had handed to Jabal beside him, but his hands clutched empty air. Jabal was gone.

It was not the Amir’s dreams which collapsed from within.

Spinning around, Jeevanbhai saw a mountainous shadow creeping towards the guards, already too far away to stop. Next moment Nury caught his arm and pointed to the beach — the boatmen, never slow to smell defeat, were far out to sea.

But even then the old fox had a trick or two left. He tore off his dhoti, tied one end of it to a kerosene-sodden date palm, and took the other in his hand. Just as Jabal was shaking the guards awake, Jeevanbhai handed the reins of one of the guards’ horses to Nury, cut the rest loose and drove them off. With shot spraying into the sand around them, he leapt on to the horse, pulled Nury up behind him, and lit his dhoti. They were lying flat on the galloping horse, holding on for their lives, when the palms burst into flames.

In the harbour the shots were heard from a long way off, and since it was already dawn a crowd soon gathered. When they saw a galloping horse beating up a cloud of dust on the far side of the inlet, there was a tremendous commotion. Some thought it was a Bedouin raid like those their grandfathers had told them about; others thought the sheikhs of the neighbouring kingdoms were attacking at last as people had so often said they would. All was confusion: al-Ghazira had been quiet so long nobody knew how to deal with a crisis. People — men, children, women — ran into the streets, screaming and crying. Then the horse was upon them, rearing, hoofs scything the air, and Nury and poor, half-naked Jeevanbhai were picking themselves from the dust and shouting, Run, run — but before they could turn the earth shook beneath their feet, for the Malik, no longer able to hold himself, was firing his ill-directed bazookas into the sea, raising volcanoes of water where it didn’t matter. And then that whole early-morning crowd, half-dressed and unwashed, underweared and unshat, turned as one man and fled down the road with Nury in the lead.

For some reason, nobody has ever understood why, instead of turning into the city, after the harbour, Nury ran straight on, past the sandspits and further, with the crowd flocking behind him in a dust-clouded mass, and shots and bazookas shaking the whole city; on, down past the Ras, along the old road, while behind them, far away in the New Palace, the Amir and his mounted guards were trotting out, towards the Maidan al-Jami‘i; and in the Oiltown the Oilmen’s uniformed hirelings from every corner of the world were polishing their guns and their batons …

But Nury knew nothing of that, and Jeevanbhai was already lost far behind; he had fallen and rolled into the Ras where he lay hidden for days, in which other house but Zindi’s? Nury just ran, on and on, until in front of him, out of the sand, there suddenly arose the barbed-wire fence of the Oiltown. From the other side of the fence, faces stared silently out — Filipino faces, Indian faces, Egyptian faces, Pakistani faces, even a few Ghaziri faces, a whole world of faces. In despair Nury threw himself on the fence begging them to open the gates. But the faces stayed where they were, already masks, staring at his sad, desperate, crossed eyes.

You must remember this was long ago, so long ago that even oil didn’t bring much money and not one Ghaziri in a hundred or even a thousand had cars and houses and palaces in Switzerland. It was before the great strikes and the riots; before the Oilmen’s planes bombed the Ghaziris in the Oiltown; before the unions were driven into secrecy; before the women and the schoolchildren poured into the streets to fight, and were murdered with the newest and best guns and helicopters and computers money can buy. It was before all of that.

In those days many Ghaziris wanted work. But there was no work for them in the Oiltown, for the Oilmen knew that a man working on his own land has at least a crop to fight for. Instead they brought their own men. They were welcome: since the beginning of time al-Ghazira has been home to anyone who chooses to call it such — if he comes as a man. But those ghosts behind the fence were not men, they were tools — helpless, picked for their poverty. In those days when al-Ghazira was still a real country they were brought here to slip between its men and their work, like the first whiffs of an opium dream; they were brought as weapons, to divide the Ghaziris from themselves and the world of sanity; to turn them into buffoons for the world to laugh at. And with time on their side they succeeded. So, when Nury threw himself on the fence and clawed his hands to ribbons, begging them to let him in, nothing happened, for there were no men inside to open the gates for Nury the desperate Damanhouri.

When the gates did open, it was to let out the Oiltown’s uniformed guards with their batons and shields and water-hoses. There was nothing Nury could do but turn again, and run, with the crowd milling behind him.

By this time the crowd was an avalanche of people and confusion, and they were driven straight on, past the Ras again, straight towards the Maidan al-Jami‘i, like fish into a net. The Amir’s men had long since ringed the square, and blocked all the lanes and roads leading out of it. Once the crowd was inside, coolly and efficiently the guards let fly.

It was not the End or the Day of Judgement — nothing of the kind. The guards hurled not bullets but tear gas. In a few minutes the excitement died away and the crowd was as docile and drugged as a school of stunned fish. The Amir’s men let them out and herded them back to their houses. Some people’s eyes watered for days afterwards, a couple of old men were stricken with palsy because of the excitement, and there were a few broken legs and a miscarriage or two. All that was lost was a little breath.

We were wrong. This was no feud: no tyrants died; there was no fratricide, no regicide, no love, no hate. It was just practice for the princes of the future and their computers — an exercise in good husbandry.

Only Nury died. He was running across the Maidan towards the Bab al-Asli when the tear gas burst. Temporarily robbed of his sharp eyes Nury shambled helplessly around until he blundered into a Bedu boy, come to the Souq on his camel to sell wool. The animal, frenzied by the noise and the gas, bit poor Nury’s head cleanly off his shoulders.

That was the end of Nury the Sharp-Eyed Damanhouri.

It happened for the best: even if Saneyya had not already blown away the foundations of his trade, Nury would have been homeless in the new Ghazira. There was no place in it for sharp-eyed egg-sellers. All the eggs now came from the poultry farms of Europe, and Nury could never have afforded a plane.

The Malik was rarely seen after that, though he was, and still is, said to be the ruler. He was left in the Old Fort, but more as a prisoner than a king. They say the Amir found and seized a vast trove of arms in the Fort. The Oilmen offered to pension the old Malik off in their own country, but they could only have carried his dead body out of the Fort, so the Amir had to be content with leaving him there, with his own guards posted outside. But, still, he’ll never have a day’s rest as long as the Malik still lives, for no one can tell what the old man is plotting.

And Jeevanbhai: all his businesses and ships, his warehouses and customs contracts were seized. Only his shop in the Souq and his office near the harbour were left to him. For years he was a broken man. But his happy couples didn’t forget him, and with a little bit of help he started again. What little he has today he had to build up anew. Then, just when he thought he still had his gods’ blessings, his wife died, and today he is the walking corpse you see. A man can try only so many times and no more. That’s why Jeevanbhai has taken to drinking in the secrecy of his shop.

Jabal the Eunuch moved to the New Palace and soon became one of the Amir’s closest advisers. The Amir never forgot that he may have lost the Battle of the Date Palms if it were not for Jabal, and he slipped a dozen or so of the most lucrative British and American agencies into his lap, and today they say Jabal the Mountainous Eunuch has grown into a whole cordillera, with enough money to buy a continent to spread himself out on.

The Amir found out which shopkeepers had supplied Jeevanbhai with kerosene that night, and their shops were seized, every single one, and distributed among the Amir’s friends. Soon after, the fairs on the empty site were stopped as well.

The New City appeared overnight, like a mushroom. The Oilmen forgot all about a new Oiltown, for the whole country was their Oiltown now.

For years that bit of land on the edges of the New City was left as it was, covered with charred date palms. Then, long afterwards, when the Amir judged the Battle of the Date Palms forgotten, he had the plot cleared, and later the Corniche was laid around it. Then, last year, people said that a group of Ghaziri companies were putting up money to build a market greater than any in the continent; an immense shopping arcade, with five pointed arms, in celebration of the starry future. It would be called an-Najma, the Star, and it was to be built on a marshy, useless bit of land at the far end of al-Ghazira near the border. Nobody knew at first where the money was going to come from; the newspapers gave the names of unknown companies.

Truth lies in silences.

That money was put up by Jabal, King of the Eunuchs, and his friends.

Hajj Fahmy retreated into a long silence. No one in the room spoke, for they knew there were many twists and turns to the Hajj’s storytelling. At length, the Hajj put up his hand again.

Let me tell you now, he said, why the Star fell. It fell because no one wanted it. The Malik didn’t want it: he hasn’t forgotten one moment of the Battle of the Date Palms and never will. Nobody in the Souq wanted it: they haven’t forgotten the Battle, either, nor the confiscations. Besides, none of them had been allotted a shop in the Star. If the Star had actually opened, how long would the Souq have lasted? The Mawali didn’t want the Star because of their sheikh’s grave. The contractors who built it didn’t care whether it stood or fell — they had made their money anyway. The lovers who went there at night didn’t want it; the smugglers who landed there didn’t want it; Jabal and his friends didn’t want it — they’ll be happier with the insurance money. Did even the Amir want it? His money’s far away in some safe country, and nothing that happens in al-Ghazira matters to him much.

No one wanted the Star. That was why the Star fell: a house which nobody wants cannot stand.

Hajj Fahmy leant back against the wall, sighing with exhaustion. After a long while Abu Fahl broke the silence with a laugh. For an old man, he said, a grain of sand can become the Dome of the Rock. Nothing is simple. Anybody can see why the Star fell: it fell because too much sand was mixed with the cement. Anyone with any experience of building can see that. There is no mystery to it. Alu had no experience of building, so he reacted too slowly and got himself caught in the wreckage while everyone else managed to get away. Finished. Some things are simple.

Abu Fahl threw a dismissive glance across the room at Hajj Fahmy. The Hajj did not see it, for his eyes were shut. It was Rakesh who spoke: You really think it’s so simple, Abu Fahl? The words were forced out of his throat with a visible effort: Rakesh was not a man who relished being conspicuous in a crowd.

Abu Fahl, artlessly skilled in carrying an audience, looked around the room smiling, encouraging laughter. Yes, he said to Rakesh, it’s really that simple.

Then, maybe, said Rakesh, there’s something you don’t know. You say Alu didn’t run out with us because he didn’t realize that the building was going to collapse? The truth is that Alu was the first among us to hear the rumbles and the noise of the falling bricks and plaster. At the time he had just discovered two sewing machines, meant for display, under a tarpaulin sheet. When he heard the noise, he left the machines uncovered and pushed us out of the basement. That was before you shouted to us. I was already running when I heard you. I stopped once on the stairs — the walls were already buckling all around — and I saw that Alu wasn’t behind me. I ran back and looked into the showroom. I couldn’t see much because there was dust everywhere but, still, I’m certain I saw him carefully covering those two machines. I shouted to him: Run, Alu. He turned and waved me on, and if it were not for the dust I would swear I saw him smile. Then the rumbles grew louder, and I ran up the stairs, while Alu stayed behind, perhaps still smiling.

Chapter Thirteen. The Call to Reason

As soon as the plane took off from Bombay, Jyoti Das knew that the light-headedness he was feeling had nothing to do with the altitude. He had been in planes before; planes didn’t make you feel quite like that. It was a mystery; he could think of no explanation.

It became a little clearer when he talked to the man who was sitting next to him. He was a motor mechanic from Gujarat and he was going to al-Ghazira because he had been offered a job which would pay him, in a month, more or less as much as an ASP earned in a year, allowances included. But, still, there were problems, the mechanic complained: no medical benefits, no accommodation, no security at all. It was all a big worry. Would he fall ill? Would he be able to find a place to live? Would his boss be reasonable or not? Would he save enough money to get married at the end of it? No escape — worries everywhere, no matter what you were paid. Listening to him, Jyoti suddenly felt his light-headedness throwing him into somersaults; blowing the weights off his feet.

He knew then that it didn’t matter, at least for a while. Things like that matter only at home, and foreign places are all alike in that they are not home. Nothing binds you there.

And it became clearer still when he looked through his window and saw an indentation on the horizon, barely visible, no more really than a speck of dust on the glass, but enough to snap something tight in his stomach and send surges of excitement coursing through him. The hairs rose all along his arm, and he had to grip the sides of the seat to hold himself steady. He knew that his swimming head had no connection with that hint of sand in the distance. It would have made no difference whether that bit of land was al-Ghazira or Antarctica. The journey was within and it was already over, for the most important part was leaving.

And then, in his exhilaration, he knew also that he was grateful. Even six months of hellish confusion were worth a journey which helped you through time even before it had ended.

He had returned from his journey to Mahé, over six months ago, ripe with enthusiasm. The DIG, he thought, could be no less enthusiastic. After all, it was he who had taken up the case and followed it through, even when he, Jyoti Das, had thought it a dead end. The DIG had trusted his own judgement and gone ahead, and in Mahé he had been proved right, after a fashion. So Das worked hard on his report of his visit to Mahé, ignoring his mother’s recommendations of prospective brides. He assumed that once the DIG was shown the hard facts he would leap to push the case through. In fact Das reckoned that he would have to fight hard to play a part in the follow-up.

But when he sent the file up it disappeared and the DIG said not so much as one word about it. A week later Das put up an application for travel allowances and foreign allowances and so on, hoping to prod the DIG into doing something. But nothing happened. When he went to meet the DIG in his room he was leaning back in his chair, mournfully toying with half a cabbage. He refused to discuss the case and instead brought the conversation menacingly around to Das’s stationery indents. Exorbitant, he said, and unaccountable — enough to stock a new shop.

Das left the room bewildered. Nothing happened for a couple of months, though Das put up regular memos and reminders. He even cultivated a humiliating familiarity with the DIG’s personal secretary. Nothing came of it: a veil had fallen.

After another couple of months, during which he slipped from anger into sleepless, nail-biting frustration, and then finally into frustrated resignation, the DIG summoned him to his office. The problem, he said, absent-mindedly snapping a carrot into bits, was that if he, Das, were to go there had to be a replacement. It would be impossible for the office to manage without so valuable an officer. The answer was, obviously, a replacement. He had already looked at the service lists and decided upon a suitable replacement: a young police officer. Unfortunately, the application he had sent to the higher-ups in the Secretariat had been turned down. Therefore the delay. Of course, the case was important, but the office couldn’t do without a replacement.

He looked at Das meaningfully.

Again Das went away bewildered. It seemed to him that the DIG was trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t understand what.

He was still scratching his head a week later when he was called to the DIG’s office again. The key to the problem, the DIG said, crumbling a piece of fried potato, was the replacement. He told Das the name; it meant nothing to him. Anyway, the DIG said carefully, stressing certain words, solve the replacement problem and we’ll see about your foreign trip. Go away and think about it. Go to Delhi if you like. You have an uncle there in the Ministry, no?

Grand-uncle, sir, Jyoti Das said automatically.

Still confused, he took a week’s leave and went to Delhi to meet his mother’s uncle, the Secretary. It was embarrassing, for Jyoti hadn’t met him in years, and he was afraid he wouldn’t be acknowledged. But in the event it turned out well: his grand-uncle was keen to buy a house in Calcutta, and wanted Jyoti’s father to look around for something suitable. On the assurance that it would be done, he set to work, and within a week the DIG’s application was cleared.

After that, the DIG’s office burst into a storm of activity: files hurtled about, the DIG spent hours on the telephone, and suddenly one day Jyoti heard that everything had been worked out. The rest took less than a week.

The day before he was to leave, the DIG came to his office, patted him on the shoulder and said: Don’t worry about the delay. Time gives a case a chance to develop properly. And don’t hurry when you get there. Take your time. Let the case mature. Then, as a token of his good wishes, he presented Jyoti with a crate of Golden Delicious apples.

And, like one of those golden apples, al-Ghazira rotated slowly below him, as the plane banked. He squinted down, through the glare of the midday sun on white gypsum-laden sand. Black roads cut through the expanses of whiteness; he picked out the radial patterns of planned roads at one end of the town, and a large square far away, with huddled, twisting lanes dribbling out of it. As the plane came in to land, blinded by the glare of the sun, he forgot the Barbary falcon and the Saker falcon and the other birds he hoped to see, for he knew suddenly that al-Ghazira wasn’t a real place at all, but a question: are foreign countries merely not-home, or are they all that home is not?

He was already older.

In the crowded, luggage-cluttered, airsick chaos of the airport Das spotted Jai Lal with relief. He was a short, dapper man, with the last traces of adolescent acne still lingering incongruously on his thin, aquiline face. He had met — rather, bumped into — him once, at the head offices of the Secretariat in Delhi. Jai Lal had not paid him much attention then, for he was a few years his senior. But Das knew him by reputation: everyone who had met him talked of his clipped urbanity and his powerful connections with awe.

Hullo, Das said, sticking out his hand, I’m—

Yes, Jai Lal said, tapping his hand perfunctorily, we’ve met, haven’t we?

Jal Lal waved a few cards with careless arrogance and they were soon out of the airport. The air outside was like hot steam, and the sweat leapt from Das’s pores. He followed Jai Lal to his car, suppressing an urge to linger in the airport and watch the extraordinary assortment of people. But Jai Lal was already at his car, arguing with the porter in Hindi.

As soon as Das had shut his door, Jai Lal said: What happened, Das? Why did you take so long? I must have sent you over a dozen telexes. Couldn’t you have come a little earlier?

With an effort Das wrenched his eyes away from the billowing concrete folds of the airport’s tent-like roof. He sighed: You don’t know what trouble I’ve been having. My DIG wanted a replacement, one particular replacement, for my post, and it took months and months to arrange the transfer. I’ll tell you about it sometime. Let me just say I’m lucky to be here at all. But forget all that. Have there been any developments in the case?

Lal laughed acidly. He reached out and pressed a button. He waited until the metallic twanging of an electric guitar had filled the car. Yes, he said, you could say there’ve been developments in the case. In fact you could call your case overdeveloped. Your man’s dead.

Oh? After the plane and the airport, Das could find no stronger reaction in himself. I suppose, he said, I’d better telex back to stop them sending next week’s foreign allowance.

Lal thought for a moment. No, he said, there’s no hurry. But maybe we’d better telex them to approve your return ticket. You know, to tell you the truth, frankly, I don’t think there was any need to send you all the way here. I could easily have handled it myself. After all, it’s my job. I even wrote to HQ. But your boss was very keen to keep his fingers in the case, and the higher-ups insisted. But, if they were going to send you, at least they could have sent you earlier.

With an aching sense of loss, Das watched the shining metallic bulbs of al-Ghazira’s desalination plant diminishing in his window. Anyway, he said, tell me what happened. I might as well know.

Nothing much, said Lal, as far as I can tell. I only heard about it yesterday, from one of our sources — someone really reliable, who’s been living in the same house as your suspect. You see, that’s the thing: we chaps in the field do all the work, build up our sources and our networks, and then they send you people out, with no experience of local conditions. And that, too, when it’s too late. There really wasn’t any need.

Lal frowned at the road, his mouth a thin white line. Yes, thought Das, there wasn’t any need at all. You could have sent in a few reports; your uncles in the Ministry would have made sure everyone saw them; you’d have got a couple of quick promotions and an ‘A’-class posting — Bonn or Brussels or something. No need at all for anyone else to come along.

Aloud he said: What happened?

Oh, just an accident really, said Lal. The chap was working with some kind of construction gang. They used to do distempering and whitewashing and things like that. They were working in a building when it collapsed. It happened about four days ago. The collapse was in all the newspapers, because the building was meant to be a real showpiece. They called it the Star. These collapses happen all the time here. The contractors save money on material and so the buildings fall down. There was nothing in the newspapers about a death. Apparently your man was the only one, and even the authorities probably don’t know. My source says the gang he was working with wants to keep it quiet, because he was here illegally, and they could all have got into trouble. Anyway, you can hear all about it yourself; we’ll go and see my source this evening and find out if there’s anything to clear up.

Lal looked at Das, and saw him staring out of the window in silent disappointment. He gave him a consoling slap on the shoulder. Never mind, yar, he said. You’ve had a good ride on a plane, you’ll get to see al-Ghazira and buy a few nice things and, besides, you’ve got your travel allowance and foreign allowance for a week, so you’ll get something out of it. Don’t feel too bad about the whole thing.

Certainly not, thought Das. A week’s travel allowance and foreign allowance for me and an Italian car for you. Clearing his throat, he said: Yes, that’s true. When do we go to meet your source?

This evening, said Lal. I’ll pick you up from your hotel. You must have dinner with us afterwards.

They drove in silence for a while, past fountained roundabouts, and vast pitted construction sites and jungles of steel scaffolding. Soon they were caught in snarling traffic and Lal’s little car was lost among sports cars, and limousines with heavily curtained windows, and dust-spattered articulated trucks as long as trains, come all the way from Europe. Then, frowning thoughtfully, Lal asked: Who did you say your DIG is?

Das told him.

And what’s your replacement’s name?

Das told him, a little puzzled by his curiosity. Lal smiled when he heard the name: Let me see … I think they’re related; uncle and nephew in fact. Yes, I seem to remember hearing that. I suppose he couldn’t think of any way of getting him into the Secretariat without shifting you from your post for a bit.

Das felt as though he had been hit in the stomach. He propped himself upright with an outstretched arm, resisting the temptation to double up.

He had known but he had not noticed.

Oh, he said, I didn’t know. What else was there to say?

No, Lal said kindly, I suppose you didn’t. I remember hearing that you’re always very busy with birds and painting and things.

Jyoti sat out the rest of the drive in silence. He could not bring himself to ask Lal about the Barbary falcon, as he had meant to.

His name’s Jeevanbhai Patel, Lal said, hurrying Das through the Bab al-Asli, past the evening crowds strolling through the Souq’s main passageway. Das looked around him at the robes and headcloths of the Ghaziri men, at the black masks of the women, at gold watches and silver calculators, jewelled belts and silk shirts. He wanted to stop and look at everything properly, but Lal was ushering him rapidly along.

My predecessor passed him on to me, Lal said. He came here years ago — God knows when — long before the oil anyway. They say that once upon a time nothing happened in al-Ghazira that he didn’t know about. He’s a businessman. I believe he was quite successful once, but he got involved in something and lost all his money. That’s the odd thing about him. Your usual Indian bania’s first instinct is to stick to his shop or his trade and not get involved in anything, whichever part of the world he may be in. He knows he can make more money that way. But this man’s different: he jumps into things. That was his undoing. He’s an old man now of course, and his life’s behind him, but he still keeps his ears open. He drinks too much nowadays but, still, I must say we’ve had some very useful material from him.

They stopped at a shop — the Durban Tailoring House, Das read, on a board hanging askew over the door. It was a very dilapidated shop, in sharp contrast with its glittering neighbours. A figure materialized somewhere in the murky interior and advanced towards them: a man well past middle age, thin and slightly stooped, his face delicately lined, like a walnut, but nondescript except for large, decaying teeth that stuck almost horizontally out of his mouth.

Jeevanbhai led them through the shop to a room at the back. As Das entered the room, he faltered, for the reek of whisky clouded the room like a fog. It was a small room made even smaller by two large steel cabinets. There was a desk in the middle of the room, marooned among scattered files and stacks of paper weighed down by cracked saucers and chipped cups. Bits of paper blew around the room chased by half-hearted gusts from an ancient table-fan. It was very dim; the only light came from a single, dusty table-lamp that had been placed on the floor.

Jeevanbhai cleared piles of paper off two steel folding chairs, wiped them with a duster and hesitantly pushed them forward.

Patel sahb, Lal said, I hope we haven’t come too early?

No, no, said Jeevanbhai, not at all, never. No formalities. The man who works here leaves early nowadays. I let him go; he’s growing old. This is the best place and time to meet.

Lowering himself into a chair behind the desk, he pulled a drawer open and took out three glasses, one of them half-full, and a bottle of cheap Scotch whisky. A little bit? he said, turning a raised eyebrow from Jai Lal to Das.

Jai Lal glanced at Das and nodded. Jeevanbhai drained his glass and poured whisky into the glasses. Splashing a little water into them, he handed them out. Cheers! he said, knocking his glass against theirs.

So, Patel sahb, Lal said, sipping his warm whisky fastidiously, how are you?

Not bad; growing older.

Lal laughed: We’re all growing older.

Yes, said Jeevanbhai. We’re all growing older. He drained his glass and poured himself another drink.

Lal cleared his throat: Patel sahb, this is a friend of mine, Mr Das, who is also interested in what we were talking about yesterday. Could you tell him what you told me — about how this young man died?

Died? Jeevanbhai ran his tongue over his teeth. Who said he died?

Lal raised a quick eyebrow at Das. Didn’t you say he died? he said smoothly.

No, said Jeevanbhai, I just said the building fell on him, and that nobody could have survived it. That is not the same thing as saying nobody did survive it. No, no.

I see, I see, said Lal. What happened?

What happened? Who knows what happened?

What do you think happened?

Who am I to think anything happened, Mr Lal? Who are you?

Lal half-rose from his chair. Perhaps, Patel sahb, we could come back later, when you feel like talking? Or when your head is clearer?

Later, earlier, how does it matter? Jeevanbhai said softly. Whatever it is, whether it’s happened or not, it’s a little difficult — to use simple words — a little difficult to understand.

Lal shot a glance at Das and motioned to him to keep quiet and sit back. But Das could not keep himself from straining forward to look into Jeevanbhai’s face. Abruptly the bulb went out. Jeevanbhai rummaged among some papers on the floor, pulled out a bent candle and struck a match. When the flame spluttered Das noticed that Jeevanbhai’s hands were shaking, but he could not tell whether it was drunkenness or only an old man’s tremor. Jeevanbhai’s eyes glowed momentarily in the candlelight. Then he put the candle on the floor, beside his chair, to shield it from the fan, and at once his face disappeared into pools of shadow, and all Das could see were the enigmatic red teeth.

Late last night, Jeevanbhai said, with an almost imperceptible slur, they brought him back. Bhagwan jane, God knows how they did it. They must have taken thirty or forty men into the ruins of that building, and tools and things as well. There’s a police cordon around the ruins, all day and all night. How did they get through it? God knows. Perhaps, but of course this is just speculation, Abu Fahl — you don’t know him, a very wily man; knows every corner and every turn in al-Ghazira — found a way to pay those policemen to stay away from the building for a while. Perhaps.

Anyway they brought him back. And it wasn’t as though he was barely alive, like a survivor from a disaster of that kind ought to be. He was well, hearty, smiling, as healthy as any of us. I know: I saw him later. How does one account for that? A whole building had collapsed on him. No ordinary building, but millions and millions of dirhams in effect. It wasn’t good money, but any money on that scale has a certain weight. You can’t disregard it. And still he lived through the fall of that whole building. Apparently — this is just hearsay — he lay flat on the floor with a huge block of concrete just inches from his chest. And that, too, for four days. It is no exaggeration to say that many people in that situation would have died of shock. And, far from being dead, he seemed to have come out a new man altogether, if such a thing is possible.

People say, I don’t know with what truth, that he had no food or water for those four days. And when they were offered to him, they say, he refused. And when they asked him whether he wanted to leave that place, right till the very end, they say, he said no, he wanted to be left alone to think.

One could say: people think of these things when something unusual happens. But the truth remains, and it is that when he was brought out at last he was unscathed. It came as no surprise to anyone when some of the women there started saying that it was the doing of a dead sheikh whose grave lies under those ruins; one of his many miracles. People say these things.

I believe a crowd had gathered there long before he was brought back. When they saw him in the distance, they ran on to the road and carried him back to a house which belongs to one Hajj Fahmy — you don’t know him — an elderly man, greatly respected in that area. They carried him into the courtyard and put him on a platform where Hajj Fahmy keeps his loom — he was once a weaver — and they all crowded into the courtyard to listen to him.

And all evening the crowds grew and grew.

I heard all this, for I wasn’t there at the time. I was at my office near the harbour. I went there after I left the Souq, for there were a few things I had to do. Even in my office things weren’t as they usually are. My assistant, one Professor Samuel — no longer my assistant, I should add, but that comes later — had left the office even though I had told him to wait. And, very unusually for him, he had left it in great disorder.

But I had my work to do and it was only much, much later that I went back to the Ras, where we all live. Anybody could see that something unusual was happening there. Usually the Ras sleeps early, all except Zindi’s house, because people have to work. But last night I had a feeling — if one may talk of such a thing — that no one was sleeping. And yet the whole place was in darkness. Not a light in any of the shacks, not a person to be seen on the lanes, nobody sleeping out on the roofs. The whole place was, to use a simple word, deserted.

But at the other end of the Ras, where Hajj Fahmy lives, there were bright lights, and a faint hum, like a slow-running machine — the noise a crowd makes merely by breathing.

I thought they had organized a film on the beach as they do sometimes, though the place is never so deserted then. But I was tired, and I wanted to sleep, so I went straight back towards my room.

There again, when I pushed the door of the house open, things were not as they usually are. It was empty, or so I thought, and that house is never empty. I called out once or twice, but there were only echoes and the sound of geese hissing. I looked into the room on my left, where the men sleep, and it was empty. I looked to my right, into the room opposite, and — to tell you the truth — I was so startled I almost bit my tongue off.

Zindi at-Tiffaha — you don’t know her — a woman large enough to fill a room, was sitting on a mat in the corner, staring at me, but sightlessly, and without a sound, like a corpse. And in her lap was a baby no less silent, staring at me, too, with huge black eyes.

Zindi at-Tiffaha is the key to your mysteries, though you don’t know her. She’s the solution. It was she who brought your man here; it was she who fed him and found him work; and it was her house that he was living in when the Star fell. She rules over that house like a seth over a shop: nothing happens in it that she doesn’t plan. But last night there she was, sitting alone, like a statue, while her whole house was elsewhere.

Something’s wrong, I said to myself. This is not how Zindi is. There’s something on her mind. To tell the truth, actually, I knew quite well that there’s been something on her mind for some time. She’s been arranging secret meetings with the man who works in this shop and he’s been telling me a few things. But with me at least she’s always been able to keep up a brave face. Last night that face had melted away.

I said to her: Zindi, where’s everyone else? And when she answered I was, to admit nothing shameful, quite relieved, for even though she looked alive I couldn’t be sure.

She said: They’ve gone to bring Alu back.

Very quietly, I said: And what about you, Zindi? Why didn’t you go?

To my surprise — for Zindi is not a woman who tells people any more than they need to know — she answered. She said: If we all spent our time chasing every new madness that sweeps the Ras, what would happen? Some of us have to think of staying alive and keeping the house together as well. And what would I do there anyway? I’m just an old woman trying to cope with the world on my own.

Of course, you don’t know her, so you don’t know what her words meant. Neither I nor anyone else has ever before seen the slightest crack in Zindi’s strength. Even yesterday I would have sworn to you that not even a pile-driver could squeeze anything like hopelessness out of her. When she said what she did, I knew something had driven Zindi at-Tiffaha to the edge of her wits; that she was ripe and waiting for a guiding hand.

But at that very moment a woman called Kulfi, who lives in the house, ran into the room and shouted: Zindi, Karthamma’s stolen your money-tin. She’s throwing all your money away. Come on, quickly.

Then the old Zindi was back again. Faster than we could see, she counted from the corner, along the wall to the fourteenth brick. She pulled it out and found the hollow behind it empty. And the next moment she was out of the house, rolling like a wave, with the baby still in her arms, and we were running behind her.

The lane behind Hajj Fahmy’s house was thick with people, even though you can’t see into the courtyard of his house from the lane. But, still, there must have been more than a hundred people there, in a lane where two men usually have to fight to pass abreast. The crowd was like a wall. But Zindi was running fast, and with her weight she had worked up the power of a steam-roller. Holding the baby above her head, she crashed through the crowd, and we were carried along in her wake. She stopped at the door to the courtyard, not because she could not have gone any farther, but because — I think you could say — she was frozen with surprise.

The courtyard was even more crowded than the lane; you could see nothing but people. But, at the same time, it was absolutely silent, and the only sound you could hear was Alu’s voice, clear as water. He was sitting behind the loom on the platform, weaving very fast, but without so much as looking at the loom, and talking all the while.

And in a way that was the strangest thing of all; that he was talking. For Alu was a very silent man. I’ve seen him in the house every day for six months now, so in a way I know him well, for you can know a lot about a man by watching him daily. Whenever he was in the house he was quiet; most of the time he was in pain, too, for he always had boils bursting out all over him. And the rest of the time, when he wasn’t at work, he was at Hajj Fahmy’s — weaving, they say. In all those months I wonder if I’ve exchanged more than ten words with him. It wasn’t just me. As far as I could tell, all the others were friendly with him, but none of them was his particular friend. There were rumours about him and Karthamma, but no one could tell what to make of those. She’s a tall woman, very dark, with the temper of an animal, but also an animal’s courage, for she was the one person in the house who was never afraid to defy Zindi. Anyone else who did that, Zindi would have thrown out long ago, but not Karthamma. For Karthamma has a baby — the child Zindi was holding in her arms that night — and poor, childless Zindi treasured her for that alone; because she was a mother and because she had given her a son. If pure will could change flesh and blood, that baby would be more hers now than his mother’s.

Maybe the rumours about Karthamma and Alu were true, maybe not. But Zindi believed them anyway; perhaps because she wanted to, because she hoped that Alu would take Karthamma’s mind off the baby. But I, who have seen the world a bit, used to wonder: what could silent Alu and Karthamma have in common? Sometimes you saw them in the courtyard, she rubbing oil on the boils on his back. She was fond of him, maybe she even loved him, but to me it seemed the love of a sister, not of a lover. Did he talk to her? Perhaps; for, after all, she had stolen the money anticipating something. But if she recognized the Mr Alu she saw that night she must have been the only one in the Ras. To everyone else he was a quiet morose man, tormented by boils. A mild man, you would have said, who didn’t care much about anything.

But last night nobody else seemed to remember the man as he was. I was the only one who saw him and recognized a mystery. I saw a man I knew, but I heard a voice I had not heard before. I hate mystery: unless mystery is the tool of business it is its enemy. But, hate it or not, there he was in front of me, as great a mystery as any I’ve seen, and I could find no explanation.

He was talking softly, but there was a force in his voice which carried it over the clicking of the shuttle, so that nobody missed a word; an extraordinary force, perhaps you could call it passion. It was like a question, though he was not asking anything, bearing down on you from every side. And in that whole huge crowd nobody stirred or spoke. You could see that silently they were answering him, matching him with something of their own.

That was another mystery, for the people who were there are rarely quiet — at work, at night, in the cinema. But last night, peering into the courtyard under Zindi’s arm — which as fastidious men you may well appreciate wasn’t easy, or greatly facile, if one may put it as such, for as you may know, when Virat Singh, the famous wrestler, the great marble-biceped pehlwan of Bareilly, was living here, he once attempted to press his suit a little forcefully with her, but since he was not greatly to her taste she overpowered him, merely by baring an armpit and blowing gently upon it — but anyway, as I was saying, last night, peering under Zindi’s arm in not altogether salubrious conditions, I saw that very crowd absolutely silent, listening to a man, hardly more than a boy, talk, and that, too, not in one language but in three, four, God knows how many, a khichri of words; couscous, rice, dal and onions, all stirred together, stamped and boiled, Arabic with Hindi, Hindi swallowing Bengali, English doing a dance; tongues unravelled and woven together — nonsense, you say, tongues unravelled are nothing but nonsense — but there again you have a mystery, for everyone understood him, perfectly, like their mother’s lullabies. They understood him, for his voice was only the question; the answers were their own.

And what of me, looking out of Zindi’s dear, half-forgotten arms, in those few moments while her eyes were busy and Abu Fahl elsewhere? I will tell you: I saw mysteries, all around me, one growing out of another, and I could find no grasp on them, not the slightest hold. I was afraid. I was so afraid, I breathed and sniffed until my nose ran, grateful for Zindi’s generosity.

He talked about Louis Pasteur. They listened without a sound as he told them in detail about Louis Pasteur’s life, his experiments and his discoveries, how he went out into the villages of his country, leaving behind the security of his laboratory, and found cures for incurable diseases, restored the vanishing livelihood of thousands of weavers by saving the silkworm, made milk pure for the world, destroyed the venom in dogs’ teeth, and so many other things.

But yet, he said, Pasteur had died a defeated man.

Why? he asked, and you could feel — if such a thing is possible — the silence beginning to stir.

He, and others before him, he said, had thought over the matter for a long, long time, and at last, in the Star, it had fallen to him to discover the answer. There, in the ruins, he had discovered what it was that Pasteur had really wanted all his life — an intangible thing, something he had not understood himself, yet a thing the whole world had conspired to deny him.

Purity. Purity was what he had wanted, purity and cleanliness — not just in his home, or in a laboratory or a university, but in the whole world of living men. It was that which spurred him on his greatest hunt, the chase in which he drove the enemy of purity, the quintessence of dirt, the demon which keeps the world from cleanliness, out of its lairs of darkness and gave it a name — the Infinitely Small, the Germ.

And when Alu came to that all his old mildness vanished. He let the loom be and sat with his hands folded on his lap, absolutely still, but his voice grew in strength and power until it reached beyond the courtyard and into the lanes and gullies outside.

He told them about germs: how they are everywhere and nowhere; how they flow freely from hand to hand, how they sweep through a thousand people in a day, in a minute, faster than a man can count, throwing their coils around people wherever they may hide.

Pasteur had discovered the enemy, the Germ, but he had never been able to find him. All his life he had tried to launch war but, like a shadow, the enemy had eluded him, and in the end Pasteur had died defeated and bewildered.

Why? Because for all his genius Pasteur had never asked himself the real question: where is the germ’s battleground? What is it that travels from man to man carrying contagion and filth, sucking people out and destroying them even in the safety of their own houses, even when every door and window is shut? Which is the battleground which travels on every man and every woman, silently preparing them for their defeat, turning one against the other, helping them destroy themselves?

That was the real question, and Pasteur had never known it.

Then he leapt to his feet and with a sigh the whole crowd rose with him. He shouted in Arabic: Wa ana warisu, and I am his heir, for in the ruins of the Star I found the answer.

Money. The answer is money.

The crowd gasped, and while they were still reeling he shouted again: We will wage war on money. Are you with me?

And the whole crowd shouted back: Yes. Yes. Yes.

No money, no dirt will ever again flow freely in the Ras. Are you with me?

And again the crowd roared: Yes.

We will drive money from the Ras, and without it we shall be happier, richer, more prosperous than ever before.

But this time only a few people shouted with him. There were other voices which said: How?

I think it can safely be said that there was a note of uncertainty in Alu’s voice then, as though he had only just understood what he was saying. Alu hesitated; I think he knew what he wanted to do, but not how to do it. The crowd sensed him falter. Another moment and the first bursts of laughter would have pealed out, sanity would have returned and that would have been the last anyone ever heard of Mr Alu.

But at that moment he was rescued. By whom?

By Professor Samuel, ex-accountant and clerk. He’s not really a professor of course. He was a teacher in some small-town college and, as you know, at home every teacher, whether he teaches pundits or pehlwans, is called a professor. This Samuel is an odd man, with peculiar ideas, but in his own way he is also a very clever man, a fine accountant. He had no sooner heard what Alu had to say than he delivered himself of a plan, full-grown and breathing.

First, he said, he would open files, with a page for every earning person in the Ras. Everyone would take their pay to him as soon as they received it, and the sum would be entered in the files against that man or woman’s name. The money would go into a common pool. Once a week the Professor and whoever wished to go with him would go into the Souq and buy everything that was needed in the Ras with that money. Then people could come and take whatever they needed, and the cost would be taken out of their accounts. In that way, he said, they would be able to do away with shops, and no longer would the shopkeepers drain away their savings, their sweat, and their labour in profits.

When he said that, the whole crowd rose and shouted and cheered, but the Professor stopped them. The shopkeepers of the Ras, he said, could be given a wage if they were willing to work with the others and help in buying and dividing food. They could be freed from their greed and they would be assured a livelihood. Otherwise, he said, there would be no place for them in the Ras.

Every person, he said, was to leave their address, their country, their town or village, wherever it was that they wished to send their money, and it would be entered into their pages on the files. At the end of every week, punctually, their savings would be sent back. And when the time came everybody there would see for themselves that the money they saved thus greatly exceeded anything they’d saved before.

There were many other things. I forget. Everyone was to be left a little money, whatever they needed to spend outside the Ras. But once they were in the Ras the money would have to be put away in an envelope and not touched again, until it was far outside the embankment. There would be no need for it in the Ras: they would get doctors, food, everything that was necessary, even films. No one would lack for something he needed, if he had no money today. The money would be found for him and taken out of his account later when he earned it.

Then Alu spoke again. He said that the Professor had read what was in his mind and put it in words. He asked the crowd: Are you willing to ask the Professor to work for us? To pay him a wage for his work? And in unison the crowd shouted: Yes.

That was how I lost my assistant.

Alu quietened them again. There was one other thing, he said. Every person in the Ras who wished to fight this war would also have to tie a piece of cloth above his right elbow. And whenever they left or entered a dwelling in the Ras they were to use that bit of cloth to dust the threshold, so that they left no dirt behind nor carried any with them. In this way, he said, they could know who was with them, and who against, and they could carry their fight to every doorstep.

After that there was so much noise, so much cheering, so much laughter that even Zindi flinched. Then I saw Abu Fahl rise and go up to Alu with his hands in his pockets. He pulled his hands out and emptied his pockets on to the platform. Alu tried to stop him, but the money was already there, beside him, and Abu Fahl wouldn’t touch it again. Professor Samuel was irritated, as well he might be, by this kind of impulsive foolishness. But he shouted for pencil and paper and counted the money and wrote it all down. There were others after that. First, the people from Zindi’s house: Zaghloul, a saner boy, you would have thought, had never lived; Chunni, the woman who swallows most of Professor Samuel’s earnings in exchange for I will not speculate what; thin Rakesh, and after him the whole crowd, hundreds of people, until the money on the platform had grown into a mound, and Samuel had run out of paper. By then it was all chaos, and I was grateful for the sheltered certainty of Zindi’s arm: women singing, people dancing and shouting. And in the middle of all that Hajj Fahmy’s family were busy sending out tray after tray of tea (they kept an account of course, for Professor Samuel’s files).

Then Zindi screamed, and for a moment I thought my head had rolled off my shoulders, for her arm snapped tight around my neck, which as you can see is no tree-trunk.

Far away from us, near the platform, Karthamma had risen to her feet, and in her hands was an old blue biscuit-tin.

Zindi threw herself into the crowd, shielding the baby with one arm and flailing about with the other. And while she fought she shouted, Give me back my money, you thief, you whore, and other things of that nature.

But Karthamma didn’t hesitate for a moment. She laughed, showing her brilliant white teeth, and said in her broken Hindi: It’s not your money, it has nothing to do with you. It’s the price of our sweat, our work. And, saying that, she took the lid off the tin and emptied the money on to the mound on the platform.

Zindi howled and her free arm thrashed about like a buzz-saw, but she was powerless — the crowd had imprisoned her.

Karthamma sneered at her as she struggled helplessly in the grip of a dozen men, and said: Give me back my child.

At that Zindi stopped fighting, and clutched the boy to her chest. There was laughter all around her then, though some people were quite angry. You could hear shouts: Send her out, send her out, what’s she doing here?

The fight had gone out of Zindi. Silently, hugging the boy, she let herself be pushed and elbowed out of the door. When she was beside me I saw that she was weeping. She muttered, tears streaming from her eyes: What are we going to do? He’s going to get us killed. We’re ruined, all our years of struggle wasted because of a few days of madness.

I took her arm then, and led her out, through the jeers of the crowd in the lane. And all the way back to her house she said not a single word.

Jeevanbhai stopped abruptly. His eyes rose to the ceiling and he seemed to go into a trance, swaying on his chair. Das, who had been straining forward, drinking in every word, felt himself fall, like a dropped puppet. He looked around him, startled. Jai Lal’s eyes were shut, as though he had been lulled into a doze by Jeevanbhai’s monotone. Das leant over and shook him. Without missing a breath Lal said loudly: Very interesting, Jeevanbhai, very interesting. And where is this man staying now?

Jeevanbhai fumbled around the desk for the bottle of whisky and poured himself another drink. He was clearly very tired. Propping up his head with his arm, he looked at them in turn.

He’s staying in Hajj Fahmy’s house now, he said wearily. I believe he’s weaving a lot. I’m sure Hajj Fahmy won’t lose by his hospitality. This man’s a good weaver, they say, and there’s a good market in hand-woven cloth among foreigners.

What will happen next, Patel sahb?

Who can tell? Jeevanbhai sighed. I know as little as you do.

I can’t understand it, Das broke in. I can’t understand it at all.

Lal snorted derisively: What don’t you understand? He’s worked out some kind of new money-making racket. That’s all you need to understand. It’s something to do with money.

He looked at Jeevanbhai for confirmation. Jeevanbhai inclined his head politely.

But what should we do now, Jai? said Das. What are our options? What can we do?

Nothing, Lal said drily. There’s nothing we can do. It’s a very tricky situation. We can’t alert the Ghaziri authorities. It would be a disaster if they found out that Indians are involved in this business. They’d probably stop giving new visas to Indian workers. They’ve done that kind of thing before. They might even expel the workers who’re already here. That would mean a drop in remittances, and therefore in the foreign-exchange reserves back home and so on and so forth. If anything like that happened, half the embassy here would be recalled in disgrace, with all their increments docked. We can’t risk anything like that. We’ll just have to try to keep the whole thing quiet, and see what we can do. Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll find some way of getting your man out of here and back to India.

Lal looked despondently at Jeevanbhai: Isn’t that true, Patel sahb?

Yes, said Jeevanbhai. His eyes searched the floor till they found the heavy leather attaché case Lal had brought with him. He looked at Lal expectantly.

Lal lifted the attaché case on to his knees and opened it. But, he said, you’ll keep us informed, Patel sahb, no?

Yes, of course, of course.

Lal took two bottles of Scotch whisky out of his case. Jeevanbhai stretched out his hand, but at that moment Das reached across and tapped Lal’s arm.

Listen, Jai, he said, I want to go to this place — the Ras — and look it over a bit. If possible, I’d like to see this man; see where he’s living and so on. It would give me a more realistic picture, and at least I’d have something for the reports I’ll have to send back home. What do you think?

Lal leant back, with the bottles in his hands, and looked inquiringly at Jeevanbhai: I’m sure you can arrange it, no, Patel sahb?

Jeevanbhai clicked his tongue in irritation: No. I don’t see how it can be done. How can anyone take an absolute stranger into that place? People would be suspicious at once. I couldn’t guarantee his safety, especially if people found out what his connections are.

Das put the bottles on the floor, beside his chair. Try to think, Patel sahb, he said sharply. I’m sure you can manage something.

Jeevanbhai wiped his forehead with his sleeve. There’s one possibility, he said reluctantly. I can’t take him of course, because the people there are suspicious of me anyway. But there’s a chance that I might be able to persuade Zindi at-Tiffaha to take him. But it’ll take some time, and he’ll have to wait.

Lal nodded: That’s fine; get in touch when it’s arranged. He held the bottles out to Jeevanbhai and smiled: That’s good whisky, Patel sahb. It would cost hundreds of dirhams for a bottle of that here.

Jeevanbhai almost snatched the bottles out of his hands, and locked them away in a drawer. Lal stood up. Patel sahb, he said gravely, we’ll need all your help over the next few weeks.

Jeevanbhai nodded. Then, softly, almost timidly, he said: What about the other thing, Mr Lal?

Other thing? said Lal surprised. What thing?

Don’t you remember? said Jeevanbhai. I was asking you the other day …

Oh, that, said Lal. Oh, yes. We’ll work out something.

Jeevanbhai dropped his eyes and led them through the shop. Lal stopped at the door. Tell me, Patel sahb, he said. You know these people, and this man. What do you think his game is?

Is it a game?

Isn’t it?

You must explain it to me, then. Jeevanbhai smiled at them, very sweetly, and ushered them out with a stoop of his shoulder.

Afterwards, at Lal’s large fifth-floor flat in a newly built residential suburb, they sat on a balcony, surrounded by potted palms and ferns, drinking beer and watching the strung-out lights of tankers at sea. Das was very tired but strangely elated: it was as though in the course of one day he had been forcibly stretched into the calm strength and insights of middle age.

He talked desultorily to Lal about their colleagues in India, while Lal’s slim, pretty wife offered them bowls of cashew nuts and dalmoth. Then a servant called her away to the kitchen, and Lal yawned and shut his eyes. My God, he said, he talked on and on. I thought he’d never stop.

Das nodded and they fell into a tired silence. After a while, Lal said languidly: Tell me, what did you think of our friend Jeevanbhai?

Das sat upright and thought for a moment. I don’t think, he said carefully, that I’ve ever heard anyone talk as marvellously as he did tonight.

Really?

Yes, Das said softly, embarrassed. But tell me, do you think he’s reliable?

Oh, yes. I think so. Besides, he has to be, because otherwise his stock of whisky would dry up. Why?

Nothing really. It’s just that … though he tries to be businesslike and all that, when he actually talks, he’s like a sleepwalker — like a man living in a dream. I wouldn’t trust him — not because he’s dishonest, though he might be — but because he doesn’t seem to be living in this world at all.

Lal laughed: Next you’ll be telling me he’s a bird of paradise.

Das grimaced in embarrassment. Never mind, he said. But what was that business at the end, about the ‘other thing’?

Oh, that. He’s got some idea into his head that he wants to go to India and settle there in a small town and start a shop. He wants citizenship and he wants help getting out of the country. He thinks they may not let him out. The trouble is we need him here; he’s much more useful here.

Lal stretched and stood up. Let’s forget business for a while, he said. Come, I’ll show you an interesting game.

He led Das into their drawing-room. At one end stood a streamlined, steel-blue television set. Beside it, on a stool, was a squat, gleaming, chrome-plated machine, bedecked with knobs and buttons.

Lal switched it on. Geometrical images and the word ‘play’ appeared on the television screen. He watched Das’s surprise with evident delight.

It’s a video game, he said. Cost me two months’ savings. Even the Ambassador hasn’t got one like it.

Of course, he added quickly, it’s for children really. I bought it for my son, Sunil. But it’s fun sometimes, even for us.

He handed Jyoti Das a set of controls. You have to shoot me down, he said, and pressed a button. The images on the screen began to circle confusingly about. Jyoti tried to make sense of it and couldn’t.

Sorry, he said, handing his controls back. I don’t think I’ll be any good at this.

Lal laughed: You’re a washout, yar. Wait, I’ll show you how it’s played.

He went to the door and called out: Sunil. Sunil beta, come and play videos. He had to call out three more times before a wide-eyed, knee-high boy in shorts was pushed into the room by a servant. He stood in the doorway, sucking his thumb.

Come on, beta, Lal cajoled him. Come and show this nice uncle how to play videos. He hasn’t seen one before.

The boy stayed where he was, sucking his thumb. Lal said apologetically to Jyoti: He doesn’t like it much. But he has to learn.

He went up to the boy and said sharply: Come on, beta. Come and play with your video. It cost money.

He pulled the boy’s hand out of his mouth and put a set of controls in it. The boy pressed the wrong button and the image on the screen faded away.

What’re you doing, beta? Lal exclaimed in irritation.

Jyoti, watching the boy, saw that his hands had begun to shake and drops of sweat had appeared on his forehead. Suddenly a heavy, putrid smell filled the room.

Jyoti glanced quickly around the room in surprise. Then he looked at the boy. A stain was spreading across the back of his shorts, and a yellow mess was dribbling down his thighs. He was sucking his thumb again.

Beta! Lal exploded. He stopped and drew in his breath. Then he caught Jyoti’s arm and pulled him out of the room. Slamming the door on the boy, he shouted towards the kitchen: Babs, go and look. He’s done it again.

He hurried Jyoti to the balcony. His forelock had fallen across his face and his hands shook as he splashed whisky into their glasses. Jyoti stood frozen in a corner.

Everything’s going wrong, Lal said. Nothing’s right any longer; it’s all chaos. It worries me. I’m very worried.

Chapter Fourteen. Besieged

Zindi counted through the hours for ten days before she allowed herself to go looking for Forid Mian again. On the morning of the tenth day, at ten o’clock — not too early to make her journey seem like anything but an ordinary shopping trip — she put Boss on her hip and set out for the Souq. When she reached the front door she stopped, suddenly remembering the plastic bag Professor Samuel had left for her that morning. She went back to her room to fetch it. It was a large bulging bag, with colourful advertisements for cigarettes printed on both sides. It was very heavy, for it contained forty-two aluminium lemon-squeezers.

Zindi hurried through the Ras to the embankment, ignoring the faces that were pointedly turned away from her on the way. As she scrambled up the slope of the embankment, the plastic bag seemed to grow heavier and heavier, until she was struggling to pull it along, like a ship fighting a dragging anchor. She cursed the lemon-squeezers, cursed Professor Samuel, cursed Alu and the whole of the Ras. When she reached the road at the top, she knew she would not be able to walk all the way to the Souq, as she had planned, so she squatted on the gravel at the side of the road and waited for a share-taxi. There was very little traffic on the road, nothing more than an occasional speeding truck. The road began to shimmer in the heat of the climbing sun, and soon the heavy cloth of her black fustan was drenched to the ankles in sweat. She began to worry about Boss, who was squirming quietly in the sun. After a while, she took off her scarf, baring the thin hair on her head to the sun, and draped it over him. A yellow and black taxi materialized like a mirage somewhere in the shimmering haze on the road, and she ran out to stop it. It swerved neatly past her and disappeared, blaring a tune on its musical horn. Zindi went back to the side of the road, cursing: Sons of bitches, shit … Now she was too impatient to sit down again, and she squinted down the road standing, shifting Boss from one hip to the other. Ten days was not such a long time, but some ten days were worse than others. These had been as bad as any she could have imagined; worse, because she could not have imagined these. She had had to lock herself into the house every day to keep herself from rushing off to the Souq and Forid Mian. The Souq was hope. That was why she had denied it to herself for so many days — so that the taste of it would be the sweeter when it came. Not just that, of course. Every time temptation threatened to overwhelm her, she had reminded herself of all the reasons why she had decided on ten days, no more, no less. Ten days was just right: long enough to make her, Zindi, seem disinterested; enough to let Forid Mian think a bit, worry a bit; but not so long that their conversation would slip from his mind. Ten days was just right.

Here was another taxi, a large one this time, an old Mercedes-Benz. She stood in the middle of the road with her arms stretched out, like a traffic policeman, and it stopped. It took her some time, and a little help, to climb out again, when the taxi drew up at the Maidan al-Jami‘i. Kam? she asked the young, curly-haired driver, reaching into the neck of her dress for her purse.

One dirham, he said.

What? she shouted. You son of a …

He laughed: Yes, Mother?

She had to forgive him: that was clever enough to make him an Egyptian, even though his accent didn’t sound it. Laughing to herself, she turned and saw the Bab al-Asli across the square, guarding hope, and everything left her mind but the main intention. She forgot that she had meant to dispose of the lemon-squeezers first. She hurried across the square, through the Bab, and turned into the first lane. There it was, the Durban Tailoring House, conspicuous by its dimness in that row of shining shops.

Forid Mian was there after all: that was one ten-day-long worry she’d forgotten this morning. She stood in the passageway for a minute, and looked the shop over again, critically judging its length, its breadth, weighing its possibilities. It didn’t disappoint her, as she had feared it might.

She bustled in, trying to look busy. Ah, Forid Mian! she said, putting her plastic bag down on the floor. How are you?

He was working at his sewing machine. How are you? he answered politely.

She lifted Boss with both her hands and put him down on his back on a pile of cloth on the counter.

Don’t do that, Zindi, Forid Mian cried in alarm. He’ll wet the …

No, don’t worry, she said. He never pisses on strange clothes. He’s not like other children.

Forid Mian looked at her sceptically and went back to his sewing machine. Zindi seated herself on a stool and leant back against the counter. For a long while she said nothing. The approaches and openings she had so carefully prepared slipped out of her mind while she looked around the shop, taking in small details, like the exposed wiring near the switches. Somewhere at the back of her mind she tried to work out what it would cost to make the place respectable again. Then, with a start, she remembered Forid Mian and turned. She caught him darting her a sidelong glance.

So, Zindi, he said quickly, what brings you to the Souq?

Oh, just some shopping, Zindi said. I was passing by and I thought I’d come around and see how Forid Mian is.

Forid Mian leant back against the wall and looked at her, his dull eyes opaque. You’re thinking about me a lot nowadays, Zindi, he said.

Of course, Zindi said blandly, I always think about old friends.

What were you thinking? said Forid Mian.

Oh, many things. I was thinking about that funny thing you said that night. How are the nights going now? Still rubbing hard on dry sheets, hoping to set them on fire?

Zindi threw her head back and laughed.

Forid Mian lowered his eyes and looked at the bulging plastic bag on the floor. What’s in that? he said, pointing with a bent, pencil-thin finger.

Oh, that, said Zindi, still shaking with laughter. That’s lemon-squeezers. Forty-two lemon-squeezers.

Forid Mian gasped: Forty-two lemon-squeezers! What are you going to do with forty-two lemon-squeezers? Start a fruit-juice stall?

No, no. Zindi shook her head, wondering why they were talking about lemon-squeezers. They’re not for me, she said quickly. I needed some money this morning, and there was no money in the Ras, so Professor Samuel sent these — someone who works in some shop or factory had got hold of them and left them with him. If I want money for the shopping, I have to sell these.

Sell these? For money? Forid Mian looked at her in bewilderment.

Yes, she said exasperated. That’s what happened. Yesterday was Thursday, the end of the week. The people in the house usually give me the week’s money on Thursday. But now there’s no money in the Ras; it’s all in accounts and account-books. In banks, and Professor Samuel’s files. Anyway, they didn’t give me any money. Samuel said he’s put it all in my account and entered it against my name and all that. But I wanted money. Money. What’s the use of numbers? So I said: You sister-fucking arsehole, I want money. Cash. But then he called all the others, and even Abu Fahl turned against me. I said: I want money. What’s the use of an account-book? Can you pay for a bus with an account-book? I haven’t been out of the Ras for more than a week and I’m going to the Souq tomorrow. I need money. So she said, that bitch Karthamma: Why’d you want to go out of the Ras? You don’t do any work. We do the work; you should stay here and clean the house. As if. So I said: I’ll tear your eyes out if you try to keep me here for one more day, you ungrateful bitch. Then she shouted, and I shouted. And I said to Samuel: Why don’t you give me one of those envelopes with money inside, like you give the others when they go out of the Ras? And he said that all the envelopes had already been given out for the next day. Then later he said he had these … these lemon-squeezers, so I took them. Luckily I had a bit of cash in my purse, and Kulfi gave me a bit.

Zindi stopped, her chest heaving, her eyes bloodshot. Why’re you asking all this? she said. You’d know all about it anyway, if you didn’t live like a snail, hidden away in the Souq.

Then a thought struck her, and she looked at him anxiously: Do you want to buy some? She took a lemon-squeezer from the bag and handed it to him. He played with the handles, opening and shutting it like a pair of scissors.

How much? he said.

Two dirhams? she answered tentatively.

No. He shook his head.

One-fifty?

I don’t really want it, he said and handed it back to her.

No, Zindi laughed. I’d forgotten. It’s something else you want to squeeze now. No?

What do you mean, Zindi?

Well … something like a wife?

Forid Mian didn’t answer. Zindi leant towards him: Don’t you remember? We were talking about your marriage that night?

Forid Mian rose abruptly from his stool. It seems to me, Zindi, he said, that you’re thinking about my marriage much more than I am.

Zindi laughed, attempting unconcern. Of course I think about your marriage, she said. If I didn’t, who would? Don’t you remember how you said that night that you’d like to get married and settle down in your Chatgan and leave all this behind? Don‘t you remember? I think there’s a chance, just a chance, that it might be arranged.

Forid Mian began to tidy one of the shelves behind the counter. I don’t know what I was talking about that night, he said. I must have gone crazy. Why should I want to go back to Chatgan when everyone in Chatgan is trying to get here?

Zindi stared at him in uncomprehending disbelief. But, she began, you said …

Oh, I was just talking.

Zindi looked wildly, tearfully around the shop. Instinctively her hand rose to scratch her mole. But, listen, she said, there must be something …

Why, Zindi, Forid Mian said loudly, are you so interested in my marriage?

Zindi impatiently waved the question away. Listen, she said, what about, what if we get you married here?

Here? Forid Mian turned from the shelf and stared at her. To whom?

To someone. Zindi compressed her lips and squeezed out a smile. But you tell me first, what do you think of the idea?

How can I tell you, until you tell me?

To Kulfi-didi, Zindi said, and watched the narrowing of his eyes with triumph. Do you know her? She lives in my house.

Let me see, said Forid Mian, stroking his stringy white beard. Tell me what she’s like.

She’s fair; very fair. And she has a nice figure — not full exactly, but not thin, either. She’s a widow. She’s nice. You’ll like her.

Forid Mian nodded. Yes, he said, I think I’ve seen her in the Souq.

What do you think?

Forid Mian shrugged in an attempt at nonchalance, but Zindi was quick to spot the suddenly lustful twist of his mouth. But do you think she’ll be willing? he said. She must be Hindu.

Let’s see, said Zindi, let’s see. She stopped and looked at him hard. But there’s one thing, Forid Mian, she went on softly. And that is this. If it’s arranged, you’ll have to come and live in my house, and you’ll have to leave Jeevanbhai and start working for me.

Forid Mian was suddenly very frightened. No, Zindi, he said, biting his knuckles. No, I can’t do that. How could I tell Jeevanbhai? What would Jeevanbhai do? No, no, Zindi, I can’t.

Zindi rose and patted his shoulder. Don’t worry, Forid, she said. I know you’re scared of him, but I’m not. You leave him to me; I’ll deal with him. And khud balak, remember, don’t be so scared. There’s not a thing he can do to you.

Forid Mian had begun to sweat. No, Zindi, he said wiping his face, I can’t. I can’t. But when he looked at her there was a spark of hope in his panic-stricken eyes.

Zindi patted him again. You leave Jeevanbhai to me, she said. I’ll deal with him. Today if possible.

She smiled, struggling to hold herself in check. She could have shouted with joy. The answers were always so easy and so elusive.

The loudspeakers in the Souq sang out the muezzin’s midday izan. Forid Mian looked distractedly around for his prayer-rug and stone.

I’ll go now, Zindi said to him. But I’ll be back tomorrow or the day after. And don’t worry.

It took Zindi a long time to sell the lemon-squeezers, and they fetched less than half the money she had bargained for. It was as good as throwing them away. But she had no choice — she had to hurry, for she could see that Boss was hungry, even though he wasn’t crying (he never cried).

Back in the house, with Boss fed and put to sleep, she had nothing to do but wait for Kulfi or Jeevanbhai. The house was empty except for her and Boss. It usually was now, because Abu Fahl and Chunni and Rakesh and all the rest of them spent all their time after work with Alu, at Hajj Fahmy’s house. What did they do there? Zindi almost didn’t want to know. Often they didn’t come back till late at night. They even ate their dinner there sometimes — Professor Samuel had made arrangements to transfer the expenses to Hajj Fahmy’s accounts. Only Kulfi came back to the house early, sometimes. She was a good girl, Kulfi. It’s all a lot of nothing, she told Zindi. Nothing happens there. They just sit there and laugh and talk and drink tea and listen to Hajj Fahmy and watch Alu weaving. Late into the night — talk, talk, talk and weave, weave, weave. So boring: what to do? I wouldn’t go at all except for the films. Now they say they’re going to get a video and have a new film every day.

Maybe Kulfi would be back early today. But early for Kulfi nowadays was usually quite late at night. She had found work as a cook for another Ghaziri family, and they ate late in the evenings, sitting on their terrace because of the heat. Perhaps Jeevanbhai would be back early. But if he’d bought a new bottle and gone to his room behind the Durban Tailoring House who could tell? Nothing to do but wait.

Wait. Zaghloul and Rakesh came to the house to bathe and change after work, but they went out again half an hour later. The house was very quiet. She went up to the roof, and she could see the lights in Hajj Fahmy’s house. She could almost hear the talk and the laughter. She wandered into the courtyard to feed the ducks and the geese. Her eyes fell on the door to Jeevanbhai’s room. She looked at the lock. It was made of brass and it looked very strong. She weighed it in her hand. It wasn’t as big or as heavy as it looked. Perhaps it wasn’t as strong, either. She gave it a small tug and something in it seemed to yield. She dropped the tray of corn she had been holding, and caught the lock in both hands. She pulled, but the lock held firm. She was suddenly very angry. It was not that she wanted anything from the room — she didn’t know what she would do if the lock opened — but why should a door be locked against her in her own house? She spread her legs, took a good grip on the lock and pulled with all her strength. The door creaked on its hinges, but the lock held.

There was a gentle cough behind her. She didn’t hear it, for the blood was pounding noisily in her head. She pulled again. There was a sound of wood cracking, near the hinges, but the lock still held. Then a hand snaked out and tapped her on the shoulder.

Zindi turned and saw Jeevanbhai. She looked at him and she looked at the lock in her hands and her anger vanished and her face began to drip with sweat. Jeevanbhai, she stammered, dropping her hands. I … I don’t know.

Jeevanbhai nodded politely; he was as sober as a rock in a desert. You should have asked me for the key, Zindi, he said.

No, no, Zindi said confusedly, it wasn’t that. I just wanted to make sure you hadn’t forgotten to lock it.

Are you sure now? Jeevanbhai smiled, putting his key into the lock. Come in — look around. There’s nothing here.

I know that, Jeevanbhai, Zindi pleaded, following him in. It was a small narrow room, with one small window set high in the far wall. There was a camp-bed in one corner, and beside it a rough wooden desk and a chair. A few neatly folded files lay on the floor, next to the desk.

Jeevanbhai flicked a switch and a pedestal fan in a corner began to turn slowly, sweeping the room with gusts of hot, damp air. He sat on the chair and pointed at the bed: Sit down, Zindi.

Really, Jeevanbhai, believe me, I wasn’t doing anything, Zindi said, sinking on to the bed. It creaked under her weight. A dimly glowing bulb dangled on a wire above her head.

I know, Zindi, Jeevanbhai said, I know. You didn’t want anything. It’s just that you’re worried about something, aren’t you?

A long minute passed while Zindi weighed the significance of the question. Then, hoarsely, she said: What do you mean?

Well — Jeevanbhai looked at his fingers — you’re worried about Forid Mian’s marriage, for example, aren’t you?

Zindi felt the breath rushing out of her. She stared at Jeevanbhai’s impassive face: What do you mean?

I suppose, Jeevanbhai said quietly, it would be nice for you if he married Kulfi and came to live here and started working for you? He would be reliable; not like the others? Isn’t that so?

Zindi, watching him, felt her face going stupidly slack, her mouth falling open.

Zindi, Zindi, he said, chiding her gently, shaking his head. How could you be such a fool as to plot against me with Forid Mian? You’re growing so old and desperate, you’re losing your wits. Did you really think I wouldn’t hear about it? Don’t you know? Forid Mian has no secrets from me; he can’t have. Do you know how he came to al-Ghazira? He used to work in a ship which, in Dhu-l-Hijja, used to carry pilgrims on the Hajj, all the way from Singapore and Chittagong and Bombay and all kinds of places. It used to stop here on its way to Jiddah. That’s how I met Forid Mian; he used to carry things for me sometimes. One year the ship arrived with Forid Mian locked up in the hold. He’d killed an eighty-year-old woman, a pilgrim. They found him under the covers of a lifeboat, trying to file the gold off the corpse’s teeth. He’d have hanged for murder in Chittagong, if I hadn’t managed to buy his way off the ship. But I kept the papers of course. So, you see, Forid Mian can’t afford to have any secrets from me. Did you really think you could make an ally out of him?

Zindi’s enormous shoulders sagged, and for a long time she sat slumped forward, in grim silence. Then, with an effort, she rose from the bed. She went to the chair and stood behind Jeevanbhai. She ran her hands over the sides of his face, over his nose, and over his lips and the edges of his red teeth.

Jeevanbhai, she said, do you remember that time? How you crawled into this house black with bruises and sweating fear? Do you remember how I hid you with the geese, and rubbed your body with oil?

Very deliberately, she undid the first button of Jeevanbhai’s shirt and slid her hand inside. She rolled the coarse hairs of his chest between her fingers and, slipping her hand under his vest, she brushed her thumb over his nipples. She could feel them stiffening. Jeevanbhai’s breath became a trace heavier. Do you remember? Her hand wandered down, past his navel, till they reached the drawstring of his underwear. She bent forward and caught his earlobe in her mouth. Jeevanbhai was shivering now. Remember? She took her hand out of his shirt and rubbed the fly of his trousers. She could hear him gasping for breath. She pulled the button open and slid a finger in.

Jeevanbhai caught her wrist with both his hands and tried to fight it off. She had as much strength in her wrist as he had in both his arms. Zindi, he gasped, stop, you’re going crazy. He twisted his body sideways and managed to struggle to his feet. Lowering his shoulders, he gathered his strength together and threw himself against her stomach. She staggered backwards, in the direction of the bed. For a moment she tottered on her feet, staring at his flushed face, and then, covering her face with her hands, she crumpled on to the bed. Her sobs came in short dry bursts, shaking the bed.

Zindi, Zindi, Jeevanbhai said, what’s the matter? What’s happened? He latched the door and went to the bed. Awkwardly he put his arm around her shoulders.

Zindi, he said, what’s happened? What have they done? Tell me.

He brushed her cheek clumsily with the back of his hand. Tell me, he said. I can help you. You know that. I know you want the shop. Why didn’t you just ask me? Why did you have to go through this drama?

He took her black scarf off, folded it neatly and put it beside him on the bed. Then he ran his hand gently through her thin, greying hair, and stroked her neck and her arms. His hand brushed her heaving breasts, and he drew it back sharply in embarrassment. Zindi, he whispered, tell me. What have they done to you? Is it something terrible?

Terrible? What could a word like ‘terrible’ mean for someone who had to spend each day watching her own house slipping out of her hands, watching it turn against her, defying nature, like a horse turning on its rider? What did ‘terrible’ mean for someone who had to watch the very people she had sheltered, her own children, picking the world apart, hunting for chaos and calling from the rooftops for their own destruction? What is terrible? Is it terrible to find yourself afloat on a whirlpool of madness, to see the currents raging around you, and to be powerless to do anything but wait helplessly for the last wave?

Sometimes broken bones and pain aren’t necessary to make things terrible; being a spectator is terror enough.

In the beginning it wasn’t so bad; it had seemed as though nothing would come of it. Everyone who had lived in the Ras long enough had seen it swept by bursts of craziness. There was the time someone spread a rumour about the potato liquor that was being sold on the beach, and the men went into a frenzy because they thought their balls were climbing back into their bodies; and there was the year people spent every night for a whole month sitting up and waiting for an earthquake.

This was different; it went on and on and on. There was no end to it.

First, they got Romy Abu Tolba. It was Abu Fahl and Professor Samuel who went to him (Alu never went anywhere; he only sat in Hajj Fahmy’s courtyard and wove and wove and wove). They went to Romy with a huge gang and they said: Your shop spreads dirt in the Ras. We won’t put up with it. Either join us and we’ll run it together, like everything else, or you’ll lose your shop.

Romy is one of those people who minds his business and doesn’t bother to find out about things. That’s madness for a shopkeeper; every good shopkeeper has to stay ahead of the news. Romy didn’t know what was happening in the Ras. When they said all that to him, he was so astonished he couldn’t think of anything to say. After a long time, he laughed and said: Are you mad? It’s all right to drink, but drunks shouldn’t go around disturbing honest people.

They said, All right, you’ll see, and they left. They were the last people to set foot in Romy Abu Tolba’s shop.

The next day Romy opened his shop in the morning and sat down to read his newspaper and wait for customers. He waited and he waited but nobody came into his shop. He called out to people when he saw them going past, but they turned their heads and walked away. He’d stocked watermelons that day, and they began to rot. And still nobody came, all through the day.

Never mind, he told his son Tolba the next day. They’ll need things; they’ll fall short.

But Abu Fahl and Zaghloul and the rest had already taken one of Hajj Fahmy’s trucks and bought stocks of sugar and oil and tea and everything else in the Souq, and they began to give them out in Hajj Fahmy’s courtyard, while Samuel noted it all down in his account-books.

There was no shortage of anything, and that evening Romy’s stock of eggs began to smell.

Next day, Romy dropped his prices. Still nobody came. That night almost the whole of the Ras gathered around Hajj Fahmy’s house and till late in the night they talked about the terrible dirt that shops deal out.

Next morning Romy began to beg people to go in. He needed money now. But nobody even passed by his shop any longer; they skirted fearfully around it as though it were a leper’s lair. They were afraid; afraid of the dirt and the germs. Germs! In Romy Abu Tolba the Fayyumi’s shop, where everyone had bought everything for God knows how many years!

At the end of the day Romy knew he was beaten. What’s the use of a shop without customers? He went to Hajj Fahmy that evening and said: Do what you like with my shop.

They say Hajj Fahmy kissed him on both cheeks and hugged him like a brother.

The day after that they went to the shop and washed every inch of it with carbolic acid. They washed the shelves, the floor, the walls, the counter, even the lane outside. They took away Romy’s old iron cash-box, and in its place they put their files and account-books.

That night on the beach they burnt the cash-box and danced around it.

Now everything in the shop is given away and the price is marked down in the files against people’s names. There aren’t any profits any more. Romy’s just a clerk now, in his own shop. He spends the day noting down who buys what in the account-books. They pay him a wage. It’s not a bad wage, but you can already see death weighing down his eyelids. Who wants to be a paid clerk in his own shop?

That was just the beginning. After that the flood of carbolic acid started. Every day they send out groups with buckets of carbolic. They wander all over the Ras, washing out lanes and houses as they please. They came to this house, too, but the door was barred, and Abu Fahl, for some reason of his own, led them away. But they’ll be back, and who’ll stop them the next time? They’ll come again and again and again, until they get in. And what then? Who can live with the stench of that stuff?

Next, they say, they’re going to put a stop to the dirtiest of the dirty — the mugaddams, the labour contractors. Soon, they say, no one in the Ras will ever work for a mugaddam again. And after that? After that — no mistake about it — they’ll want the houses; houses which have been held together for years with sweat and love. They’ll want them, too.

Everyone’s with them now. They’ve got so much money, it’s unbelievable, but at the same time they say there’s not a note or a coin left anywhere in the Ras. It’s all in their account-books and files. Every day every person who works outside takes money for the day in an envelope, and at the end of the day they burn the envelopes. Every week they bring their pay to the Professor in envelopes (he’s got a kind of office now, in a shack near Hajj Fahmy’s house). He writes it all down in his books and puts it in the bank. Then, at the end of every week, he goes to the post office and sends money to all the addresses in his files. They say the shacks in the Ras are now full of people who’re growing as rich as kings back home in their villages. They’re sending back three, four, five times more money than they used to before, because they don’t have to spend any of it here, as they used to. But there’s so many of them, and there’s so much money in those books, that they still have money to burn. They began by showing films on the beach every second day. Now it’s videos and a new film every day. Then they’re going to hire buses to take them on holidays to the hot springs. They’re not going to go home on ordinary planes any more. They’re going to charter whole planes, and everyone who’s going to Egypt or India or wherever will go together. They’ll save half the money, they say.

And now it’s not just the Ras any more. People are getting to hear of it outside, and they’re pouring in. Last week the Baluchis, who used to sweep the streets of the New Town during the day and sleep in them at night, started arriving and they’ve all been given places to stay.

It’s getting worse and worse every day. Now no one will talk to me any more or let me into their houses or their shacks, because I’m not fool enough to wear their duster on my arm. They say I bring in germs. Think of it! Zindi at-Tiffaha, without whose consent no shack could be built in the Ras once upon a time, brings in germs now!

Whatever happens, it’s the end for me: either they’ll get the house or the police will. It’s just a matter of time now before the police and the Amirs get to hear of it. No one’s gone to them yet, because that’s the one thing no one in the Ras ever does. But soon enough someone or other will go, and then it’ll be the end of the Ras, the end of our houses, the end of our peace, the end of our luck and our good times.

And where shall I go then?

Jeevanbhai Patel was staring at the floor, his hands clasped between his knees. It was a long time before he spoke. He said: Zindi, you don’t have to go very far. What about the shop?

Zindi, still hiccuping with sobs, stopped wiping her face: What shop?

My shop. The Durban Tailoring House. Don’t you want it?

Zindi looked him over suspiciously: Yes. Why?

Jeevanbhai smiled and patted her on the shoulder. Tell me, Zindi, he said, why do you want that shop so much?

Why do I want it so much? Can’t you see why I want it so much? If I had it, I’d be able to get away from here before the end comes. And who knows? God willing, I might be able to take a few of them with me. They might listen to me if I had something to offer, some alternative. They won’t listen to me now, but with that shop who knows? And at least, if I do get it, when the end comes a couple of them will have somewhere to hide.

Jeevanbhai ran his tongue over his teeth. Zindi, he said, I told you before, but you weren’t listening. You can have the shop.

Zindi rose from the bed and went to the door. All right, Jeevanbhai, she said briskly, tell me what you’ve got in your mind or I’m going. I know you’re not a man who gives away shops for love and sweet words. So just tell me the truth; I’m not a child.

No, Jeevanbhai said quietly, you’re right; I’m not the kind of man who gives away a shop for nothing. But I’m not going to give it away for nothing. You’ll have to pay me half what it would cost on the open market. I know you’ve got enough money hidden away somewhere. We can talk about the price later. The other half will be my share. We can divide the profits. The place needs a change anyway; it never brings luck if it stays the same for too long. I’ve been thinking of it myself.

Watching him closely, Zindi said: But that’s not all, is it?

Jeevanbhai smiled. No, Zindi, he said, it’s true. That’s not all. I want something from you, too. But it’s a small thing, and it’s not very important.

Tell me quickly and no more talk. You know you can have what I’ve got to give, but that you don’t want. What do you want?

She leant forward and peered at him. Not Kulfi? she gasped in surprise. No, not her?

Jeevanbhai burst into laughter: An old whore’s like an old zip — stuck. Can’t you ever think of anything else? No, I don’t want her or anything like that. You can still marry her off to Forid Mian if you like — if he has the strength to sign the khitba. No, what I want is a very small thing. I just want you to tell me what’s happening here, now and then. You know I don’t get to hear as much now as I used to and, as you said yourself, nowadays one can’t afford to be behind the news. And I may want you to do a couple of things for me sometimes.

What things?

Small things. For example, I’ve got a couple of friends — Indians, nice people. One of them’s heard about Alu and wants to meet him. Maybe you could take him tomorrow?

Zindi leant her head against the door and thought hard for a while. Then, with a quick, regretful shake of her head, she said: Police, I suppose? No, I can’t. You know that’s one thing I couldn’t do to them. Whatever happens in the future, in the past they all ate my bread and salt. They’ve become part of my flesh. You shouldn’t have said that, Jeevanbhai. You know I can’t do it.

Zindi, Zindi, don’t be a fool. Do you think I’d ask if they were police? Don’t I know you well enough? They’re not — they’re just ordinary people who I met once in India. They’re just ordinary people. You’ll know as soon as you see this man. He’s a boy really, just like Alu. He must be in his twenties. He always looks surprised, like a schoolboy. One of his eyebrows is higher than the other. He’s just heard a few things and he’s curious, like anyone else. Like you or me. That’s all. Believe me.

Zindi hesitated for an instant, and then she shook her head. No, she said, you know I can’t do it.

So what about the shop, then?

Zindi turned, swinging her huge bulk sharply on her heel, and took the latch off its hook.

Jeevanbhai spoke rapidly, at her back: Listen, Zindi. God didn’t mean you to be a fool. Listen to me. I’ll talk to my friend and I’ll tell him to wait for you, in the road opposite my office, near the harbour. Don’t come into the office. Bring him straight here and take him to Hajj Fahmy’s house. Wear a duster if you have to, for once. Give him one, too, if they won’t let you in otherwise. Let him talk to Alu if he wants. He may even want to take a few pictures. Afterwards take him out of the Ras, put him into a taxi and send him home. But I want you to tell me what he does and what he says. So come to the Souq the next day — day after tomorrow. Come to the Durban Tailoring House at nine. I’ll be there. We can talk safely there. And the very next morning you can start setting up the shop. Do you hear me? Zindi?

Zindi threw the door open and hurried across the courtyard. It was time to feed Boss again.

Chapter Fifteen. Reflections

Zindi knew that today she would have to walk all the way to the Souq. Very few share-taxis or buses passed by the Ras after dark, and those that did never stopped.

She left her house at a quarter past eight, for she knew it would take her three-quarters of an hour, probably more, with Boss in her arms. At least there weren’t any lemon-squeezers to carry. She remembered at the last minute to take her torch; it was very dark in the Ras at night, and even someone who knew its lanes like the lines on her own hands, as she did, stood in danger of tripping over a sleeping dog or stumbling into some newly sprouted shack. As an afterthought she decided to take a stick as well — many of the stray dogs in the Ras were known to turn vicious at night.

It took her longer than she had expected to reach the Maidan al-Jami‘i. She had to stop twice on the way to rest: Boss was growing heavier every day. By the time she reached the Souq it was almost nine-thirty. Most of the jewellery- and electronics-shops had already shut down, but a few of the cloth-shops were still open. She didn’t expect to see a light in the Durban Tailoring House. She knew Jeevanbhai would be in the small room behind the shop. Drinking, probably. He could wait: it would do him good; make him drunker. Maybe he’d drink himself to death.

Zindi wandered into one of the cloth-shops and looked it over. It took her no more than a glance to see that it was all wrong — some shelves were too crowded, some too bare, and there weren’t enough sample leaflets on the counter. She left it, nodding to herself. She knew she could do better.

The Durban Tailoring House was dark, as she had expected; but she could see a sliver of light under the door to the room at the back. She rattled the shop’s heavily padlocked steel collapsible gates. The door at the back opened promptly, and she saw Jeevanbhai silhouetted against a rectangle of dim light. He stood there for a moment, fumbling for his keys, his shoulders slightly stooped, his hair neatly combed as always, his teeth an iridescent ruby streak in the darkness. As she watched him unlocking the gate, the helpless, unnameable rage that had kept her awake for two nights suddenly poured into her head and began to throb in her temples.

’Aish Halak ya Zindi? he said, smiling politely, as he pushed the gate back along its rails.

Zindi crashed past him into the shop, knocking him aside with her shoulder. Why is it so dark here? she snapped. Spinning around, she slammed the edge of her palm on the light switches. Two neon lights flickered on, filling the shop with their silvery glare.

Zindi, what’re you doing? Jeevanbhai protested, sheltering his eyes and groping for the switches.

Zindi blocked his way with an outstretched arm. What’s the matter? she said. Why d’you always hide from the light like a cockroach?

She reached over the counter to the shelves and yanked out a roll of cloth. With jerks of her hand she spread several layers of the cloth over the counter. Then, very gently, she laid Boss on the improvised cot.

Yalla, go on, ya Boss, she whispered loudly. Piss, shit, do what you like. It’s our cloth now — yours and mine. We’re buying it tomorrow.

Zindi, Zindi, Jeevanbhai muttered in mild protest. Can’t you do all that later? I’ve been waiting for you. Come into the other room, and tell me …

Listen, Zindi snarled, spraying his face with spittle. I did what you said, for my reasons. Mine, not yours. I’m not your bought slave like Forid Mian. So don’t give me any orders. I’ll do what I want, and I’ll tell you when I want.

She reached into a pocket in the waist of her fustan and pulled out a tape measure. Laying one end of it at the corner of the shop, beside the collapsible gate, she measured along the wall to the far corner. Then she started at another corner and measured the breadth of the shop.

Just four metres by three metres, she said to Jeevanbhai. Very small; much smaller than it looks.

It’s big enough, Jeevanbhai said.

Have you got the documents ready?

In good time, Zindi, he answered guardedly. In good time.

‘Good time’ means tomorrow morning, as you said that day. You’ll remember that, if you want to keep all your bones together.

Zindi lifted Boss, together with his makeshift cot, off the counter and put him on the floor, in a corner. Then she put her hands and shoulders to the counter and pushed with all her strength. It scratched out a tooth-jarring squeak as it moved across the floor.

Zindi, Jeevanbhai shouted over the noise, what’re you doing?

Zindi dusted her hands and leant back to look at the counter. It was now parallel to the far wall. It looks better this way, she said. And it’s more convenient. Tomorrow I’ll get it painted nicely.

The counter had left behind a long, rectangular plinth of dust near the shelves. Zindi picked a dead scorpion out of the dust and threw it out through the bars of the collapsible gate. Look at this filth! she said. I’ll have to get it properly cleaned tomorrow.

All right, she said briskly, looking round the shop. Now I’ll do the shelves.

Zindi, Jeevanbhai said, can’t you do that tomorrow? Come inside now and tell me what happened.

Zindi smiled grimly at the unfamiliar sight of Jeevanbhai pleading. First, she said, tell me, what time shall I come tomorrow?

Any time.

No, I want a definite time. I’ll come in the morning, at eight-thirty, before the other shops open. I want to take the signboard down and shut the place up, while I rearrange it and get new stock and all that.

Jeevanbhai spat disgustedly through the collapsible gates into the corridor. All right, he said, come at eight-thirty, come at seven, stay the night, do what you like. Can’t we decide all that later?

No; the important things come first. So you’ll be here at eight-thirty with the documents, then?

Why do we want documents? Can’t we just have an agreement, between friends?

Yes, we could if we were friends, but you haven’t had a friend since your wife died. So listen, you bastard, you bring those documents with you tomorrow or I’ll tear out your cock and stuff it up your arse with a pneumatic drill. Do you understand?

Jeevanbhai backed away from her, licking his teeth. Yes, he said, I’ll bring them.

Fine, she said and shoved him towards the room at the back. We’ll go inside now.

Before going into the room, Jeevanbhai switched off all the lights in the shop, while Zindi put Boss back on the counter. The only light in the tiny room at the back came from a table-lamp that had been turned to the wall. Jeevanbhai cleared files and papers off a folding steel chair and gestured to it. A half-empty whisky-bottle and a few glasses stood on the desk, weighing down the litter of flapping paper. Jeevanbhai waved the bottle at her. Have a little bit?

Zindi made a face: A little bit.

So what happened yesterday? Jeevanbhai asked, pouring whisky into two glasses. He handed Zindi one of the glasses. She stared at the amber liquid for a moment, and then threw her head back and drained the glass.

A little bit more?

A little bit.

So what happened yesterday? Jeevanbhai asked again, pouring whisky into their glasses.

Nothing very much happened, she said. She took the glass and gazed into it, holding it in both hands. Then she pinched her nose tightly shut and tossed the whisky down.

I met him exactly where you’d said, she began. He was standing in the road outside your office and I went straight up to him and spoke to him in Hindi.

He was absolutely flabbergasted. Who knows what he’d expected? His mouth fell open and his eyebrows shot all over his forehead. He looked as though he was longing to run back across the road into the office. Perhaps he thought there had been some kind of mistake; that he was talking to the wrong woman. And then, when he understood that it wasn’t a mistake, he began to behave like a schoolboy who’d run into his headmistress with a cigarette in his mouth. In the taxi he sat squeezed against the door, as though he was afraid of being beaten, and began to talk about birds.

Birds!

It seemed as though he wasn’t really in his right mind. It grew even worse when he was trying to explain what he did for his living. He seemed to be choking on his tongue. In the end he managed to say: I’m a journalist — but he didn’t, for one instant, look as though he expected to be believed.

The whole thing seemed more and more difficult as the taxi drew closer to the Ras. How was anyone going to take this tip-top suited-booted babu into the Ras without people knowing exactly what he was the moment they saw him?

But it was the Ras itself which solved that problem.

From a long way away it was clear that something unusual was happening around the embankment. The driver saw it, too, and he slowed down. There was a crowd at the foot of the embankment. Even at that distance, they could hear shouts and a tremendous noise. Then a large part of the crowd broke away and went up and over the embankment, and disappeared into the Ras.

They saw then what had drawn the crowd — a car lying on its side. The taxi-driver stopped the car when he saw the crowd. He was a Ghaziri and he tried to stay away from the Ras, he said, when it looked as though there’d be trouble. So they had to walk the last part.

There was so much confusion, nobody looked at them twice. They slipped into the crowd and worked their way down the embankment to the car (she holding him by the hand). It was a new Peugeot, balancing on one side, with a wheel still spinning, and a door open in the air, like a trapdoor. There was a jagged, gaping hole in one side of the windscreen, and what was left of the glass was all frosted over with cracks.

Someone must have been hurt, she said to somebody.

No, he said, whoever he was, no one was hurt. It must be true, she thought to herself. There’s no blood anywhere.

So how did it happen?

It was all to do with the mugaddams, the labour contractors.

Adil al-Azraq, the blue Moroccan, and his cousin had come to the Ras in their car that evening as they often did. When they reached the embankment, they lit cigarettes, gave the horn a gentle push, and sat back in their seats, expecting people to come running up to them, as they usually did.

But there was a surprise waiting for them. They sat for a full five minutes, which they’d never done before, and there was still no sign of anyone. They blew the horn again, a little less languidly this time. It made no difference. They blew it again, and again, until at the end of twenty minutes, when the setting sun had heated the car into an oven, Adil the Blue had his elbows jammed on the horn. But still they wouldn’t get out of the car and go into the Ras — their prestige wouldn’t let them.

Then the men appeared — not running, but in a compact, dignified group. There were a lot of them there — about thirty, including Rakesh and Zaghloul. Abu Fahl was in the lead. They’d decided that he’d speak for all of them.

Abu Fahl didn’t waste any breath on greetings. He went straight up to them and said: Listen, I have to tell you something. Here in the Ras we’ve all been thinking a lot about dirt and germs and money. We’ve managed to do away with almost all the money in the Ras. The big problem is you mugaddams. With you it’s money, money, money all the time: take money, hand out money, take back money. It’s a dirty system: it spreads germs like a squid spreads ink. We’ve decided to do away with it. From now on we’ll go to the contractors and architects ourselves, all together, and we’ll work out our own terms, and we’ll carry the money we make safely to the bank, in envelopes. You can join us if you like — you can come and work with us. But — salli-’ala-n-nabi — no one here will work for a mugaddam again.

Adil the Blue and his cousin were fuming and steaming all through this, especially Adil, whose burnt blue cheeks had turned purple. He’d have run Abu Fahl over right then, but his cousin stopped him. He saw Zaghloul and twenty-eight others standing around the car, so he squeezed Adil’s elbow to keep him quiet and smiled at Abu Fahl and said: Abu Fahl, why not send all these people away, to the bottom of the embankment, and then we’ll talk?

Abu Fahl could see no harm in that, so he told Zaghloul to take the others off, and he went to the side of the road and watched them go down the embankment.

The moment the others had gone Adil the Blue started the car and threw it at Abu Fahl’s back.

Abu Fahl spun round, as quick as a top, but the car was just a hair away from his chest. So, instead of running, he jumped at the bonnet and managed to roll over safely on the other side. He picked himself up, ran to the side of the embankment and looked for something to throw, but there was nothing there, except a few pebbles. So he slipped his watch off his wrist — it was a heavy old automatic, not one of those thin quartz things — and hid it in his palm.

Adil the Blue looked back, and he was surprised to see Abu Fahl still on the embankment, waiting for him. He wheeled the car around and went straight for him, steering carefully. Abu Fahl waited until it was almost on him, and then in one movement he hurled his watch at the windscreen and jumped aside.

The watch was thrown with such force that when it hit the windscreen there was an explosion of glass. Adil lost control and the car rolled over the side of the embankment.

The others were already running up the embankment, and they followed Abu Fahl down to the car. Nothing had happened to Adil or his cousin, though they both had a bit of glass in their hair. Soon enough they got over the shock and climbed out through the door at the top.

Abu Fahl would have beaten them to a pulp right there, but Zaghloul and Rakesh stopped him. No, they said, we shouldn’t do anything to them ourselves. We’ll take them to Hajj Fahmy and see what he has to say. And so they led them off across the embankment and into the Ras.

And it was only a few minutes after that that their driver stopped his taxi and told them that they would have to walk the rest of the way.

In a way it was the best thing that could have happened. In all that confusion and excitement, it was clear that nobody would have the time to notice who was who, and who was wearing a duster and who wasn’t. So she decided not to waste any more time and led the Bird-man straight to Hajj Fahmy’s house.

There was a huge crowd there already. The news had spread everywhere: Adil al-Azraq had tried to kill Abu Fahl, but Abu Fahl had been too quick for him, and they’d caught Adil and his cousin and taken them to Hajj Fahmy’s to be judged.

She had to use all her strength to clear a path for them through the crowd, holding tightly on to his arm all the while so that he wouldn’t fall and end up being trampled to death. Once, she wondered how this young bird-lover was taking the crowds and the Ras and the excitement; whether he was frightened or nervous.

He wasn’t. The arm she was holding so tightly was perfectly steady, though damp with sweat. He seemed curious, mainly: he was staring all around him, at the crowds, peering into shacks, watching people, looking at the colourful dusters on their arms. It was as though he were watching a film.

Pushing, shoving, thrusting her weight at sharp angles, she managed to clear a way for them right up to the door to Hajj Fahmy’s courtyard. By wriggling a couple of tall Baluchis out of the doorway she managed to get a good view of the courtyard. The crowd had formed a huge circle around the courtyard now. Adil the Blue and his cousin were alone in the middle of the circle, squatting. Someone handed them a couple of cigarettes, and they lit them, and puffed away furiously. But that wasn’t enough for them. They asked for tea. Hajj Fahmy sent a message into the house, and Professor Samuel made a note in his pad, and soon a tray with two glasses appeared.

Zindi pulled the Bird-man in front of her, and held him tight against her chest, so that she could whisper into his ear without anyone else hearing. And then she pointed them all out to him. There was Abu Fahl, his one eye glowing a livid red, his jallabeyya tied around his waist with a scarf, like it used to be when he went into the fields to harvest rice. There was Zaghloul laughing, that laugh which used to drive the girls in his village mad; and there was Rakesh, worrying about his hair, smoothing his shirt. That was Professor Samuel there, worried, nervously fingering the calculator in his breast pocket. And there was Chunni squatting at the edge of the circle and Karthamma, enjoying herself while Kulfi looked after Boss at home. And of course, over there, sitting gravely on the platform, legs folded, next to the loom was Hajj Fahmy, solemnly counting his beads, for all the world like an elder sitting in council to settle a family quarrel.

And Alu?

She pointed him out, at the loom, weaving, his big head turned away from the crowd, ignoring the noise. And when he saw him the Bird-man stared and stared, like a timid falcon sizing up some unusual and frightening prey.

Hajj Fahmy asked Abu Fahl to speak first since he was the one who had been wronged. So Abu Fahl walked into the circle and, like a storyteller at a fair, he began to speak. He described every moment of it — what he had said, and what they had said, and how they drove at him, and how he shattered their windshield. It was masterful; the whole crowd was enthralled. At the end of it the courtyard rang to shouts and applause and the stamping of feet. Abu Fahl, of course, was as pleased as a new bridegroom: he was smiling and grinning so much you’d have thought he’d be happy to forgive Adil al-Azraq for giving him a chance to tell that story.

All through this, Adil al-Azraq and his cousin were sullenly smoking cigarettes and drinking tea in the centre of the courtyard. By the time Hajj Fahmy called on them to speak Adil was grinding his teeth so loud it was like the rattle of stones in a crusher.

Hajj Fahmy called him to the platform and said: What have you to say for yourself?

Adil stood up, with his cigarette in his hand, and went up to Hajj Fahmy. He blew a cloud of smoke straight into the Hajj’s face and said: You’ll find out what I have to say soon enough, you son of a whore. You’ll find out when my men come here tomorrow and tear your rotten old teeth out.

Hajj Fahmy was quite unmoved, but the whole courtyard gasped. Abu Fahl leapt on Adil and sent him sprawling across the courtyard. He would have taken him apart right there if Hajj Fahmy hadn’t gestured to the others to hold Abu Fahl.

The Hajj was quite angry. He pointed his finger at Abu Fahl and said: Who do you think you are? Who gave you the right to fight in my courtyard? Do you think this is a market? There won’t be any fighting in my house.

Abu Fahl was furious, too; there were at least six men holding him and you could see they weren’t finding it easy. He shouted at Hajj Fahmy: I didn’t do anything to them at the embankment even though they tried to kill me. The others said we should bring them here, and I let them. But now that they’re here do you think I’m going to let them threaten us? Do you think I’m going to let them go? Just like that?

Hajj Fahmy looked at him very coldly and said: Since you can’t control yourself, you should let other people think about these things.

He held up his hand and looked around the courtyard. No one spoke. The Hajj said: We won’t have any fighting or beating here. But, still, it is true — these men are dirty. They’ve dealt in dirt so long you can see it caked on their skin. Fighting and beating won’t do them any good. What they need is a bath.

A bath? everyone said.

Yes, said Hajj Fahmy, a bath. A good proper bath, with lots of antiseptic to kill all the dirt that’s clinging to them. They’ll bathe themselves — we won’t do anything but watch quietly — and then they can go.

He sent a message to his wife, and soon she sent out four buckets. They were all full of water that was milky with antiseptic. Someone carried the buckets and two mugs to the centre of the circle and put them in front of Adil and his cousin. And then the crowd drew back.

Adil the Blue and his cousin were alone now, in the middle, each with their two buckets of water and a mug in front of him. The courtyard was so silent you could hear the waves breaking on the beach, in the distance.

And Alu?

Alu? Alu wasn’t weaving any longer, but he wasn’t watching, either. He was looking in front of him, totally bewildered. You had only to look at him to know that the whole thing was beyond him now. He could no longer understand what he’d started.

At first Adil and his cousin looked at the buckets and from them to Hajj Fahmy, in complete disbelief. Then Adil let out a loud, sneering laugh and shouted: Do you think Adil al-Azraq, who’s given you all work for the last fifteen years, has suddenly become a child that you’re going to make him bathe in public?

Hajj Fahmy looked straight at him, without blinking and without speaking. Adil and his cousin turned to their left and to their right and they laughed again, as though they wanted to share a joke with the crowd. Look, they said, he’s a mad old man — he’s lost his mind.

But their laughter returned to them, echoing hollowly in that bowl of silence.

They spun around then, appealing to everyone. This is crazy, they said. What’ll you get out of watching us bathe? We’ll give you some money instead. It’s true, we shouldn’t have tried to run down Abu Fahl. But it’s a simple thing and easily settled. How much do you want? Just tell us. How much?

No one took their eyes off them, and no one answered. Now they were running from one end of the courtyard to the other, like insects in a matchbox, clutching at people’s hands, Abu Fahl’s hands, begging, pleading.

Nobody moved, no one spoke.

Trapped in that storm of silence, they circled slowly back to the centre, looking around the courtyard like caged foxes. Slowly, as they began to understand the depths of their humiliation, the disbelief and mockery on their faces faded into terror. Weighed down by the silence they sank to their knees. Then suddenly they lifted up their buckets and drenched each other in antiseptic.

And at that moment the young bird-lover jerked himself free, and fought his way through the crowd. Once he was out of the lane, he began to run. He lost his way among the shacks but he kept on running, in circles, until somehow he reached the embankment. He stopped there to get his breath back, but also because he realized at last that he was lost.

Why did he run? Jeevanbhai asked incredulously. His eyes were glazed now and he was slumped across his paper-littered desk, with a glass clutched in one hand.

Why did he run? Was he scared?

No, said Zindi, tossing off another shot of whisky. He wasn’t scared exactly. He was shocked: it was as though the world had suddenly started moving backwards.

What did you do then?

Zindi could feel herself swaying on the chair, and she gripped the edge of her desk to hold herself steady. I found him near the embankment, she said. And I walked with him till we found a taxi. And all the way, like a child in search of a secret, he bombarded me with questions about birds.

Birds! Jeevanbhai snorted, curling his lip. That’s all they’re good for: birds, and their promotions and their postings. It’s no use expecting anything from them. A man has to do what he can for himself.

So, Zindi said, holding out her empty glass, I’ll be back at eight-thirty tomorrow. And you’d better have the papers ready, Jeevanbhai.

Wait, Jeevanbhai cried, with drunken petulance. That’s not all. You have to tell me more. What happens now?

What do you mean? said Zindi. I’ll come at eight-thirty, then we’ll sign the documents, and after that I’ll start work. And tell me: have you told Forid Mian yet?

No, no, I didn’t mean that. Jeevanbhai waved an impatient hand. I meant, what are they going to do next?

Zindi repeated with slow menace: Have you told Forid Mian yet? When are you going to tell him?

I’ll tell him tomorrow, don’t worry. There’s nothing to worry about. Now tell me: what are they going to do next?

Zindi poured a finger of whisky into her glass and sat back. Nothing much, she said. They were so happy with what they did to the mugaddams they’ve decided to celebrate. They’re all going to the Star tomorrow evening — half the Ras.

The room was suddenly swimming before Jeevanbhai’s eyes. He shook his head fiercely, in an effort to clear it. They’re going to the Star? he asked hoarsely.

Yes, said Zindi. They’re all going to the Star tomorrow. You know, they lifted the police cordon last week, so there’s nothing to stop them going now. They’re going to look at the room Alu was buried in. If they find the two sewing machines that saved him, they’re going to bring them out and give them to him as a gift. And the Mawali women are going to take fruit and bread and kahk biscuits to distribute at their sheikh’s grave, if they can find it in that mess. After that they’re all going on a shopping spree in Hurreyya Avenue — in all the foreign shops. Professor Samuel is going to take a briefcase full of money.

Jeevanbhai rose slowly from his chair, gripping the desk tightly. He stood still for a moment, testing his legs. Then he staggered over to Zindi’s chair and leant against her back.

I went to the Star once, he said thickly, clutching her shoulders. Only the Star wasn’t there then and I had to go by boat. Do you remember, Zindi?

I remember, Zindi said grimly, and brushed his hands away. They came back again, feeling their way unsteadily over her shoulders and neck.

Do you remember? Do you remember how I arrived in your house? Jabal and the Pathans were behind us. Abusa managed to get us on to a horse, and we raced away. Only, I fell off on the dirt path, where the embankment is now. But somehow I crawled into your house. Do you remember?

He bent down and kissed her on the top of her head, where her hair was thinnest. She jabbed her elbow angrily into his stomach. He lurched backwards and then fell to his knees beside her, hugging her arm.

Do you remember how you looked after me, Zindi? Do you remember that one time when you came to me at night and found me writhing in pain?

Zindi pushed him back: Stop this nonsense.

There were tears in his eyes now, and his face crumpled like wet paper. He caught her hand and lifted it to his cheek.

We lost that battle, Zindi, he said, and that war, too. Why did we lose?

Zindi snatched her hand away. Jeevanbhai, she snapped, be a grown man, in God’s name.

Jeevanbhai brushed the back of his hand across his eyes. Then he put his arm around her waist as far as it would reach, and sank his head into her lap.

Do you think I’d win now, Zindi, he said, if I tried?

Zindi did not answer and she made no effort to push his head away. He looked up at her. He said: Do you think I might win, once?

Zindi shook her head. Stop this now, Jeevanbhai, she said wearily. There’s nothing to win any longer.

Jeevanbhai reached up and pulled her head down. Zindi, he whispered into her ear, once more. Please. Just one more time, like the last one.

Zindi snapped her head back, startled. But where? she cried.

Jeevanbhai waved a hand at the records of his planned matings. I could spread them out on the floor, he said eagerly.

Zindi laughed: We’re too old, Jeevanbhai.

Zindi, he pleaded, just one more time.

She looked at him and saw a spark of hope glinting behind the fog of years of defeat and, despite herself, she drew his face towards her and kissed him gently on his moist forehead. Then she pushed him away: It’s too late now, Jeevanbhai.

He caught her hand and sat back on his haunches. As you like, Zindi, he said. But can I tell you something? I can tell you now because we’re both drunk and tomorrow’s so close. In my own way I’ve always loved you — as much as I can love, and with as much as I had to spare from my wife.

Zindi ran her hand over his papery cheek. No, Jeevanbhai, she said sadly. You’re like all men; what you loved was the reflection you saw of yourself in my eyes.

She rose from her chair and banged her glass on the desk. I have to go now, she said. Boss has to go to sleep; it’s very late.

Jeevanbhai darted to one corner of the room and began to rummage around in a stack of files. Wait, he called out after her. I’ve got another new bottle somewhere here.

Zindi went into the shop and pulled the collapsible gate open. The passageway was pitch dark. She lifted Boss into her arms and pressed him to her breasts.

Listen, she shouted into the inner room, I’ll be back tomorrow at eight-thirty. You’d better have the papers ready.

There was no answer. Growling to herself, she left the shop and walked down the passageway, trying to keep her steps even.

Zindi! a shout echoed down the passageway. She turned, pulled her torch out, and shone it towards the shop. Jeevanbhai was leaning against the collapsible gate, holding a new bottle of whisky in one hand. She turned back and hurried away towards the Bab al-Asli.

But his voice followed her: Zindi! Tell them I’ll meet them at the Star. Tell them they have nothing to worry about. We’ll win this time.

Chapter Sixteen. Dreams

At six in the morning the telephone shattered Jyoti Das’s thirty-two hours of sleep. The telephone was on a low table beside his bed. He tried to open his eyes and found them gummed together. Turning over he fumbled blindly around till his fingers touched the cold plastic of the sleek digital telephone, and found the right button. The electronic bleating stopped. He had no idea how long it had been making that noise; the sound had seemed to grow out of his sleep. It could have been hours.

Hullo? he said into the plastic flap which opened out of the receiver. His throat felt like clotted sand.

Hullo? Das? He recognized Jai Lal’s voice, crackling with urgency.

Yes, he said. He prised his eyes open with his fingers. The heavy curtains that he had drawn across the plate-glass windows yesterday were glowing, with the first morning light behind them.

Das? Jai Lal said. Listen.

Yes? said Das.

I’ve got something to do in your part of the town. It’s important. I’ll stop by your hotel on the way. It might interest you, too.

All right, Das said. Jai Lal disconnected before he could say anything else.

Stretching his arm out to put the phone back, he could feel an almost painful stiffness in his joints. The crumpled sheets of his bed had left their impression on his skin over the last day and a half; his arm was marbled over with wrinkles. He hadn’t slept through all of the thirty-two hours, of course. Twice yesterday he had gone down to the hotel’s restaurants. He had even thought of going out for a walk once, but when he reached the revolving glass doors which sealed the steamy Ghaziri air out of the hotel his resolution had failed him. He had looked through the glass at the swirling traffic, at the entrails of unfinished buildings festooned across the skyline, and the flow of people with their inexplicable nationalities, and all he had wanted was to get back into bed, back to peaceful, orderly sleep. He had meant to ring up Jai Lal but hadn’t got around to it; sleep had claimed him first. Besides, Jai Lal had made it clear that he was busy and wouldn’t be able to shepherd him around any longer.

But now he had to hurry to be ready for Jai Lal. He made his way unsteadily to the bathroom.

By the time Jai Lal knocked, he had shaved, changed and even ordered breakfast. Jai Lal, looking grim, forced a smile when he opened the door.

Hullo, Jai, hullo, Das said. Come and sit. I’ve just ordered breakfast — do you want some?

Breakfast? Jai Lal gaped at him in astonishment. Yar, this is urgent; I didn’t come to have breakfast.

Das grimaced. Sorry, he said. I was just asking. What’s the matter?

Jai Lal glanced around the room. Haven’t you got a radio or something? he asked.

Das pointed to a knob set in a perforated panel next to the bed. Jai Lal turned it and the hotel’s piped music tinkled out of the panel.

Sorry, said Lal. There’s no need really — it’s just a habit. I even do it at home sometimes.

There were two low chairs, upholstered in imitation leather, near the window. Das took one and gestured at the other.

What’s the matter? he said. What’s so urgent?

Jai Lal kept standing. I can’t sit now, he said. I just came to tell you: Jeevanbhai Patel has been taken in by the local security people. It happened early this morning — or, rather, very late last night. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I may be able to find out soon. One of their security people, a Pakistani who I know a bit, rang up this morning. He didn’t say very much except that Jeevanbhai had said, during an interrogation, that I might be willing to stand bail for him. Don’t know what gave him that idea, and I don’t know what else he’s said. It could be quite tricky. He wants me to go there as soon as possible. Of course bail doesn’t have anything to do with it; it could hardly be anything bailable. Anyway, I’m going there now to find out. I thought I’d keep you informed, because I think — I’m not sure, but I think — it may have something to do with your friend, the Suspect. Something he said gave me that impression.

Das nodded thoughtfully. So, then, he said, do you think their security knows about the whole thing now?

Jai Lal shrugged: I don’t know. Maybe. I thought of taking you along, but the thing is I know this chap, and he might talk to me a little. He wouldn’t if someone he didn’t know was there, too. Anyway I’ll come back and tell you all about it.

Fine; I’ll wait here.

Jai Lal went to the door and opened it. I’ll be back as soon as I can, he said, and hurried away.

Das sat down to wait. Soon a waiter brought him his breakfast. Das looked at him curiously; he seemed Indian. He was a young man, with sandy skin and very dark hair.

Are you from India? Das asked him in Hindi.

The waiter grinned shyly and scratched his head. Yes, sahb, he said.

From where exactly?

From Sundernagar.

Sundernagar? Where’s that?

The waiter was surprised: You don’t know Sundernagar, sahb? How’s that? It’s a district headquarters. It’s in Himachal, at the foot of the Dhauladhar Range.

Das bit his lip, embarrassed by his ignorance. It must be cold there, he said, up in the mountains.

Arre han sahb, he said. It’s very cold. There’s always snow on the Dhauladhar. All the greatest rivers in the world start there — the Beas, the Suketi. You should see them; they could sweep away a place like this.

Oh? said Das. And where do you live? In the hotel?

No. I and some friends — they’re mechanics, electrical, all from Sundernagar — we share a room.

In the Ras al-Maktoo? Das prompted.

No, sahb. He was quite indignant. Our room’s a long way from that place.

Das was oddly relieved. He called the waiter back as he was going out, and gave him half a dirham.

After finishing his breakfast, he tried to read a magazine, but his feet took him to his bed, and he lay down. Jai Lal would probably take longer than he’d expected, he thought as his eyes closed.

He had hardly shut his eyes, it seemed to him, when a knock woke him. In fact it was almost midday and he had been asleep for more than four hours.

Jai Lal’s clothes were crumpled and there were large dark patches under his armpits. Were you sleeping or what? he said sharply, his urbanity a little frayed, when Jyoti Das opened the door. I’ve been knocking for five minutes.

Sorry, Das said. He almost added ‘sir’.

Why’s this room so dark? Jai Lal said. He went to the window and drew the curtain back. Das flinched from the sudden burst of light, but Jai Lal did not notice. He sank into one of the chairs near the window and wiped his face with his handkerchief.

Das turned the music on again. So? he said. What happened?

Jai Lal pulled a face: God, it’s so hot out there. I was really tired by the end of it. It would take too long to tell you all about it. I’ll just sum up the main points. It appears that they’ve been watching Jeevanbhai Patel for quite a long time now. That’s because he was fairly deeply involved in the old regime. In other words, he was quite close to the old Malik of Ghazira. After this regime came into power, they banned him from going to the Old Fort, where the Malik lives. But apparently Jeevanbhai used to get in there every now and then — how, nobody knew. The security people had some idea of his doings, because they had a source placed quite close to him. But they didn’t know anything concrete. Now very late last night, at about three or four in the morning, they had information from their source that he was on his way there again. The source thought it was something serious this time.

They picked him up near an old disused gate at the back which they hadn’t bothered to guard all these years. He was horribly drunk, and more or less raving (must have been drinking that whisky I gave him). They questioned him a bit last night and again at dawn today. Apparently he raved on and on. They couldn’t make sense of everything he said, but the gist of it was this: a massive procession led by your old friend is going to march out of the Ras tomorrow — sorry, today — in the evening. They might even be armed. They plan to march to the Star. The Star is the building which collapsed and buried your Suspect — you remember? The security people aren’t quite sure why they’re going there; maybe it’s some kind of demonstration. Whatever it is, that alone is a serious business. Demonstrations and processions are as forbidden as forbidden can be here, and have been ever since this regime came into power. But, it seems, Jeevanbhai had even grander plans for them and himself. He had some wild idea of getting the old Malik to take advantage of the demonstration and make a show of force at the same time. Perhaps even …

A coup?

Maybe that’s not the right word, but something like that, I think. You know, he still has a lot of support among some people here. But the whole idea was crazy of course. The Malik’s bedridden and ill. He’d probably have thrown Jeevanbhai out, or handed him to security himself. Jeevanbhai must have been very, very drunk to think of something like that.

Maybe he wasn’t, said Das. I told you — that man was living in a dream. There was no telling what he might do.

Maybe you were right, Jai Lal said.

So what happens now?

Well, they’re very concerned. A demonstration by migrant labourers could be quite dangerous. They’re going to deal with it very firmly.

You mean they’ll go into the Ras al-Maktoo and arrest them?

No, that would take a lot of preparation, and there isn’t enough time now. And, in any case, that place is a labyrinth; half of them would be gone before the security people got within a mile of the place. No; they’re going to wait for them near the Star, and they’re going to take the whole lot in over there.

Oh, said Das. So what happens to our Suspect?

Jai Lal coughed into his fist. Well, he said, I was able to work out an agreement. It’s very lucky I happen to know this chap. They’re willing to take us along as observers. They’ll hand over your Suspect once they’ve got him, and you can take him back. They have no interest in keeping him of course but, still, it’s very generous, you know, because we don’t have an extradition agreement with them. Anyway, be ready at four today. I’ll pick you up.

Jai Lal sat back and lit a cigarette. He said: Personal contacts help, you know. No one can work without contacts. That’s the only talent a good officer needs, I always say.

But won’t you need clearance from your ambassador?

No, not strictly. He doesn’t really have jurisdiction over what I do or don’t do. It’s a matter of courtesy really. But I thought something like this might crop up sooner or later, so only last week I put up a note. HE sent it back marked ‘urge fullest co-operation’ or something like that. So that’s OK.

He looked at Das expectantly. Das inclined his head. That was very far-sighted, he said. Good work. You’ll probably get a promotion for this, Jai. Or at least an increment.

Jai Lal shook his head: Oh, I’m not expecting anything like that. It’s much too early yet. Let’s see how the reports and things turn out first. But it’s turned out well for you, hasn’t it? You can go back now, with your friend all tied up. I’ll send a telex so that they’ll be ready for you.

God, yes, said Das. I’ll be glad to get back.

Jai Lal got up to go. Jyoti Das was staring at the streets below the hotel and the expanse of white sand beyond the city. He turned suddenly. Listen, he said on an impulse, couldn’t we meet Jeevanbhai Patel again before I leave? I’d like to ask him a few things — just personal things. How he ended up here, what he did and suchlike. Meeting him was the only worthwhile thing that happened to me here. Is it possible?

No.

But couldn’t you ask this chap in security, since you know him so well? Or else couldn’t we visit him in gaol, like ordinary visitors?

Lal shuffled his feet uncomfortably. No, he said, it’s not possible. You see, Jeevanbhai hanged himself this morning. With his belt. He was dead when I got there. Must have done it as soon as he sobered up. That’s why I took so long. They needed someone to identify the body and sign papers and all that. He had no relatives.

Chapter Seventeen. A Last Look

There was no sleep for Zindi that night. When she got back to her house, she lay on her mattress with Boss beside her and tried to still her pounding pulse and shut her eyes. But it was no use; the metallic sharpness of her excitement worried at her tongue like a brass shaving. Soon she gave up and lay on her back, staring at the ceiling, and to the tune of the snores in the next room she filled the darkness with her plans for the Durban Tailoring House.

She rose a little before dawn, alerted by the stirring of the geese in the courtyard. That was when, she knew, sleep is at its deepest; she could have knocked down a wall without waking anyone in the house. But, still, her every instinct cried to her to be careful. She found her torch, and stealthily, crouching on the floor, she cleared a pile of mats, mattresses and cooking-pots from a corner of the room. Once, a tin tray dropped from her hands. She froze as the clattering echoed through the house. But there was no break in the steady rhythm of snores in the next room. She went back to work, biting her lip fiercely.

When she had laid the floor bare, she counted four handspans from the corner towards the centre of the room, and marked the place with a matchstick. Then she sat back, closed an eye and examined the angle again. She had to get it just right. When she was sure, she removed, very carefully, a section of the thin, cracked layer of cement which served as the floor. There were bricks underneath. She shone her torch over them, squinting hard, until she found the brick she wanted: one with a tiny daub of white paint in a corner. That brick had an almost invisible dent in one side, which provided a grip of sorts for a fingertip. But the bricks were wedged firmly together and it took her a long time and a broken fingernail to pull it out. After that, the four bricks around the empty space of the first came away easily, exposing a large patch of loose soil.

Zindi bent down and dug her hands into the soil. She scrabbled about for a moment, and then, sucking in a long breath, she drew out a large aluminium cooking-pot. Inside, wrapped in cellophane, was a heavy iron box. It was fastened with a huge padlock. She drew her handkerchief-wrapped bunch of keys out of the neck of her dress, found the right key and opened the box.

It was all there, all the money she had saved in her decades in al-Ghazira: the measure of her life. It was a lot of money: dirhams and dollars and sterling in yellowing cash. Enough to pay for the shop and lay in an entire range of new stocks.

She shut her eyes and breathed the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

It took only a few minutes after that to stuff the money into her dress, to put the empty box back, and rearrange the bricks and the cement and the mats and mattresses. Then she stood back and looked at it, pleased with herself; even she wouldn’t have known whether anything had been moved.

It was dawn now, and the wads of notes rustling against her skin charged her with an unbearable impatience. But before leaving she had to talk to Kulfi, and Kulfi was still asleep in the women’s room. If she went in there to wake her up she might wake the others as well. So instead she decided to wait in the courtyard, for Kulfi was always the first one up in the morning.

Squatting in the courtyard, listening to the hissing of the geese, Zindi suddenly remembered that other day, so many long months ago, when someone else had waited for Kulfi at dawn, and she smiled to herself. Mast Ram was beaten now, at last. She had beaten him. With the shop in her hands, she would wean Rakesh away first, with clothes perhaps. Then Zaghloul. Kulfi was with her anyway, only too timid to say so. Abu Fahl would follow, and then they’d all come, back to the shelter of her house. All of them, hanging their heads and pleading …

Kulfi came out soon, yawning. Zindi gestured quickly to her to be quiet and caught her arm. Don’t go anywhere today, she whispered into her ear. Wait for me in the house. I’ll need you later today — there’ll be work to do. I can’t talk now, but I’ll tell you about it later. Boss is in the other room. Look after him. Don’t go anywhere; don’t move. Stay here and wait for me.

But where are you going at this time of the morning? Kulfi asked in surprise.

To the Souq, Zindi hissed, to Jeevanbhai’s shop.

Now? Kulfi said doubtfully. She turned and looked at Jeevanbhai’s door. A lock hung upon the latch. But, she cried, he’s not here. Where is he?

Zindi pinched her arm and Kulfi squealed. Be quiet, Zindi snapped. What does it matter? You know he often passes out in his sleep when he’s been drinking. He’s there, in his shop, waiting for me. Now, remember: don’t go anywhere — just wait for me.

With a last warning tap on Kulfi’s arm, Zindi turned and surged out of the house.

It was not yet seven when she reached the Maidan al-Jami‘i, and the shops and cafés in the square were all shut. A man was washing the pavement outside the mosque, singing to himself, and in the square there were a couple of figures stretched out on the stone benches. Zindi hurried past them, straight to the Bab al-Asli. She stopped there for a moment, and for the first time that morning a doubt struck her. Would he be waiting after all? She shook her head and slipped quickly through the Bab al-Asli into the enveloping blackness beyond.

She had to feel her way along slowly at first, half-blinded by the sudden darkness. She tried to hurry and stumbled. Muttering to herself, she slowed down again, though impatience and worry were clawing at her scalp now.

She turned into the first lane and a huge sigh of relief gushed out of her lungs. The steel collapsible gates of the Durban Tailoring House were drawn and its neon lights were glowing like beacons in the gloom of the passageway. She stopped and carefully patted the wads of notes around her neck and waist. Then she looked up again, and at exactly that moment a head appeared in the shop’s doorway, blew its nose, and vanished into the shop.

It wasn’t Jeevanbhai. Even in that brief glimpse she had seen, quite clearly, a peaked cap and the neck of a black uniform.

Her mouth went dry and she had to lean her shaking body against the wall of the corridor. After a while, when her knees were steady again, she pressed herself against the shop-fronts and inched forward, towards the Durban Tailoring House, grateful for the shadowy blackness of her fustan.

An age seemed to pass before she was halfway down the corridor. The head didn’t appear again, but she could hear muffled voices now. They grew louder as she worked her way forward, but she could see nothing except the shop’s window. When she was almost opposite the Durban Tailoring House, she dropped to her knees and half-crawled along the corridor till she could see inside. Three black-uniformed men were lounging on stools, laughing and talking good-humouredly. Files and papers lay piled up in heaps all over the floor of the shop. Zindi crouched back against the billboards of the travel agency behind her, shivering. They had only to turn their heads to see her.

One of the men called out towards the room at the back: Where’s the tea gone, ya ’ammi? A moment later the door of the back room opened and Forid Mian came out, nursing a kettle in his hands. He put it on the counter, raised his head and looked straight across the corridor into Zindi’s eyes.

For a long moment they stared at each other. Then Zindi pulled her dress up to her knees and lurched down the passageway as fast as she could.

Zindi! Forid Mian’s voice echoed after her. She stumbled fiercely on, without looking back. Faintly, through the convulsive wheezing of her own breath, she heard other footsteps ringing through the corridor, and Forid Mian again, shouting shrilly: Zindi! Stop! Why’re you running?

She pressed a hand on the wads of money around her neck and pulled herself round the corner. A blinding patch of daylight was shining in through the Bab al-Asli. Gulping in a huge breath, she flung herself at it. And when she was no more than a yard from the daylight Forid Mian’s hands closed on her elbow and drew her to a halt. She struggled feebly but her strength was gone.

She collapsed almost gratefully on the floor, shuddering and swallowing air.

Why were you running, Zindi? Forid Mian panted. What was the need?

Zindi cast a frightened glance past him into the passageway.

Why’re you afraid? Forid Mian said aggrievedly. They aren’t coming. They don’t care about you; they have nothing to do with you. They’ve only come to take away his papers.

What papers? Zindi scoured his face with her eyes. Why?

Forid Mian threw a quick glance over his shoulder and fell to his knees beside her. Don’t you know? he confided, his eyes alight. They caught Jeevanbhai last night and put him in gaol. He died this morning.

Zindi gazed at him, trembling. He stroked his beard and pressed his thin, cracked lips together. His mouth twitched, his eyes flickered, and then suddenly his face flowered into a wide, boyish smile.

Zindi! he cried, shaking her shoulders. I did it. I did it at last. I saw him going out and I knew he was going to the Old Fort, so I rang them up just like they’d told me to, and I told them, I told them, and they caught him and put him in a black car, handcuffs and all, and took him straight off to the big gaol and locked him up. Locked him up. That’s where he died — killed himself.

He dropped his hands and stared at the floor. He’s dead, he whispered incredulously; he’s dead at last. And now the shop’s mine. They’re going to give it to me.

Then he flung his arms around her and hugged her, whimpering with joy and disbelief. He was a bad man, he said. He was a bad, wicked man.

Zindi pushed him away and patted her dress to make sure her wads of notes were undisturbed. He was a bad man, Forid Mian whispered again, shaking his head. A bad, bad man.

He was a better man than you’ll ever be, Forid Mian, Zindi said. Despite everything. A thousand times better. At least, while he lived, he was alive.

Forid Mian laughed. You didn’t know him, Zindi, he said. I tell you, he was a bad man.

Zindi dusted her dress and turned to go. Forid Mian reached out and caught her arm. Wait, Zindi, he said. Don’t be in a hurry.

Zindi stopped. He dropped his eyes and shot her a shy, upwards glance. Maybe I’ll feel lonely now, Zindi, he said. Maybe I should have someone to look after me, as you were saying that day. I can afford it, now that I’ve got the shop.

He looked away modestly and shuffled his feet. The stringy white beard was suddenly incongruous on his glowing face; he looked twenty years younger. Tell me, Zindi, he said, did you talk to Kulfi?

Zindi tried to speak and could find no words. She pushed him aside and looked down the murky passageway into the heart of the Souq. Then her eyes filled with tears and she turned abruptly and hurried out through the Bab al-Asli.

Zindi took a taxi from the Maidan and so reached Hajj Fahmy’s house in half an hour. When she arrived there she stood outside the walls of the courtyard and shouted in: Are you there, ya Hajj Fahmy? Come out.

A girl peeped through the door and, seeing her, shut it again. She heard the pattering of feet and shrill cries inside the house: It’s Zindi, Zindi at-Tiffaha; she’s here.

She called out again: Ya Hajj, are you there? The door flew open and Hajj Fahmy stood in front of her, beaming: Come in, Zindi, come in, how are you, come in, come in, you’ve brought blessings, come in.

Zindi stepped reluctantly over the threshold and stood with her back to the door. Alu was working at the loom, at the other end of the courtyard. He looked up and smiled at her. She could see two little girls watching her from the shelter of a door.

Come in, Hajj Fahmy said. I’m glad you’ve come, Zindi. I hope you’ve come to join us at last. I knew you would sooner or later; I told the others so. Come and sit in the mandara and have some tea.

No, no, she said urgently, shaking her head. There’s no time.

No time? he smiled at her gently. No time for a cup of tea?

No, ya Hajj, there’s no time. Listen: Jeevanbhai’s been taken to gaol. I think he’s killed himself.

The Hajj started; his face clouded over. God have mercy on him, he said, laying his right hand on his heart.

But that’s not all, Zindi cried.

It’s very sad, Hajj Fahmy went on, talking more to himself than to her. But it was bound to happen. He got his fingers into too many things; that was always the trouble with him.

Zindi caught his arm. Listen, she said. Just listen to me now. There’s no time. He knew that all of you are going to the Star today. I told him so last night. I think that’s the reason why he was arrested. I don’t know exactly how, but I’m sure that’s the reason. He was planning something. He was arrested on his way to the Old Fort.

The Hajj stared at her in astonishment. Because of our trip to the Star? he said. What are you talking about? We’re going on a shopping trip and on the way we’re going to stop at the Star for a few minutes, to see if we can find Alu’s sewing machines. It’s allowed now; there’s no police cordon. Why should Jeevanbhai be taken to gaol for that? He had nothing to do with it.

I don’t know, she said, but I think that was why …

She saw him looking at her with a faintly ironic smile, and the things she had meant to say, all her arguments and phrases, became a confused jumble in her mind.

What gave you this idea, Zindi? he asked. Have you heard something definite?

No, Zindi stammered, searching her mind. But I think …

Hajj Fahmy frowned. Is this one of your little tricks, Zindi? he said softly.

Helplessly Zindi shook her head. She decided to make one last effort. Just believe me, she pleaded. Don’t go today. Take my word for it; I have nothing to gain. I came straight here, as soon as I heard about Jeevanbhai — to warn you. I had to. I didn’t think you would believe me, and I can see you don’t, but I had to try. That’s why I’ve come. You’ll be taking my whole house with you, and a woman can’t sit by and watch her children walking to their end. Don’t go, for God’s sake, don’t go. Don’t take the risk.

Hajj Fahmy scratched his cheek. But, Zindi, he said, we’re just going on a shopping trip. What could possibly happen? Why should the police be interested in a shopping trip? If they were, they’d be locking up the whole of al-Ghazira every day.

Trust me, ya Hajj, she said. Allahu yia’alam, this is no trick. Don’t go. Not just because of me or my people. Think of the Ras. If, just if, something does happen and the police are there and they catch you all together, it’ll be the end of the whole place. They won’t leave it standing — it’ll be finished.

Hajj Fahmy broke into a smile. Zindi, he said playfully, you’ve been having your bad dreams again.

She dropped her hands hopelessly. So you’ll go? she said.

He thumped her on the back and laughed: Come and have some tea. It won’t be as good as yours, but it won’t be bad.

Zindi turned away from him and went quickly across the courtyard to Alu. She reached up, caught his shuttle strings and said very rapidly in Hindi: Alu, don’t go. Don’t let them go today. You can stop them if you try. If anything happens, their blood will be on your hands.

Slowly Alu shook his head. There’s nothing I can do, he said. You know that. I don’t want to go myself. It’s not in my hands.

Hajj Fahmy came up and stood beside her. Stop running about, Zindi, he said. Come and have some tea and cool your head a little.

Zindi released Alu’s shuttle strings and turned slowly to Hajj Fahmy. She took his hand, and before he could pull it away she bent down and kissed it, formally.

God keep you, Hajj Fahmy, she said. You’re a good man.

And then she rushed away, for there was a lot to do and very little time to do it in: providentially she had heard somewhere that a sambuq called Zeynab was to sail for the Red Sea that very night.

Chapter Eighteen. Dances

When Abu Fahl stepped through the door, everyone in Hajj Fahmy’s courtyard could tell at once that he had a bottle hidden under his jallabeyya. His gleefully secretive grin made it plain; they didn’t even really need to look at the bulge under his arm to make sure.

Though it was only four o’clock, there were already a dozen men waiting in the strip of shade under the far wall of the courtyard. Alu was sitting at the loom at the other end, and Zaghloul was squatting beside him, asking questions and laughing at the answers, pretending incomprehension. Zaghloul saw Abu Fahl first, so he knew even before the others. He leapt to his feet and shouted delightedly: Bring it here, ya akhi, fast, before they get their hands on it. But there was a quick chorus from the other end, too: What have you got there, Abu Fahl? Show us.

Abu Fahl, swaggering across the courtyard, tried to wipe his grin away and assume innocence: Nothing, nothing at all — wala haja.

Come on, Abu Fahl, they sang out again. What is it? Potato stuff? Arrack? Whisky? Anything good?

Nothing, really, nothing at all, Abu Fahl said, demurely smoothing over the bulge under his arm. He glanced quickly around the courtyard and at the house: Where’s Hajj Fahmy?

Everyone laughed — sympathetically, for they would have been nervous, too, in his place. No drop of liquor had ever passed between Hajj Fahmy’s lips, and were he to hear that a bottle had entered his courtyard the man who had brought it would almost certainly be expelled from his house for all time. Don’t worry, someone said, it’s all right. He’s inside, sleeping. But hurry.

Abu Fahl, relieved, winked across the courtyard at Zaghloul and began to back away from the others. A couple of them jumped indignantly to their feet, crying: What’s the matter? Where’re you going? Do you think you’re going to drink it all by yourself?

Just one minute, Abu Fahl said, begging for patience with a gesture. I have to tell Zaghloul something. You’ll get some, don’t worry. There’s plenty.

He edged back to the loom, with the others still watching suspiciously. Then, very swiftly, he turned, and with his back to them he pulled a green bottle out through the neck of his jallabeyya and slipped it to Zaghloul. Zaghloul tore the cap off and took one long gagging swallow, and then another. The liquor was white and raw, distilled from potatoes, and it burnt like red coals in his throat. The others jumped to their feet, all together, shouting protests. Abu Fahl spun round to face them, pushing the sleeves of his jallabeyya threateningly back. They hesitated for a moment. The bottle passed into Alu’s hands and he gulped down a mouthful. Then Abu Fahl snatched it out of his hands and threw his head back, and the others surged across the courtyard.

But by the time they managed to pull the bottle away from him it was a third empty and Abu Fahl was weak with laughter: Fooled you, gang of asses.

And then, with the bottle drained, lit, and thrown away, everyone, as always, was complaining; it wasn’t enough, what good was one bottle, and that, too, of this second-rate Goan stuff, what use? There was still an hour or more to kill before they left for the Star, and everyone was tired of talking about what they were going to buy afterwards, and they’d already told all the jokes about Japanese cassette recorders called No and Aiwah, so instead somebody got hold of one of Hajj Fahmy’s transistors and found a station playing Warda. But nobody was in a mood to sit and listen quietly, for the potato liquor, which always proved stronger than it seemed, was bubbling pleasantly in their stomachs. Abu Fahl began clapping first, very loudly, with his palms cupped. Soon Zaghloul joined in. Then suddenly everyone else was clapping, too, and some were stamping their feet as well, sending up clouds of dust. The women of Hajj Fahmy’s house, his wife, his daughters, his sons’ wives and their daughters, came pouring out into the courtyard and stood around the doors, laughing behind their hands and their scarves — all except the Hajj’s wife, who was too old to care whether she was seen laughing, black teeth and all, or not.

More people were arriving now, and they began clapping, too, and soon there was so much shouting and noise and laughter that no one could hear Warda any more. So Abu Fahl switched off the transistor and bellowed, Why’re we all sitting when we can dance? — and even before he’d finished people were jumping to their feet.

Everyone gathered in the centre of the courtyard and formed a ring. Someone handed Zaghloul a spoon and a disht, a huge circular steel wash-basin. He stood at the edge of the ring with the disht leaning against his knee and began to beat out a ringing, ear-splitting, one, two, three, four, five, six rhythm with the spoon.

Go on, Abu Fahl, the crowd shouted, go on — you’re in the middle.

Abu Fahl looked around him as though he was waking from a trance, and saw that it was he who the ring had formed around, that he was alone in its centre, and at once his grin was struck away by shock and he tried to break his way out, pleading: No, I can’t — you know I can’t. But the ring held firm and pushed him back into the centre: Dance now; let’s see what you can do. So Zaghloul took pity on him and began a quick, pugnacious chant, for he knew the best Abu Fahl could do when he tried to dance was mimic a fight. Khadnáhá min wasat ad-dár, he chanted; we took her from her father’s house. Wa abúhá gá’id za’alán, the crowd shouted back; while her father sat there bereft. Then Zaghloul again — Khadnáhá bis-saif il-mádi; we took her with our sharpest sword. And the refrain, Wa abúhá makánsh rádi; because her father wouldn’t consent.

But still, despite Zaghloul, it was pitiful, though funny, for no song could have made a dancer of Abu Fahl. He tried hard, but his shoulders were too broad, his legs too heavily muscular, his waist so knotted that when he moved his hips his whole torso twitched as though he were in a fever. The second chanted refrain dissolved into laughter, and Abu Fahl sank gratefully back into the ring, mopping his dripping purple face and smiling sheepishly.

Then it was Zaghloul’s turn. Zaghloul was a real dancer: slim and lithe as a cat. He undid the grey scarf that he usually kept knotted around his skullcap and tied it tightly around his waist. Someone was beating a difficult rhythm on the disht now, slowly to begin with. The first line of a song rang through the courtyard — dalla’ ya’árís, ya abu lása nylo — and everyone roared their approval, for what better song could there be to sing for Zaghloul with his youth and his fine, bright face than one which told of the joys of bridegrooms?

Zaghloul began slowly, by turning in the centre of the ring with short, quick steps, his arms raised high above his head. Then gradually the pace of the beat increased, and in perfect time Zaghloul’s hips began to move with it. The crowd closed in intently around him, the shuffling of so many feet raising a cloud of dust which hung above the ring, encircling him in a golden halo. The claps came in sharp, quick bursts now, as the whole ring threw itself into his dance. In response, the jerking, twitching movement of Zaghloul’s hips quickened, too, and in exact counterpoint, as his hips moved faster and faster, the upper part of his body became more and more rigid and still, the tense fixity of his torso framing the driving energy of his waist. The disht was ringing deafeningly now, the beats spinning out in a throbbing, vibrant tattoo. And Zaghloul danced still faster, his face perfectly, stonily grave, his arms flexed above him, his torso motionless, his waist pulsating, hammering, in a movement both absolutely erotic and absolutely abstract, both love-making and geometry; faster still, the claps driving him on, and still faster, until with a final explosive ring of the disht the chant died and he collapsed laughing on the ground.

Somewhere the women were ululating as though it were a real wedding building towards its climax.

Then someone spotted Rakesh, sitting by himself in a corner of the courtyard, and a shout went up — Rakesh now! — and he was hauled towards the ring, screaming protests. But Abu Fahl saw that he was close to tears because his carefully ironed terry-cotton trousers were being dragged through the dust, so he wrenched him free and sent him back to his corner with a slap on the back. Instead Hajj Fahmy’s wife pushed her way into the ring and, without feigning a modesty she was too old to feel, she did an odd little dance mimicking Zaghloul. She ended by tweaking his cheeks and kissing her fingers. In the midst of the laughter and the cheers a thought struck Abu Fahl, and he exclaimed: Where’s Isma’il? He’s the one who loves to dance!

None of the men around him had seen Isma’il, so he asked one of Hajj Fahmy’s grand-daughters: Hey, you, girl, where’s your uncle Isma’il?

Covering her face shyly with her sleeve, the girl murmured: He’s inside.

Inside? Why?

He’s sitting on his bed. He won’t get off.

In bed! Abu Fahl exclaimed in surprise. Ya nahar abyad! Why in bed?

He’s like that sometimes, the girl shrugged and turned away, embarrassed for her uncle.

Abu Fahl ran into the house, and found Isma’il sitting perched on a high bed in his mother’s room. Hajj Fahmy was sitting at the other end of the bed. They were watching a wrestling match on television.

What’s the matter, ya Isma’il? Abu Fahl cried in surprise, putting out his hand. What’re you doing sitting here, when we’re all outside?

Smiling cheerfully, Isma’il shook his hand without stirring from the bed. I’m watching television, he said.

Tell Isma’il to come out, we’re all waiting for him, Abu Fahl said, extending his hand to Hajj Fahmy. And what about you, ya Hajj? Why haven’t you come out yet?

Hajj Fahmy smiled: There’s too much noise outside, and Isma’il doesn’t want to go. I’ll come a little later. His eyes narrowed and he sniffed suspiciously: What have you been drinking?

Abu Fahl leapt back. Nothing, nothing at all, he said, trying to smile.

I hope so, said Hajj Fahmy, turning grimly back to the television set.

Come on, Isma’il, Abu Fahl exhorted. You can’t sit here all day. Come out. Aren’t you coming to the Star with us?

No. Isma’il shook his head. I can’t.

Allah! Why not?

The germs are out today. They’re all around the bed. I can’t get off.

Abu Fahl’s mouth fell open: Germs around the bed!

Yes, said Isma’il. All the germs are out today. They’re all over the floor. Can’t you see?

Abu Fahl looked significantly at Hajj Fahmy, but the Hajj was intent on the television programme. Isma’il, Abu Fahl said, gently reasoning, there’s nothing on the floor, absolutely nothing. Can’t you see? I’m standing here. There’s nothing.

They’re all over the floor, Isma’il said stubbornly. They’re just waiting to bite. I’m not getting off. It doesn’t matter to you — your hide’s too thick — they’d break their teeth. I’m not like that.

Ya Hajj Fahmy, Abu Fahl appealed, why don’t you tell him?

Let him be, the Hajj said. Let him sit here if he wants to. How does it matter?

But what about you, then? Abu Fahl said. Aren’t you coming? To the Star and shopping and all that? Everyone’s here.

I’ll come as soon as the noise stops, Hajj Fahmy said. He looked at his watch. You’d better go out and tell them to hurry up. It’ll be time to leave soon.

Be careful, Isma’il called out, gurgling with laughter, as Abu Fahl turned to go. They’re everywhere today; even with your hide you should be careful. They might get you in a soft part.

The first person Abu Fahl saw as he stepped back into the courtyard was Professor Samuel. He was sitting on the platform, beside the loom. His briefcase was open on his knees, and he was worriedly counting through a pile of thick white envelopes. Abu Fahl went straight up to him and gave him a bone-jarring slap on the back. At least you’re here, he said. And now since you’re here we have to see you dance.

Stop that! the Professor snorted, furious. Can’t you see I’m busy? I have things to do. I have to count the people here. I have to distribute the envelopes, all the arrangements have to be made …

You’re always busy, Professor, Abu Fahl said. But today we’re going to see you dance.

Be quiet, Abu Fahl, the Professor said sharply. Go and do some work instead of wasting my time. Have you handed out your tools and ropes and all that yet?

But Abu Fahl only turned and shouted to the others: Come here. The Professor’s going to dance for us. Help me carry him.

A moment later the Professor was hoisted on half a dozen shoulders and carried, kicking and scolding, into the courtyard. They put him down in the middle and imprisoned him in a tight circle. Go on, Professor, dance a little, Zaghloul said, tapping the disht. Just for fun.

But I can’t, he cried. I’ve never done it before.

Go on, go on, just for fun, they urged, and even Chunni joined her voice to theirs: Go on, Samuel, what does it matter? Do anything at all; anything you can.

The Professor looked grimly around him. All right, he said. He kicked off his sandals and, leaping high, he snapped his right arm back, clenched his fist and swung it through the air. He jumped up again, and the first enthusiastic claps wavered and then faded away as everyone looked on in astonishment. He was leaping around the ring now, spinning in the air, flailing his right arm over his head. Zaghloul tried to find the right rhythm on the disht and gave up baffled. The Professor jumped again, faster, and yet again, his face flushed, sweat flying off his forehead. The initial laughter died away and an awestruck silence descended as the Professor flung himself into the air, again and again, swinging his rigid arms over his head in great powerful arcs.

What is he doing? someone said. That’s how they dance in those parts, a voice answered. Haven’t you seen them in films?

Chunni was beside herself. It’s the queues, she shrieked. Stop him, Abu Fahl; something’s gone wrong. He can’t stop; the queues have got him again. But instead everyone backed apprehensively away from the leaping, whirling Professor.

At last the Professor stopped, winded, and looked around, clutching his waist, at the circle of wide eyes and frozen faces. What’s wrong, Samuel? Chunni asked anxiously. He looked at her for a moment, so sternly that she edged away. Then he doubled up, laughing uncontrollably, and his spectacles dropped off his nose.

What’s the matter, Professor? What’s happened?

Professor Samuel, holding his sides, face flushed, tears pouring out of his eyes, managed to say: Nothing. I was just practising my badminton smashes. Nice cabaret, no?

After that it was all confusion, for it was almost time to leave. Everyone was worrying about what they were going to buy now, and they milled around the courtyard, the newly arrived begging advice from the experienced, gathering information on the relative prices of the various makes of calculator they were thinking of buying for college-going brothers at home; of the portable television sets they were planning to take to their village-bound parents and sisters; and of the clothes they were going to buy for themselves (and there Rakesh was in great demand, for there was not a thing he didn’t know about all the brands of American jeans and Korean shirts). There was a mild panic when someone claimed to have heard that Professor Samuel hadn’t brought enough money for them all, and the Professor was immediately riddled by volleys of anxious questions. But he had no answers to give, because, as he said: How can I know whether I’ve got enough? First, I’ve got to count how many people there are here, and how can I count unless you stand still? That only made the panic worse — He admits he hasn’t got enough; that’s what he said — and everybody milled about even more, and that made counting still more difficult. Then, in the middle of all that, Hajj Fahmy appeared and shouted that it was time to tie on the dusters and get ready to leave, because sunset was no more than an hour away, and there would be no point in going if they got to the Star after dark. That reminded the Professor of something else altogether and he forgot about counting and pushed his way around the courtyard until he found Abu Fahl and cried, worriedly: Listen, Abu Fahl, what are we going to do if we do find those sewing machines in the Star? How will we bring them back? We can’t carry them with us into all those foreign shops in Hurreyya. What are we going to do? But Abu Fahl had his own worries now, for he was busy trying to find all the ropes and crowbars and everything else he had gathered together over the last few days in preparation for their journey to the Star, so he merely shrugged and said: How should I know? Why don’t you ask Alu? We only promised to present him with the sewing machines. He’ll have to think of some way of bringing them back himself. But that wasn’t good enough for the Professor, and he rushed off, clicking his tongue in irritation, to look for Hajj Fahmy. The Hajj tried to reassure him: Don’t worry, Samuel, it won’t be difficult — we can always put them in a taxi if it comes to that. But, said the Professor, there aren’t any taxis in that part of the Corniche. And this time the Hajj pushed him away: Don’t worry — we’ll manage.

There was nothing more he could do, so the Professor went back to his counting, and while he was at it Karthamma ran into the courtyard, sweating and wild-eyed. I can’t find Boss, she cried to anyone who would listen. I just went to the house and there was no one there. Zindi’s cleared all her things out, and Kulfi’s gone, too, and there’s no sign of Boss anywhere. But there was too much noise in the courtyard, and everyone had something to do, so nobody had time to listen to her. Frantic with worry, Karthamma found Chunni and, shouting into her ear, told her everything; but Chunni only laughed, saying: Why’re you so worried? Where could they have gone? They’ll be in the house when we get back this evening, you’ll see. Where could they go? There’s nothing to be worried about. That heartened Karthamma, for there is nothing so reassuring as having one’s fears laughed at, and she went back to thinking about the pram she was going to buy for Boss.

A little later the Professor finally finished counting and discovered that there were fewer people in the courtyard than he had expected — only thirty-two, where he had allowed for forty-five — so there was plenty of money for everyone. He tried to spread the good news, but his voice was too weak, and by that time people had forgotten about him anyway, so he had to ask Abu Fahl instead. But it was some time before even Abu Fahl could make himself heard, and when he did it only made matters worse in a way, for there was a great cheer and people began streaming out of the courtyard, and Abu Fahl had to run out and bring them back, because he hadn’t distributed the tools yet. There weren’t very many — a few crowbars, a couple of saws, some coils of rope and a pulley, a few shovels, pickaxes, an ancient car-jack, and three powerful torches — but because of the confusion it took a long time to hand them out.

At last, when all the tools had been given out and everything was more or less ready, Abu Fahl remembered Alu and saw him sitting at the loom with his head in his hands. It made Abu Fahl angry to see him sitting there like that. Come down here, Alu, he shouted, we’re going now. But Alu hesitated, and sensing his reluctance Abu Fahl went up to the platform and pulled him off it. What do you think? he said, thrusting a coil of rope into his hands. Do you think you’re going to sit there like that all day while we do all the work and fetch you your sewing machine?

The others were already straggling out, led by Hajj Fahmy and Professor Samuel. Abu Fahl waited with Alu and Zaghloul till everyone was gone. Then, after making sure that no one was left in the courtyard except the women of Hajj Fahmy’s house, they set off through the lanes of the Ras. By the time they reached the top of the embankment the sun had dipped low over the city, and the others were strung out over the road ahead of them. They could see Rakesh, Karthamma and Chunni a long way ahead of them. They stopped for a moment to catch their breath, and when they started walking again Abu Fahl clapped Alu on the shoulder. So, he said, at last you’re going to get your sewing machine.

Chapter Nineteen. Sand

The sleek black road on the embankment ran through a kilometre or so of empty sandflats after leaving the Ras behind. Then gradually it sloped downwards till the road was on level ground. A little farther on, stray mud-brick houses appeared on either side. With every step after that the houses crowded closer and closer to the road. Soon the road merged into a narrower and much older thoroughfare which ran along the inlet. From that point onwards the road became a thronged, bustling hive. Fifty or even a hundred men, no matter what they were carrying, could have vanished into that crowded street with all the ease of pigeons in a piazza.

On one side of the road, jostling for space, were tiled Iranian chelo-kebab shops, Malayali dosa stalls, long, narrow Lebanese restaurants, fruit-juice stalls run by Egyptians from the Sa’id, Yemeni cafés with aprons of brass-studded tables spread out on the pavement, vendors frying ta’ameyya on push-carts — as though half the world’s haunts had been painted in miniature along the side of a single street.

The other side of the road was comparatively less crowded, for it looked out over the inlet and no shops or stalls were allowed there. That was where the people of the Old City came with their friends and brides in the evenings, to walk and eat and watch the brilliant sails of the sambuqs and booms in the inlet.

The other bank of the inlet rose steeply out of the water into a solid concrete-and-glass cliff of hotels and offices.

The road became even narrower and still more crowded farther on when it reached the wooden jetties and rickety wharfs of the old harbour. There, the pungent muddy waters of the inlet were only a step away from the road, and in places the pointed lateen sails of the sambuqs sometimes seemed to be poised directly above the pavement.

It was there, in a little room above a café, that Jeevanbhai Patel had had his office.

Soon after that the road wound around the inlet, through a huddle of houses and away, straight into the sands beyond, towards the broad sweep of a curving headland in the distance. At that point the road broadened and blackened and became the Corniche.

A short way after the last cluster of houses, the Corniche began to rise gradually, and by the time the sea first became visible on the left, a kilometre or so away, it was a good height above the sand on the seaward side, and still rising. In contrast, on the other side of the road, to the right, the ground fell away only slightly. All along that side of the Corniche the viscera of newly begun high-rise buildings lay scattered in a long, skeletal trail. Soon an outward curve took the road even closer to the sea, and there it rose still higher, till it was about ten feet above the sandy beach on the far side. At its outermost point the road was so close to the sea that its surface was usually moist with spray. At that point there stood a huge, almost-finished airline office. The office had been built to take advantage of the view, and one part of it jutted out almost into the road. There the road turned, angling sharply around the building, so that approaching the building from one end the other side of the curve was blocked out of view. After that the Corniche ran inland for a stretch before curling out again to meet the Star.

When Zindi first spotted the airline office, Hajj Fahmy, Professor Samuel and a knot of people immediately behind them were very close to the building and walking fast. The rest were strung out behind in an untidy dribble, their dusters bright against the indistinct greyness of the twilight. Sometimes, when the road curved, she could see silhouettes; the outlines of crowbars and axes on bent shoulders clearly etched against the sand and the evening sky.

Abu Fahl, Zaghloul and Alu, still bringing up the rear, were only a hundred paces or so ahead of her. That was a stroke of luck for her, for she could not have planned that. Otherwise it had all happened exactly as she had hoped. She had waited in the harbour with Kulfi and Boss, hidden in the little launch that was to carry them to Zeynab. She had spotted Hajj Fahmy and Professor Samuel easily enough despite the crowds, for the dusters on their arms stood out like bright lights. She had waited till they had gone past, all of them, and then, at a careful distance, she had hurried after them to salvage what she could of her fallen house.

It had been a long walk and she was tired now. Her feet ached and the tension of expecting something to happen at every turn had worn her patience away. But nothing had happened. Maybe it was she who was wrong after all, and Hajj Fahmy right. She stopped to wipe her face. She could see the shadowy figures of Hajj Fahmy and Professor Samuel in the distance, very close to the airline office and the blind curve. She shut her eyes and turned to the sea breeze and let it play over her face. She pulled the neck of her dress up with her finger and gratefully felt the coolness of the breeze on her chest.

And while she stood there, with her eyes shut and the wind licking gently at her body, she knew suddenly that it had happened, for she heard something like a shout, and by the time she had turned a whirling cloud of sand had blotted Hajj Fahmy and Professor Samuel from her view.

As she watched, a helicopter rose into the greyness behind the building and swooped down on the road. She had seen it before that evening, twice. It had flown overhead and away, in the other direction. She hadn’t given it much thought: rich young Ghaziris were always buzzing the roads in their planes and helicopters. But this time it was coming in very low, sweeping the road slowly. And now it was above her, a high staccato drumming noise, buffeting her with axe-like strokes, pulling at her clothes. Around her the sand was rising in solid walls from both sides of the road to meet it. As it passed above, only a few feet from her head, she saw a pointing arm, the barrel of a gun and a black uniform.

She knew then that this was no young Ghaziri on a joyride, but a part of the machine that she had known to be lying in wait.

It was all sand now, everywhere, like the desert in a Khamsin, wrapping her in layers, sifting into her mouth and into her eyes. She was caught in a sandy fog, hardly able to see the road beneath her feet. She could hear screams in the distance, and odd muffled popping sounds. Then she heard the helicopter again, and in terror she ran blindly along the edge of the road. She heard it swooping low over her and she threw herself over the side and rolled to the bottom of the embankment. As she rose unsteadily to her feet again, she felt an odd stickiness on her eyelids. She drew a hand across her face and it came away covered in blood. She screamed, but the sound was lost, for there were shouts and screams everywhere now, shrilling eerily out of the gritty, golden cloud. Faintly she caught a whiff of tear gas.

Sobbing with fear, she pulled the scarf off her head and wrapped it over her face, covering her nose and leaving only a slit for her eyes. She tried to run but fell and struck her head against the embankment. She struggled up and tried to run again, in the other direction, but she could see no more than a few feet ahead; and suddenly, horror-struck, she realized that she was running towards the screams. She stopped in utter, terrified confusion, and then somewhere close by she heard a shout. She looked up and saw two figures tumble off the road and come rolling down towards her, screaming. A moment later another figure came crashing down after them.

When he was almost upon her, she recognized Abu Fahl. He collapsed in a heap hardly a foot away from her and lay there whimpering in shock, blood pouring from a gash in his head. A little way behind him lay Alu and Zaghloul, clinging to the sand in blank terror.

Suddenly Zindi’s head was clear again. She pulled Abu Fahl’s arm and shouted — Get up, get up — but he lay as he was, inert on the sand. She shook him and then drew her hand back and slapped him hard across his face. His head snapped back, and then slowly recognition filtered into his eyes. She pulled him to his feet and screamed into his ear: What about the others, all the rest, Samuel, Karthamma, Chunni, Hajj Fahmy?

He could only shake his head stupidly. She turned him round and pushed him towards Zaghloul and Alu. Take them with you, she shouted, pointing towards the inlet, and run in that direction. Hurry, we can still get away; they haven’t seen us yet and there aren’t any of them on this side of the embankment. They were all on the other side so that we wouldn’t see the ambush.

She pushed him again — Run — but he clung helplessly to her arm: And you?

I’m coming, she said. But, first, I’ve got to see if there are any others. She gave him a shove, and this time he stumbled away; and, pulling up her skirts, she scrambled up the side of the embankment.

The tear gas clawed at her nose and eyes as soon as her head was level with the road. For a moment she was blinded. Then, very hazily, through a golden-grey glow, she saw a line of helmeted black-uniforms with riot-shields and batons, charging the milling crowd on the road. She saw Hajj Fahmy prone, screaming under a baton; she saw Professor Samuel and Rakesh being dragged off the road by their feet, and then she couldn’t see any more for her eyes were smarting like a salted wound. Blindly she pushed herself back towards the edge of the embankment, and just as she was about to slip down again she heard a familiar shriek across the road.

She fought her eyes open, scraping at them with her nails, and darted across. It was Chunni, kneeling on the ground, tearing at her hair and screaming hysterically, as though she wanted to rip her lungs apart. Zindi crouched low and clutched at Chunni’s hand. She caught a bleary glimpse of Karthamma lying beside Chunni and she snatched at her hand, too, and pulled, crying: Come on, quick. But Chunni slapped her hand away, and before Zindi could stop her she had struggled to her feet and wandered off, screaming, straight towards the black-uniforms. Then Karthamma’s head rolled limply to one side and Zindi screamed, too, for she saw that Karthamma was dead; that she had fallen on a pickaxe, and that the end of the axe had passed through her back and emerged bloodily from her navel.

Heaving the body away, Zindi turned and threw herself across the road and down the embankment. She rolled to the bottom, her skirts ripped to shreds and splashed with blood. When she managed to push herself up again, she saw three figures, nothing more than shadows, vanishing into the haze. She ran after them and caught up; and together, shielded by the darkness, they hurried towards the inlet and the waiting motor-launch.

And, though she was weeping herself, she comforted them and helped them and she put her arms around their shoulders and held them up, for they stumbled often on that torn beach: it was not long since that the black-uniforms had driven their jeeps across the same sand, leaving it furrowed and sown with salt.