The House of the Mosque

The Locusts

It was an extraordinary day. More things happened than anyone could have expected.

Lizard, having heard the doorbell, opened the gate and looked up to see two big brown horses staring down at him in the late afternoon sun. To get a better look, he grabbed hold of the gate and pulled himself up until he was standing. A large horse-drawn wagon containing two coffins had stopped outside.

‘A delivery for Aqa Jaan!’ bellowed the coachman in a long black coat and black hat.

Lizard crawled quickly over to Aqa Jaan’s study, where he pointed at the gate and neighed like a horse. When Aqa Jaan saw the coachman, he put on his hat and went to the gate.

‘Enna lellah!’ the coachman said.

‘Enna lellah,’ Aqa Jaan replied. ‘How can I help you?’

‘I have two dead people for you.’

‘Dead people? For me?’

‘I beg your pardon, I don’t mean actual people, just the remains.’

‘Of whom?’

‘Two women from Mecca.’

‘The grandmothers!’ exclaimed a horrified Aqa Jaan.

‘Sign here,’ the coachman said, and handed him the documents.

‘I need my spectacles,’ said Aqa Jaan.

Lizard scurried back inside and fetched Aqa Jaan’s reading glasses.

One of the documents was an official letter in Arabic. It consisted of a few Koran verses, followed by a short statement explaining that the bodies of the grandmothers had been found in a cave in Hira Mountain near Mecca.

Hira Mountain is the most sacred mountain in the Islamic world — the mountain that Muhammad used to climb every night to speak to Allah. It’s also the mountain where the archangel Gabriel first came down from Heaven to reveal Muhammad as the prophet.

There was a small cave in Hira Mountain. Muhammad had hid in this cave when he’d been forced to flee from Mecca to Medina in the middle of the night, because his enemies had sworn to kill him in his bed.

Ever since then the cave and that night have played a crucial role in the history of Islam. The Islamic calendar dates back to that night, or that day, on which Muhammad had fled to Medina.

Later the cave became known as the ‘spider cave’, because every time Muhammad went in, a spider spun a web across the entrance so no one could see that he was inside.

The grandmothers had hidden in that cave. It didn’t seem possible, but they had. The police had found their wills beside their bodies.

It was an incredible story. Every year millions of pilgrims went to see the cave. Visitors weren’t allowed to enter, but only to view it from a distance. If the story was true, the grandmothers must have had an amazing adventure.

Aqa Jaan felt sad. Yet at the same time, his mind was taken up with an entirely different matter: his son Jawad was due home that night after an absence of six months. Now a student at the University of Isfahan, he had never been away from home for so long. He was studying applied physics, so he could become a petroleum engineer.

A huge deposit of natural gas had been discovered near Senejan, and an American oil company had acquired the drilling rights. The university was therefore offering a new course of study. Hundreds of students had applied and taken the rigorous entrance exam, but only twelve had been admitted. Jawad had been one of the lucky ones. They were going to be taught special courses by American oil engineers. Although they were registered as students at the University of Isfahan, they were soon going to be transferred to the Shahzand oil refinery, twenty-five miles outside of Senejan, where they would continue their course work under the supervision of the oil company. They would be housed in a dormitory and speak only English.

Jawad was guaranteed a job after graduation, and would now be closer to home as well. Things couldn’t be better. When they heard that Jawad had been accepted, Fakhri Sadat had been so happy she couldn’t sleep that night, and Aqa Jaan had glowed with pride.

Aqa Jaan and Fakhri had been getting ready to go to the station to collect Jawad when the coachman knocked.

‘Why did you bring the coffins here?’ he asked the coachman. ‘You should have taken them to the mosque. And you should have phoned me beforehand and let me know you were coming. You can’t just show up on someone’s doorstep with two coffins. What am I supposed to do with them?’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said the driver. ‘I’m not bringing you two corpses, but two sacks.’

‘Two sacks? What’s that supposed to mean?’ Aqa Jaan answered testily.

The coachman hopped onto his wagon, opened the lid of one of the coffins and took out a small sack. Then he opened the second coffin and took out another one. Holding them up, he said, ‘You see? The Saudis sent only these two small sacks! Do you want them, or should I send them back?’

‘Why are you transporting two small sacks in two full-size coffins? Why have you brought them in a horse-drawn wagon? And why have you come so late in the afternoon?’

‘I understand how you feel, but I’m only the coachman.’

Aqa Jaan quickly stuffed a few banknotes in the man’s pocket, took the sacks from him, went into the courtyard and shut the gate.

‘What’s going on?’ Fakhri Sadat called from upstairs.

Aqa Jaan hid the sacks in the garden under a few large pumpkin vines. ‘Nothing!’ he told her. ‘Nothing important. Are you ready? We’ve got to leave now or we’ll be late.’

The red sun was sinking below the desert horizon when Aqa Jaan got behind the wheel of his Ford and drove to the station with his wife.

Fakhri Sadat wept with joy when she saw her son emerge from the train. He had always been her favourite. Only six months ago, before he’d left for Isfahan, she used to give him a goodnight kiss every evening before he went to bed. Now he had a black moustache and long hair.

Fakhri Sadat had raised Jawad herself. She hadn’t wanted him to get too involved in the mosque, the bazaar or politics. She had raised him to think for himself, so he could choose his own path. Now she could reap the rewards. Her son didn’t look like a religious fanatic, and she was pleased that he’d let his hair grow a bit longer. He seemed to take after his uncle Nosrat more than his father.

In all the years that he’d lived at home, he’d never shown the slightest interest in the affairs of the mosque. Fakhri Sadat was glad that Aqa Jaan considered Shahbal, and not Jawad, his successor. What she didn’t know, because Aqa Jaan hadn’t told her yet, was that he was disappointed in Shahbal and was now pinning his hopes on his son.

It had been several months since Shahbal had phoned Aqa Jaan. He’d called him at the bazaar, but had dialled the number of the warehouse rather than that of his office. Someone from the warehouse had come running in to tell Aqa Jaan that he was wanted on the phone.

‘Who’s calling?’

‘A businessman from Tehran.’

‘Why did he call the warehouse?’

‘He says he tried your number several times, but there was no answer.’

Aqa Jaan went to the warehouse and picked up the phone.

‘I apologise for the inconvenience, Aqa Jaan, but I was afraid your phone might be tapped. I called to tell you not to worry if I don’t come home for a while. I’ve got a couple of things going at the moment. I just wanted to hear your voice. Will you give my love to everyone?’

‘I will. And may God watch over you!’

There was no need for Shahbal to elaborate. Aqa Jaan understood why the call had to be kept short.

Still, the last thing he wanted to do was to talk to Fakhri about it now. This was her evening, and he didn’t want to spoil it.

It was a pleasant evening. They lingered at the table and everyone was in a good mood. Normally Zinat would have told them a story, but she wasn’t home tonight. What Aqa Jaan didn’t know was that she had secretly been in contact with the fundamentalists in Qom. Her instructions were to form the women’s devotional groups into a tight unit, under the guise of teaching them about the Koran.

To keep the tradition going, Muezzin took over Zinat’s role and told them a story about the prophet Yunus:

One day a disillusioned Yunus left his house for good. His followers were both saddened and surprised. Yunus reached the sea, saw a few travellers boarding a ship and decided to go with them.

The ship sailed for three days and three nights. On the fourth day the sky suddenly turned dark and a huge fish rose up out of the water, blocking the ship’s way. The passengers didn’t know what to do: the fish wouldn’t move. Then an older traveller, a veteran of many sea voyages, spoke up. ‘One of us has sinned. The fish will not let us pass until we offer up the sinner.’

‘The fish has come for me,’ Yunus said. ‘Throw me into the sea and the rest of you can sail on.’

‘We know you,’ a few of the passengers said. ‘You’re a righteous man. You could never have blasphemed. We knew your father, too. He was also a God-fearing man. No, you are not the one the fish is seeking.’

But Yunus knew that he was. ‘This is between me and my God,’ he said. ‘That is why the fish has come.’

He climbed up on the railing and leapt into the water. The fish swallowed him whole and disappeared beneath the waves.

They were still mulling over the story when they heard a strange sound coming from the courtyard. Aqa Jaan cupped his hand behind his ear.

‘What’s that I hear?’ Muezzin asked. ‘What’s that sound?’

Aqa Jaan went outside and saw that the sky had become strangely dark.

‘I hear a horde of insects,’ said Muezzin.

‘Locusts!’ Aqa Jaan shouted. ‘Close all the doors and windows!’

But it was too late. Thousands of locusts flew into the house, and the air turned brown, as if the house had been hit by a desert storm.

The women flung on their chadors and raced from room to room, closing doors and windows.

Ahmad hurried into the library, while Aqa Jaan raced down to the cellar to close the shutters.

The locusts landed on the roofs, the trees, the plants in the garden, even in the hauz, and began to devour everything in sight.

Every once in a while locusts descended on Senejan from such faraway places as Mecca. Only after they’d stripped the city bare did they move on to the grapevines by the river and finally disappear behind the mountains. No one had ever seen such an enormous swarm of locusts as they did that day. Only the old people could recall hearing their parents talk about such devastation.

One of the books in the library described a plague of locusts that had taken place fifty years ago:

The locusts came in droves, millions of them, and the world went dark. Even though they were as big as your finger, you couldn’t see them when they were on the ground, because they were the same colour as the soil, but when they moved, it looked as though the ground itself was moving.

People went up to their roofs and banged on pots and pans in hopes of scaring them off, but the locusts didn’t seem to hear them. So they lit fires and hoped the smoke would drive them away, but that didn’t work either. So then they took out their Korans and read the surah about the Valley of the Ants.

Solomon, it was said, once came upon such a mass of ants that the valley floor looked as if it were covered with a black carpet. Solomon’s messenger, the hoopoe bird, flew over the valley and cried, ‘Ants! Didn’t you hear? The man who just spoke to you is Solomon. He speaks the language of animals. He is on his way to the queen of Sheba. Haven’t you heard of this beautiful queen? Step aside! Clear the road so the troops can pass! Step aside for Solomon and the beautiful queen of Sheba! You are about to witness a great event. Step aside!’

At first nothing happened, but then the mass of ants began to move. They crept back into the earth and were never seen again.

Only when daylight came did the locusts fly off towards the mountains. Every plant and tree in the garden had been stripped bare, and there were fish bones floating in the hauz. Even the grandmothers had been spirited away by the locusts.

It’s a sign that something terrible is about to happen, thought Aqa Jaan as he viewed the damage from his window. Locusts come for a reason.

He slipped his hand into his pocket and wrapped his fingers firmly round his Koran.