‘I can tell you this,’ I said, ‘he knows a lot. He’s read a great deal, and he’s one of the best-informed people I’ve ever met.’
‘You must be right,’ said Shaikh Musa. But a look of doubt descended on his face as he puffed at his shusha.
Ustaz Sabry had taken me by surprise the very first time I met him.
I had been introduced to him by the headmaster of the school he taught in, the primary school in Nashawy. The headmaster was a friendly, pleasant man in his early forties who had been elevated to his post largely because his father had been headmaster before him. He played the part he had inherited with conscientious diligence but he was at heart too gentle a man to enjoy the authority that came with it. I once watched him caning a boy with a ruler: he had applied himself to the task with such an evident lack of relish that the boy had never once lost his smirk.
In me I think the headmaster hoped to find a source of sympathy for his daily vexations, a connection with the student-world in Alexandria that he had once inhabited himself. In any event, he always went out of his way to be kind to me, inviting me frequently to his house and always sending word the moment a letter addressed to me went astray and ended up on his desk.
It was on one such occasion, when I’d been asked to go to his office to collect a letter, that I first met Ustaz Sabry.
The mid-morning break was in progress when I arrived at the school, and a number of teachers had drifted into the headmaster’s office to take refuge from the hurricane of screaming children that was whirling through the corridors. I knew several of the teachers already, and the headmaster introduced me to the rest, one by one. Most of them were from Damanhour and other nearby towns, and they were all smartly dressed, the men in jackets and ties and the women in skirts and white nylon scarves. I had been surprised at first, to see how they always arrived in Nashawy looking perfectly turned out, proper effendis, with every hair in place despite the dusty ride from Damanhour; I discovered later that it was their privilege to travel in the drivers’ cabins of the trucks that ran through the area — the villagers had given them the right of sanctuary from their lowly dust.
Going around the room, shaking hands, we came to a man who did not seem to belong with the others. He was dressed in a grimy, ink-stained jallabeyya, a barrel-bodied man in his mid-thirties, with thick, liver-coloured lips, and large, watery eyes.
‘This is Ustaz Sabry,’ said the headmaster. ‘He is from Nashawy; his family live at the far end of the village, across the canal from the government clinic. You will have a lot to discuss with him because he is writing a thesis too.’
He put a hand on Ustaz Sabry’s shoulder and asked: ‘What is it that you’re studying exactly?’
Ustaz Sabry flashed me a smile and said something quickly about medieval Egyptian history. His voice had the precise, resonant pitch of that of a man accustomed to addressing large gatherings and when he turned to me and asked what my subject was, I found to my surprise that he spoke in the simple fellah dialect of Nashawy. All the other teachers had educated city accents.
‘Anthropology,’ I answered, and he responded immediately with another question: ‘Social or physical?’
‘Social,’ I said, and he nodded, smiling: ‘Yes, good; that’s a bit like history or philosophy, isn’t it? Much better than all those bones and skeletons.’
The headmaster was pleased by this exchange. ‘I knew you would have a lot to talk about,’ he said. He gave me a slap on the back and said: ‘You must go and talk to Ustaz Sabry properly. He’s read so much he’ll be able to tell you about many things.’
Later, after we had exchanged a few remarks about our respective subjects, Ustaz Sabry invited me to visit him at his home that evening, so we could carry on our conversation.
I set off for his house a little before the sunset prayers, and in my eagerness to get there I forgot to find out exactly where he lived. As a result I was soon lost, for Nashawy was much larger than Lataifa, with its houses squeezed close together around a labyrinth of tunnel-like lanes, some of which came to unexpected dead ends while others circled back upon themselves. At the centre of the village was a large, open square where the mosque and the ceremonial ‘guest-house’ stood, adjoining each other, a modest pair of buildings, neat, square and whitewashed, with the mosque’s single minaret rising high above the tousled hayricks that topped the surrounding houses. After I had passed through the square a second time I swallowed my pride and turning to the long train of children who had attached themselves to me, I asked the tallest among them to lead me to Ustaz Sabry’s house.
He ran ahead of me and after a couple of turnings he stopped and pointed at a carved door at the corner of two lanes. A communal water-tap stood directly opposite and the teenage girls who had gathered there looked up from their jerrycans and earthen pots as I came around the corner in a cloud of dust, with my train of children rumbling behind me. They watched as I stood in front of the house, looking undecidedly at the heavy wooden door, and soon they began to giggle and make catcalls.
‘Come and talk to us, over here.’
‘Why so shy, ya Hindi?’
‘Wouldn’t you like a drink of water?’
I turned my back upon them while the children squealed with laughter, and holding myself stiff and stony-faced I went up and knocked at the door. ‘Who’s there?’ came the response, in a woman’s voice, and from across the road one of the girls shouted: ‘It’s the Hindi.’
The door opened and a woman dressed in the severe black robes of an elderly widow appeared in front of me. ‘Yes?’ she said, frowning in puzzlement.
‘Let him in,’ the girls laughed. ‘Or he’ll run away.’
The woman’s head snapped upright, eyes blazing. ‘Shut your mouths, you over there,’ she shouted. ‘Don’t you have any shame?’
The girls muttered rebelliously under their breath—‘Listen to her, who does she think she is?’—but to my relief their giggles died away.
‘Is Ustaz Sabry here?’ I asked.
She was watching me closely now, and suddenly, clapping her hands to her thin, fine-boned cheeks, she cried: ‘Why, aren’t you the doktór al-Hindi? I saw you at the Thursday market last week: tell me, why did you pay fifteen piastres for that little handful of peas? Everyone was talking about it.’
I cast my mind back, but try as I might, I could not remember how much I had paid for my peas.
‘You should let ‘Amm Taha go to the market for you,’ she said. ‘Isn’t he helping you in your house? He’ll know what to do — he knows all about buying and selling.’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘but I’m here now because Ustaz Sabry told me …’
‘Welcome, welcome,’ she said. ‘Please come in, you’re welcome, but Ustaz Sabry isn’t in just this minute.’
‘He isn’t here?’ I said. ‘But he told me.…’
Craning her head around, with a considerable effort, she shouted into the interior of the house: ‘Where did Sabry go?’
There was no answer, and she turned around again to face me, so slowly that I could almost hear her joints creak. ‘He should be back soon,’ she said.
Then, all of a sudden her eyes focused brightly on me, and she stretched out a thin, bony finger and tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Is it true what they say about you? That in your country people burn their dead?’
‘Some people do,’ I said. ‘It depends.’
‘Why do they do it?’ she cried. ‘Don’t they know it’s wrong? You can’t cheat the Day of Judgement by burning your dead.’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Do you know when Ustaz Sabry is going to be back?’
‘Soon,’ she said. ‘Soon. But now tell me this: is it true that you worship cows? That’s what they were saying at the market. They said that just the other day you fell to your knees in front of a cow, right out in the fields in front of everyone.’