He cast a glance at the sheepish grins on the faces around him, his small wizened face crumpling up with mirth.
‘So I told them,’ he said, ‘why no, that’s not a military inspector; he’s not an effendi or even a veterinarian — that’s the doktór from al-Hind, where they have ghosts just like we do.’
‘Ahlan!’ said the man sitting next to him, a sharp-faced young fellah in a brown jallabeyya. ‘Ahlan! So you’re the doktór from al-Hind?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and you?’
‘He’s a rat,’ someone answered, raising a gale of laughter. ‘Don’t go anywhere near him.’
His name was Khamees, said Zaghloul, laughing louder than the rest, Khamees the Rat, and the others sitting there were his brothers and cousins. Their land ran next to each others’, he explained, so they always worked together as a group. It was Khamees’s family’s land they were working on today; it would be his own tomorrow and so on, until they all finished harvesting their rice, in one short week of hard work and good eating.
‘Why are you still standing, ya doktór?’ cried Khamees. ‘You’ve come a long way and you won’t be able to get back to your country before sundown anyway, so you may as well sit with us for a while.’
He moved up, smiling, and slapped the earth beside him. He was in his mid-twenties, about my age, scrawny, with a thin mobile face, deeply scorched by the sun. Almost in spite of myself, I felt instantly at home with him: he had that brightness of eye and the slightly sardonic turn to his mouth that I associated with coffee-houses in Delhi and Calcutta; he seemed to belong to a familiar world of lecture-rooms, late-night rehearsals and black coffee.
He leant back to look at me now, as I seated myself, summing me up with his sharp, satirical eyes.
‘All right, ya doktór,’ he said, once I had settled in beside him with my legs crossed. ‘Tell me, is it true what they say, that in your country you burn your dead?’
The moment he said it the women in the group clasped their hands to their hearts and cried in breathless horror: ‘
arâm! arâm!’ and several of the men began to mutter prayers, calling upon the Lord to protect them from the devil.
My heart sank: this was a question I encountered almost daily, and since I had not succeeded in finding a word such as ‘cremate’ in Arabic, I knew I would have to give my assent to the term that Khamees had used: the verb ‘to burn’, which was the word for what happened to firewood and straw and the eternally damned.
‘Yes,’ I said, knowing that I would not be able to prevent the inevitable outcome. ‘Yes, it’s true; some people in my country burn their dead.’
‘You mean,’ said Khamees in mock horror, ‘that you put them on heaps of firewood and just light them up?’
‘Yes,’ I said quickly, hoping he would tire of the subject.
It was not to be. ‘Why?’ he persisted. ‘Is there a shortage of kindling in your country?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you don’t understand.’
There was a special word, I tried to explain, a special ceremony, certain rites and rituals — it wasn’t like lighting a bonfire with a matchstick. But for all the impression my explanation made, I may as well have been silent.
‘Even little children?’ said Khamees. ‘Do you burn little children?’
Busaina spoke now, for the first time. ‘Of course not,’ she said, in disbelief, hugging her baby to her breast. ‘They wouldn’t burn little dead children — no one could do that.’
‘Yes,’ I said, regretfully. ‘Yes, we do — we burn everyone.’
‘But why?’ she cried. ‘Why? Are people fish that you should fry them on a fire?’
‘I don’t know why,’ I said. ‘It’s the custom — that’s how it was when I came into the world. I had nothing to do with it.’
‘There’s nothing to be surprised at, really,’ Zaghloul said wisely, gazing at the horizon. ‘Why, in the land of Nam-Nam people even eat their dead. My uncle told me: it’s their custom — they can’t help it.’
‘Stop jabbering, ya Zaghloul,’ Busaina snapped at him, and then turned her attention back to me.
‘You must put an end to this burning business,’ she said to me firmly. ‘When you go back you should tell them about our ways and how we do these things.’
‘I will,’ I promised, ‘but I don’t know if they’ll listen. They’re very stubborn, they go on doing the same thing year after year.’
Suddenly Khamees clapped his hands with an exultant cry. ‘I’ll tell you why they do it,’ he said. ‘They do it so their bodies can’t be punished upon the Day of Judgement.’
The others keeled over with laughter while he looked around in triumph, his eyes astart with the thrill of discovery. ‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘It’s really clever — they burn the bodies so there’ll be nothing left to punish and they won’t have to answer for their sins.’
‘No, no, that’s not true,’ I said, obscurely offended by this imputation. But no sooner had I begun to argue than I realized that Khamees’s interpretation was not intended as a slur: on the contrary he was overcome by a kind of appalled admiration at the wiliness of ‘my people’—as far as he was concerned we were friends now, our alliance sealed by this daring cosmic confidence trick.
‘All right then,’ said Zaghloul, silencing the others with a raised hand. ‘The people in your country — do they have a Holy Book, like we do?’
‘Yes,’ I said, pausing to think of an answer that would be both brief and undeniably true. ‘Yes, they have several.’
‘And do you have a Prophet, like we do?’
I answered with a quick nod, and having had enough of this conversation, I tried to turn it in a more agronomic direction, by asking a question about phosphates and rice-growing. But Zaghloul, as I was to discover later, had all the patient pertinacity that went with the weaver’s craft and was not to be easily deflected once he had launched upon a subject.
‘And who is your Prophet?’ he said, ignoring my question. ‘What is his name?’
I had no option now but to improvise; after a few moments of thought, I said: ‘Al-Buddha.’
‘Who?’ cried Khamees. ‘What was that you said?’
‘Al-Buddha,’ I repeated feebly, and Zaghloul looking at the others in stupefaction, said: ‘Who can that be? All the world knows that Our Prophet, the Messenger of God, peace be on him, was the last and final Prophet. This is not a true prophet he is speaking of.’
Khamees leant over to tap me on my knee. ‘All right then, ya doktór,’ he said. ‘Tell us something else then: is it true what they say? That you are a Magûsî, a Magian, and that in your country everybody worships cows? It is it true that the other day when you were walking through the fields you saw a man beating a cow and you were so upset you burst into tears and ran back to your room?’
‘No, it’s not true,’ I said, but without much hope: I knew from experience that there was nothing I could say that would effectively give the lie to this story. ‘You’re wrong. In my country people beat their cows all the time; I promise you.’
‘So tell us then,’ said someone else. ‘In your country do you have military service, like we do in Egypt?’
‘No,’ I said, and in an effort to soften the shock of that revelation I began to explain that there were more than 700 million people in my country, and that if we’d had military service the army would have been larger than all of Egypt. But before I could finish Busaina interrupted me, throwing up her hands with a cry of despair.
‘Everything’s upside down in that country,’ she said. ‘Tell us, ya doktór: in your country do you at least have crops and fields and canals like we do?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we have crops and fields, but we don’t always have canals. In some parts of my country they aren’t needed because it rains all year around.’