In the years when the Imam had allowed his clients to drift away, several men had taken to barbering to make a little extra money. There were some half-dozen barbers in Nashawy now, who went from house to house, cutting their clients’ hair and doling out injections for fifteen piastres a shot. But Yasir had started with an advantage over them in that he was the only man of his age in the village who could legitimately claim to have been born with the scissors in his fist. Upon coming to manhood he had made the best of his head-start by setting up a small barber-shop, the first in the entire area.
‘Amm Taha had pointed it out to me once as we walked past. It was a simple enough affair; a little room with a couple of chairs, a wooden desk on which he kept his scissors and razors, a mirror hanging on one of the mud walls, and a few pictures for decoration, including a poster from a cinema theatre in Damanhour, of Raj Kapoor in Sangam.
There were those who had warned against the venture, ‘Amm Taha said, for new-fangled ideas didn’t generally go down well in Nashawy. There was the case of Shahata Bassiuni’s café, for example: everyone had said it was a good idea to begin with, especially the young mowazzafeen who missed the coffee-houses they had got used to while studying in the city. So Shahata Bassiuni went ahead and set up a few iron tables and chairs, bought some narguilahs for those who wanted to smoke, and laid out a couple of chess and backgammon sets. As far as he was concerned, he was in business. But in the end all that came of it was that a few young layabouts took to spending their days hanging around his shop, ordering nothing and filching the chess pieces. A couple of times fights broke out too, and eventually, for the sake of his own peace of mind, Shahata Bassiuni had shut the place down.
‘Amm Taha had laughed gleefully at the end of the story, giving me a suggestive little glance, to let it be known that if he had conspired with the dark powers that had taught Shahata Bassiuni his lesson, he would neither admit nor deny it. But even ‘Amm Taha was willing to grant that Yasir had made a success of his barber-shop; so willing, in fact, that I was not surprised when Yasir began to whisper prayers to protect himself from envy upon encountering ‘Amm Taha’s eye as we walked past his shop.
Yasir’s was now the only barber-shop in the area around Nashawy; the next one lay at a full truck-rides distance, halfway to Damanhour. Over the past few years many men from nearby villages and hamlets had started coming to Yasir’s shop — not just his father’s old clients but even educated people like Ustaz Sabry, who could just as easily have gone to shops in the city. But despite his best efforts, Yasir had not yet succeeded in enticing college students like Nabeel or Isma‘il into his shop; this was one instance in which they were not willing to follow Ustaz Sabry’s lead. They would readily grant that Yasir was a perfectly good barber, more than adequate for the fellaheen and village folk but, as for themselves, they went on saving their coins in ones and twos, waiting for their monthly visit to the one shop in Damanhour which could be trusted to execute the styles they liked best.
Yasir’s shop was in the front room of the small house that he and his family shared with his mother, the Imam’s first wife. His mother had moved into the house when Yasir was just a boy, soon after the Imam took a second wife. The Imam was distraught with grief at the time, even though they’d only moved to the other side of the village square — Yasir was his only son and the thought of being separated from him was more than he could bear. In the end, taking pity on him, Yasir’s mother allowed him to visit her house once a day, at the time of the midday meal. The arrangement stuck and ever afterwards Imam Ibrahim had walked over to their house once a day, after the noon-time prayers, to share his midday meal with his son and his grandchildren.
Yasir usually began work early in the morning, not long after the sunrise prayers and, depending on the flow of customers, he worked through till the midday prayers, when he went home to eat with his father. On Thursdays, however, his day was interrupted by the souk: he would close his shop for the morning, and with his ticket-book under his arm he would go out and plunge into the crowd of people swirling past his ancestor’s tomb. Soon his white turban would be lost in the flood of colour that poured through the market-place on Thursdays: the flashing red of the butcher’s tarpaulin, the cloth-sellers’ bolts of parrot-green, scarlet and azure, the fish glittering on plastic sheets and the great black umbrella that hung slantwise over the man who repaired stoves. On other days the dun shades of the village’s mud walls seemed thirsty for a touch of colour; Thursday mornings were the moments when that need was abundantly and extravagantly slaked.
The professional traders and vendors were usually the first to set up their stalls. They would begin to arrive early in the morning in their little donkey-carts, the fishmongers, the butchers, the fruit-sellers, the cloth-merchants, the watchmaker and a score of others of less determinate callings. The amateurs would follow a little later, women for the most part, swathed heavily in black, carrying wicker baskets loaded with tomatoes, carrots and cauliflowers, depending on the season. The moment they set foot in the market-place they would begin to call out greetings to their friends, to cousins from other villages and sisters who had married into faraway hamlets; they would spread out little sheets of plastic in the dust and pile them high with vegetables or fruit or whatever it was that they had gathered on their plots that morning and then, squatting behind their heaped wares, they would revive the innumerable interrupted relationships the market sustained from week to passing week.
The younger girls would do their best to be there too, slipping quietly out of their houses after their father’s and brothers had gone out to work on the fields; they would wander around the souk in groups, their hands around each others’ waists, talking and laughing, and when they encountered a group of young men they would flounce past, holding their noses high, amidst explosions of bantering laughter.
On this particular Thursday the crowd had thinned by the time I went down to the market; it was already ten o’clock now, and most people had done their shopping earlier, while the vendors’ wares were still fresh. Now, the time of day was beginning to show on the vegetables; the lettuce and watercress had wilted and the tomatoes were beginning to blister. Soon the prices would begin to tumble, when the women became impatient to set off for their homes in time to give their children their midday meals.
‘What are you doing here?’ a voice demanded as I stooped over a pile of knobbly carrots. ‘Didn’t I tell you to ask me if you wanted anything from the market?’
Looking up in surprise, I saw two diminutive women standing over me, their frowning faces framed by heavy black robes. The smaller of the two was Ustaz Sabry’s mother, and her eyes darted from my face to the carrots in my hand as she leant over to look at me.
‘What will you do with those carrots?’ she shot at me, glaring, as though she had chanced upon a dark secret.
‘I’ll eat them,’ I answered.
‘How?’
‘I may eat them raw,’ ‘I said, or I may cook them if I feel like it.’
‘Cook them?’ she said, frowning. ‘What will you cook them on? Have you got a stove?’
‘Yes.’
‘What sort of stove do you have?’
‘A kerosene stove.’
‘A kerosene stove! And what do you cook on your kerosene stove?’
‘Many things — rice for example; I cook rice.’
‘How do you cook your rice?’ she said, smiling sweetly. ‘Do you cook it with milk?’