‘He’ll be really surprised!’ said Fawzia. ‘He’ll think someone’s playing a joke on him.’
‘We’ll write and tell him,’ said ‘Ali. ‘We’ll write tomorrow so he won’t be surprised. We’ll tell him that you’re going to phone him from America.’
For a while we talked of other things, of the state of politics in India and the Middle East and what it was like to watch the World Cup on television. It was only when it was time for me to leave that I got to ask ‘Ali whether Nabeel liked living in Iraq.
‘Ali shrugged. As far as he knew, he said, Nabeel was well enough. That was what he always said at any rate. The fact was, he didn’t know; he had never been there himself.
‘God knows,’ he added, people say life is hard out there.’
It was dark outside now and I couldn’t stay any longer. After we had said our goodbyes, Hussein insisted that he would see me to the main road. On the way, we stopped at his cousins’ house and took one of Isma‘il’s younger brothers along with us. It turned out that they, like Nabeel and Isma‘il before them, were best friends, and were studying at the same college as their brothers had.
It was eerie crossing the village with the two of them beside me. It was as though a moment in time had somehow escaped the hurricane of change that had swept Nabeel and Isma‘il away to Iraq: the two cousins so much resembled their brothers that I could have been walking with ghosts.
6
BEN YIJU’S SECOND letter, unlike his first, did eventually reach his brother Yusuf and his family. They were then resident in a small town called Mazara (Mazara del Vallo), near the western tip of Sicily, not far from Palermo. Mazara had once been a busy port, serving ships from North Africa and the Levant, but the current hostilities between Sicily and Ifriqiya had affected its traffic badly and sent it into a sharp decline. In terms of material sustenance it had little to offer Yusuf and his family, who were reduced to extremely straitened circumstances while living there. But it had other compensations: through its long trade contacts with Ifriqiya, it had imbibed something of the cultural and educational ambience of that region, and Yusuf and his sons probably felt more at home there than they would have in other, more rudely prosperous parts of the island. Still, there can be no doubt that they felt themselves to be suffering the privations of exile in their new home: looking across the sea from the shores of that provincial town, the material and scholarly riches of Egypt must have shone like a beacon in the far distance.
It is easy to imagine, then, the great tumult of hope and enthusiasm that was provoked in this dispossessed and disheartened family by the arrival of Ben Yiju’s letter. The young Surur for one clearly received his uncle’s proposal of marriage with the greatest warmth: his immediate response was to set off for Egypt to claim his bride.
The preparations for Sururs voyage threw his whole family into convulsions of excitement. The elderly Yusuf and his wife launched upon a severe regimen of fasting and prayer to ensure his safe arrival, and Surur’s brother Moshe went along to accompany him on the first leg of the journey.
To arrange Surur’s passage to Egypt, the two brothers had first to proceed to a major port, since Mazara itself no longer served large eastbound ships. In the event they decided to go to Messina on the other end of the island rather than to nearby Palermo — probably because they knew that that was where they would find the courier of their uncle’s letter, Sulîmân ibn 
a
rûn. They boarded a boat on a Friday night, having agreed upon a fare of three-eighths of a gold dinar, in exchange for being taken to a lighthouse adjoining Messina.
Arriving in Messina nine days later, they sought out their wayward uncle, Mubashshir, who was then living in that city. In this instance, Surur reported in a letter to his father, his uncle ‘did not fall short [of his family duties],’ and invited him and his brother to stay in his house. Later, the brothers sought out two friends of Ben Yiju’s, one of whom was the courier Suliman ibn Satrun. Their efforts were immediately rewarded: ‘I shall take care of your fare,’ said Ibn Satrun to Surur, and you will go up [i.e. to Egypt] with me, if God wills.’
But now, seized by a yearning for travel, young Moshe too began to insist that he wanted to go on to Egypt with Surur. Ibn Satrun and their uncle Mubashshir both counselled against it—‘they said: “There is nothing to be gained by it. He had better go back to his father” ’—but Moshe was determined not to go back to Mazara ‘empty-handed’. The matter was now for their father to decide, Surur wrote, and in the meanwhile they would stay in Messina to await his instructions.
Upon receiving the letter, Yusuf must have decided against allowing Moshe to go any further, for when Surur next wrote to his parents he was already in Egypt and his brother was back in Mazara. The letter he wrote on this occasion was a short one. ‘I have sent you these few lines to tell you that I am well and at peace,’ he wrote, and then went on to convey his greetings in turn to various friends at home as well as to his parents and his brothers, Moshe and Shamwal. But Surur had yet another reason for writing home at this time: he wanted a certain legal document from his father and in the course of his letter he asked him to send it on to Palermo, possibly with Moshe, so that it could be forwarded to him in Egypt.
As it happened, the letter rekindled Moshe’s yearning for travel and prompted him to set out for Egypt himself. But the times were not propitious and the store of good fortune that had carried Surur safely to his destination ran out on his brother: Moshe’s ship was attacked on the way and he was imprisoned in the Crusader-controlled city of Tyre.
Their parents, already prostrate with anxiety, were to learn of these developments in a letter from Surur. ‘We were seized with grief when we read your letter,’ Shamwal wrote back from Sicily, ‘and we wept copiously. As for [our] father and mother they could not speak.’ But their tears were soon stemmed: later in the same letter, they discovered that matters had already taken a happier turn. Moshe had since written to Surur from Tyre to let him know that he was now ‘well and in good cheer.’
At home in Sicily meanwhile, things had got steadily worse. Food was short, the price of wheat had risen and the family had already spent most of its money. ‘If you saw [our] father,’ wrote Shamwal, ‘you would not know him, for he weeps all day and night … As for [our] mother, if you saw her, you would not recognize her [so changed is she] by her longing for you, and by her grief. God knows what our state has been after you left … Know that all we have is emptiness since God emptied [our house]. Do not forget us, oh my brothers; to visit us and to write to us. You must know that those of your letters that reached us conjured up your two noble faces [for us]. Send us letters telling us your news, the least important and the most; do not scorn to tell us the smallest thing, till we know everything.’
But gradually things improved. The brothers were reunited in Egypt, and Surur must have announced his wedding to his cousin shortly afterwards. His father, overwhelmed, wrote back to say: ‘Come quickly home to us, you and your uncle’s daughter … and [we shall] prepare a couple of rooms for her, and we shall celebrate [the wedding] …’
The marriage did indeed take place: a list recording Sitt al-Dar’s wedding trousseau, now preserved in St. Petersburg, is proof that this child of a Nair woman from the Malabar was wedded in 1156 to her Sicilian cousin, in Fustat.
Both Surur and Moshe went on to become judges in rabbinical courts in Egypt, where they were probably later joined by their parents and Shamwal.