‘You still haven’t told me about this “Hinduki” business,’ he said. ‘What is your God like?’
I tried to stutter out an answer of some kind, but fortunately for me Ustaz Mustafa wasn’t really paying attention to me any more.
‘Well thanks be to Allah,’ he said quickly, eyeing his watch. ‘Now that you are here among us you can understand and learn about Islam, and then you can make up your mind whether you want to stay within that religion of yours.’
He jumped to his feet and stretched out his hand. ‘Come with me to the mosque right now,’ he said. ‘That is where we are going — for the noon prayers. You don’t have to do anything. Just watch us pray, and soon you will understand what Islam is.’
I hesitated for a moment, and then I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t. I have many things to do.’
‘Things to do?’ cried Ustaz Mustafa. ‘What is there to do here that you can’t do later? Come with us — it’s very important. Nothing could be more important.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’ he insisted quietly. ‘Just come and watch — that’s all I’m asking of you.’
And just then the voice of the muezzin floated over from a nearby mosque, singing the call to prayer, and before I could say another word Ustaz Mustafa and the boys had vanished from the room.
But I couldn’t go back to work even after I was alone again. I began to wonder why I had not accepted Ustaz Mustafa’s invitation to visit the mosque and watch him at his prayers; he had meant well, after all, had only wanted to introduce me to the most important element of his imaginative life. A part of me had wanted to go — not merely that part which told me that it was, in a sense, my duty, part of my job. But when the moment had come, I’d known that I wouldn’t be able to do it: I had been too afraid, and for the life of me I could not understand why.
But soon enough, Ustaz Mustafa came back to talk to me again. This time he had a child in his arms. ‘This is my son,’ he said, tweaking the child’s cheeks. He glowed with love as he looked at the boy.
‘Say salâm to the mister,’ he said, and the child, alarmed, hid his face in his father’s shoulder.
Ustaz Mustafa laughed. ‘I missed you the last few days,’ he said to me. ‘I was busy in the evenings — I had to go and meet someone in Nashawy, so I couldn’t come to talk to you. But today I decided that I would come over as soon as I got back from work.’
I was better prepared for him this time, and I began to talk at length about the hamlet’s history and his family’s genealogy. But Ustaz Mustafa had little time for matters of that kind, and soon he began to steal anxious glances at his watch over his son’s back.
Eventually he brushed my patter aside and began to ask questions, first about my family and then about Indian politics — what I thought of Indira Gandhi, was I for her or against her, and so on. Then, with a wry, derisory smile he began to ask me about ‘The Man from Menoufiyya’—the current nickname for the President, the Raïs — phrasing his questions in elaborately allusive, elliptical forms, like riddles, as though he were mocking the Raïs’s habit of spreading surrogate ears everywhere. My answers left him a little disappointed however, for many of his riddles had stock responses with which I was not then familiar.
Suddenly the bantering note went out of his voice.
‘Tell me something,’ he said, ‘tell me, are you a communist?’
He used a word, shiyu’eyya, which could mean anything from ‘communist’ to ‘atheist’ and ‘adulterer’ in the village dialect; my understanding of it was that it referred to people who rejected all moral and ethical laws.
‘No,’ I said.
‘All right then,’ he said, ‘if you’re not a communist, tell me this: who made the world, and who were the first man and woman if not Adam and Hawâ?’
I was taken aback by the abruptness of this transition. Later I came to expect elisions of this kind in conversations with people like Ustaz Mustafa, for I soon discovered that salaried people like him, rural mowazzafeen, were almost without exception absorbed in a concern which, despite its plural appearance, was actually single and indivisible — religion and politics — so that the mention of the one always led to the other. But at the time I was nonplussed. I mumbled something innocuous about how, in my country, people thought the world had always existed.
My answer made him flinch. He hugged his sleeping son hard against his chest and said, ‘They don’t think of Our Lord at all, do they? They live only for the present and have no thought for the hereafter.’
I began to protest but Ustaz Mustafa was not interested in my answers any more. His eyes had fallen on his watch, and he rose hurriedly to his feet. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘I will take you with me to the graveyard, and you can watch me reciting the Quran over my father’s grave. You will see then how much better Islam is than this “Hinduki” of yours.’
At the door he turned back for a moment. ‘I am hoping,’ he said, ‘that you will convert and become a Muslim. You must not disappoint me.’
Then he was gone. A moment later I heard the distant voice of a muezzin, chanting the call to prayer.
He had meant what he said.
He came back the next evening, his Quran in his hands, and said: ‘Come, let’s go to the graveyard.’
‘I can’t,’ I said quickly. ‘I have to go out to the fields.’
He hesitated, and then, not without some reluctance, decided to accompany me. The truth was that walking in the fields was something of a trial for Ustaz Mustafa: it demanded ceaseless vigilance on his part to keep particles of impure matter, like goat’s droppings and cow dung, from touching his jallabeyya, since he would otherwise be obliged to change his clothes before going to the mosque again. This meant that he had to walk with extreme care in those liberally manured fields, with his hem plucked high above his ankles, very much in the manner that women hitch up their saris during the monsoons in Calcutta.
Before we had gone very far we came upon some of his relatives, working in a vegetable patch. They invited us to sit with them and began to ask me questions about the soil and the crops in India. Ustaz Mustafa soon grew impatient with this and led me away.
‘They are fellaheen,’ he said apologetically. ‘They don’t have much interest in religion or anything important.’
‘I am just like that myself,’ I said quickly.
‘Really?’ said Ustaz Mustafa, aghast. We walked in silence for a while, and then he said: ‘I am giving up hope that you will become a Muslim.’ Then an idea occurred to him and he turned to face me. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘would your father be upset if you were to change your religion?’
‘Maybe,’ I said.
He relapsed into thoughtful silence for a few minutes. ‘Has your father read the holy books of Islam?’ he asked, eagerly.
‘I don’t know,’ I answered.
‘He must read them,’ said Ustaz Mustafa. ‘If he did he would surely convert himself.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He is accustomed to his own ways.’
He mulled the issue over in his mind, and when we turned back towards Lataifa he said: ‘Well, it would not be right for you to upset your father. That is true.’
After that the heart went out of his efforts to convert me: he had a son himself and it went against his deepest instincts to urge a man to turn against his father. And so, as the rival moralities of religion and kinship gradually played themselves to a standstill within him, Ustaz Mustafa and I came to an understanding.
A connection was already beginning to form in my mind now, as I turned towards Shaikh Musa’s wife. ‘Is Ustaz Mustafa really your uncle?’ I asked her, uncertain of whether she was using the word in a specific or general sense. ‘Your father’s real brother, your ‘amm shagîg?’