This made me all the more determined to meet him, and one evening, a few months after I first came to the village, I found my way to his house. He lived in the center of the village, on the edge of the dusty open square that had the mosque in its middle. This was the oldest part of the village, a maze of low mud huts huddled together like confectionery on a tray, each hut crowned with a billowing, tousled head of straw.
When I knocked on the door, the imam opened it himself. He was a big man, with very bright brown eyes set deep in a wrinkled, weather-beaten face. Like the room behind him, he was distinctly untidy: his blue djellaba was mud-stained and unwashed, and his turban had been knotted anyhow around his head. But his beard, short and white and neatly trimmed, was everything a barber's beard should be. Age had been harsh on his face, but there was a certain energy in the way he arched his shoulders, in the clarity of his eyes, and in the way he fidgeted constantly, was never stilclass="underline" it was plain that he was a vigorous, restive kind of person.
"Welcome," he said, courteous but unsmiling, and stood aside and waved me in. It was a long dark room, with sloping walls and a very low ceiling. There was a bed in it and a couple of mats, but little else apart from a few scattered books. Everything bore that dull patina of grime that speaks of years of neglect. Later I learned that the imam had divorced his first wife and his second had left him, so that now he lived quite alone and had his meals with his son's family, who lived across the square.
"Welcome," he said again, formally.
"Welcome to you," I said, giving him the formal response, and then we began on the long, reassuring litany of Arabic phrases of greeting.
"How are you?"
"How are you?"
"You have brought blessings?"
"May God bless you."
"Welcome."
"Welcome to you."
"You have brought light."
"The light is yours."
"How are you?"
"How are you?"
He was very polite, very proper. In a moment he produced a kerosene stove and began to brew tea. But even in the performance of that little ritual there was something about him that was guarded, watchful.
"You're the doktor al-Hindi," he said to me at last, "aren't you? The Indian doctor?"
I nodded, for that was the name the village had given me. Then I told him that I wanted to talk to him about the methods of his system of medicine.
He looked very surprised, and for a while he was silent. Then he put his right hand to his heart and began again on the ritual of greetings and responses, but in a markedly different way this time, one that I had learned to recognize as a means of changing the subject.
"Welcome."
"Welcome to you."
"You have brought light."
"The light is yours."
And so on.
At the end of it I repeated what I had said.
"Why do you want to hear about my herbs?" he retorted. "Why don't you go back to your country and find out about your own?"
"I will," I said. "Soon. But right now…"
"No, no," he said restlessly. "Forget about all that; I'm trying to forget about it myself."
And then I knew that he would never talk to me about his craft, not just because he had taken a dislike to me for some reason of his own, but because his medicines were as discredited in his own eyes as they were in his clients'; because he knew as well as anybody else that the people who came to him now did so only because of old habits; because he bitterly regretted his inherited association with these relics of the past.
"Instead," he said, "let me tell you about what I have been learning over the last few years. Then you can go back to your country and tell them all about it."
He jumped up, his eyes shining, reached under his bed, and brought out a glistening new biscuit tin.
"Here!" he said, opening it. "Look!"
Inside the box was a hypodermic syringe and a couple of glass vials. This is what he had been learning, he told me: the art of mixing and giving injections. And there was a huge market for it too, in the village: everybody wanted injections, for coughs, colds, fevers, whatever. There was a good living in it. He wanted to demonstrate his skill to me right there, on my arm, and when I protested that I wasn't ill, that I didn't need an injection just then, he was offended. "All right," he said curtly, standing up. "I have to go to the mosque right now. Perhaps we can talk about this some other day."
That was the end of my interview. I walked with him to the mosque, and there, with an air of calculated finality, he took my hand in his, gave it a perfunctory shake, and vanished up the stairs.
Khamees the Rat I met one morning when I was walking through the rice fields that lay behind the village, watching people transplant their seedlings. Everybody I met was cheerful and busy, and the flooded rice fields were sparkling in the clear sunlight. If I shut my ears to the language, I thought, and stretch the date palms a bit and give them a few coconuts, I could easily be back somewhere in Bengal.
I was a long way from the village and not quite sure of my bearings when I spotted a group of people who had finished their work and were sitting on the path, passing around a hookah.
"Ahlan!" a man in a brown djellaba called out to me. "Hullo! Aren't you the Indian doktor?"
"Yes," I called back. "And who're you?"
"He's a rat," someone answered, raising a gale of laughter.
"Don't go anywhere near him."
"Tell me, ya doktor," the Rat said, "if I get onto my donkey and ride steadily for thirty days, will I make it to India?"
"No," I said. "You wouldn't make it in thirty months."
"Thirty months!" he said. "You must have come a long way."
"Yes."
"As for me," he declared, "I've never even been as far as Alexandria, and if I can help it I never will."
I laughed; it did not occur to me to believe him.
When I first went to that quiet corner of the Nile Delta, I had expected to find on that most ancient and most settled of soils a settled and restful people. I couldn't have been more wrong.
The men of the village had all the busy restlessness of airline passengers in a transit lounge. Many of them had worked and traveled in the sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf, others had been in Libya and Jordan and Syria, some had been to the Yemen as soldiers, others to Saudi Arabia as pilgrims, a few had visited Europe: some of them had passports so thick they opened out like ink-blackened concertinas. And none of this was new; their grandparents and ancestors and relatives had traveled and migrated too, in much the same way as mine had in the Indian subcontinent — because of wars, or for money and jobs, or perhaps simply because they got tired of living always in one place. You could read the history of this restlessness in the villagers' surnames: they had names that derived from cities in the Levant, from Turkey, from faraway towns in Nubia; it was as though people had drifted here from every corner of the Middle East. The wanderlust of its founders had been plowed into the soil of the village; it seemed to me sometimes that every man in it was a traveler. Everyone, that is, except Khamees the Rat, and even his surname, as I discovered later, meant "of Sudan."
"Well, never mind, ya doktor," Khamees said to me now. "Since you're not going to make it back to your country by sundown anyway, why don't you come and sit with us for a while?" He smiled and moved up to make room for me.
I liked him at once. He was about my age, in the early twenties, scrawny, with a thin, mobile face deeply scorched by the sun. He had that brightness of eye and the quick, slightly sardonic turn to his mouth that I associated with faces in the coffeehouses of universities in Delhi and Calcutta; he seemed to belong to a world of late-night rehearsals and black coffee and lecture rooms, even though, in fact, unlike most people in the village, he was completely illiterate. Later I learned that he was called the Rat — Khamees the Rat — because he was said to gnaw away at things with his tongue, like a rat did with its teeth. He laughed at everything, people said — at his father, the village's patron saint, the village elders, the imam, everything.