That day he decided to laugh at me.
"All right, ya doktor," he said to me as soon as I had seated myself. "Tell me, is it true what they say, that in your country you burn your dead?"
No sooner had he said it than the women of the group clasped their hands to their hearts and muttered in breathless horror, "Haram! Haram!"
My heart sank. This was a conversation I usually went through at least once a day, and I was desperately tired of it. "Yes," I said, "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 wood and just light them up?"
"Yes," I said, hoping that he would tire of this sport if I humored him.
"Why?" he said. "Is there a shortage of kindling in your country?"
"No," I said helplessly, "you don't understand." Somewhere in the limitless riches of the Arabic language a word such as "cremate" must exist, but if it does, I never succeeded in finding it. Instead, for lack of any other, I had to use the word "burn." That was unfortunate, for "burn" was the word for what happened to wood and straw and the eternally damned.
Khamees the Rat turned to his spellbound listeners. "I'll tell you why they do it," he said. "They do it so that their bodies can't be punished after the Day of Judgment."
Everybody burst into wonderstruck laughter. "Why, how clever," cried one of the younger girls. "What a good idea! We ought to start doing it ourselves. That way we can do exactly what we like, and when we die and the Day of Judgment comes, there'll be nothing there to judge."
Khamees had got his laugh. Now he gestured to them to be quiet again.
"All right then, ya doktor," he said. "Tell me something else: is it true that you are a Magian? That in your country everybody worships cows? 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 that you burst into tears and ran back to your room?"
"No, it's not true," I said, but without much hope. I had heard this story before and knew that there was nothing I could say which would effectively give it the lie. "You're wrong. In my country people beat their cows all the time, I promise you."
I could see that no one believed me.
"Everything's upside-down in their country," said a dark, aquiline young woman, who, I was told later, was Khamees's wife. "Tell us, ya doktor, in your country, do you 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 the year round."
"Ya salám," she cried, striking her forehead with the heel of her palm. "Do you hear that, o you people? Oh, the Protector, oh, the Lord! It rains all the year round in his country."
She had gone pale with amazement. "So tell us then," she demanded, "do you have night and day like we do?"
"Shut up, woman," said Khamees. "Of course they don't. It's day all the time over there, didn't you know? They arranged it like that so that they wouldn't have to spend any money on lamps."
We all laughed, and then someone pointed to a baby lying in the shade of a tree, swaddled in a sheet of cloth. "That's Khamees's baby," I was told. "He was born last month."
"That's wonderful," I said. "Khamees must be very happy."
Khamees gave a cry of delight. "The Indian knows I'm happy because I've had a son," he said to the others. "He understands that people are happy when they have children. He's not as upside-down as we thought."
He slapped me on the knee and lit up the hookah, and from that moment we were friends.
One evening, perhaps a month or so after I first met Khamees, he and his brothers and I were walking back to the village from the fields when he spotted the old imam sitting on the steps that led to the mosque.
"Listen," he said to me, "you know the old imam, don't you? I saw you talking to him once."
"Yes," I said, "I talked to him once."
"My wife's ill," Khamees said. "I want the imam to come to my house to give her an injection. He won't come if I ask him, he doesn't like me. You go and ask."
"He doesn't like me either," I said.
"Never mind," Khamees insisted. "He'll come if you ask him — he knows you're a foreigner. He'll listen to you."
While Khamees waited on the edge of the square with his brothers, I went across to the imam. I could tell that he had seen me — and Khamees — from a long way off, that he knew I was crossing the square to talk to him. But he would not look in my direction. Instead, he pretended to be deep in conversation with a man who was sitting beside him, an elderly and pious shopkeeper whom I knew slightly.
When I reached them, I said "Good evening" very pointedly to the imam. He could not ignore me any longer then, but his response was short and curt, and he turned back at once to resume his conversation.
The old shopkeeper was embarrassed now, for he was a courteous, gracious man in the way that seemed to come so naturally to the elders of the village. "Please sit down," he said to me. "Do sit. Shall we get you a chair?"
Then he turned to the imam and said, slightly puzzled, "You know the Indian doktor, don't you? He's come all the way from India to be a student at the University of Alexandria."
"I know him," said the imam. "He came around to ask me questions. But as for this student business, I don't know. What's he going to study? He doesn't even write in Arabic."
"Well," said the shopkeeper judiciously, "that's true, but after all, he writes his own languages and he knows English."
"Oh, those," said the imam. "What's the use of those languages? They're the easiest languages in the world. Anyone can write those."
He turned to face me for the first time. His eyes were very bright, and his mouth was twitching with anger. "Tell me," he said, "why do you worship cows?"
I was so taken aback that I began to stammer. The imam ignored me. He turned to the old shopkeeper and said, "That's what they do in his country — did you know? They worship cows."
He shot me a glance from the corner of his eyes. "And shall I tell you what else they do?" he said to the shopkeeper.
He let the question hang for a moment. And then, very loudly, he hissed, "They burn their dead."
The shopkeeper recoiled as though he had been slapped. His hands flew to his mouth. "Oh God!" he muttered. "Ya Allah."
"That's what they do," said the imam. "They burn their dead."
Then suddenly he turned to me and said, very rapidly, "Why do you allow it? Can't you see that it's a primitive and backward custom? Are you savages that you permit something like that? Look at you — you've had some kind of education; you should know better. How will your country ever progress if you carry on doing these things? You've even been to the West; you've seen how advanced they are. Now tell me, have you ever seen them burning their dead?"
The imam was shouting now, and a circle of young men and boys had gathered around us. Under the pressure of their interested eyes my tongue began to trip, even on syllables I thought I had mastered. I found myself growing angry — as much with my own incompetence as with the imam.