Dimyan and Magd al-Din looked at him in surprise. “Don’t you mean independence from England?” corrected Magd al-Din.
“From both, Sheikh Magd.”
“All my life I’ve known that England occupies Egypt and Sudan,” said Dimyan. “This is the first I’ve heard of Egypt occupying Sudan. Perhaps it’s because of this that we have too many monkeys in Egypt nowadays.”
Al-Safi al-Naim growled, or rather made a gentle roaring sound.
“Egypt and Sudan have always been sisters,” Magd al-Din said.
“Exactly, Sheikh Magd,” said al-Safi al-Naim, “What sweet words!”
Everyone laughed with the exception of Bahadur. Even the young Indian soldiers laughed when they saw Magd al-Din, Dimyan, and al-Safi al-Naim laugh. Perhaps that was why Bahadur felt awkward and told al-Safi al-Naim to translate. Al-Safi thought a little, then said quickly, “Sudan, like India and Egypt, is under Britain’s control.”
Bahadur nodded and al-Safi added, “They will be independent as quickly as possible.”
Once again Bahadur nodded gently, and the three other Indians smiled. Magd al-Din suggested that they stop talking politics. They looked at him in surprise and asked why. He hesitated before answering. Actually he did not know why he had made the suggestion or how to answer.
“Because we’re in the desert,” he finally said.
He never understood, even later on, what the desert had to do with not talking politics. But that’s what happened. Everyone fell silent, unconvinced and a little bewildered, then they stared at the vast expanse of the desert.
Faint lights came from the trenches, and from the scattered rooms above ground. In the morning the officers and soldiers came out of their holes and went to the great sea. Spring had arrived and nothing remained of the winter except the bitter cold of the night. Summer uniforms came out anew, and the scorpions and insects came out of their holes. Every morning the soldiers went into the sea, naked except for their dirty underpants. The bodies of the soldiers were no longer white, they had turned bronze-colored. The new soldiers exposed their bodies to the sun as long as possible so they would look more awe-inspiring, as if they had had a long fighting experience. In truth, as Magd al-Din said of them, they were all poor children, “God’s little children who have come down from heaven for this difficult test,” in exactly the same way he had been driven out of his village, and perhaps just as easily.
“Do you still carry the snake in your pocket?” Dimyan asked Bahadur.
“It’s with me all the time during the war.”
He took the snake out of his jacket pocket, a small, thin, yellow snake with dark speckles that coiled itself on his fingers. He returned his hand to his pocket and took it out easily without the snake.
Al-Safi translated what Bahadur had said, to the effect that in India they domesticated large and small snakes, even cobras, that certain Indian sects worshipped snakes, cobras in particular, that Indians in general were skillful at domesticating snakes and handling them, that the snake in his pocket had not come from India but that he had caught it in the desert the previous summer. At night he placed the snake in a tin can with some food, like chopped eggs and corned beef. The snake had not escaped, or even thought about it so far.
That was not the strangest part of what Bahadur had said. Al-Safi al-Naim translated and no one believed that the world could be so small. Bahadur said that his father also served in the cavalry in the British army in Egypt during the Great War. When the war ended there was a big revolution. Dimyan interrupted him to say that was in the days of Saad Pasha. Al-Safi did not translate what Dimyan said, and Bahadur continued to say that there was an uprising in a town named “De-rut.” Bahadur paused to look at the faces of his listeners and Dimyan told him, “You probably mean Dayrut.” Bahadur continued to say that its name was “De-rut.” No one commented, and he added that in a village near De-rut there was a big rebellion attacking the British forces, so the English sent the Indian Sikh cavalry to the village. “My father was among them, and their commanding officer was an Englishman. He ordered his men to rape the women of the village before the eyes of their men, who had been bound with ropes.”
Magd al-Din closed his eyes in pain. Dimyan looked shocked, his lips trembled, and he said nothing. Bahadur smiled and added that his father had told him how the women ran and threw themselves into the Nile, preferring death by drowning to rape. “My father lived in pain because he had done that, and especially because he had seen the English rape Indian women also.” Bahadur fell silent and so did everyone, until Magd al-Din said calmly, “That’s a strange story; we didn’t hear of it during the revolution. We took part in the revolution. We attacked the English and sabotaged the railroad, but we never heard that any force from any army raped the women of any village — no English army or Indian army.”
The young Indians had been smiling at first, but now were bowing their heads, looking at the ground.
“I’ve seen the Indians in Sudan walking arrogantly as peacocks,” said al-Safi al-Naim, “as if they owned the earth with everything on it. But I didn’t see them beat anybody or rape any woman.”
Bahadur did not understand what al-Safi said and naturally the latter did not translate it.
“I’m from Dayrut and I know the story,” Dimyan joined the conversation. “I’ve heard it — it’s a true story.”
“They also killed the men,” said Bahadur loudly.
“The whole village was eradicated without a trace,” added Dimyan. “I remember that it was called Kom Gahannam, ‘Hell Hill.’ The men who survived disappeared, dispersed all over the country. Most of them died of shame.”
Everyone fell silent. There was a wide range of reaction, sorrow on al-Safi’s part, sadness in Magd al-Din’s case, despair in Dimyan’s, and awe in the case of the young Indians.
“In many countries foreigners have raped the women,” said Magd al-Din.
“In Egypt there are many villages that bear that out. Rosetta by the English, and in the deep south there are blond girls of Mamluk origin,” Dimyan said nonchalantly.
Al-Safi al-Naim said, “Thank God you can’t find a single white man in Sudan. Our women are still black, and giving birth to black babies. Blackness has protected our women against rape.”
He wanted to make light of what Bahadur had said. He realized that Magd al-Din and Dimyan, or at least one of them, would explode. It was Dimyan who spoke.
“But Mr. Bahadur, if you look all over Egypt for any trace of anyone Indian, you would find none.”
He fell silent and Bahadur waited for al-Safi to translate. Al-Safi hesitated, but Dimyan told him to go ahead.
“You mean I’m a liar?” Bahadur asked.
“No. You’re telling the truth. It’s your father and the Sikh cavalry that are liars. They didn’t do anything. On the contrary, it was the Egyptians who mounted them.”
Magd al-Din could not laugh, nor could al-Safi al-Naim, whose face turned ashen with fear. He stopped playing his role as interpreter, but Bahadur ordered him to translate at once.
Actually al-Safi liked what Dimyan had said; he got some satisfaction out of it. After all, he was an Arab like Dimyan and Magd al-Din, and they all came from the Nile valley. That was why he translated precisely and slowly what Dimyan had said. The dark of the twilight was descending upon the desert as the night breeze was stirring. The moment al-Safi finished the translation, Bahadur’s hand was on his revolver. He stood up, hurling curses in Hindi at Dimyan, who had jumped up to flee the moment Bahadur got up. Shots rang out in the air behind Dimyan, but he was not hit. The dark helped him escape. Bahadur stood for a few moments fuming with rage, then roared in Hindi at the young soldiers and they all left. He looked askance as al-Safi and Magd al-Din, who in turn got up and moved away. As soon as they were at a safe distance they burst out in jubilant laughter.