Jeevanbhai caught her wrist with both his hands and tried to fight it off. She had as much strength in her wrist as he had in both his arms. Zindi, he gasped, stop, you’re going crazy. He twisted his body sideways and managed to struggle to his feet. Lowering his shoulders, he gathered his strength together and threw himself against her stomach. She staggered backwards, in the direction of the bed. For a moment she tottered on her feet, staring at his flushed face, and then, covering her face with her hands, she crumpled on to the bed. Her sobs came in short dry bursts, shaking the bed.
Zindi, Zindi, Jeevanbhai said, what’s the matter? What’s happened? He latched the door and went to the bed. Awkwardly he put his arm around her shoulders.
Zindi, he said, what’s happened? What have they done? Tell me.
He brushed her cheek clumsily with the back of his hand. Tell me, he said. I can help you. You know that. I know you want the shop. Why didn’t you just ask me? Why did you have to go through this drama?
He took her black scarf off, folded it neatly and put it beside him on the bed. Then he ran his hand gently through her thin, greying hair, and stroked her neck and her arms. His hand brushed her heaving breasts, and he drew it back sharply in embarrassment. Zindi, he whispered, tell me. What have they done to you? Is it something terrible?
Terrible? What could a word like ‘terrible’ mean for someone who had to spend each day watching her own house slipping out of her hands, watching it turn against her, defying nature, like a horse turning on its rider? What did ‘terrible’ mean for someone who had to watch the very people she had sheltered, her own children, picking the world apart, hunting for chaos and calling from the rooftops for their own destruction? What is terrible? Is it terrible to find yourself afloat on a whirlpool of madness, to see the currents raging around you, and to be powerless to do anything but wait helplessly for the last wave?
Sometimes broken bones and pain aren’t necessary to make things terrible; being a spectator is terror enough.
In the beginning it wasn’t so bad; it had seemed as though nothing would come of it. Everyone who had lived in the Ras long enough had seen it swept by bursts of craziness. There was the time someone spread a rumour about the potato liquor that was being sold on the beach, and the men went into a frenzy because they thought their balls were climbing back into their bodies; and there was the year people spent every night for a whole month sitting up and waiting for an earthquake.
This was different; it went on and on and on. There was no end to it.
First, they got Romy Abu Tolba. It was Abu Fahl and Professor Samuel who went to him (Alu never went anywhere; he only sat in Hajj Fahmy’s courtyard and wove and wove and wove). They went to Romy with a huge gang and they said: Your shop spreads dirt in the Ras. We won’t put up with it. Either join us and we’ll run it together, like everything else, or you’ll lose your shop.
Romy is one of those people who minds his business and doesn’t bother to find out about things. That’s madness for a shopkeeper; every good shopkeeper has to stay ahead of the news. Romy didn’t know what was happening in the Ras. When they said all that to him, he was so astonished he couldn’t think of anything to say. After a long time, he laughed and said: Are you mad? It’s all right to drink, but drunks shouldn’t go around disturbing honest people.
They said, All right, you’ll see, and they left. They were the last people to set foot in Romy Abu Tolba’s shop.
The next day Romy opened his shop in the morning and sat down to read his newspaper and wait for customers. He waited and he waited but nobody came into his shop. He called out to people when he saw them going past, but they turned their heads and walked away. He’d stocked watermelons that day, and they began to rot. And still nobody came, all through the day.
Never mind, he told his son Tolba the next day. They’ll need things; they’ll fall short.
But Abu Fahl and Zaghloul and the rest had already taken one of Hajj Fahmy’s trucks and bought stocks of sugar and oil and tea and everything else in the Souq, and they began to give them out in Hajj Fahmy’s courtyard, while Samuel noted it all down in his account-books.
There was no shortage of anything, and that evening Romy’s stock of eggs began to smell.
Next day, Romy dropped his prices. Still nobody came. That night almost the whole of the Ras gathered around Hajj Fahmy’s house and till late in the night they talked about the terrible dirt that shops deal out.
Next morning Romy began to beg people to go in. He needed money now. But nobody even passed by his shop any longer; they skirted fearfully around it as though it were a leper’s lair. They were afraid; afraid of the dirt and the germs. Germs! In Romy Abu Tolba the Fayyumi’s shop, where everyone had bought everything for God knows how many years!
At the end of the day Romy knew he was beaten. What’s the use of a shop without customers? He went to Hajj Fahmy that evening and said: Do what you like with my shop.
They say Hajj Fahmy kissed him on both cheeks and hugged him like a brother.
The day after that they went to the shop and washed every inch of it with carbolic acid. They washed the shelves, the floor, the walls, the counter, even the lane outside. They took away Romy’s old iron cash-box, and in its place they put their files and account-books.
That night on the beach they burnt the cash-box and danced around it.
Now everything in the shop is given away and the price is marked down in the files against people’s names. There aren’t any profits any more. Romy’s just a clerk now, in his own shop. He spends the day noting down who buys what in the account-books. They pay him a wage. It’s not a bad wage, but you can already see death weighing down his eyelids. Who wants to be a paid clerk in his own shop?
That was just the beginning. After that the flood of carbolic acid started. Every day they send out groups with buckets of carbolic. They wander all over the Ras, washing out lanes and houses as they please. They came to this house, too, but the door was barred, and Abu Fahl, for some reason of his own, led them away. But they’ll be back, and who’ll stop them the next time? They’ll come again and again and again, until they get in. And what then? Who can live with the stench of that stuff?
Next, they say, they’re going to put a stop to the dirtiest of the dirty — the mugaddams, the labour contractors. Soon, they say, no one in the Ras will ever work for a mugaddam again. And after that? After that — no mistake about it — they’ll want the houses; houses which have been held together for years with sweat and love. They’ll want them, too.
Everyone’s with them now. They’ve got so much money, it’s unbelievable, but at the same time they say there’s not a note or a coin left anywhere in the Ras. It’s all in their account-books and files. Every day every person who works outside takes money for the day in an envelope, and at the end of the day they burn the envelopes. Every week they bring their pay to the Professor in envelopes (he’s got a kind of office now, in a shack near Hajj Fahmy’s house). He writes it all down in his books and puts it in the bank. Then, at the end of every week, he goes to the post office and sends money to all the addresses in his files. They say the shacks in the Ras are now full of people who’re growing as rich as kings back home in their villages. They’re sending back three, four, five times more money than they used to before, because they don’t have to spend any of it here, as they used to. But there’s so many of them, and there’s so much money in those books, that they still have money to burn. They began by showing films on the beach every second day. Now it’s videos and a new film every day. Then they’re going to hire buses to take them on holidays to the hot springs. They’re not going to go home on ordinary planes any more. They’re going to charter whole planes, and everyone who’s going to Egypt or India or wherever will go together. They’ll save half the money, they say.