"They left for Iraq soon after they finished their national service," said Fawzia. "They went to make money."
They had rented a room in Baghdad with some other young men from the village, she said, and they all lived and cooked and ate together. She had taught Nabeel and Ismail to cook a few things before they left, so they managed all right. Ismail was a construction laborer. There was good money to be had in construction; Nabeel earned less as a photographer's assistant, but he liked his job. Ismail had been trying to get him to go into construction, but Nabeel wasn't interested.
"You know him," she said, laughing. "He always wanted a job where he wouldn't have to get his clothes dirty."
Later, when her husband, Aly, had come home from the fields and we had all had dinner, she gave me the number of the shop in Baghdad. Once every couple of months or so she and Nabeel's brothers would make a trip to a post office in a nearby town and telephone him in Baghdad.
"It costs a lot," she said, "but you can hear him like he was in the next house."
Nabeel couldn't telephone them, of course, but now and again he would speak into a cassette recorder and send them a tape. He and his brothers had all been through high school; Nabeel himself even had a college degree. But they still found the spoken word more reassuring than the written.
"You must hear his voice on the machine," said Aly, producing a tape. He placed it carefully inside a huge cassette recorder cum radio and we gathered around to listen. Nabeel's voice was very solemn, and he was speaking like a Cairene, almost as though he'd forgotten the village dialect.
"Does he always talk like that now?" I asked Fawzia.
"Oh no." She laughed. "He's talking like that because it's a cassette. On the telephone he sounds just like he used to."
Nabeel said almost nothing about himself and his life in Iraq, just that he was well and that his salary had gone up. He listed in detail the names of all the people he wanted them to convey his greetings to — members of his lineage, people in the village, his school friends. Then he told them about everyone from the village who was in Iraq — that so-and-so was well, that someone had moved to another city, and that someone else was about to go home. For the rest he gave his family precise instructions about what they were to do with the money he was sending them — about the additions they were to make to the house, exactly how the rooms should look, how much they should spend on the floors, the windows, the roof. His brothers listened, rapt, though they must have heard the tape through several times already.
Later Aly wrote down Nabeel's address for me. It consisted of a number on a numbered street in "New Baghdad." I pictured to myself an urban development project of the kind that flourishes in the arid hinterlands of Cairo and New Delhi — straight, treeless streets and blocks of yellow buildings divided into "Pockets," "Phases," and "Zones."
"You must telephone him," one of Nabeel's younger brothers said. "He'll be so pleased. Do you know, he's kept all your letters, wrapped in a plastic bag? He still talks of you, a lot. Tell me, didn't you once say to him…"
And then he recounted, almost word for word, a conversation I had once had with Nabeel. It was about something trivial, about my college in Delhi, but for some reason I had written it down in my diary that very day, while it was still fresh in memory. I had read through my diaries of that time again recently. That was why I knew that Nabeel's brother had repeated that conversation, or at least a part of it, almost verbatim, in near exact detail. I was amazed. It seemed to me an impossible, deeply moving defiance of time and the laws of hearsay and memory.
"You can be sure that I will telephone him," I said to Nabeel's brother. "I'll telephone him soon, from America."
"You must tell him that we are well and that he should send another cassette."
"Won't he be surprised," said Fawzia, "when he hears Amitab's voice on the phone? He'll think someone's playing a joke on him."
"We'll write and tell him," said Aly. "We'll write tomorrow so he won't be surprised. We'll tell him that you're going to phone him from America."
But they hadn't written: the surprise in Nabeel's voice as he greeted me over the phone was proof of that. And I, for my part, even though I had the advantage, was almost as amazed as Nabeel, though for a different reason. When I was living in their village, in 1980 and '81, Nabeel and Ismail had had very definite plans for their immediate future: they wanted salaried jobs in the Agriculture Ministry. It would not have occurred to any of us then to think that within a few years they would both be abroad and that I would be able to speak to them on the phone from thousands of miles away.
There was only one telephone in the village then. It had never worked, as far as anyone knew. It was not meant to — it was really a badge of office, a scepter. It belonged to the government, and it resided in the house of the village headman. When a headman was voted out in the local elections, the telephone was ritually removed from his house and taken to the victor's. It was carried at the head of a procession, accompanied by drums and gunshots, as though it were a saint's relics. "We carried the telephone that year," people would say, meaning "We swept the elections."
Nabeel's family was one of the poorest in the village — and the village was not by any means prosperous. Few families in the village had more than five feddans of land, but most had one or two. Nabeel's family had none at all. That was one of the reasons that he and his brothers had all got an education: schools and colleges were free, and they had no land to claim their time.
Nabeel lived with his parents in a three-room adobe hut, along with Aly and Fawzia and their three other brothers. Aly worked in the fields for a daily wage when there was work to be had; their father carried a tiny salary as a village watchman. He was a small, frail man with sunken cheeks and watery gray eyes. As a watchman he had the possession of a gun, an ancient Enfield, that was kept in a locked chest under his bed. He said that he'd last had occasion to use it some fifteen years ago, when somebody spotted a gang of thieves running through Hassan Bassiuni's cornfields. The thieves had escaped, but the gun had mowed down half the field — it was really very much like a blunderbuss. He was very proud of it. Once when a fire broke out in Shahata Hammoudah's house and everyone was busy doing what they could, I noticed Nabeel's father running in the opposite direction. When I next looked around, he was standing at attention in front of the burning house, holding his gun, smiling benignly.
Nabeel's mother, a dark, fine-boned woman, secretly despaired of her husband. "He's been defeated by the world," she would say sometimes. "There's no one to stand beside Nabeel and his brothers except themselves."
Now, eight years later, Nabeel's father and mother were both dead. "And the saddest thing," Fawzia said to me, "is that they didn't live to see how things have changed for us."
The three mud-walled rooms were gone now. In their place was a bungalow, or at least its skeleton — four or five rooms, in a largely unfinished state but built of brick and cement and entirely habitable. There was provision for a bathroom, a kitchen, a living room, as well as another entire apartment upstairs, exactly like the one below. That was where Nabeel would live once he was married, Fawzia said to me. She, for her part, was content; in her house she now had a television set, a cassette recorder, and a washing machine.
It wasn't just her life that had changed. When I first came to the village, in 1980, there were only three or four television sets there, and they belonged to the handful of men who owned fifteen to twenty feddans of land, the richest men in the village. Those men still had their fifteen to twenty feddans of land and their black-and-white television sets. It was the families who had once been thought of as the poor folk of the village whose homes were now full of all the best-known brand names in Japan — television sets, washing machines, kitchen appliances, cameras… I could not have begun to imagine a change on this scale when I left the village in 1981. If I had not witnessed it with my own eyes, I would not have believed it possible.