Isma’il? said Zindi, surprised. He hasn’t been here.
But I sent him here. We heard the rumours, you see, and I wanted to find out. He didn’t come so I was worried.
Zindi clicked her tongue in sympathy. How you’ve aged, she said, since Mohammad’s accident, God have mercy on him. She threw an extra handful of tea and mint into the pot. Hajj Fahmy was the house’s oldest friend and he had a right to its best tea.
Hajj Fahmy’s family was said to have been founded, several generations ago, by a weaver called Musa, who had fled his village in the far south of Egypt after a blood feud. He escaped to Sudan and the Red Sea coast with his child bride, and there, penniless and starving, he had entered himself and his bride into servitude.
After innumerable adventures in Ethiopia, Somalia and the Yemeni coast, Musa had found his way somehow to al-Ghazira with his no-longer-young wife and many children. The Malik of the time took them into his service, and Musa and his still growing family lived in the Old Fort and wove their cloth in peace. Eventually Musa and his family came to be known as the Malik’s dependants, his Mawali. His descendants were known forever afterwards by that name, even when they depended on no one but themselves.
Then the old Malik died and Musa died, and one day the Mawali found themselves not quite as welcome in the Fort as they had been in the past. So they moved, not into the town, because the townspeople still looked on them with suspicion as strangers of uncertain provenance, but into an empty sandflat which people called the Severed Head. They built themselves barasti huts, spacious airy dwellings, built with palm fronds and wooden stakes, and they installed their looms and lived and worked in proud penury.
It was Hajj Fahmy who changed all that. He saw the first oilmen coming into al-Ghazira, and he knew at once that the Mawali could profit from the future. Against all his instincts, he stopped teaching his craft to his sons and his kinsmen, and told them to be ready to learn other trades. When the oil began to gush, Hajj Fahmy was the only man in al-Ghazira who was ready for it. Within a few years one of his sons was in the construction business and making more money than he could count; another had three Datsun trucks which were never short of work (it was he who died when he drove one of his trucks off the embankment); a third had filled every Mawali with pride by going to Alexandria to study medicine.
But Isma’il, Hajj Fahmy’s fourth son, did nothing at all. He had no skill at weaving, and though he talked occasionally of learning plumbing no one took him seriously. He was known to be unusually dim-witted, more or less an idiot. He spent his days wandering about the Ras, talking to people and wandering into whichever shack took his fancy for his meals. Yet, of all his sons, Isma’il was the dearest to Hajj Fahmy. He wouldn’t hear of his wife’s plans to push him into a trade. We have enough, he said. Isma’il helps us live with it in peace.
Soon after Hajj Fahmy and the other Mawali families began to make money, they tore down their barasti huts and built themselves large, strong houses of brick and cement. At the time, some of the Mawali had said to Hajj Fahmy: Why don’t we leave the Ras and its stinking beaches, and go into the city?
Never, Hajj Fahmy had answered. In al-Ghazira the Ras is where we belong. Still, some of the Mawali left. But most of them stayed, for they knew instinctively that Hajj Fahmy was right — the Mawali had always kept to themselves in al-Ghazira. Old Musa had fetched wives for his sons from his own village in Egypt. After that the Mawali had always married amongst themselves. They spoke the Arabic of Musa’s village with each other. They even wore its dress — jallabeyyas and woollen caps. Often, the men wore shirts and trousers, but never the flowing robes of the Ghaziris. Why this should be, no one knew. It was just so.
When the Ras began to fill up with shacks and people from all the corners of the world, the Mawali were alarmed. They went to Hajj Fahmy and said: What shall we do now? Soon our houses will be pushed into the sea.
Hajj Fahmy had laughed: How will they push our houses into the sea, when ours are the only solid houses in the Ras? Let them come to the Ras if they keep out of our way. The Ras gave us shelter; let it give them shelter. Besides, think of the business they’ll bring.
One of his cousins opened a grocery-shop at one end of the Ras and within months he was rich. After that the Mawali never again worried about the crowds in the Ras. And the others in the Ras, for their part, left the Mawali alone and never encroached on their houses.
It was only natural that there should be a close link between the Mawali and the inhabitants of the only other permanent house in the Ras — Zindi’s. No one knew how long back the connection stretched, but it was said that when Zindi first came to al-Ghazira from Egypt, as a young and buxom beauty, it was Hajj Fahmy who first found her a place and cared for her, almost as he did for his own wife. Zindi’s house grew and she found other friends, but nothing ever interfered in her friendship with Hajj Fahmy. Zindi and her house kept his interest in the world alive, Hajj Fahmy would say, and he was always one of the first to visit her house when she returned from one of her trips to Egypt or India. It was inevitable that he would meet Alu sooner or later. But, as it happened, when Mariamma arrived the Hajj did not hear of it for a few days. Instead, one evening a young, lumpy-headed man whom he had never seen before was led into the room in which he received guests.
He had heard, Hajj Fahmy said, that we have a loom in the house. Of course no one uses it now but me, and that rarely. When I do I think myself a fool, because in the past I wove because I needed the money, and now I weave because I have nothing else to do. Anyway I showed it to him. He walked around it, looking at it carefully, but he didn’t touch it. He was thinking. Who knows what he was thinking? We couldn’t ask him because then he didn’t know any Arabic, and all we had to talk in was signs. Next day he was back, with yarn. He set about warping the loom and a week later he was weaving. He was a little clumsy in the beginning. He said the loom wasn’t like those he knew. But after a few days his hands were flying over it, and everyone in the house used to gather around to marvel at his skill. After that he used to come in the evenings, when he had finished the day’s work with Abu Fahl and the others. He said it made him feel well again after a day of painting walls. He wove cloth for the whole house — soft, fine cloth (of course, we gave him a little money) — cloth of that kind is beyond my skill, Zindi, really. To tell you the truth, I often thought to myself: Why, I could start a business with the cloth this boy makes. If he could work on that loom all day long, instead of painting houses, Allahu yia’alam, God knows how much money he could make. I tell you, I often thought of setting up a business with that boy, often … Anyway, my heart was glad to see that loom being used at last, and my father would have been glad, too. And once Alu began to talk Arabic like any of us everyone in the house came to love him, though he wasn’t a Muslim. I myself, I loved him like a grandson. Yesterday, when we heard about the collapse, my house wept. I wept. Then today we heard rumour after rumour. Of course, the women in the house started talking about the Sheikh …
What sheikh? Zindi broke in.
Oh, no one — an odd idea some of the Mawali women have. Anyway, as soon as I heard the rumours I sent Isma’il to your house to find out. He didn’t come back, and only our Lord knows where he is. So then I set out myself. I said: I must find out from Zindi herself what’s become of Alu.
Zindi stiffened suddenly, alerted by a noise in the lane outside. She was at the door before the first knock. She flung the door open, throwing her tarha askew in her haste. There were half a dozen men outside, some of them Mawali, some Indian and some Egyptian. Forid Mian was not among them.