That was the plan, some say, but nobody knows for sure. What is sure is that, within minutes of hearing what Nury had to say, Jeevanbhai was on his donkey flying towards the Old Fort. What happened there nobody knows. Some say that Jeevanbhai had to lock the Malik into a room to keep him from attacking the New Palace at that very moment with all his hidden arms. What is sure is that Jeevanbhai found some way to stop him, for of course he had his own plan. Within an hour he was back in the town, with Jabal the Eunuch and a wad of letters from the Malik.
Feverishly Jeevanbhai, Jabal and Nury raced around the old city, waking up certain shopkeepers known for their loyalty to the Malik and showing them the Malik’s letters. They worked like madmen, for they knew, each one of them, that they were fighting for their survival (though already, unknown to the others, in one of those heads, ripples of doubt about the future were spreading).
Then a large group of shopkeepers led by Jeevanbhai, Jabal and Nury vanished into the Souq. When they came out again they were carrying and pushing barrels and tins of oil — mainly kerosene, but all kinds of other oils as well, mustard oil, cottonseed oil, linseed oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, even ghee. The oil was taken down to the harbour in carts and loaded on to a flat-bottomed boat. When that was done Patel, Jabal, Nury and a couple of boatmen climbed into the boat and rowed down the inlet towards the sea until they disappeared into the blackness of the night.
The next anyone saw of them, Jeevanbhai, naked except for his long white shirt, and Nury were clinging to an enormous horse, white-eyed with fear, galloping crazily up the dirt track which later became the Corniche, towards the harbour. A whole platoon of the Amir’s guards, huge bandoliered Pathans from the Khyber, were chasing them on foot, almost as fast as the horse could run, whooping and pot-shotting.
As it was reconstructed in the cafés, Jeevanbhai’s plan was to row silently along the coast to the site. The Amir’s men, he reasoned, would probably guard the dirt tracks along the road, and turn their backs to the sea. Once there, he planned to soak the whole place in oil, step back into the boat and toss a lighted rag behind him, sending the Amir’s dreams up in flames.
Jeevanbhai was too subtle a man to think of acts as important in themselves; that was why he stopped the Malik from attacking the New Palace, even though, with the townspeople behind him, he may well have won the day. But for Jeevanbhai it is not acts, but warnings, meanings, those delicate shades which remove an act from mere adventure and place it in history, which are important. Jeevanbhai didn’t simply want to burn the date palms. What would be the use of that? For him the date palms were to be words, to tell the Amir that dreams collapse from the inside, of themselves.
That was the irony of it.
The first part of Jeevanbhai’s plan went off perfectly: the palms had already been planted, and the Amir’s guards, posted to guard the track to the city, were snoring behind a sand-dune, a long way from the site, while their horses were tethered under the palms. The three of them soaked the place in oil without so much as a sound. In less than an hour they were ready, and not one of the guards had noticed.
Already smiling in triumph, Jeevanbhai reached out for the rag which he had handed to Jabal beside him, but his hands clutched empty air. Jabal was gone.
It was not the Amir’s dreams which collapsed from within.
Spinning around, Jeevanbhai saw a mountainous shadow creeping towards the guards, already too far away to stop. Next moment Nury caught his arm and pointed to the beach — the boatmen, never slow to smell defeat, were far out to sea.
But even then the old fox had a trick or two left. He tore off his dhoti, tied one end of it to a kerosene-sodden date palm, and took the other in his hand. Just as Jabal was shaking the guards awake, Jeevanbhai handed the reins of one of the guards’ horses to Nury, cut the rest loose and drove them off. With shot spraying into the sand around them, he leapt on to the horse, pulled Nury up behind him, and lit his dhoti. They were lying flat on the galloping horse, holding on for their lives, when the palms burst into flames.
In the harbour the shots were heard from a long way off, and since it was already dawn a crowd soon gathered. When they saw a galloping horse beating up a cloud of dust on the far side of the inlet, there was a tremendous commotion. Some thought it was a Bedouin raid like those their grandfathers had told them about; others thought the sheikhs of the neighbouring kingdoms were attacking at last as people had so often said they would. All was confusion: al-Ghazira had been quiet so long nobody knew how to deal with a crisis. People — men, children, women — ran into the streets, screaming and crying. Then the horse was upon them, rearing, hoofs scything the air, and Nury and poor, half-naked Jeevanbhai were picking themselves from the dust and shouting, Run, run — but before they could turn the earth shook beneath their feet, for the Malik, no longer able to hold himself, was firing his ill-directed bazookas into the sea, raising volcanoes of water where it didn’t matter. And then that whole early-morning crowd, half-dressed and unwashed, underweared and unshat, turned as one man and fled down the road with Nury in the lead.
For some reason, nobody has ever understood why, instead of turning into the city, after the harbour, Nury ran straight on, past the sandspits and further, with the crowd flocking behind him in a dust-clouded mass, and shots and bazookas shaking the whole city; on, down past the Ras, along the old road, while behind them, far away in the New Palace, the Amir and his mounted guards were trotting out, towards the Maidan al-Jami‘i; and in the Oiltown the Oilmen’s uniformed hirelings from every corner of the world were polishing their guns and their batons …
But Nury knew nothing of that, and Jeevanbhai was already lost far behind; he had fallen and rolled into the Ras where he lay hidden for days, in which other house but Zindi’s? Nury just ran, on and on, until in front of him, out of the sand, there suddenly arose the barbed-wire fence of the Oiltown. From the other side of the fence, faces stared silently out — Filipino faces, Indian faces, Egyptian faces, Pakistani faces, even a few Ghaziri faces, a whole world of faces. In despair Nury threw himself on the fence begging them to open the gates. But the faces stayed where they were, already masks, staring at his sad, desperate, crossed eyes.
You must remember this was long ago, so long ago that even oil didn’t bring much money and not one Ghaziri in a hundred or even a thousand had cars and houses and palaces in Switzerland. It was before the great strikes and the riots; before the Oilmen’s planes bombed the Ghaziris in the Oiltown; before the unions were driven into secrecy; before the women and the schoolchildren poured into the streets to fight, and were murdered with the newest and best guns and helicopters and computers money can buy. It was before all of that.