In Arabian Nights (14 page)

As always, my teachers were the people around me.

One morning I asked Zohra if she had seen a hundred
dirhams which I remembered leaving in my trousers the night
before. She looked worried, said she would search for the money,
and ran off upstairs. When she came down, she was holding a
crumpled hundred-dirham note.

'Here it is, Monsieur,' she said, handing it over.

I thanked her.

That afternoon Rachana found the original hundred-dirham
note I had 'lost'. It was on the night-stand beside my bed. Zohra
had been prepared to forgo a hundred dirhams of her own money,
a huge sum, more than ten dollars, to cloak my carelessness.

Nothing was really so important to my father as the achievement
of selflessness. He rarely mentioned it directly, but tried to
guide us to it in a roundabout way. It was sometimes like setting
out for a specific destination without a map or the name of the
place you are hoping to find. With their rock-solid culture of
values, stories were a way of understanding the goal.

During one visit to Morocco, I remember travelling back up
towards Tangier. I had been given a small coin for my pocket
money. We stopped at a market to buy some fruit. Standing
there, I saw a woman with no hands, begging at the side of the
road. In front of her was a bowl. Feeling very sorry for
the woman, I went over and dropped my pocket money in the
bowl.

When we got back to the car, I told my parents what I had
done. I expected praise, to be told how well I had behaved. But
my father's face soured.

'Never give charity if the reason is to make yourself feel
better,' he said. 'Real charity is not selfish, but selfless.'

After his death, I began to learn of my father's own
selflessness. Hearing that he had died, a number of people wrote
to tell me how he had helped them anonymously and that only
later had they realized he had been the benefactor.

Perhaps his strangest act of charity involved the Queen of
England.

On a state visit through the Middle East, Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth had presented an Arab head of state with her customary gift, a signed
photograph of herself in a silver frame. Reading about the gift over his morning
tea, my father must have balked at such a presentation. Through Arab eyes
it would be regarded as a tasteless embodiment of ego. My father withdrew
a large amount of money from his bank, purchased in cash a gift more appropriate
to royal Arabian taste and had it sent to the head of state, on behalf of
the Queen.

One afternoon Marwan saw me reading in the garden. Unlike
Osman and the Bear, he was always keen to make conversation.
He came over, shook my hand and wished me peace.

'What is your book?' he asked.

'Folktales from Scandinavia.'

'How does it feel?'

'Good, it feels good.'

Marwan touched a fingertip to his eye.

'There,' he said. 'How does it feel there?'

'To my eyes?'

'Yes.'

'It feels good.'

'But it's different.'

'Different from what?'

'From a story that comes in through the ears.'

Over the first weeks that Marwan worked for us, I found
myself thinking about his situation. He was a product of a far
more ancient and, in some ways, a far purer system than I. In our
world we frown on the illiterate because we feel they are missing
out on the wealth of information stored in books. In a way, it's
true of course. The very word 'illiterate' is heavy with negative
connotation.

But at the same time we are who we are as a result of illiteracy
throughout much of human history. If you have no written
language, you have to commit information to memory. Instead
of reading it, you rely on those with the information – the storytellers
– to recount it.

By their nature, most tribal and nomadic societies have had no
writing system. And they are blessed as a result. They depend on
one another for entertainment, for stimulation. Huddled round
the campfire, the storytellers pass on the collective wisdom of the
tribe. Their oral tradition is perfected and sleek, like stones in a
river, rounded by time. The information has an extra dimension
because it enters the body through the ears and not through
the eyes. Listen, stare into the flames, and imagination
unfolds.

I have seen storytellers casting their magic in the depths of the
Peruvian Amazon and in teahouses in Turkey, in India and
Afghanistan. I have found them, too, in Papua New Guinea
and in Patagonia, in Kenya's Rift Valley, in Namibia and
Kazakhstan. Their effect is always the same. They walk a
tightrope, no wider than a hair's breadth, suspended between
fact and fantasy, singing to the most primitive part of our minds.
We cannot help but let them in. With words they can enchant us,
teach us, pass on knowledge and wisdom, as they had done to
Marwan.

Stories are a communal currency of humanity. They follow
the same patterns irrespective of where they are found. And,
inexplicably, the same stories appear in cultures continents apart.
How is it that similar tales can be found in Iceland and in pre-Columbian
America? How come Cinderella is considered
European, but is also a part of the folklore of the American
Algonquins?

My father used to tell me that stories offer the listener a
chance to escape but, more importantly, he said, they provide
people with a chance to maximize their minds. Suspend ordinary
constraints, allow the imagination to be freed, and we are
charged with the capability of heightened thought.

Learn to use your eyes as if they are your ears, he said, and you
become connected with the ancient heritage of man, a dream
world for the waking mind.

Work is not what people think it is.
It is not just something which, when it is operating, you can see from
outside.

Jalaluddin Rumi

THE THOUGHT OF OUR HOME BEING BUILT OVER A HOLY MAN'S
grave was unsettling at first. I didn't want to tell Rachana about
it, in case it proved to be the straw that broke the camel's back.
During the time we had lived in Morocco, we had crossed an
ocean of difficulties, ranging from locusts to overweight rats,
from police raids to jinns and dismembered cats. At long last
Rachana was getting used to life at the Caliph's House. Deep
down I knew she regretted ever leaving the imagined
tranquillity of London and wished we were living in a sleepy
corner of suburbia. But, as I kept reminding her, a life without
steep learning curves is no life at all. I didn't want to tip the
balance with another unwelcome revelation.

So I bit my lip.

As so often happened, I found myself trapped by Casablanca,
or, rather, by Dar Khalifa. The maids, the guardians, and the surfeit of workers,
who drifted in and out like the Atlantic tide, ensnared us with demands. I
longed to take to the road and go in search of the story in my heart but,
each time I tried to break free, a giant wave washed me back to shore.

Then, one morning, I received a telephone call from a
stranger in Tangier. He spoke in a frail Italian voice and said he
would explain who he was.

A month before, I had been accosted by a door-to-door salesman.
Somehow he had made his way through the protective
barrier of the shantytown and happened upon our house. He
rapped hard on the door. I went out to see who was there. The
salesman had a battered vinyl case, a scruffy mauve-coloured suit
and dark circles round his eyes. I guessed he was in sales before
he even opened his mouth. There was something about his fingers
that gave it away. They fidgeted about, as if hoping to
tantalize me with a range of manufactured goods.

The salesman lunged forward and pressed a business card on
to my palm.

'What do you need?' he asked.

I looked at him, wondering how I could get away without
being too impolite.

'I need to go back to my work,' I said.

The man, whose card advertised his name as Abdul Hafiz,
flipped open his shabby attaché case and snatched a handful of
brochures.

'Whatever your need, I have a product,' he said confidently.
'If you have rats, blocked drains, dandruff, or boils, I can solve
your problem.'

'We did have rats,' I said, 'but they seem to have been chased
away, because we rent a cat twice a week from a neighbour in the
bidonville
. As for blocked drains, the guardians clear those. And
dandruff and boils, well . . .' I said, 'I think we have them both
covered.'

I thanked the salesman, stepped back into the house and shut
the front door.

Another member of society might have felt disheartened at
having a door shut in his face. But to a salesman it's the dropping
of a gauntlet.

I turned to go back to my library and my book. There was
another loud thump at the door. I am a believer that everyone
deserves a certain amount of attention, even salesmen with goods
no one wants. So I opened the door a second time.

Abdul Hafiz jabbed a fidgety finger across the threshold.

'I know,' he said menacingly, 'I have guessed it.'

'Guessed what?'

'What you need.'

I took a deep breath.

'You need an electric razor,' he said.

'No, I don't.'

I was about to close the door again, when the salesman slipped
a pad of paper from his case.

'Write on this what you do need,' he said.

'But I don't need anything.'

Abdul Hafiz brushed a hair off the lapel of his mauve jacket.

'Everyone needs something,' he said.

It was then I remembered. There was one thing I wanted very
much to find, an original edition of Richard Burton's
Arabian
Nights
, like the one my father had given to the guest. I wrote the
title of the book and the details of the edition on the paper.
Abdul Hafiz squinted at the words, took my telephone number
and clicked the catches of his attaché case closed.

He shook my hand, turned about and trudged back down the
muddy track through the shantytown. I never expected to hear
of him again. The chance of there being a first edition of
Burton's great work in Morocco was slim; the chance of it being
for sale was one in a million.

So when the call came from Tangier, it was all the more of a
surprise.

'Monsieur Shah?' said the Italian voice on the phone.

'Yes, I am Tahir Shah.'

'Monsieur Shah, I have the books.'

'Which books?'

'The books you asked Abdul Hafiz to find.'

Before catching the train to Tangier, I stopped in at the cobbler's
shop with another pair of worn-out shoes. The ancient craftsman
was huddled up against the cold, the navy wool hat pulled
down low on his creased brow. He greeted me with the lengthy
greeting of old friends. He asked me my name. I told him.

'I will call you Tahir,' he said, 'and you must call me
Noureddine.'

'I am honoured to do so.'

The cobbler licked his top lip.

'Have you brought me another treasure?' he asked.

I fumbled in my satchel and dug out a pair of suede brogues.
The soles were completely worn through. I apologized for not
having taken more care of the shoes. The old cobbler's eyes
seemed to glow. He picked them up one at a time and ran a
thumbnail down the stitching.

'Your feet have known luxury,' he said.

'I'm going to Tangier to buy some books,' I explained, 'and I'll
be back in three or four days.'

'They will be ready by then, if God wills it,' said the cobbler,
nudging the shoes into one of the pigeon-holes behind him.

I was about to leave, when the old man touched a finger to my
cuff.

'Would you bring the books to show me?' he asked.

Tangier holds a special place in my heart. It was there that my
grandfather lived, then died, knocked down outside his villa on
the steep rue de la Plage by a reversing Coca-Cola truck. He was
an Afghan named Ikbal Ali Shah. Much of his life was spent
travelling the Middle East and Central Asia, writing books on
the worlds he encountered. When his wife died of cancer before
she reached sixty, he was distraught beyond words. With a sea-trunk
full of books, he set sail for Morocco, because it was the
one place he could think of where they had never been together.

Whenever I visit Tangier, I can feel my grandfather's presence
there. I imagine that I spot him walking up the hill to take his
usual seat at Café France, or strolling down near Cecil's Hotel on
the palm-fringed Corniche. His air of quiet sophistication, a
bridge between East and West, matched the city in which he
spent the last decade of his life.

My grandfather had passed the baton of storytelling to my
father, a baton which he had received from his own father, the
nawab Amjed Ali Shah, a century ago.

I was only three when he was struck down and killed, but I
just remember him, an elderly figure in the yellow light of afternoon,
sitting on his terrace, holding court. The more time I have
spent in Morocco, the more I have come to appreciate his own
love of the kingdom, and have understood the way it must have
reminded him of home.

He had been raised at Sardhana, our family's principality in
northern India, as well as at our ancestral lands in Afghanistan's
mountain fortress, the Hindu Kush. His childhood had been
tinted with the rich colours of eastern folklore, an immersion in
the tales of great heroes and arch villains, a backdrop woven
from the
Arabian Nights
.

Like his father before him, he had been taught to think and
learn through the matrix of stories. He regarded them as a repository of information,
a tool for higher thought, a baton to be passed on and on.

The train pulled into Tangier's new terminal, a mile or two from
the town. It was a damp winter day, with a chilling wind ripping
in from across the strait from Spain. Following the other
passengers' example, I shunned the underground passage and
scurried over the railway tracks despite the oncoming trains.

No sane Moroccan would ever forgo a good short cut.

I dialled the number to the salesman's contact, a man called
Señor Benito, who was supposedly selling a first edition of
Burton's
A Thousand and One Nights
. No reply. I tried a second
time and a recorded voice revealed in French, and then Arabic,
that the number had been disconnected. I hailed a taxi.

'To the Continental,' I said.

There can be no twentieth-century travel writer who has not
been at least a little affected by the life of Richard Francis
Burton. He was a polymath, a man of astonishing ability, who
pushed his body and his mind to the limits of their capacity. In
modern terms he was racist, a sexist, politically incorrect beyond
all measure, but at the same time he was a man propelled by the
devil's drive.

Despite his personality flaws, I regard Burton as a champion,
a kind of role model. After reading his
First Footsteps in East Africa
in my teens, I travelled to Africa and lived there for three years. Then I
journeyed to the port of Santos, in Brazil, where Burton had been based as
a diplomat. After that I went to Iceland, to Trieste and Salt Lake City, each
one a destination on the Burtonian map. I took up fencing because it had been
his passion, joined London's Athenaeum Club because he had been a member and,
when we were first married, I spent all our savings on a secret report in
his own hand, detailing the wealth of the Sultan of Zanzibar.

The taxi rolled down the Corniche, past the port and up the hill,
through narrowing streets lined with random life, to the
Continental. I knew of the hotel because Richard Burton had
stayed there, waiting for his long-suffering wife, Isabel, and
while translating the
Arabian Nights
. A grand, square colossus of
a building, it leers out across the strait towards Spain, as it has
done for a century and more.

The hotel was sprinkled with the usual array of tourist kitsch,
meek-looking porters and imposing wear and tear. It couldn't
have changed much since Burton had arrived in December 1885,
laden with trunks filled with papers and books.

I asked for a single room. A key was slid across the mahogany
counter and a finger pointed to the stairs.

'Fifth floor,' said the clerk.

'Is there a lift?'

'Certainly not, Monsieur.'

There was a sense that only the hardiest of travellers would
ever put up at Hotel Continental. The staircase was like a sheer
mountain path, the treads between each step extra deep, hinting
at the Victorian hardiness that built them. Once at the top, I
found my room, little more than an alcove hidden between two
others, smothered in blood-orange paint. I turned on the tap to
wash my face. The water supply had run dry.

I retraced my steps down to the reception and dialled the
salesman's contact once again. The number was still out of order.
The clerk demanded to know whom I was calling.

'There's a man selling some books,' I said.

'Books?'

'Yes, by Richard Burton.'

'You are an actor, Monsieur?' the clerk enquired.

'No, not by the actor,' I said. 'There's another Richard Burton.
He was a traveller. In fact, he stayed here a long time ago.'

'Last year?'

'No, not last year. Before that.'

'The year before?'

'No, more than a hundred years ago,' I said.

The clerk combed his lower teeth through his moustache.

'How do you hope ever to find him now?' he asked.

It was one of those inane conversations, the kind that gets
trapped in your head, and you find yourself replaying mentally
again and again on long-distance bus journeys. I showed the
manager the telephone number and the name.