In Arabian Nights (21 page)

'I will explain it to you, Tahir Jan. But you must pay attention
well. For Sufis, the salt – called
milh
in Arabic – is
a homonym for another word that means "being good". The donkey symbolizes
Man, or the pupil. The river is the process and Joha is the teacher. By discarding
one's goodness, a person feels much better. But the drawback is that he loses
his chance at prosperity, or attaining enlightenment. The wool signifies the
Sufi. When they cross the river the second time, Joha is again the teacher,
the one leading the pupil. This time the load is heavier, more spiritually
valuable, its weight, gravity, only increased by its passage through the river.'

Until that day in Casablanca, I had never heard a Joha tale told
in Morocco. I supposed that the character's popularity had died
out, killed off by Egyptian soap operas.

When I got back to Dar Khalifa, I asked Marwan if he knew
of the folk hero. He burst out laughing.

'Oh, yes, yes, Monsieur Tahir,' he said. 'Just thinking of Joha
makes me laugh.'

'Do you know any of the jokes?'

Marwan had already begun.

'Joha was a known smuggler and would cross the frontier every
day,' he said. 'The patrol guards would search his donkey each time, but could
find nothing in their loads of hay. Sometimes they would confiscate the hay
and set fire to it. Despite having no income, each week Joha became more and
more wealthy. One day he became so rich that he retired across the frontier.
Years passed and one day the police chief bumped into him. He said to Joha,
"We spent years trying to catch you, but we could not. Tell me, brother, what
were you smuggling?" Joha smiled and said: "Donkeys. I was smuggling donkeys."'

The next week, I arrived at Café Mabrook to find Abdul Latif
standing guard. He was holding a kind of home-made club in
his fist. I asked what was happening.

'My regular clients are like my family,' he said, scowling.
'They are like my children. I love each one of them.'

'And we come here because we value you so highly,' I said.
'But please explain what is bothering you.'

'A woman came here and looked at me in a certain way!' he
replied.

'Was she a beggar?'

Abdul Latif swished his club.

'No, she wasn't begging. She was a
sehura
, a sorceress.'

'But what business did she have here?'

The waiter stared out at the street.

'She wants to give me the evil eye,' he said.

'Whatever for?'

'She's working for the café over there,' he said, pointing out of
the door. 'And they want to put us out of business.'

Inside, Dr Mehdi was talking to Hafad, the clock enthusiast.
They were discussing a new kind of watch, one powered by the
heat of the wrist.

'It will never catch on,' Hafad said sternly.

'Why not?'

'Well, imagine,' he said. 'Imagine if you die.'

'Yes . . .'

'Well, it would stop.'

I sat down and asked them if they had ever heard of Joha. The
surgeon clapped his hands.

'Hah! Here's your Joha,' he said, patting Hafad on the back.

'So you know him, Joha?'

'Of course we do,' said Hafad.

'Everyone knows Joha,' declared Dr Mehdi.

'He's from Meknès,' said Hafad.

'But Turks say he's Turkish, the Russians claim he's Russian,
and the Afghans will tell you he's from Afghanistan,' I said.

Dr Mehdi stood up and slapped his hands together so loudly
that everyone else in the café, including Zohra's husband, looked
round. I was surprised he had lost his characteristic veneer of
cool.

'Well, all the others are lying!' he snapped.

I ordered more
café noir
and changed the subject. 'When shall
I leave for the Sahara?'

The surgeon regained his composure.

'On Thursday afternoon,' he said.

Each day more and more e-mail messages arrived from people
who had read
The Caliph's House
. My ego was inflated beyond all
reason by the attention and the praise. Whereas our lives had
been invisible up till then, the location of our home was suddenly
published in glossy colour magazines in a dozen countries. A few
diehard adventurers like Burt managed to find us through the
maze of the
bidonville
. There were others who sought me out not
because of the books I had written on Casablanca, but because of
my father.

In his effort to popularize teaching stories and the Sufi
tradition, my father's work has attracted a wide range of readers
across the world. They come from all types of social strata, backgrounds
and professions. Since my earliest childhood, I have met
thousands of them, because they have beat a path to our front
door.

Most of them are pretty conventional. A few are questionable.
And a handful are downright odd.

When my father died from a heart attack a decade ago, his
mail – sent to his publishers – was forwarded to me. Over the
years, I wrote to hundreds of his readers, explaining that my
father, Idries Shah, was no longer alive. The majority took the
news with sadness, but were satisfied to have an answer
nonetheless.

There was, however, one reader from Andalucia, in Spain,
who refused to believe that my father was no longer alive. Every
month he wrote an airmail letter addressed to Idries Shah, sometimes
begging, and at other times ordering him to make his
whereabouts known. At first I wrote back, assuming the gentleman
had not heard the news. But the years passed and the letters
continued with increased regularity.

My father used to say that the answer to a fool is silence.

And so, I refrained from correspondence. Then, on the
Monday morning before I set out for the desert, Osman came to
tell me there was a visitor at the door. I asked who it was. The
guardian motioned the confused outline of a man.

'He's both tall and short,' he said.

'You'd better bring him in.'

A minute passed. I had turned the dining room into a
makeshift office and was working in there. Osman trudged
through the house and stood to the side to allow the visitor to
enter. I finished what I was doing on my computer. When I
looked up a tall man with a hunched back was standing over my
desk. He had a fatigued face, grey-blue eyes and a froth of salt-and-pepper
hair. I hadn't been prepared and so did not make the
connection. I introduced myself. The visitor extended his hand.
It was rough and clammy.

'José Gonzales,' he said.

I narrowed my eyes, then opened them wide in an involuntary
action.

'As in . . .
the
José Gonzales?'

The gentleman seemed content to have elicited a response.

I stayed quite still. Perhaps he half-expected me to show him
out.

'My father is dead,' I said. 'He's been dead quite a while now.'

Gonzales didn't flinch.

'I have heard this before,' he said, in a heavy accent.

'I wrote to tell you.'

'Yes.'

'And you have not believed me.'

The visitor seemed to stoop a little lower.

'I am searching for Truth,' he said.

'Are you sure that you are not really searching for Idries
Shah?'

Gonzales looked at me coldly. He didn't reply.

A year before my father died, he sat me down in a quiet
corner of his garden. We shared a pot of Darjeeling tea and
listened to the sound of a pair of wood pigeons in a nearby tree.
I poured a second cup of tea. As I was putting the strainer back
on its holder, my father said: 'Some time soon I will not be here
any more. My illness has reached another phase. I can feel it.'

I sat there, touched with sadness. I didn't say anything because
I could not think of anything appropriate to say.

'When I am not here,' my father continued, 'some people we
have always trusted will betray us. Beware of this. Others will
stand forward as true friends, people who were in the shadows
before. Many more will ask who I left as my successor. They will
hound you, asking for a name. It is important that you tell them
that my successor is my printed work. My books form a complete
course, a Path, and they succeed when I cannot be there.'

He stopped talking, raised the porcelain cup to his lips and
took a sip. I finished my tea and we walked back to the house. I
was going to leave, when he told me to wait.

'One day,' he said, 'you may meet someone who is misguided.
It might not make sense now, but at the time when it happens
you will know. If this happens, take this piece of paper and give
it to him.'

He held up the sheet, folded it in half once and then again and
gave it to me. The following November he died. I grieved, but I
was consoled by the thought that he was inside me, alive in the
stories he had told. Our lives rattled forward. Ariane and Timur
were born and we moved into the Caliph's House. Nine years
eventually passed. The paper was kept safe in a box file, along
with my own papers.

And so came the morning on which I found José Gonzales
standing over me. I took a deep breath and he repeated himself:
'I am searching for Truth.'

I asked him to wait for me and I went into my storage room
and rooted about until I found the file and the paper. It was still
folded as it had been when my father handed it to me. Before I
stepped back into the dining room, I opened out the sheet and
read what was written on it.

It was this story:

There were once three men, all of whom wanted fruit, though
none of them had ever seen any, since it was very rare in their
country.

It so happened that they all travelled in search of this almost
unknown thing called fruit. And it also happened that, at about
the same time, each one found his way to a fruit tree.

The first man was heedless. He got to a fruit tree, but had
spent so much time thinking about the directions that he failed
to recognize the fruit.

His journey was wasted.

The second man was a fool, who took things very literally.
When he saw that all the fruit on the tree was past its best, he
said: 'Well, I've seen fruit and I don't like rotten things, so that is
the end of fruit as far as I am concerned.'

He went on his way and his journey was wasted.

The third man was wise. He picked up some of the fruit and
examined it. After some thought, and racking his brains to
remember all the possibilities about this rotting delicacy, he
found that inside each fruit there was a stone.

Once he knew that this stone was a seed, all he had to do was
to plant, and tend the growth, and wait for – fruit.

More harm is done by fools through foolishness than is done by
evildoers through wickedness.

The Prophet Mohammed

AN HOUR BEFORE I SET OFF ON THE LONG JOURNEY TO THE
Sahara, Ariane tied a pink ribbon round my wrist. She said that
each time I touched my hand to the ribbon, or looked at it, it
would mean she was thinking of me.

In a small bag I had packed a few essentials and a letter of
introduction from Dr Mehdi. I pulled the door of the house
closed. The guardians were standing to attention in a kind of
shambolic royal guard. They saluted and Rachana drove us out
through the shantytown, up the hill, to the railway station at
Oasis.

We crossed the tracks and I waited for the train to Marrakech.
Rachana was standing against the light, Timur on her hip,
Ariane between us. There was a blast of a horn in the distance
and the train rolled in, steel wheels grinding against the tracks. I
kissed Rachana and the children.

'I won't be long,' I said. 'I'll be back as soon as the favour is
done.'

'This isn't about a favour,' said Rachana, leaning forward to
hug me.

I climbed up, turned back to wave, and the train jolted away
out of Casablanca towards the south.

There is nothing like a train journey for reflection, and the passage
from Casablanca to Marrakech is one of the most inspiring
I know. Movement has a magical effect on the mind. It
stimulates the eyes, distracts them, allowing real thought to take
hold. I stared out of the window at a landscape changing by slow
degrees from urban to farmland and then to a desert panorama
– baked terracotta red.

My mind jerked from one memory to another, scraps of
people, places, smells and sounds. A single minute of recollection
can be a roller coaster. I thought of the scent of summer flowers,
drowsy with bees, at my childhood home. Soaring above the
Amazon in a two-seater Cessna. Toes in the sand on a Brazilian
beach. Lying on the cement floor of a Pakistani torture prison.

For more than a decade I have travelled with two books. They
are always with me, a part of my hand luggage. The first is my
father's
Caravan of Dreams
. The other is Bruce Chatwin's
The
Songlines
. They are my travelling companions, a source of
stimulation on a dark night, or on a train journey south.

I value
The Songlines
for the notes in the middle. Each one is
a polished jewel, a splinter of wisdom, a piece of something
much larger, but complete in itself. I dug out the book, opened it
at random as I always do and read a line which says that a Sufi
dervish wanders the earth because the action of walking
dissolves the attachments of the world, and that his aim is to
become a 'dead man walking', a man whose feet are rooted on
the ground but whose spirit is already in Heaven. I have read
The Songlines
so many times. My eyes have scanned that passage
again and again but, until then, I had not really pulled it through
the machinery of my mind.

As the train grumbled south over the first miles of brick-red
desert, I absorbed it for the first time. It made absolute sense. I
slipped the book back in my bag and gazed out at a herd of
scrawny camels standing at the bottom of a low hill. My eyes
took a mental photograph of them.

But my mind was far away.

That evening I retraced my steps through Marrakech's medina,
in search of Murad. I wanted to rebuke him for running off with
Osman's wife. I have no sense of direction and it took me three
hours to find the corridor at the end of which he lived.

Once there, I stood at the bottom of the ladder and called out
the storyteller's name. There was no answer. I called again, and
a third time. Then a muffled sound came from the chamber
above. I crept up. Murad was sprawled on a heap of rags. I
thought he was drunk at first, because he was lying back, in a
kind of stupor. I greeted him frostily and asked about Osman's
wife.

'She was unhappy,' he said, 'so very unhappy that I agreed to
help her escape.'

'Where is she now?'

The storyteller shrugged.

'As soon as we reached Marrakech, she left,' he said. 'She was
going to her relatives near Ouarzazate.'

'But why did you do this? If Osman wasn't so depressed, he
might have come to kill you.'

Murad coughed hard.

'A woman is a flower,' he said. 'And the saddest thing of all is
for a beautiful flower to bloom unadmired.'

That evening, I paid a visit to the Maison de Meknès, to have
a chat with its owner, Omar bin Mohammed. I turned up quite
late, but expected to find him reading in the lamplight near the
door, or chatting to friends out in the street. To my surprise,
though, the shutters were drawn. I banged on them. No reply. I
assumed he must have gone home for the night. Then the owner
of the next shop along rode up on a moped and held up a hand.

'He's shut down, closed, gone away,' he said over the sound of
the engine.

'Why, where, how?'

The shopkeeper shut off the fuel and his vehicle conked out.

'In Marrakech there is a merchant tradition,' he said. 'We are
proud of it, proud to be shopkeepers. Our Prophet – peace be
upon Him – was a trader himself. But every moment you are in
business, there is a clock ticking.'

'So what happened to Omar and the Maison de Meknès?'

The shopkeeper unlocked his front door.

'His time ran out,' he said.

The next day I was up at dawn. I wandered down to Jemaa el
Fna, the great square. It was empty. No one. Not a bird, not a
beggar, not even a storyteller. I stood there, right in the middle,
and I thought of the history and the power of that place – the
executions, the stories, the performances. Even when it was
empty you could feel the energy. It almost knocked you down. I
closed my eyes, shut my nostrils and put my fingers in my ears.
Instead of feeling alone, I felt connected to every person who had
ever traipsed across it. When I finally moved on, it seemed as if
I was leaving with something new inside me, as though the soul
of Jemaa el Fna had slipped in through my skin.

I went to the bus terminal and bought a ticket for the first bus
south to Ouarzazate. There was a sense of great expectation.
Families hustling aboard with bundles of cloth and bags of dried
fruit, packets of dates, blankets in plastic bags, and buckets tied
up on strings. The driver tore the corner of my ticket and wished
me peace. I took a seat at the back, behind a large wicker crate
filled with chickens. They were alive but very silent, as if they
hoped their owner might forget about them. Across from me sat
a man with a striped kitten on his lap. The animal had smelled
the birds, and was clawing to get nearer to the crate.

We left Marrakech and thundered out into the open country,
on what is one of the most scenic roads in the kingdom. The man
with the cat said he was a schoolteacher and that he didn't trust
his wife.

'She hates animals,' he said. 'If she had her way, she would
have them all poisoned – everything from the birds in the sky to
the foxes in the forest.'

He had a don't-mess-with-me kind of face, angry eyes and a
wild, frantic mouth packed with jumbled teeth. I glanced down
at the kitten. The hand smoothing back its fur was gentle
beyond description. It was hard to believe such a tender hand
could be attached to the same body as the face.

'She must have had a bad experience with an animal,' I said.

The passenger clicked his mouth.

'She doesn't see their beauty,' he said. He stared down at the
kitten, his angry eyes melting. 'But I hope she will change now.'

The bus hit a pothole, rocked to the side and the chickens lost
their cool.

'Tomorrow's her birthday,' said the man. 'I've brought her
this kitten from Marrakech. It's from an expensive pet shop. I
spent a fortune on it.'

'Do you really think your wife will change after a lifetime of
animal-hatred?'

The man held the kitten's head up to my ear.

'Can you hear that?'

I listened.

'The purr?'

'It is the sound of an angel,' said the man. 'When my wife
hears it, purring in her own ear, how can she resist?'

Dr Mehdi had told me to head south from Marrakech, to
Ouarzazate, and then on past Zagora, until the small town of
M'hamid, the end of the road. Once I got there, he said I was to
make contact with his nephew Ibrahim, who would take me
to the source of the salt. He gave exact instructions how much
salt to bring back and how to pack it up.

At Ouarzazate, I found a small hotel where the rooms were
little bigger than the beds and where the owner spent his life in
the kitchen, beside a huge cast-iron pot filled with lamb stew. He
was called Mustapha. He had scars on his hands from decades of
stirring the pot, and a way of talking that was very pleasing to
the ear. His sentences flowed like syrup, one pouring into the
next.

The walls of the hotel were adorned with paintings of scenes
from the High Atlas. I recognized one as the Berber bridal
festival of Imilchil. There were no other customers, except for a
pair of nervous Swiss tourists, who were travelling with their
dog. I went into the dining room, where there was a single table.
The Swiss were sitting there, tensely. When they saw me, they
got up, apologized politely and left.

Mustapha stepped out of the kitchen and said the stew was
fresh. I ordered a bowl. He brought it to my table and blew the
steam off the top.

'It's very hot tonight,' he said.

I tasted it. 'Delicious.'

'I call it Morocco stew.'

'But stew is not typically Moroccan.'

Mustapha licked a fresh scar on his hand.

'There are a mixture of fine ingredients,' he said, 'prepared
with care, over just the right heat. The flavour is subtle, a little
delicate, but a delight to the senses.' Mustapha licked his hand
again. 'Just like Morocco,' he said.

I pointed to the painting of a Berber girl in the traditional
black and white striped robe of the Atlas.

'I come from Imilchil,' he said. 'We are a famous Berber
family.'

When I had finished the stew, I ordered a second bowl.

He refused to charge me. 'Your mouth's appreciation is payment
enough,' he said.

As I ate the stew, I told him about the favour I had been asked
to do. I said that I was searching for the story in my heart.

'We are all searching for that,' he said.

'How can I find it?'

Mustapha pressed his palms together and touched them to his
nose.

'I cannot tell you,' he said. 'But I can offer you something.'

'What?'

'A story that was given to me by my grandfather at Imilchil.'

He pulled up a chair, took off his apron, and began.

'There was once an island kingdom far away from here,
where all the camels were tall and proud, and the men were
skilled in making pottery, from the soft clay near the shore. The
king was fair to his people and a state of harmony prevailed. No
one went without delicious fruit, or fine cloth for their clothes.

'Although the kingdom was prosperous, it was cut off from
the world beyond, in the middle of the sea. Whenever anyone
needed something not found on the island, a boat would be sent
to the mainland to bring it back. But the waters all around were
so perilous that these boats often sank, drowning all on board.

'Now, there lived in this kingdom a man called Jumar Khan.
He was young and he was handsome, and he had a boat that he
used to ferry goods from the next kingdom, far away. He would
brave the high waves and travel there often. And on one such
journey he spotted a stallion for sale. It was the colour of newly
fallen snow, with a jet-black mane and eyes that shone like coals.

'Jumar Khan had no wife or children to support and he had a
bag of gold, the profit from many dangerous crossings. He asked
the owner the price of the horse. He had just enough money, but
the animal's owner said to him: "I will sell it to you on the condition
that you promise never to sell it to anyone else."

'Jumar agreed and paid the money. The animal was loaded up
on to the boat and, in rolling seas, carried back to the kingdom.

'A few years passed and everyone praised the stallion. Jumar
Khan himself loved it a little more each day. Then, one winter
dawn, he set sail as normal, but a giant wave struck and smashed
his boat on to rocks. Jumar and the passengers were saved by the
beneficence of God. But with no boat, Jumar lost his livelihood
and was ruined.

'He might have sold his horse, but he had made a promise
never to do so. In any case, he loved it with all his heart and could
not bear to be parted from it.

'One day an important merchant visited the kingdom. He was
known by reputation throughout the East and his name was
Sher Ali. While staying on the island, he heard of Jumar Khan
and the hapless circumstances in which he found himself. And
he heard of the fabulous stallion and the promise not to sell it.
But in the merchant's experience every object had a value.