Jabrin Taxi, 1
Islam, My Taxi Rides May 21st, 2007
There are three things which Abdul passionately enjoys: cigarettes, Egyptian music and speed. He loves many more things, including his son, his wife, Pepsi and sewing machines. At least, I think that the motion he is making with his hand is meant to indicate the flutter of a sewing machine’s foot. Taking great liberties with my understanding of his speech, I concoct a biography for him in my head. He was born in Nizwa, and he has spent all of his life here. Sometimes he drives a taxi, sometimes he works in the hotel. He is married to a seamstress; he enjoys the rhythm of her work more than his own.
His son, at 8 years old, is almost old enough to start fasting for Ramadan. Abdul is proud of this fact. “In Oman, the children can choose to fast as soon as they turn 8,” he says. I try to imagine what it would feel like to be hungry every day for a month at such a young age. There are many mysteries of Ibadi practice which I do not understand. When I was 8, the most discipline I was able to muster concerned my piano: I practiced it for the better part of an hour each day. In retrospect, that effort seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the work that goes into fasting for a month. The care I put into practicing piano eventually paid off; by the time I turned 18, I was studying piano at a private college, and was giving recitals on grand pianos in halls with velvet curtains. I think of how much more seriously Omani children practice their faith than I practiced my piano. My God, what expertise they must have by the time they come of age. As we leave Nizwa for Jabrin Castle, Abdul drops a handful of CDs into my lap. He tells me to pick one.
I look at them one by one, sounding out the names of the artists as best I can. They are written in technicolor cursive. I read them for Abdul, who is quick to correct my pronunciation. “Ahmed Adaweyah,” I try. My host nods. “That’s an old one,” he says. “Now his son has become a singer too.” He chews his lip. I try another. “Umm Kulthum.” The woman shown on the cover has dark glasses, and waved black hair, piled onto her head in a bouffant. Her smile does not reveal her teeth, but her lips are long and pink. She looks proud. She is not wearing a headscarf.
“Who is she?” I ask Abdul. He looks away from the road and studies the disc in my hand. “Ah!” he says. “She is a very famous singer,” he says. “She was a good woman. She was always modest,” he says, “and always caring about people. For a while, she was an actress. But then, she left acting. She was too far away from people when she was on the screen.” I turn the CD over, and look at its contents. None of the songs on the album is familiar to me, and none was recorded after the 1960s.
“Where is she now?” I ask. This is not exactly the way in which I would like to ask this question, but my Arabic is too rough to permit politeness or subtlety. I wonder if the singer is still alive, if she is still performing. I hope that Abdul understands. He is quiet for a long time, and I study his face from the corner of my eye. His cheeks are full and his forehead is broad. His eyes are black. He is either in need of a shave, or else about 30% of the way to a beard. He wears a white robe and a round embroidered hat: even if his accent did not give him away, his is unequivocally Omani. It is hard for me to guess his age; I could believe that he is younger than myself, or, that he is ten years older. He is somewhere between youth and middle age, and the flesh around his stomach has only just begun to bulge.
There is something not altogether wholesome about this journey, I think to myself, as I wait for Abdul to answer my question. I had not intended to sit right next to him, but the concierge from the hotel helped me into the passenger seat. Neither the price nor the itinerary for today’s tour was discussed to my satisfaction: when I asked the young man at the desk last night about a ride to the Jabrin Castle, he grunted dourly. “My cousin will be by in the morning,” he said, before returning his attention to the ledger book before him.
I asked Ali about it this morning at breakfast, over pink sections of grapefruit in syrup. He shook his head. “Don’t worry, madame,” he said. “You like the tour, you can pay for it. You don’t like it, do not pay too much.” “Where will the tour go?” I asked him. After yesterday’s misadventure in the souk, I find my trust in Omani hospitality shaken. “Wherever you like it to go, it can go there,” Ali replied obsequiously. Alas, Ali, if only I knew.
Outside of my window, an army of grey-brown mountains rises up on our right. The sign on the highway indicates that we are passing the town of Tanuf. A light flickers on in my memory. Tanuf, Tanuf. I have read that name in the histories of the Civil War between Muscat and the people of the Interior. I am about to ask Abdul about it, when he opens his mouth to answer my question about Umm Kulthum. “The singer has died,” he says. He feels around in the glove compartment for a cigarette. “She went to America, to see the doctors there. Then she went home to Egypt, and died.” There is not so much as a discarded butt for him to smoke.
“We can listen to her CD, if you want,” I say. He holds out his right hand. I open the CD case, and delicately pry the disc from its plastic post. Then I set it between his fingers, careful not to let our skins brush. Abdul slides it into the CD player, and a whirl of blue light explodes from the face of the dash. A flat screen, perhaps two inches by two inches, has been installed above the CD player (or is, perhaps, part of it.) It shows a fine network of lines which fan around each other in spiraling patterns.
Abdul presses a combination of buttons on the stereo, and I can hear the disc begin to spin. As the music starts, the miniature screen flashes in time with the beat. Blue waveforms skate across its surface as the singer begins a phrase. She constructs it slowly, word by word, then line by line. She sings about the night, about someone’s eyes. What began as a quiet rush of syllables builds, layer by layer, into a lament. We leave Tanuf in the dust.
Abdul watches it disappear in his rear view mirror. “Our drinking water comes from there,” he says, “But the town is gone.” Further up the road, a cluster of broken clay houses sits forlornly in the shade of the jebel. “That was Tanuf,” he says, pointing. “Before the war. They cut the falaj, to punish the people for fighting on the side of the Imam. After they cut the falaj, the town died.”
I cannot think of anything more awful for an Omani family than having their water supply cut off. I study the mountain as the road curves around it, looking for remnants of the falaj. There are 11,000 aflaj (plural of falaj) in Oman; 4000 of them are constantly running with water. They are the secret to the country’s survival, for they allow its inhabitants to suck water from underground chambers, often hidden beneath mountains.
A falaj is composed of a mother well, as much as 200 feet deep, from which water is carried up to the surface of the earth through a main channel. Smaller channels split off from this main one. These small channels can be as long as 12 kilometers. I suppose that cutting the falaj means that the auxiliary channel through which the Tanufi people received their water was bombed. I wonder what effect this had on the falaj as a whole. Did it bleed water through its broken vein? Did the other channels grow stronger, after this one was destroyed?
The ubiquitous Tanuf bottled water, on sale throughout Oman, seems to imply that the falaj as a whole continued to function. I suppose that, for Nizwa’s sake, this is a good thing. I wonder how many consumers of the bottled water realize its history. I wonder if the people of the interior can drink it without tasting their defeat.
I listen to the CD, and stare out of my window for the rest of the trip to Jabrin. It is not far out of Muscat, perhaps 25 miles. At the rate at which we are traveling, the journey takes less than 20 minutes. Abdul’s thirst for speed eclipses common sense: our cab has been fitted with an electronic chime, which sounds when the vehicle is traveling at more than 60 miles per hour. It has been chiming for the past 15 minutes, adding a sort of electronic percussion to the music. How Abdul can tolerate it when he is already struggling with the need for a cigarette is beyond me; by the time that he pulls the car off of the road into the parking lot of Jabrin castle, my ears are ringing.
It is 10:00 in the morning when we reach the front gates. The castle is the color of sandstone, a sort of dusty yellow-pink. From the outside it is a hodgepodge of towers and turrets, surrounded by a handful of trees. It sits smack in the middle of a plain, squat as a toad. Abdul follows me inside, to a desk where a small man in a white turban presides. I write my name in his register, and look in my camera case for money. The man waves me along with a gesture of his hand. I look at Abdul for confirmation. He beckons me to follow him. We turn left out of the entry, and the world plunges into silence.
The room in which I find myself is small and dimly lit. It is carved entirely from stone, with walls four meters thick. The room is divided into three sections by a narrow hallway which runs its length. The rightmost of these is composed of a pit, lit from the bottom. A system of stone troughs walls off the pit. The central section of the room is mostly empty. The leftmost section of the room is also mostly consumed by a pit, but this was is not illuminated. As I stand by it, I feel a rush of cool air on my hands. I look down into its belly: nothing but blackness looks back.
The ceiling is short, not six feet tall. As I look carefully at it, I notice a pattern of staves and tails carved into its surface. My eyes ache as I strain to see in the dark. The patterns, I decide after a moment, are writing. I cannot read what they say, and I ask Abdul for help. He shrugs. “It is some verses from the Qur’an,” he says. “Do you know what this is?” he gestures to the pit on the right. I shake my head. A warm incandescent glow emanates cheerfully from the pit. It is perhaps six feet deep. Its bottom is perfectly level, and it seems to be perfectly empty.
“It is the tomb of Imam Bil’Arub,” Abdul says. “He is the one who built this place.”
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