Quest for an Indian KingFrom Dislocating Dreams

One of the more exotic stories – half truth, half legend – in currency among my extended family and the El-Zein clan, relates the adventure in India of one of our ancestors around the end of the eighteenth century. Ali El-Zein was among those who had marched from the Shi’a village of Sh’hoor, east of the city of Tyre, in the south of what would later become the republic of Lebanon, onto the castle of Tibnine, less than twenty kilometres away, defeating its Ottoman garrison of two hundred men and killing the mutassalim, the representative of the Ottoman governor Ahmad Pasha Al Jazzar also known as the Butcher. A few years later, Al Jazzar, with the help of the English fleet, was to halt the advance of Napoleon Bonaparte at Acre, as the French armies moved north from Alexandria into Palestine, overrunning Ottoman defences. The Ottomans, we had been taught at school, were a dynasty of Turkic people who had inherited the vast Muslim empire back in the fifteenth century, reuniting it, expanding it with new acquisitions in Eastern and Central Europe, moving its capital to Istanbul and aligning themselves with its Sunni Muslim orthodoxy. They consolidated the power shift within the empire from the Arabs of Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo in the south, to the Turks of Anatolia in the north, a shift which had already started by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries when the Turkish Mameluks finally evicted the Crusaders from their fortified towns on the Eastern Mediterranean.

The rebels of Sh’hoor, including my ancestor, were minority Shi’a Arabs and had undoubtedly many reasons to dislike the imperial Sunni Turks. They were angry at the slaying by the Ottomans of their feudal overlord, Nasseef Annassar, in what is likely to have been an episode of violent local politics rather than religious, ethnic or ideological tension. Istanbul, long satisfied with decentralised government of the empire’s outlying territories, with their colourful mosaic of religious and ethnic minorities, was now attempting more direct rule, and facing fierce local resistance. It had finally managed to overthrow the dangerously powerful leader, Thaher Al Umar, based in Acre, and had installed Al Jazzar, as a strong, ambitious and more accountable governor. Al Jazzar was attempting to secure the loyalty of the local population. He put down local resistance with an iron fist, and levied more taxes. The power of the Ulama, or religious leaders, was severely curtailed and, according to some history books, their manuscripts burned as fuel in the bakeries of Acre. The nineteenth-century bid by the Ottomans to re-structure local government occurred largely in reaction to their growing awareness of British, French and Austrian military superiority, as well as economic and demographic changes in the region. It would become a defining element of the politics of the Levant, the Balkans, North Africa and the Arabian Gulf, right through to the First World War.

Al Jazzar sent an expedition to avenge the fall of the castle of Tibnine and punish the rebels that my ancestor had joined. His troops sacked the village of Sh’hoor and impaled at least one of the rebel leaders, Sheikh Hamze. The El-Zeins were a clan of Woujahaa: they possessed some wealth and power and acted as intermediaries between the far more powerful feudal leaders on the one hand, and the peasantry on the other. Ali El-Zein, who had been in the service of his slain overlord Nasseef Annassar, ran for his life with Annassar’s sons, first to Damascus, whose governor was a rival of Al Jazzar then, when Damascus proved unsafe, to Iraq. From there he found his way to the Indian subcontinent. In India, he was received and honoured by a king and became his minister. He re-married, and fathered a few children before returning to his home village some years later. His return, according to one version of the story, was hastened by the rise of British power in India. It is also rumoured that one of his Indian descendants came to Lebanon as recently as the 1970s, looking for his roots and his fellow El-Zeins. The story, as told by my father and relatives, carries an unmistakable trace of pride at this intrepid ancestor of ours, fighting and outsmarting empires, travelling through Muslim lands and spreading the El-Zein genes as far away as India!

What I found fascinating about this story, I now realise, is its fairy-tale quality, combined with its seeming authenticity. It was a fable which had really happened. Even when I sought it in books rather than family hearsay – there are brief mentions of it in historical records relating the Tibnine battle – it did not lose its ‘magic realism’. To get to India from the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean, one must cross nearly half the Asian continent, including today’s Syria, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. Huge distances and years of travel, hardship and adventure are delivered in a few sweet story lines, like condensed milk at the breakfast table, the product of a mysterious process of concentration.

But the fairy-tale quality, like the sweetness of condensed milk, was also what made the story suspect. The further east my ancestor went, the less tangible the events felt to the listener, the less real they seemed. How long did he stay in Damascus and how long did it take him to get to India? Where did he stop on the way? What kind of Indian king gave him refuge? Where was he in India? The ratio of words to duration declined considerably, the story starting with a specific battle which must have lasted a few hours or a few days, and ending with years of exile and finally return.

My ancestor had been, at once, a soldier, an adventurer, a politician, a womaniser and a happy refugee. His adventures took him to exotic lands. Gracious hosts gave him welcome. His needs, including his sexual needs, were attended to. And when the threat that made him into an exile expired and the threat of another tyranny loomed in India, he returned to his family and reunited with his wife, whose faithfulness was so unquestionable, it did not even get a mention in the story. Ulysses must have moved in his grave!

Whichever way I looked at my ancestor’s story, I could find bold deeds and fascinating events. The fact that we were related by blood made him more valuable to me since, as a teenager, in my more self-indulgent daydreams, I would bask in his glory and claim as mine some of his heroic qualities. When I looked at my relatives, with their rivalries and petty quarrels, I could see that very few, if any, of these qualities had survived. But this did nothing to diminish my ancestor in my eyes, or make me less willing to identify with him. After all, heroes are like rare stones: their scarcity does not make them any less precious or real.

—

Almost 200 years after Ali El-Zein’s adventures, his Lebanese descendants were to know less happy experiences of exodus. During the civil war, from 1975 to 1990, many families had to move from one place to another, one city to another, as the war ebbed and flowed. The war, like a mad fairy, kept shifting location and changing in intensity; there were times when it even appeared to have expired, only to re-erupt a year or two later. Although we were far less adventurous than our ancestor, the dangers we were fleeing were no less real. To be burnt or torn to pieces by a shell or a missile was no more pleasant a prospect than to be impaled on a pointed stake.

In 1982 – I was nineteen years old – the Israeli army invaded Lebanon, in an attempt to crush Palestinian guerrillas, adding its own distinctly superior contribution to the civil-war violence, with bombardments by land, sea and air. West Beirut was about to be besieged by the advancing Israelis and their Christian-militia allies. As the bombing intensified, my family moved to the small house of my eldest brother, who lived in a relatively safe area of West Beirut. Then, a week or so later, with the prospect of a long and painful siege looming, my father decided to take the family out of the city. On the appointed day we drove out of West Beirut through winding sand fortifications, into Christian East Beirut. We were made to wait for a few hours at a road block and our identification cards were temporarily confiscated. After some hesitation about the best place to seek refuge, and a brief stay in a small hotel near Tripoli in the north, we headed south again, and ended up in Brummana, a predominantly Christian Maronite town in the mountains, forty five minutes to the east of the city. We had joined scores of middle-class refugees who could afford to pay guest-house rents.

Our means of transport were faster than our ancestor’s horse, the car seats more comfortable than his saddle and, once we were free of the clutches of militiamen, the ride altogether smoother. But, although we headed east just like him, we could not travel far, and our range of destinations was limited. Leaving the country, conceivably to Damascus, was out of the question because it would entail crossing the Bekaa valley which, were the Israelis and the Syrians to confront each other, could have become a battleground. Besides, crossing the Lebanese-Syrian border was an enterprise laden with bureaucracy, never an experience to look forward to. Cyprus was too expensive and foreign a destination. We spoke neither Greek nor Turkish and had never been a sea-faring family. The best option by far was Brummana, merely fifteen or twenty kilometres from Beirut.

A summer resort that had been protected from development by its single-minded municipal council and wealthy locals, Brummana was both idyllic and lively. Its red-tiled houses, its sandstone churches and schools and its leafy town centre happily co-existed with vibrant cafés and nightclubs, crowded restaurants and stylish shops. Its population always became swollen, between June and September, by Beirutis escaping the summer heat. In 1982, Beirut’s heat combined with war, and there were many more people around than usual.

Every day, from late afternoon onwards, the old and the young, women and men, took a stroll through the town centre, moving between restaurants, take-away shops, ice-cream vendors and hotel bars. Young men with sunglasses and wooden crosses hanging over their half-buttoned shirts and curly chest hair proudly drove their sports cars through town, and parked them off the road before strutting into a café or a club. The more glamorous men and women – by virtue of beauty, wealth, blood or class – kept the rumour circuit alive.

With my medical eyeglasses and my shy disposition, I stood no chance with the girls. Even though I had managed to drive my motorcycle out of West Beirut – the nearest equivalent to my forebear’s charger I could boast – I could not compete with the more impressive motor-vehicles on display. Besides, it wasn’t long before I had an accident which, not only immobilised my motorcycle, but gave me a cut eyebrow, putting me in bed for a couple of days and landing me, once again, in my mother’s caring hands, an undignified experience for a nineteen-year-old who was keen on his manhood, and rather insecure about it.

Friends came to visit, to console and chatter away. We lived in a single spacious room, all five of us, my father and mother, my younger brother, my older sister and myself. Sometimes we played cards. Sometimes we argued and quarrelled. We were safe, bored and despondent. It was a deadening form of safety, twice removed from life, the safety of a hospital bed in the midst of an epidemic. Beirut was being pounded with explosives. People were dying by the thousands. We had become impotent spectators, and had no idea what we would find when we got back to Beirut, if we ever did.

The room where we stayed overlooked a major road. Confined to bed with a mild fever, I listened to the passing cars, the way would-be-travellers in sentimental novels watched ships come and go. Occasionally, a pastoral silence erupted, as if Brummana had secretly kept, from times past, a residue of rural bliss with which it indulged itself every now and then. But the silence never lasted more than a few moments and the traffic returned. In any case, I found silence depressing, especially in the afternoon, because it brought me face to face with my unhappiness. Noise distracted and kept introversion at bay.

The upbeat, sometimes jubilant atmosphere of Brummana – as the new pax-Israeliana started to take shape, promising Christians total victory in the civil war – was not something the refugees could step into. We were outsiders, largely unable to take part in the social life of the trendier part of town. We could only watch and pray that things did not take a turn for the worse. Nor would we admit that we were refugees – the word was somewhat pejorative and had come to designate exclusively those Palestinians who had arrived in Lebanon in 1948 and 1967 and were living in squalid camps in all the major cities.

At the guesthouse there were other families from West Beirut, mostly Muslim middle-class, middle-aged men and women, who suddenly (and conveniently) discovered how uncomfortable they had been with the radicalism of West Beirut and how much they had in common with their more politically-conservative Maronite brethren. We knew that it would be the end of the war – how wrong we were! – but we also knew that the new order was not very good for our creed.

Brummana had stunning views of the city and, from the right spots, Beirut could be seen, sprawled and shimmering, like a giant, irregularly patterned carpet. Many vantage points in the town, including the far end of the guesthouse’s leafy terrace, promised our tiny irises vast landscapes. But our anticipation would often turn into disappointment as we found the city hiding under clouds of smog. If the mountain’s mist did not block the view, the heat haze hanging over Beirut itself did the job…

But we could clearly hear the explosions. The creatures of war, like jungle creatures, had to rely on their ears more than their eyes. But we, creatures of war, also lost our mobility, and found ourselves stranded in one place or another. My eldest brother and sister had stayed behind in the besieged city and we worried about them. At night, we imagined the worst happening to them. Just like the nights in shelters, when the civil war first started seven years earlier, we couldn’t see the violence but we could hear the explosions. The shelter offered safety, but at the cost of a strict sensory economy – hearing and no vision. This economy would play a major role in the life of my characters in Tell the Running Water, including the sniper who would command great cityscapes but would receive precious little sound, and the frontline fighter who would empty a magazine of bullets blindly, because the enemy would always be concealed by fortifications.

How different it was from my ancestor’s adventures! Whenever I tried to imagine him fleeing Al Jazzar, I saw vast stretches of land, blue skies as infinite as oceans, open spaces which honoured his eyesight and never deprived him of clear vision. No wonder he reached India. As he rode east across the plains, through the rolling hills and mountain passes, he could probably picture India, months before he reached it. His galloping horse would have thumped the ground, sending wave after wave of echoes, which travelled ahead like perfect scouts and brought him back a flavour of the valleys lying beyond. There was no sensory economy at play there. Agency and abundant experience sent the world, in all its manifestations, coursing through my ancestor’s mind, and bestowed upon him a rich vision. He was unlikely to find himself confined to bed. He was not made for shelters and idle talk in guesthouses. He did not listen to other people’s stories and adventures – adventure was where he happened to be. The difference between my ancestor and myself, I decided as I turned in my bed and caught the smell of my own sweat, was that he knew where he was going. He could see ahead and I could not.

—

Brummana proved too expensive for us in the long run and, a few weeks later, my father decided to go south, to the village of Jibsheet where we could stay at my grandfather’s house indefinitely. The South was by then fully occupied by the Israelis, the battle had come to a standstill around Beirut, and negotiations were under way to organise the withdrawal of Palestinian guerrillas from Beirut to Tunis in exchange for the lifting of the siege.

The trip was daunting. The coastline immediately to the south of Beirut was still an erratic battleground that had to be avoided. The only safe route south from Brummana ran through narrow mountain roads, roughly parallel to the coastline. On the way, we came across Israeli military personnel and armoured vehicles, seeing for the first time the enemy whose aeroplanes had dropped bombs on Lebanon and broken the sound barrier over its cities, so often and for so many years, we had almost ceased to believe Israel was anything but a colony of brilliant machinery put in place by unscrupulous American politicians. We had seen some Israeli soldiers in Brummana, but here on the road there were hundreds of them in full gear – tanks, armoured vehicles, trucks and jeeps. They appeared to be more vulnerable than we had pictured them and, perversely, there was something comforting about seeing them there, on the ground, rather than in the skies. Some had European complexions, others were dark-skinned and could have been from the Palestinian side, judging by their appearance. Also on the road were members of the South Lebanese Army (SLA) – a Christian militia set up by the Israelis after they first invaded in 1978, distinguishable from the Jewish soldiers by their darker khaki uniforms.

We crossed the Shouf mountains over potholed roads, snaking through subdued villages, empty squares, encroached-upon pine forests, and unhealthy trees. Once we reached a point some twenty kilometres south of Beirut, far enough from the battleground, we headed west. My father drove slowly down a wider and steeper road towards the coast. And when, from behind a thicket, the Mediterranean finally emerged – deserted by boats and bathers, languid under the midday sun – its colour was the pale whiteness of a hypochondriac teenager.

Some thirty or forty metres before we reached the coastal road, the car started gathering speed dangerously. ‘The brakes are gone!’ exclaimed my father with frightening alarm.

Our Mercedes was now careering towards the T-junction and the SLA roadblock occupying it. At the last moment, my father managed to control the car and stop it, but not before it screeched and turned, right next to the road block, and certainly not before everyone in the car, all five of us, had anticipated that gunfire would put us out of our misery. These were the days before suicide bombing, which came two years later, making Israeli and SLA soldiers far more nervous. But even then, out-of-control cars rushing towards road blocks were not seen kindly by gun-toting men fighting a war.

A gunman wearing sunglasses stared at my father through the window then asked him to explain what was going on. Although gunfire did not materialise, we still expected some rough interrogation, and maybe even worse. After all, we were Muslims in what had now become Christian and Jewish enemy territory. My father was still recovering from the shock and needed a few moments before he could utter a word. But my mother was quick to tell the gunman about the softened brakes, in a slightly entreating tone, which her children, sitting in the back seat, secretly resented. The gunman did not acknowledge my mother, addressing my father again despite his silence. He checked our IDs, then asked my father to open the glove compartment and the car boot, and once he was satisfied that we were as harmless as we looked, he told my father to go back.

The Mediterranean, behind the gunman’s shoulder, now appeared to be a tiny, distant version of itself, like an anonymous town on a map – the idea of a place rather than the place itself. No galloping horse or racing boat was likely to stir it out of its stillness or sound its depths. My father turned the ignition on and made a U-turn. Even if there was a point in arguing, at that stage, no one in the car had the strength to do so.

After hours of travel, we had, almost literally, driven into a wall. Why hadn’t we anticipated all this? Why did we think that we would be allowed through the road blocks and the military convoys and the supply lines of the triumphant Israeli army? We had to blind ourselves to the reality around us, otherwise we would never have moved anywhere. Perhaps blindness, not vision, was the condition of escape and adventure. Perhaps if we knew where we would end up, we would never have left in the first place. Who knows, Ali El-Zein may have been planning an escape to the Hijaaz, or Istanbul or even Algiers, and might have ended up in India by chance. Did he outsmart empires or did he move within the limits set out by them? What kind of a hero would that make him? Although I would not easily admit it to myself, I suspected, even then, that the ‘magic reality’ of my ancestor’s story might well turn into a dull illusion if I examined it too closely.

My father drove back and, on the way, decided to head for Beirut. There was an open passage between East and West Beirut and things had been very quiet in the preceding few days. We crossed into West Beirut and, although we were returning to a beleaguered city, we felt a great relief at re-entering familiar territory. The hundred metres of road which made up the crossing – between the National Museum on the east side of the city to the race-course on the other side – were full of sandbag walls and debris. The quietness was amazing given that fierce battles had taken place there only a couple of weeks earlier. Despite the destruction and hardship, there was a sense of relief in the city that the ordeal was over.

The hostility of strangers, I had just learned, could be as frightening as random shelling, air-to-ground missiles and the sniper’s bullets. We had not travelled very far, had not been to exotic places but, at least, we were safe, and back where we belonged. 

—

Things were to turn sour again. A month or two later, the newly-elected pro-Israeli Christian president was to be murdered by a bomb; Israeli tanks were to cross into West Beirut despite the agreement which had seen Palestinians leave the city a few weeks earlier – apparently, Ariel Sharon could not resist the temptation of occupying an Arab capital-city, if only for a few days – and Palestinian civilians were to be massacred at Sabraa and Shaateela; Israeli soldiers were to be shot point-blank on the streets of West Beirut; the French and US soldiers from the multi-national force were to be blown up in suicide attacks which left huge smoke clouds mushrooming over the city. The new regime set up by the Israelis and the Americans would collapse two years later; seventeen thousand, Lebanese and Palestinian, civilians – a full half per cent of the total population – would be killed during the Israeli invasion…

Four years later, in 1986, I flew out of the country on my way to London to continue my studies. But sitting in my narrow, economy-class seat, not only could I not see the way ahead, my vision was hopelessly blocked by the seat in front of me. I was immobilised for five hours. The most basic of my eating, drinking and bladder needs had to be managed and timed, down to the minute. The distance I was crossing this time was respectable by my ancestor’s standards. But had he been able to see me and overcome his amazement at the flying object, he might have sneered at this cattle-like mode of transport.

On that same day, my first day in England, by a strange turn of events, a policeman knocked on the door of my bed-and-breakfast room in Southampton at about midnight, just after I had slipped into bed. He addressed me with ‘Sir’, and asked to search my luggage because of ‘all those terrorists coming from your country’. The bed-and-breakfast owners, a middle-aged married couple, had become suspicious when, on arrival, I had asked them for a nail or any pointed object I could use to force the lock of my suitcase, because I had lost the key on the way from Beirut. When we failed to open it, the owners suggested that we break the lock. But I decided, impatient as I was to go to bed, against anything of the sort before the next day. I was still hoping that, with a fresher mind, I might find the key in the morning. After I went into my room, the owners called the police.

As rude awakenings go, it wasn’t so bad. I hadn’t yet gone to sleep and, although I had read a magazine article on Omar Sharif and Sophia Loren on the coach from Heathrow to Southampton, I knew that Arab men were not quite as popular as Italian women – even if I didn’t expect the chemistry to work so fast. Besides, the bed-and-breakfast owners had been kind and hospitable. They had offered to pick me up at the Southampton coach station on Bedford Place, from where I called them on arrival, well after dark, even though they had no advance warning of my arrival and did not know me.

I was keen to explore the city I was visiting for the first time. As I walked through Bedford Place the next day, and saw the Indian and Chinese restaurants, the fish-and-chip shop, and the Turkish take-away, I must have been entertaining dreams of exotic travel and hospitality, not to mention wealth, success, gene-spreading and a glorious return. I was 23-years-old, after all, in Europe, about to do my Master’s degree at University. There was a new white page in my life waiting to be filled, and the world was full of possibilities.

But I was further disenchanted a few days later, when I went to the police station to register as an alien, a word I had only come across in science-fiction movies – a point made by many migrants to the United Kingdom and the United States, I have since discovered. This had nothing to do with the bed-and-breakfast episode; I had been told by the immigration official at Heathrow that I was required by law to register with the nearest police station. Although back in Beirut, unacquainted as I was with bureaucratic English lingo, I had found the British word for a visa, ‘leave to remain’, a little obtuse – why not ‘permission to stay’ or just ‘visa’? – I had failed to notice the reluctance subtly evoked by the words ‘leave’ and ‘remain’. At Heathrow and, later at the bed-and-breakfast and the police station, I realised that, if I had counted on a refreshing anonymity in my new place of abode, on being a complete stranger, on some kind of new start, I was wrong. I hadn’t become anonymous; I had been given a new, ready-made identity, a mass-produced garment which sticks to the skin. It wasn’t so much anonymity as a stereotype; blind substitution rather than white page. As my aeroplane entered British airspace and thundered through the London sky, the nationality of my passport had billowed out and, like a mild but chronic illness, had colonised a small corner of my life.

—

Did Ali El-Zein carry a travel document? I am not sure. Nor do I expect that this detail would have survived, down the ages, the tale-making mill of my extended family. In fact, there was a detail in my ancestor’s story which was sometimes mentioned but not dwelled upon by my relatives. Ali El-Zein was the treasurer of his overlord Nasseef Annassar, and may have ended up with a significant portion of his dead master’s fortune as well as the bounty taken from the castle of Tibnine, or part of it, including taxes collected by the Ottomans. True or not, I like this detail. It injects a subversive element into the story. It could explain the open arms of the Indian king. It would certainly make my ancestor even harder to classify. Knight? Minister? Adventurer? Thief? Fugitive? Refugee? Or, real as he was, a figment of his descendants’ imagination, the lands he had travelled, as infinite as their fancies?

What was missing from my ancestor’s story were borders, highwaymen, distance, the duration of time, the economics of hospitality, red tape, travel documents, and the intriguing art of obstruction that is the road-block, the checkpoint and the immigration official sitting leisurely behind a computer screen.

I would hate to see my ancestor pandering to border guards, suppressing his pride and home-grown authority in foreign lands, concealing the source of his fortune from prying eyes, or getting stranded in a dull town because he or his horse has fallen ill. Yet the absence of these events puts him above other mortals. So I keep the possibility in mind. It brings him down to earth and allows me to entertain the thought that, although I went west while he headed east, although he travelled on horseback while I boarded a giant plane, perhaps we lived in the same emotional world after all. It is a little trick, a secret pact that I have with him. If we could see each other today, I like to think that he might see through my self-deception, might even nod or wink, in appreciation. After all, I have seen through his own deception – all those well-concealed imperfections – without losing my affection for him.