The Year of Rice and Salt

Back in Nsara, Budur worked and studied. At Kirana's suggestion she read about southeast Asia, and learned how the Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic cultures had mixed there to make a vibrant new offspring, which had survived the war and was now using the great botanical and mineral riches of Burma and the Malay peninsula, and Sumatra and Java and Borneo and Mindanao, to create a group of peoples united against China's centripetal power, freeing itself from Chinese influence. They had spread into Aozhou, the big burnt island continent south of them, and even across the oceans to Inka, and in the other direction to Madagascar and south Africa: it was a kind of emerging southern world culture, with the huge cities of Pyinkayaing, Jakarta and Kwinana on the west coast of Aozhou leading the way, trading with Travancore, and building like maniacs, erecting cities that included many steel skyscrapers more than a hundred floors tall. The war had damaged but not destroyed these cities, and now the governments of the world met in Pyinkayaing whenever they tried to work out some more durable and just postwar dispensation.

There were more meetings all the time, as the situation became more and more deranged; anything to keep war from returning, as so very little had been resolved by it. Or so the members of the defeated alliance felt. It was unclear at this point if the Chinese and their allies, or the countries of Yingzhou, who had entered the conflict so much later than the rest, had any interest in accommodating Islamic concerns. Kirana remarked casually in class one day that it was very possible Islam was in the rubbish heap of history without yet knowing it; and the more Budur read of her books, the less sure she could be that this was necessarily a bad thing for the world. Old religions died; and if an empire tried to conquer the world and failed, it generally then disappeared.

Kirana's own writing made that very clear. Budur took out her books from the monastery library, some published nearly twenty years before, during the war itself when Kirana had to have been quite young, and she read them with close interest, hearing Kirana's voice in her head for every sentence; it was just like a transcript of her talking, except even more long winded. She had written on many subjects, both theoretical and practical. Whole books of her African writings were concerned with various public health and women's issues. Budur opened one of these randomly, and found herself reading a lecture that had been given to midwives in the Sudan:

If the parents of the girl insist, if they cannot be talked out of it, it is extremely important that only one third of the clitoris should be cut off, and two thirds left intact. Someone who practically attacks a girl with a knife, cutting off everything, this goes against the words of the Prophet. Men and women are meant to be equal before God. But if a woman's entire clitoris is cut off it leaves ber a kind of eunuch, she becomes cold, lazy, without desire, without interest, humourless, like a mud wall, a piece of cardboard, without spark, without goals, without desire, like a puddle of standing water, lifeless, ber children are unhappy, her husband is unhappy, she makes nothing of her life. Those of you who must perform circumcisions, therefore remember: cut off one third, leave two thirds! Cut off one third, leave two thirds!

Budur flipped the pages of the book, disturbed. After a while she collected herself, and read the new page that presented itself:

I was privileged to witness the return of Raiza Tarami from her trip to the New World, where she had attended the conference at Yingzhou's Long island on women's issues, just after the end of the war. Conference members who came from throughout the world were greatly surprised to see this Nsarene woman exhibiting a full awareness of all the issues that mattered. They had been expecting a backward woman living behind the walls of the harem, ignorant and veiled. But Raiza was not like that, she stood on the same footing as her sisters from China, Burma, Yingzhou and Travancore, indeed she had been forced by conditions at home to explore theoretically far in advance of most.