The Year of Rice and Salt

So she represented us well, and when she returned to Firanja, she had come to believe that the veil was the biggest obstacle in theway of the progress of the Muslim woman, as standing for general complicity in the whole system. The veil had to fall if the reactionary system were to fall. And so, upon her arrival on the docks of Nsara, she met her companions from the women's institute, and she stood before them with her face unveiled. Her immediate companions had removed their veils as well. Around us the signs of disapproval became apparent in the crowd, shouting and jostling and the like. Then women in the crowd began to support the unveiled, by removing the veils from their own faces and throwing them to the ground. it was a beautiful moment. After that the veil started to disappear in Nsara with great speed. In just a few years unveiling had spread throughout the country, and that brick in the wall of the reactionaries had been removed. Nsara became known as the leader of Firanja because of this action. This I was lucky enough to witness with my own eyes.

Budur took a breath, marking the passage as something she would read to her blind soldiers. And as the weeks passed she read on, working her way through several volumes of Kirana's essays and lectures, an exhausting experience, for Kirana never hesitated to attack head on and at length everything that she disliked. And yet how she had lived! Budur found herself ashamed of her cloistered childhood and youth, the fact that she was twenty three, now almost twenty four, and had not yet done anything; by the time Kirana Fawwaz was that age she had already spent years in Africa, fighting in the war and working in hospitals. There was so much lost time to be made up!

Budur also read in many books Kirana had not assigned, concen trating for a while on the Sino Muslim cultures that had existed in central Asia, how they had attempted for a number of centuries to reconcile the two cultures: the books' bad old photographs showed these people, Chinese in appearance, Muslim in belief, Chinese in language, Muslim in law; it was hard to imagine such a mongrel people had ever existed. The Chinese had killed the greater part of them in the war, and dispersed the rest across the Dahai to the deserts and jungles of Yingzhou and Inka, where they worked in mines and on plantations, in effect slaves, though the Chinese claimed no longer to practise slavery, calling it a Muslim atavism. Whatever they called it, the Muslims in their northwest provinces were gone. And it could happen everywhere.

It began to seem to Budur there was no part of history she could read that was not depressing, disgusting, frightening, horrible; unless it be the New World's, where the Hodenosaunee and the Dinei had organized a civilization capable, just barely, of resisting the Chinese to their west and the Firanjis to their east. Except even there, diseases and plagues had wrought such havoc on them in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that they had been reduced to a rather small populace, hiding in the centre of their island. Nevertheless, small in number though they were, they had persevered, and adapted. They had remained somewhat open to foreign influences, tying everything they could into their leagues, becoming Buddhists, allying themselves with the Travancori League on the other side of the world, which indeed they had helped to form by their example; advancing from strength to strength, in short, even when hidden deep in their wild fastness, far from both coasts and from the Old World generally. Maybe that had helped. Taking what they could use, fighting off the rest. A place where women had always had power. And now that the Long War had shattered the Old World, they had become a sudden new giant across the seas, represented here by tall handsome people like Hanea and Ganagweh, walking the streets of Nsara in long fur or oilskin coats, butchering Firanjic with friendly dignity. Kirana had not written much about them, as far as Budur could find; but Idelba was dealing with them, in some mysterious fashion that began to involve packages, now, that Budur helped take on the tram up to Hanea and Ganagweh's temple on the north coast. Four times she did this for Idelba without asking what it was for, and Idelba did not offer much explanation. Again, as in Turi, it seemed to Budur that Idelba knew things the rest of them did not. It was a very complicated life Idelba was living. Men at the gate, some of them pining for her romantically, one pounding on the locked door shouting 'Idelbaaaa, I love you, plceeasse!' and drunkenly singing in a language Budur didn't recognize while punishing a guitar, Idelba meanwhile disappearing into their room and an hour later pretending nothing had occurred; then again, gone days at a time, and back, brow deeply furrowed, sometimes happy, sometimes agitated… a very complicated life. And yet more than half in secrecy.

TWELVE