The Year of Rice and Salt

'Well… we are beginning to feel that there is some kind of surveil lance being placed on us. Apparently from a part of the government, some security department. It's a bit murky. But anyway, best to be very careful.'

'Why don't you go to the police?'

'Well.' She refrained from rolling her eyes, Budur could see it. Voice lowered to a gentleness: 'The police are part of the army. That's from the war, and it never changed. So… we prefer not to draw any attention whatsoever to the issues involved.'

Budur gestured around them. 'Surely we have nothing to worry about here, though. No woman in a zawiyya would ever betray a housemate, not to the army.'

Idelba stared at her to see if she was being serious. 'Don't be naive,' she said finally, less gently, and with a pat on the knee got up to go to the bathroom.

This was not the only cloud to come at this time and drop its shadow on Budur's happiness. Throughout Dar al Islam, unrest was filling the newspapers, and inflation was universal. Military takeovers of the governments in Skandistan and Moldava and al Alemand and the Tyrol, very close to Turi, alarmed the rest of the world all out of proportion to their puny size, as seeming to indicate a resurgence of Muslim aggressivity. The whole of Islam was accused of breaking the commitments forced on them at the Shanghai Conference after the war, as if Islam were a monolithic block, a laughable concept even in the depths of the war itself. Sanctions and even embargoes were being called for in China and India and Yingzhou. The effect of the threat alone was felt immediately in Firanja: the price of rice shot up, then the price of potatoes and maple syrup, and coffee beans. Hoarding quickly followed, old wartime habits kicking in, and even as prices rose staples were cleared off the shelves of the groceries the moment they appeared. This affected everything else as well, both food and other matters. Hoarding was a very contagious phenomenon, a bad mentality, a loss of faith in the system's ability to keep everything running; and as the system had indeed broken down so disastrously at the end of the war, a lot of people were prone to hoard at the first hint of a scare. Making meals in the zawiyya became an exer cise in ingenuity. They often dined on potato soup, spiced or garnished in one way or another so that it remained tasty, but it sometimes had to be watered pretty thin to get a cup of it into everyone at the table.

Cafe life went on as gaily as ever, at least on the surface. There was perhaps more of an edge in people's voices; eyes were brighter, the laughs harder, the binges more drunken. Opium too became subject to boarding. People came in with wheelbarrows of paper money, or exhibited fivetrillion drachma bills from Roma, laughing as they offered them in exchange for cups of coffee and were refused. It wasn't very funny in all truth; every week things were markedly more expensive, and there didn't seem to be anything to be done about it. They laughed at their own helplessness. Budur went to the cafes less often, which saved money, and the risk of an awkward moment with Kirana. Sometimes she went with Idelba's nephew Piali to a different set of cards, with a seedier clientele; Piali and his associates, who sometimes included Hasan and his friend Tristan, seemed to like the rougher establishments frequented by sailors and longshoremen. So through a winter of thick mists that hung in the streets like rain freed of gravity, Budur sat and listened to tales of Yingzhou and the stormy Atlantic, deadliest of all the seas.

'We exist on sufferance,' Zainab Shah said bitterly as she knitted in their regular cafe. 'We're like the Japanese after the Chinese conquered them.'

'Let the occasional chalice break,' Kirana murmured. Her expression in the dim light was serene, indomitable.

'They have all broken,' Naser said. He sat in the corner, looking out of the window at the rain. He tapped his cigarette on the ashtray. 'I can't say I'm sorry.'

'In Iran too they don't seem to care.' Kirana appeared to be trying to cheer him up. 'They are making very great strides there, leading the way in all kinds of fields. Linguistics, archaeology, the physical sciences, they have all the leading people.'

Naser nodded, looking inwards. Budur had gathered that his fortune had gone to fund many of these efforts, from an exile of some unexplained sort. Another complicated life.