The Year of Rice and Salt

They flew back the next day, Piali fretting at the slowness of the airship, wishing that the military aeroplanes had been adapted more generally for civilian passenger use, also wondering if they would be arrested on their arrival, as intellectuals visiting a foreign power during a time of national emergency, or some such thing.

But when their airship landed at the airfield outside Nsara, not only were they not arrested, but in fact, looking out of the windows of the tram as it rolled into the city, it was impossible to tell that anything at all had changed.

It was only when they got out of the tram and walked over to the madressa district that a difference became apparent. The docks were quieter. The longshoremen had closed down the docks to protest about the coup. Now soldiers stood guard over the cranes and gantries, and groups of men and women stood on the street corners watching them.

Piali and Budur went into the offices of the physics building, and heard all the latest from Piah's colleagues. The army command had dissolved the Nsarene state council and the district panchayats, and declared martial law over all. They were calling it sharia, and they had a few mullahs going along with it to provide some religious legitimacy, though it was very slight; the mullahs involved were hardline reactionaries out of step with everything that had happened in Nsara since the war, part of the 'we won' crowd, or, as Hasan had always called them, the 'we would have won if it weren't for the Armenians, Sikhs, Jews, Zott, and whoever else we dislike' crowd, the 'we would have won if the rest of the world hadn't beaten the shit out of us' crowd. To be among like minded people they should have moved to the Alpine emirates or Afghanistan long before.

So no one was fooled by the facade of the coup. And as things had recently been getting a bit better, the timing of the coup was not particularly good. It made no sense; apparently it had only happened because the officers had been living on fixed incomes during the period of hyperinflation, and thought everyone else was as desperate as they were. But many, many people were still sick of the army, and supportive of their district panchayats if not of the state council. So it seemed to Budur that the chances for successful resistance were good.

Kirana was much more pessimistic. She was in the hospital now, as it turned out; Budur went running over to it the moment she found out, feeling raw and frightened. For tests only, Kirana informed her brusquely, though she did not identify them; something to do with her blood or her lungs, Budur gathered. Nevertheless, from her hospital bed she was calling every zawiyya in the city, organizing things. 'They've got the guns so they may win, but we're not going to make it easy.'

Many of the madressa and institute's students were already out in crowds on the central plaza, and the corniche and docks, and the grand mosque's courtyards, shouting, chanting, singing, and sometimes throwing stones. Kirana was not satisfied with these efforts, but spent all her time on the phone trying to schedule a rally: 'They'll have you back behind the veil, they'll try to turn back the clock until you are all domestic animals again, you have to get out in the streets in great numbers, this is the only thing that scares coup leaders' – always 'you' and not 'we', Budur noticed, excluding herself as if speaking posthumously, although she was clearly pleased to be involved in all the activities. And pleased also that Budur was visiting her in the hospital.

'They mistimed it,' she said to Budur with a kind of mordant glee. Not only were the food shortages getting better, but it was spring, and as sometimes happened in Nsara, the endlessly cloudy skies had abruptly cleared and the sun was shining day after day, illuminating new greens that welled up everywhere in the gardens and the cracks in the pavement. The sky was washed clear and gleaming like lapis overhead, and when twenty thousand people gathered on the commercial docks and marched down Sultana Katima Boulevard to the Mosque of the Fishermen, many thousands more came to watch, and joined the crowd marching, until when the army ringing the district shot pepper gas canisters into the crowd, people poured in every direction out of the big transverse streets, cutting through the medinas flanking the Liwayya River, causing it to appear that the whole city had rioted. After those hurt by the gas were cared for, the crowd returned bigger than it had been before the attack.