The Year of Rice and Salt

The next morning this same cleric got up on the dais and started the day by reciting into the microphone a poem by Ghaleb, waking people up and calling them out to the square again: 'Soon I will be only a story But the same is true of you. I hope the bardo will not be empty But people do not yet know where they live. Past and future all mixed together, Let those trapped birds out the window! What then remains? The stories you no longer Believe. You had better believe them. While you live they carry the meaning When you die they carry the meaning To those who come after they carry the meaning You had better believe in them. In Rumi's story he saw all the worlds As one, and that one, Love, he called to and knew, Not Muslim or Jew or Hindu or Buddhist, Only a Friend, a breath breathing human, Telling his boddhisatva story. The bardo Waits for us to make it real.'

Budur on that morning was awakened in the zawiyya by someone bringing news to her of a phone message: it was from one of her blind soldiers. They wanted to talk to her.

She took the tram and then walked into the hospital, feeling apprehensive. Were they angry at her for not coming recently? Were they worried about the way she had left after her last visit?

No. The oldest ones spoke for them, or for some part of them, anyway; they wanted to march in the demonstration against the army takeover, and they wanted her to lead them. About two thirds of the ward said they wanted to do it.

It wasn't the kind of request one could refuse. Budur agreed, and feeling shaky and uncertain, led them out of the gate of the hospital. There were too many of them for the trams, so they walked down the riverfront road, and then the corniche, hands on the shoulders before them, like a parade of elephants. Back in the ward Budur had got used to the look of them, but out here in the brilliant sunshine and the open air they were a shocking sight once again, maimed and awful. Three hundred and twenty seven of them, walking down the corniche; they had taken a head count when leaving the ward.

Naturally they drew a crowd, and some people began following them down the corniche, and in the big plaza there was already a crowd, a crowd that quickly made room for the veterans at the front of the protest, facing the old palace. They arranged themselves into ranks and files by feel, and counting off in undertones, with a little aid from Budur. Then they stood silently, right hands on the shoulders to their left, listening to the speakers at the microphone. The crowd behind them grew bigger and bigger.

Army airships floated low over the city, and amplified voices from them ordered everyone to leave the streets and plazas. A full curfew had been declared, the mechanical voices informed them.

This decision had no doubt been made in ignorance of the blind soldiers' presence in the palace square. They stood there without moving, and the crowd stood with them. One of the blind soldiers shouted, 'What are they going to do, gas us?'

In fact this was all too possible, as pepper gas had been deployed already, at the State Council Chambers and the police barracks, and down on the docks. And later it was said by many that the blind soldiers were in fact tear gassed during that tense week, and that they just stood there and took it, for they had no tears left to shed; that they stood in their square with their hands on each other's shoulders and chanted the Fatiha, and the bismallah which starts every sura: 'In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful! In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful!'

Budur herself never saw any pepper gas dropped in the palace square, although she heard her soldiers chanting the bismallah for hours at a time. But she was not there in the square every hour of that week, and hers was not the only group of blind soldiers to have left their hospitals and joined the protests, either. So possibly something of the sort occurred. Certainly in the time afterwards everyone believed it had.