Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (25 page)

‘T
HE ONLY TRUE NOBILITY
I can accept is that conferred by talent. The worst thing in the world is ignorance. The preachers you seem to respect so much say that ignorance is a woman’s passport to paradise. I would rather the Creator banished me to hell.’

Hind was in the midst of a flaming argument with her lover-to-be, whose affectionate mocking tone had suddenly begun to irritate her. Ibn Daud was taking a special delight in tormenting her. He had begun by posing as an orthodox scholar from the al-Azhar university and had defended the prevalent theology, especially in its pronouncements on the duties and obligations of women believers.

Hind’s impassioned rejection of paradise was what he had really wanted to hear. The passionate Hudayl blood had surged up to her face as she stared at him with angry eyes. She was magnificent in her rage. Ibn Daud felt her power, for the first time. He took her hand and covered it with kisses. This spontaneous display of emotion delighted and excited Hind, but they were not alone in the pomegranate glade.

Ibn Daud’s daring produced a spate of coughing from behind the nearby bushes where three young maid-servants were in attendance. Hind knew them well.

‘Go and take a walk, all of you. Do you think I am deceived by all this nonsense? I know very well what happens when you first catch sight of the palm-tree that grows between the legs of your lovers. You begin to behave like a flock of hungry woodpeckers. Now go and take a walk for a few minutes and do not return until you hear me call! Is that clear?’

‘Yes Lady Hind,’ replied Umayma, ‘but Lady Zubayda ...’

‘Have you told Lady Zubayda that my brother mounts you like a dog?’

Hind’s bold retort settled the matter. A staccato outburst of laughter from Umayma’s companions was the only response to this query. Fearing further indiscretions in front of the stranger, the maids moved away from the site. Hitherto their role had been to act as guardians of Hind’s chastity and protect her honour. They now reverted to playing a part more suited to their temperaments and became, once again, the accomplices of their young mistress, keeping watch and making sure that the couple was not surprised.

Unknown to them, Yazid was close by. Soon after Ibn Daud’s arrival at the house, Yazid had felt abandoned by his sister. He had also sensed the reason and, as a result, had begun to snub the newcomer with a ruthlessness only a child could deploy. He developed an irrational, but deep hatred for the stranger from al-Qahira.

At first Yazid had been fascinated by Ibn Daud’s stories of the old world. He had been eager to learn, desperate to know more about life in al-Qahira and Dimashk; intrigued and curious as to the difference in pronunciation and meaning of certain Arabic words as spoken and understood in al-Andalus and in the land of the Prophet’s birth.

The boy’s thirst for information had, in turn, stimulated Ibn Daud. It forced him to think hard in order to explain facts which he had hitherto taken for granted. Yazid, however, began to notice that Hind would change colour, avert her eyes whenever Ibn Daud was present and put on an act of ultra-modesty. Once Yazid had realized that it was the Qahirene who was responsible, he began to avoid Ibn Daud’s classes, or when compelled to attend them, made no attempt to conceal his displeasure and acted as if he were permanently bored.

He stopped questioning Ibn Daud. When the tutor asked him a question, Yazid either remained silent or restricted himself to monosyllabic replies. He even stopped playing chess with him. This was an enormous sacrifice, since Ibn Daud was new to the game and had not been able to defeat his pupil even once, till the point was reached when the latter had unilaterally broken off all personal relations.

When Hind asked him to explain his behaviour, Yazid sighed impatiently and stated in the coldest possible voice that he was not aware of any abnormality in his attitude to the hired teacher. This annoyed his sister and increased the tension that had built up between them. Hind, usually ultra-sensitive where Yazid was involved, was blinded by her love for Ibn Daud. And so it was her brother who suffered greatly. Zubayda, noticing the unhappiness on the face of her youngest child, understood the reason only too well. She resolved to settle the matter of Hind’s marriage as soon as possible and decided to postpone any discussion on the subject with Yazid till that time.

Unaware that they were being observed, Hind and Ibn Daud had now reached a stage where certain crucial decisions had to be made. His hands had wandered underneath her tunic and felt her breasts, but retreated immediately.

‘Two full moons upon a slender bough,’ he muttered in a voice which she imagined was choked with passion.

Hind was not to be outdone. Her hands found a path from above his waist to the unexplored regions below which were covered by baggy silk trousers. She felt him underneath the silk. She began to stroke his thighs. ‘Soft like dunes of sand, but where is the palm-tree?’ she whispered as her fingers gently brushed the dates and felt the rising of the sap.

If any further advances were made, they would undoubtedly pre-empt the rites of the first night. But, Hind thought, if we stop now, the frustration, not to mention the long wait till our passion is finally consummated, will make life unbearable. Hind did not wish to stop. She had discarded every sense of propriety. With all her being, she wanted to make love to this man. She had taken so much vicarious pleasure from the unending descriptions supplied by maid-servants and giggling cousins in Gharnata and Ishbiliya, but now she wanted to know the real thing.

It was Ibn Daud who, realizing this, organized a hasty retreat. He withdrew his hands from her body and gently removed hers from inside his trousers.

‘Why?’ she asked in a hoarse whisper.

‘I am your father’s guest, Hind!’ His voice sounded resigned and emotionless. ‘Tomorrow I will ask to see him alone and request his permission to make you my wife. Any other course would be dishonourable.’

Hind felt the passion draining away.

‘I felt I was on the edge of something. Something which is more than just pleasure. Something indefinably pure. Now I feel on the threshold of despair. I think I have misjudged you.’

A torrent of reassurances followed. Repeated declarations of his undying love. The high regard in which he held her intelligence. He had never met another woman like her, and all the while he was talking he was also kissing every toe on her feet and muttering a special endearment to each and every one.

She did not speak. It was a silence more expressive than anything she could have said, for the truth was that having lost her temporarily, he had won her back. And yet her instinct that she had misread him was not as remote from the truth as his gestures suggested.

Ibn Daud had never been with a woman before. His decision to disrupt the lovemaking was only partly explicable by his status in the household. He was surprised at how much Hind had succeeded in inflaming him, but the real reason he had pulled back was a fear of the unknown.

Till now there had been only one great passion in the life of Ibn Daud, and that was a fellow student in al-Qahira. Mansur was the son of a family of prosperous and long-established jewellers in the port-town of Iskanderiya. He had travelled so extensively and to so many cities, including a boat journey to Cochin in southern India, that his stories had Ibn Daud in a state of perpetual enchantment. Add to that the love they both felt for good poetry and the flute, and that each had striking features and a questioning mind, and the friendship which grew up between them seems inevitable. For three years the two men lived in close proximity. They shared a room in the
riwaq
overlooking the mosque of al-Azhar.

It soon became a triune relationship which concurrently fed their intellects, their religious emotions—they were disciples of the same Sufi shaykh—and, finally their sexual appetites. They had written poetry for each other in rhymed prose. This was composed in a language in which no pleasure was veiled from the other reader’s sight. During the summer months, when they were separated from each other by the necessity of spending time with their families, they both kept diaries in which they recorded every detail of their daily lives as well as the effects of sexual abstinence.

Mansur had died in a shipwreck while accompanying his father on a trading mission to Istanbul. The inconsolable survivor could not bear the thought of living in al-Qahira any longer. It was this, more than any desire to study the works of Ibn Khaldun, that had brought him to Gharnata. He was drawn intellectually to al-Zindiq, but after several conversations felt that, while the crafty old fox was full of genius and learning, there was a lack of scruple in the stratagems he employed to outwit an opponent. At the end of one discussion of the poetry of Ibn Hazm, Ibn Daud had remembered a similar talk with Mansur. The memory had overpowered him. He had given way to unfeigned emotion. Naturally, he had not told al-Zindiq everything, but the old man was no fool. He had guessed. It was this that was worrying Ibn Daud. Al-Zindiq was a friend of this family. What if he confided his suspicions to Hind’s parents?

As if guessing his thoughts, Hind fondled his hand and enquired innocently: ‘What was the name of the woman you loved in al-Qahira? I want to know everything about you.’

Ibn Daud was startled. Before he could reply there was a scream and shouts of laughter as the maid-servants pounced on a mortified Yazid and dragged him into the glade.

‘Look who we found, Lady Hind!’ said Umayma, grinning shamelessly.

‘Let me go!’ shouted Yazid, the tears pouring down his face.

Hind could not bear the sight of her brother upset in this fashion. She ran to Yazid and hugged him, but he kept his hands firmly at his side. Hind dried his tears with her hands and kissed his cheeks.

‘Why were you spying on me?’

Yazid wanted to embrace and kiss her, tell her of his fears and worries. He had heard how Great-Aunt Zahra had run away and never come back again. He did not want his Hind to do the same. If they had been alone he would have blurted all this out, but the smile on Ibn Daud’s face stopped him. He turned his back and ran to the house, leaving behind him a bemused and bewildered sister.

Slowly it was beginning to dawn on Hind that Yazid’s strange behaviour could only be explained in relation to her own state of mind. She had been so bewitched by those eyes, greener than the sea, that everything else had become secondary, even the voice of a lute. It was her carelessness that had upset her brother. She felt guilty. The intoxication of the embrace was all but forgotten.

The sight of a distraught Yazid reminded her of her own irritation with Ibn Daud.

‘The truth is,’ she told herself, ‘that his honourable behaviour was nothing more or less than a refusal to recognize the beauty of our passion.’

This annoyed her so much that she, who had almost burnt him with her flame, now resolved to teach Ibn Daud a few elementary lessons. He would soon discover that she could be colder than ice. She still wanted him, but on her terms. For the moment her main concern was to repair the breach with Yazid.

The subject of Hind’s thoughts was lying with his head buried in his mother’s lap. He had burst in on Zubayda with the words: ‘That man was playing with Hind’s breasts. I saw them.’ Yazid had thought his mother would be horrified. She would rush to the scene of the crime and instruct the male servants of the house to whip Ibn Daud. The upstart from al-Qahira would be sent home in disgrace, and on his way to the village to find transport to Gharnata he might even be attacked by wild dogs. Instead Zubayda smiled.

‘Your sister is a grown woman now, Ibn Umar. Soon she will be married and will have children and you will be their uncle.’

‘Married to him?’ Yazid was incredulous.

Zubayda nodded and stroked her son’s light brown hair.

‘But, but, he owns nothing. He is ...’

‘A learned man, my Yazid, and what he owns is in his head. My father always used to say that the weight of a man’s brains is more important than the weight of his purse.’

‘Mother,’ said Yazid with a frown. His eyes were like unsheathed swords and his voice reminded her so much of her husband at his most official that she could barely keep a straight face. ‘Have you forgotten that we cannot harvest grapes from prickly pears?’

‘True my brother,’ said Hind, who had entered the room unseen just in time to hear Yazid’s last remark, ‘but you know as well as I that a rose is always accompanied by the thorn.’

Yazid hid his head behind his mother’s back, but Hind, laughing and very much her old self again, dragged him away and imprinted dozens of kisses on his head, neck, shoulders and cheeks.

‘I will always love you, Yazid and more than any man I happen to marry. It is my future husband who should worry. Not you.’

‘But for the last month ...’ began Yazid.

‘I know, I know and I am truly very sorry. I did not realize that we had not spent time together, but all that is in the past. Let’s be friends again.’

Yazid’s arms went round her neck and she lifted him off the ground. His eyes were shining as she put him down.

‘Go and ask the Dwarf what he’s cooking for supper tonight,’ instructed Hind. ‘I must talk to our mother on my own.’

As Yazid scampered out of the room, mother and daughter smiled at each other.

‘How she takes after me,’ thought Zubayda. ‘I, too, was unhappy with love till I obtained permission to marry her father. In my case the delay was brought about by Umar’s mother, unsure of the blood that flowed through my veins. Hind must not go through all that just because the boy is an orphan.’

Hind appeared to have divined her mother’s thoughts. ‘I could never wait as long as you did, while they discussed the impurities in your blood. It is something else that worries me. Be truthful now. What do you make of him?’

‘A very handsome boy, with a brain. He is more than a match for you, my child. What more could you want? Why the doubt?’

Hind had always enjoyed a special relationship with her mother. The friendship that developed between them was due, in no small measure, to the relaxed atmosphere which prevailed in the house. Hind did not have to imagine what life could have been like had her father married again or kept the odd concubine in one of his houses in the village. She had visited her cousins in Qurtuba and Ishbiliya often enough to remember households in the grip of a permanently stifling atmosphere. Her cousins’ accounts of indiscriminate and casual lechery reminded her of descriptions of brothels; the accounts of infighting amongst the women filled her vision with images of a snake-pit. The contrast with life at al-Hudayl could not have been sharper.