Damascus Nights

Sometimes I carefully choose books and pieces or conversations to read or re-read and sometimes I don’t know what exactly I want to read and sometimes I know exactly what I would love to read but know I can’t right then, and sometimes I cannot read much because the head doesn’t really follow written words the way a head normally does. Sometimes when a book or a piece of writing comes with a recommendation  or a reminder – I find myself unable to resist the call, and so run out to the library or try to wait for the book to turn up (sometimes it does) or click on a button to place an order or simply read the piece if it is readily available. 

Sometimes a book or a piece jumps on me and tells me that I’m supposed  to read it. This happens every now and then – and especially when I badly want to read something but not much is pervading my reading consciousness, and I think sadly that there is nothing that I will pick out because I won’t be able to read it anyway. 

I finished reading a book late the night before last. Only it already seems such a painfully long time ago. Damascus Nights by Rafik Schami. I had some quiet moments just sitting on top of the heat vent with a blanket on my legs thinking about the book and not thinking that I needed to write about it and feeling sadly that I’d probably even forget I read the book some months down the line or not be able to remember the book anyway. The book had practically jumped out of the book-shelf at me and I didn’t know the writer nor had heard about the book but the title and something about the blurb which I suddenly had no problems understanding made me pick it out and it seemed to be a tiny enough book, which could be read and finished within a space of an evening or two at the most – no matter what other tasks one needed to finish. The tiny tale had me transfixed and the best way to put it in is to say that the book had me enchanted as I sat for a bit late in the night wondering about life and the matter of life being a matter of places, people and of stories involving places and people... There’s a quoted line in an essay I’ve read often, ‘The universe is not made of atoms – it is made of stories.’ And recently and very often a line from the first Hindi movie I watched – a line by Amitabh about ‘unfinished stories’ makes me feel not only wistful but terribly sad, and yet makes me feel equally sure that for some stories one must simply walk and wait to see where they go. Some stories from books and some stories within the space of life simply cannot be predicted the whole way through and one has to simply turn the pages. I didn’t think I’d be writing about this book today, and I won’t digress any more but I resisted the feeling of having to write about the book saying I had a few things that simply have to be finished and can’t write about books too well anyway – but there is the nagging prod to write about the book, and so I shall save time and write some.

I’ll try not to give away the tale – and the odd thing is that one cannot really give away the tale anyway. For the tiny book must be read to be savoured. It is done in the style of the classic 1001 Nights, in a way – maybe that’s why I picked the book when it jumped on me instead of putting it back firmly in its place on the shelf. The book has tales running through it and nestling within and some of the stories have to do with the life of the main characters and some of them are simply narrated tales living within narrated tales ensconced within the main tale about the unlikely hero – a very old and odd coachman who decided to be a coachman in Syria and traveled far and wide (but not that far and wide really) because he couldn’t stand the idea of being anything else and even though being a coachman in Syria was not safe nor the most respectable profession to join (people used to avoid it if they could) – he didn’t give two hoots about it. The coachman is the teller of tales, and he realizes at one point that that is what keeps his travelers hooked to his coach. This is but one tale and the book unfurls in a peculiar way for it is about friendship and how seven of his friends who gather together and every evening – seven odd and old friends who are clear characters in the book too, from the genial but poor barber who sells songbirds and is known as a miser but isn’t really one but who cannot help counting every head of hair and bushy beard as money for his family and he too has stories to tell and stories to hear which make his clients come back to him for their next haircut or shave in spite of the nicks received sometimes….to the coachman’s best friend who simply cannot tell a tale when it comes down to him to narrate one and so he brings his wife to tell a tale among the gathering of old men…and so the book takes the reader through a strange collection of characters and stories wrapped in stories with the number seven occupying some significance - and the most beautiful tale within another springs in the middle of the book: of a red star following a silver white one and the young man Shafak who lives partly in a dream world and the real world and yet tosses a pearl back into the sky and disappears, and one is convinced that he finds everlasting happiness – for that is what he was searching for. 

The book is placed in real socio-historical and political time in Syria between 1959-1963, and the political disturbances and the dark horrors and the shuffle in dictators, of neighbouring states, of the secret spies and the young boys who disappear and families which are left to be, pensions which are not received, soldiers and policemen who wait to overhear suspicious sounding words, poor orphans who are given a  home and treated as family, noisy and nosy neighbours, unpleasant people too…all fill the tiny book too and yet with such a laughing and easy grace and sometimes naughty and mischievous humour that one simply runs with the flow and the dark shadows aren’t allowed to hover over one’s shoulder – it’s almost like the book and one’s mind and watchful thoughts pursuing the tale carefully don’t allow one to sit and brood. The old men are cantankerous, querulous, sometimes even suspicious, and they argue a whole lot, and they are unpredictable, not always likeable and not all of them equally and yet they are friends of the coachman and they want – more than anything else in the world - him to be back in his old form as the teller of tales, and there is a camaraderie and love that simply cannot be defined in words. They are not rich at all nor are they all so poor that they cannot laugh or commiserate or love beauty and they come with their eccentricities and their obstinacies and yet all of them love the coachman and they are human beings and one cannot help liking them as they argue and quarrel and show their genuine concern and drink their cups of coffee or tea and cogitate and meditate on their water pipes. 

One gets to read about ‘hakawatis’ who are the narrators of tales and who frequented the cafes of Damascus and who tempted the clients by the old ruse of leaving a hanging tale so that the listeners would come back the following evening. One reads about a woman, Leila  – who nobody could keep tied to a place, not the prince who loved her and nor her husband who loved her because she wanted to roam the world and tell stories – and she stays in Damascus only to give birth to and bring up her daughter and then leaves without saying too much once the daughter is 18 and is married. The old coachman’s wife who visits him in a vivid sleep dream in a blue velvet dress after he falls asleep in a full-bellied fuzzy state and in a mosque after an interesting but curious day right after he receives his pension suddenly (I started feeling a bit like the old coachman through his day long wandering around his town). His wife tells him that she didn’t have a choice but to die first because she couldn’t stand being without him for she got bored without him and had never been able to stand being bored; and she goes on to say when he is looking hurt that yes-yes she knew that he had always been so much in love with her all along but for her, life with him had been worrisome yes, tension-ridden yes – but boring – never, and so she had loved life with him…, and his wife in her fine way reminds him in a hilarious scene that the oh-so-beautiful-platter that he just about bought is ‘errr – missing?’ and so he shoots awake – the old man. Being scolded by his beautiful muse in another dream because he has the tendency to ramble and forget when he’s rambling. The little boy who loves the coachman and hears the thoughts of the coachman because the old coachman shares even his thoughts with this little boy (who is the official narrator, I guess of the whole tale) even when the coachman is not speaking with anybody else…. Oh, how does one begin to write about a rambling, spinning book like this or even say much about it.

The book charmed me and at so many levels and in so many places and just when I needed it and was ready for it. It enchants for it makes the reader see and yet again just why one loves companionship and also through stories and tales even though they feel like such personal and ‘non-useful’ deep delights, and loves to both hear and tell stories and tales and share stuff by the fireside and through the changing seasons. The book talks about the power of the imagination to seduce when one is least expecting it or believes one is far too old (if not wise) to be seduced and its power to run through and chase through life – life, which could come across as nothing but dreary and being a drudgery and a drag and a bore unless it feels and is frightening and somehow meaningless and in its chaotic flux or stupor – as it slips in to take us higher in its magic, just so as to make a couple of dreams or more come real, and the book blurs the line between dreams and reality, and very gently and very easily and sometimes sharply and suddenly and yet so divinely and therefore naturally. It speaks about the power of different kinds of love, and also of easy and unconditional love which both demands nothing and demands more than one knows but one senses, and precisely because it becomes unconditional – the ‘why’ is a matter which never stops perplexing one. One keeps guessing about more things than I can write and till the last page and never really stops guessing but even that is part of the joy which fills one soul and the trusty friend in the mind seems to get even sprightlier while egging one on to laugh without feeling bad or sad and keeps saying, “See how a tale develops? That’s how one needs to weave a tale…”…and so one sees the tale yet again in little movie clips: the old, laughing and somewhat mysterious coachman who is a teller of tales and who stops speaking altogether, and his friends…, the old coachman who had another incomparable gift – of healing sparrows and making them fly again, the tale within tales of fables and myths and magic, and a couple of shared dreams that might just become real within the given space of now and the sand left in the hourglass...

I’m not sure sometimes about life and sometimes I get panic stricken while life keeps running at a maddening pace through the hour-glass and yet sometimes I am told to look at it from a distance and in its meaning and sense evoking moments which are sharp and clarified and it would seem then that one simply must play as well and hard and with whatever gifts and goofs that God and one’s creator and one’s pilot has armed one with and take some moments to be a human being and then walk with renewed faith that life connected is a mix of darkness, reality, light and winking magic and certainly a few mysterious miracles even though one knows one errr...is a crank and even a sinner but no saint – not by a long shot.