A Story a Week
Ewan Lawrie
Copyright 2012 by Ewan Lawrie
1. Breaking the Curfew
'Dinardinardinardinardinardinar!'
Every stallholder in the Manama souk shouted it after Stu and I, our pale skins being a temptation too great to pass up. Every stallholder offered the same cat-in-a-bag, muezzin-alarm-clock tat, all at the no longer tempting price of 1 Dinar. It was a matter of pride to look them in the eye and shake our heads vigorously. Neither one of us would speak a word of Arabic to them. Contrary to what I used to think, it only made them worse. The biggest souk in Bahrain, naturally enough, was in the capital. You entered via a huge and eye-wateringly white marble gateway; Beib Al-Bahrain. The Bahrain Gate. The souk started at this end and it started with the tat. We had no interest at all in this end of the bazaar.
You could smell the next section long before you come upon it. We used to walk slower to savour this smell. The medicinal perfume of nutmeg, cinnamon's red apple tones, the liquorice tang of cardomom and anis, the sub-continental coriander and cumin and – permeating all of it – the king of spices, the treasure of the East India Company: black pepper. After what seemed like one hundred stalls the tat stopped abruptly, and the spices were piled high, waiting to be measured out into scales counter-balanced by shiny brass avoirdupois weights. It was around 7 o'clock in the evening. The foetid heat of the day was descending into the warm fug of early evening. We had broken curfew, of course. In twelve hours we would be rolling out for take off from Muharraq.
I spotted him first. Elbowing Stu in the ribs, I brought him up short, although I knew he liked him. We stopped, watched for a few minutes. The man haggled for every plastic bag full of spice. He must have bought a pound of every single powder, grain and seed on the stall, secreting each bag inside the large Air Force holdall at his feet. Every few minutes, he looked at his watch.
Eventually, he paid his bill. I doubt very much whether it came to more than a couple of dinar. He turned to head in our direction, back to the hotel, kitbag on his shoulders as though it was a particularly badly-designed rucksack. As he passed us, he tapped his wristwatch, I looked at mine and raised my eyebrows at him.
'Don't be late, Stu,' he said. He didn't even look at me.
I laughed at him, but he went on his way without a word.
Stu stopped at the same stall, but I tugged his sleeve,
'On the way back, come on!'
Stu looked doubtful,
'You really don't want to miss this, Stu.' I told him.
About 30 yards further on the fabric stalls began. Linens, broadcloths and, though you might not believe it, tweeds. Around 20 percent of the stall operators were Arabs; the rest were exclusively from the sub-continent: Goans, Bengalis, Gujaratis, Keralans, Tamils, Kashmiris, Punjabis, young men from Sindh, Quetta and Balochistan and even Sinhalese rubbed along in a rich cacophony of Hindi, Urdu and English with far more equanimity than had ever been achieved at home. These men's brothers and cousins worked away at treadle-powered Singers in the back streets behind the souk, tailoring clothes for expatriates and visiting military types like us. Stu and I forged on, nearly at our objective and hungry to reach it.
I had found the place after picking up some shirts from a back-street laundry. Munshi had already had the keys in his hand when I got there at about 7 o'clock about three years ago. It had been my very first trip to Bahrain, not long after the No Fly Zone was imposed over central Iraq. The polite young man who had accepted my dhobi a day earlier had been transformed into a sullen youth who stuffed my clean laundry into my RAF holdall.
'What's up?'
'Very late, very late!' He looked over my shoulder at the door.
'In a hurry, Munshi?'
Munshi was very dark. He came from Bangladesh, but he'd been at pains to tell me he was Sylheti. I'd nodded as if I knew what that meant and he'd laughed explaining that when he'd lived in Brick Lane everyone had called him a Paki anyway. We must have chatted for twenty minutes when I'd left my washing. And now?
'Yes, yes, very late!'
It was as though he thought poor English would get rid of me quicker. As if he was insulting me by using it. I shouldered my bag and left the laundry. It was easy enough to hide on the corner of the side-street. There was a fruit juice bar, mobbed by USN personnel, I was just another white face. Munshi headed for the souk. I followed. He reached the long snaking street of the souk at about the middle of the spice stalls. He turned right, head down, shoulders forward. He passed all the smells and exhortations from the spice merchants. He did wave at someone selling bolts of gaudy material as he passed, but he didn't stop to talk. I thought he'd been heading for the Gold souk, this was separated from the bazaar by quite a few blocks. In reality, it was no more than a large mall and several dozen streets dedicated to selling gold and precious stones. You could purchase a ruby by weight, choose a bale, mounting necklace and follow the salesman into the back-streets to catch him dropping it off at a goldsmith's in the back room of a shop with no window. But Munshi stopped short of that area, these streets were almost entirely the garment and drapery shops that the Bahrainis, the American Servicemen and Saudis from across the causeway used, ordering tailor-made clothes that were actually sewn by the same tailors as a souk cloth-seller would use.
Munshi stopped in front of one that I knew several of our officers had used.
He didn't go in. Instead he stopped at a narrow doorway beside the draper's. The door was open and a line of people were queueing up a staircase. I looked at the floor above the draper's. I'd not noticed anything above any of the ground floor businesses in the buildings in this part of town.
The windows were dirty, dim light crept through the glass. Lettering had peeled from the glass: Surma was written in English and there was some lettering which might have been Hindi, Urdu or Thai for all I knew. I stood behind Munshi in the queue. He turned and glared
'Late, see!'
'Let me pay,' I smiled, and he smiled back.
'Sure, why not.'
So I had.
Stu and I were on our way there now. We were late too, but we were happy to queue.
When we reached the top of the stairs, the formica tables were all full. Ours were the only white faces there. Two middle-aged men were in front of us. As soon as two spaces on a 6 seater table became free they took them. I waved at Munshi, who was in a far corner with five… friends, I supposed. He waved back and the group huddled over their food for a moment. They waved at a waiter. He collected two tubular chairs from a stack and came over to us. Giving us each a chair he waved us over to Munshi's corner.
'Sit, sit,' Munshi said.
'We couldn't possibly…' Stu started.
'We have too much, why not share?' An older man next to Munshi smiled as he said it.
'Besides,' Munshi added. 'You paid last time.'
And there was a great deal of food on the table. So we crammed another two around the stained formica. We ate. How we ate! Salmon kofta, turned quite pink by the fish's flesh;sardines in tomato sauce, perhaps rejected by John West but succulent and pungently oily; tilapiu with nostril-clearing-strength mint; tiny keski mach emboldened by at least a handful of green chilis, tomato tok with monkfish. There were mounds and mounds of brown rice: not the constipatory sludge vegetarian friends might foist on you; separate, dry grains full of the earthy flavour of the sub-continent. When it was gone, Munshi summoned the waiter, he spoke many more than 20 words, the last two being something like 'Gulab Jamun'
Within a scant quarter hour, two waiters arrived with arms full of dishes. There seemed to be two of everything. As the waiters placed the dishes and bowls on the table top, Munshi declaimed the contents of each,
in English and Sylheti,
'Baked Yoghurt, Mishti Dhoi!'
'Almond Candy, Badam Burfi!'
The procession of sweetmeats continued until at last one of the waiters squeezed the last two dishes onto the crowded table. This time he gave the Sylheti first,
'Gulab Jamun! Doughnuts!' He laughed, and so did we.
2 If This Is a Woman