Ясмин Азад – Останься, дочь / Stay, Daughter (страница 4)

At the time, there was a Dutch law that restricted Muslims – whom the colonizers called Moors – to their own enclaves in the country, but in 1774, Raheema Umma was allowed to move to the safety of the Fort with its army barracks and impregnable walls.

Not everyone in the Fort was willing to accept that it was someone in Uncle Zain’s family who had been the first to move there – such distinctions were only grudgingly conceded. But when challenged, Uncle Zain whipped out the evidence: Dutch Governor Willem Jacob Van der Graff’s census of 1789 did have an entry for a Moor widow with seven daughters living in the Fort; and the name of the widow was recorded as Raheema Umma.

When this great-grandmother, several times removed, first settled into a house on Church Cross Street, she lived, a lone Muslim, among Christian Burghers – the middle-class traders from Holland whom the Dutch had encouraged to migrate to their Asian colonies. After the British repealed, in 1832, the law that restricted the rights of the Moors to live where they wanted, more of them migrated into the Galle Fort. Traders by profession, they appreciated the advantages of living near what was then the country’s principal harbor. Eventually, a large community of Muslims came to live inside this fortress, among the descendants of the white-skinned people who had colonized Ceylon. We called them Parangis, from the Arabic Ferengi for Frankish crusaders.

“Grandfather Rohani Cassim spent so much time with the Parangis,” Kaneema Marmee told me, “people began to talk.”

Kaneema Marmee was the oldest of a group of relatives who regularly got together to chat over afternoon tea. The daughter of my mother’s paternal aunt, Thalha, she was Umma’s first cousin. Nearly every day, they gathered at our house on Lighthouse Street in the Galle Fort, to sit by our spacious courtyard and be cooled by the gentle sea breeze. The savory pastries and sweet confections our cook laid out, made it even more of a favorite venue.

“What were they saying about your grandfather?” I asked Kaneema Marmee. Someone had lain themselves open to almost the very worst thing that could happen to a person – have people talk about them. Someone in my own family, no less. Had this person not cared? I felt a thrilling shudder just considering the possibility of such boldness.

“They complained that he was spending too much time with the Marshazi.”

The Marshazi were ‘others’—maru in Tamil, meaning different and shazi meaning group, or type. The Parangis who were Christian naturally fell into that group. They were people unlike us – infidels from whom, the Ulemas warned, we were to stay away.

“Didn’t other people do that?” I searched my aunt’s face as she took a bite from a crisp pastry.

“Not the way he did.”

Great-grandfather Rohani Cassim, I learned, was not like most other Muslim men of his time who worked as local tradesmen dealing in gems, hardware and cloth. He was a ship chandler who sold coal, oil, rope and other supplies to the foreign vessels that berthed in Galle. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when he began his business, this harbor in the south of the island was a port of call for hundreds of steamers, mail boats, and military vessels. Travelers from all over the world disembarked from visiting ships, and with a regularity its residents came to expect, the narrow streets of the Fort teemed with Europeans in white morning dress. Many of them, directly or indirectly, were Rohani Cassim’s customers.

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