A Hundred and One Days: A Baghdad Journal Read Free

the table. We eat with our fingers, dipping the bread in the dishes.
     
    The conversation is stilted. It is difficult to talk with Ali. Or maybe he finds it difficult to talk with us.
     
    There is plenty of room in the restaurant. A nearby family wolfs down starters and fish at a furious rate. In a corner two men loll about, replete. A group of big guys in leather jackets, each carrying a walkie-talkie, throw themselves like hungry bears over their meal. Mobile phones don’t exist, satellite telephones are forbidden, but collaborators, the important ones, are evidently furnished with walkie-talkies.
     
    I go out to watch the cook. He pours oil and marinade over the fish, chops some chillies and grills some more. Ali follows me, to make sure I’m behaving.
     
    The feeling of anticipation stays with me all day. It is like being poised at the start of a maze; the answer is hidden and there is a mess of routes to choose from.
     
    No one can reach me, the mobile phone won’t work, no one knows me. Chores not done before departure will remain undone, post will remain unopened, messages will remain unanswered. The restlessness from home lets go its grip.
     
     
    Back in room 707, according to the receptionist the best he has, I unpack my hoard of books and lay them out on the ochre bedspread. Like a serene island between the bathroom, where the cockroaches scurry over the broken tiles, and the evening rush-hour outside, my bed occupies the major part of the room. The noise is even shriller than in the morning. But I don’t close the door to the balcony. I want the curtains to flap in the desert wind.
     
    My eyes alight upon Arabian Diary and I am sent whirling into Gertrude Bell’s fantastic world. Early in the last century she travelled alone with smugglers and bandits in the desert right outside my window. She was called the mightiest woman in the British Empire and was the adviser to kings and prime ministers. Gertrude Bell was the only woman Winston Churchill invited to the Cairo Conference in 1921 - the conference that was to decide the future of Mesopotamia. She was also one of the few among Middle Eastern travellers who described the life of women.
     
    There they were, those women - wrapped in Indian brocades, hung with jewels, served by slaves, and there was not one single thing about them which betrayed the base of existence of Europe or Europeans - except me! I was the blot. Some of the women of the shaikhly house were very beautiful. They pass from hand to hand - the victor takes them, with her power and the glory, and think of it, his hands are red with blood of their husbands and children , she writes from the Hayyil Harem on 6 March 1914. The eunuch Said has just informed her that she is a prisoner and cannot leave. She is allocated a tiny house in the harem where she waits before being released. I sat in a garden house on carpets - like all the drawings in Persian picture books. Slaves and eunuchs served us with tea and coffee and fruits. Then we walked about the garden, the boys carefully telling me the names of all the trees. And then we sat again and drank more tea and coffee. It gets on your nerves when you sit day after day between high mud walls and thank heaven that my nerves are not very responsive. They have kept me awake only one night out of seven.
     
    After a long wait she is at last set free, by order of the emir. My camels came in, and after dark Said with a bag of gold and full permission to go where I liked and when I liked. Why they have now given way, or why they did not give way before, I cannot guess. But anyhow, I am free and my heart is at rest - it is widened.
     
    Someone knocks on the door. Said, the eunuch with tea and exotic fruits?
     
    A man stands outside with a yellow towel in his hand. He says something in Arabic and passes me the towel. Then he walks past me into the room. I follow. He shows me where the soap is, what the toothbrush mug is for, how the drawers are pulled