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40 Days and 1001 Nights Carrying her sleeping bag and mini camera, along with a note book, Dallal reached out to obscure lands all by herself, stuck it out through the rough and tough of camp life and came back with fascinating tales of customs and ways of life of some societies about which few regular world travellers or tourists have ever cared to find out about and much less write about. Though most of the exotic places she visited would be any genuine world traveller’s dream it has to be, however, said that after 9/11 the craze to write about the Muslim world and any other facet connected with it seems to definitely spur books of this kind as they sell well in the West, and that the one thing that seemed to be somewhat forcibly juxtaposed into the account are a few of the belly dancing sessions with the locals, without which her travels themselves would have made for a very compulsive read. Her first port of call is the tsunami-ravaged Banda Aceh in Indonesia where an entire line of villages on the coastline had vanished from the map. Resupply of fresh drinking water, remapping of whatever land has been spared by the waves and a spot of dry land or a mosque, where the faithful can gather to pray, are only a few of the problems that NGOs and the Red Cross have to face. The misery that unbridled forces of nature can rain is unimaginable: “Sharifa was 38 years old. She had had four children, one of whom died before the tsunami; the other three died during the tsunami, as did the husband”. In another corner of the world in the dusty oasis of Siwa in Egypt, she pedals her bike to the ruins of the Oracle of Amun, where she saw two rooms “where the priests of Alexander the Great’s day relayed messages that Gods wanted to send to earth”. Closer to present times, Dallal also learns that Siwa had a long history of homosexual relations and homosexual marriages which were legal until King Fouad banned them in 1928. They however continued secretly until the 1950s, and were accepted because the custom helped enforce the protection of women and keep the youth isolated. In Zanzibar, a beautiful island off Tanzania in the Indian Ocean, Dallal walks through the sites of the slave markets of yore, where the leaves of the clove tree tasted tangy and appetising enough to munch, and where “outdoor vendors sold fish kebabs, seafood, chunks of octopus and squid, boiled bananas, and grilled breadfruit”. Famous somehow for having all the cats of the world harboured on one small island and the infamous ‘papasi’ or the beach boys who make a living selling drugs, Dallal experienced the “sultry and melancholic music” of a people who had once suffered from “slavery, revolution by mass killing, poverty, disease” and now “young men’s futures dimmed by heroin addiction”. In the suburbs of Amman in Jordan, Dallal discovers the two passions that most of the locals have, i.e., reading the grounds in a Turkish coffee cup and the accuracy one can master in the prediction once the art has been mastered, and then following the age-old traditions of the Bedouins, where even the poorest offers hospitality and a warm welcome to a needy stranger at his homestead. She explains, “This attitude comes from the days when Bedouins travelled the deserts under the harshest circumstances. The only way to survive was to be given food and a place to stay by strangers, even if they were of an enemy tribe”. She also provides an insight into the fleeting relationships that fellow globetrotters have with each other these days in remote corners of the world and how some other meetings can be far more durable. Like perfect strangers, one has run into and “sharing many details of (their) lives, problems back home, and hopes and dreams. Then, when it comes time to leave, we rarely stay in contact. If one meets a local or a settled expat while travelling, the probability of maintaining the relationship is much higher”. How true! But by far the most expressive and captivating account that the book carries, Dallal reserves for the very end when she takes us to the rugged and desultory land of the Muslim Uyghurs high up in the Xinjiang province, which in Mandarin means the ‘new frontier’. On the Karakoram highway, “the highest paved international road in the world”, and across the windy Kunjerab pass, Dallal travels in any mode of transportation that she can lay her hands on, a broken down car or a station wagon driven round hairpin bends by grumpy and rude drivers to boot. She describes what she saw: “We rode past snowy mountains in the distance and dry brown desert mountains that were closer. We saw swampland, yaks, two-humped camels, and lots of sheep, goats and cattle”. At the Kizilu Kyrgiz Autonomous Prefecture, where at a check-post their passports were checked, Dallal turns humorous when she writes, “A family of yaks crossed the wrong way (without passports?) and got kicked by a border-patrol officer”. It is evident that the Uyghurs have a lust for life and “epitomise self-expression”, and a fierce pride in their distinctive way of life which they protect even today from the inroads that the migrant majority Han Chinese always keep attempting. People who travel to remote corners of the world and then write about it are the true historians of any age or civilisation. Dallal writes with ease and as she crosses the frontiers of land as easily as that of the mind, she succeeds admirably in making 40 Days a fascinating reading experience.
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THOUGH it would take much more than what the Arabic proverb says about having to live 40 days with a people you really wish to understand, the belly dancer Tamalyn Dallal’s book narrating her experience with segments of the Islamic world spread over vast corners indicates that she not only spent her time wisely when she journeyed to unknown destinations but also enjoyed every one moment of it.