Free The Caliph's House by Tahir Shah Page B

could.
    â€œGet a dog,” he said.
    â€œCan you send your team over this week?”
    The architect sighed as if I were asking an impossible favor. “The builders will come,” he said.
    â€œWhen?”
    â€œThey will come.”
    â€œBut
when
will they come?” I asked again, more forcefully than before.
    â€œWhen God wills it,” he said.
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    A WEEK LATER THERE was still no sign of the builders. I called the architect again and again, but his cellular phone was switched off. At the gallery, his secretary said he had gone to Paris and no one knew when he would be back.
    The problem of the rats got worse. It became so bad that they made a nest from our mattress, gnawed holes in my bookshelf, and chewed up my books. After that, they ate all the soap in the house. Rachana regarded them as a health hazard and ordered me to stop them before the children were bitten.
    I consulted Osman. He smiled broadly and gave me a double thumbs-up.
    â€œDon’t put poison,” I said.
    â€œNot poison, Monsieur Tahir.”
    â€œAnd don’t put traps!”
    â€œNo, Monsieur Tahir, no traps.”
    He sauntered off, returning that night with a sheet of cardboard and a tube of glue. The tube featured the adhesive’s many varied applications. There was a picture of a house, a car, a boat, a child’s toy and, below it, a small indistinct image of a rat.
    Osman squeezed a quantity of the glue onto the cardboard and positioned it inside one of the holes in the wall. He gave another thumbs-up and hurried off to pray. Next morning, to my great surprise, he took me to see the haul—three good-sized rats stuck spread-eagled on the cardboard.
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    DAYS CONTINUED TO PASS, and still Hamza refused me entry into the locked room at the far end of the courtyard garden. I had tried to pick the lock and had even attempted to prise the slatted shutters open. Hamza had no sympathy. He urged me to stop thinking about the room and to start the popular tradition of putting out platters of food again, for Qandisha. He repeated for the tenth time that the key was lost. I suggested bringing a locksmith.
    â€œHe is a bad man, that locksmith!” the guardian barked.
    â€œThere must be more than one locksmith in Casablanca.”
    Hamza screwed up his face. “They are all bad men,” he said. “They’ll make copies of all the keys and will come and rob us in the night.”
    â€œBut we have three men protecting the house,” I said.
    Again, the guardian cursed the locksmith and his profession.
    â€œNo locksmith can open that door,” he said.
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œBecause it is locked for a reason.”
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    MY FATHER NEVER SAID it, but I think he was ashamed of raising his children in a quiet English village. His own childhood had been spent in the Hindu Kush and rambling through the foothills of the Himalayas. His unconventional upbringing began early—he was born at the Indian hill station of Simla while his father was on an expedition hunting markhor. Always the trouper, his Scottish mother had agreed to tag along despite being eight months pregnant. When he eventually had children of his own, my father found that their school life was not something he could easily understand. We were, as he frequently reminded us, the first children in the family’s history ever to go to school. Every other generation had been tutored by an eclectic mix of poets, philosophers, mystics, and battle-hardened warriors. For my father, education had meant learning to ride and shoot gazelle at the same time by the age of nine, memorizing the works of Saadi, the Persian poet, by the age of twelve, and mastering championship chess. He scoffed when he heard that his only son was learning Latin, the long jump, and the flute.
    â€œWhen are you going to learn to hunt game?” he asked me