The Tree of Wishes

A long time ago, in the dim and distant past, 1984, while I was very near pushing up daisies, my mum went off to the Chisti tomb and tied a thread to the marble window, like many other pilgrims, to beg for my life. Well, as you can see it worked and since then, this idea of asking for a wish to be granted from a saint has been resonating with me for obvious reasons. So when I read in the book I got as a Christmas gift, called "The Blue Manuscript" by Sabiha Al Khemir, that there was a tree of wishes, where people would tie a ribbon torn off from their clothes when asking for a wish. This tree of wishes was on top of a saint’s tomb. When the ribbon springs free and flies off with the wind, then the supplicant would know that his/her wish has been granted.

Coming from India and being a Sufi myself, that spoke to me, very loudly even. But I am jumping ahead, let's get back to the book.. There are two separate stories that are linked together through a blue manuscript, written and illustrated by the Court Calligrapher, ironically called Ibn Warraq, to the court of the Fatimid Caliph al Muizz in Egypt. He dreams and thinks about how best to write his masterpiece. He looks up into the sky and prays and begs for divine guidance and at the end, he feels that God speaks to him in his heart and guides his pen and he sees what the manuscript should look like in a vision.The manuscript is a copy of the Quran commissioned for the Caliph’s mother, in two volumes. It is the calligraphers crowning glory, his best and last work. He lavishly writes it in letters of gold, using a feather pen on vellum dyed with Lapis Lazuli brought all the way from Afghanistan. He becomes one with the letters, having taken a vow of silence for 6 years, during which he slaves over the creation of this masterpiece.  One volume is buried with the mother of the Caliph and the other volume is to be buried with him, as a reward for his excellence and ultimately is lost.

The first volume is found sometime in the 20th century and the dealer divides it and sells individual pages of it for the horrendous sum £100,000 per page, thereby putting a very high value on whoever can find the undamaged second volume.

Some dealers get together and fund an academic international archaeological dig in a tiny village near Cairo in Lower Egypt to find this second manuscript. Some scholars join the dig for other purposes, related to exquisite rare Fatimid pottery and other reasons that I do not want to divulge, so as not to give away the plot. The second story is primarily of this dig, the archaeologists and their interaction with the villagers, with some flashbacks to the first story at the time of the Fatimid Caliph, which details the work of the calligrapher, the Caliph's mother interwoven with some history.

In the village there is  a blind mysterious man who remains in the shadow of the book, emerging once in a while to tell a story to the Tree of Wishes, because the villagers have long ago ceased to listen to him. His stories are lovely, like stories out of the 1001 Nights. He speaks to the tree and the tree is listening. I loved that imagery.

Do you remember the story behind the shrieking tree? The idea that you go and embrace a tree and then shriek out your sorrows and pains into its rough gnarled bark and trunk. The tree absorbs your pains and leaves you limp, but happier an d relieved. I envisioned the Tree of Wishes to have a trunk like this one below, a big thick solid tree which has been on this earth for centuries, burrowing deep into mother earth, having seen hundreds of thousands or even millions of pilgrims move underneath its leaves, going on tiptoe to tie a ribbon, sometimes touching the bark and wishing from their hearts.

So this tree of wishes reminded me of a tree that I had seen in Sanchi with prayer flags. Here is a picture that I took then and it is the same concept like the one in the book.

But this is far too much like India. Here are two pictures which sort of show the dusty rather barren nature of the area.

The dry dusty stony land, almost exactly like the area where the excavation is being held. Instead  of Saqqara, imagine an earthen mound with a small shrine on top.

Ignore the fat bloke in the middle (damn fella keeps on popping up in the strangest of places), but imagine another view of a rather barren stony, sandy land, interspersed with isolated hardy trees, in the middle of a very poor village and then you are there, where the story is set.

The author describes the heat, the relationships between the villagers and the scientific team, the bureaucracy, the permits to dig, and even the cook and his apprentice, the bumpy dusty ride daily to and from from their camp in the half finished school to the dig. She also talks about onions, about mangy dogs, the dishdiba, smoking, the oligeneous eyes of the Egyptians, the religious element, the slow going nature of the village combined with blind unreasoning violent action.

The tree of wishes is planted on the mound  with the grave of a woman. As the blind story teller tells it, a man accompanied by his heavily pregnant wife were travelling the desert in this location many many moons ago. The wife then suddenly goes into labour and the man finds a small cave in which she gives birth to his son ,but dies in childbirth shortly after. Knowing that his son will also die, as there is no way of feeding him till he reaches the next civilised outpost, he puts the baby at his dead wife’s right breast, and with a heavy heart walls up the cave to protect them from the animals and leaves weeping bitterly. Several years later, he happens to return to the area with a caravan and notices with great surprise that the wall he had built has been broken open and the ground was covered with the footprints of a child. He finds his son and the dried desiccated body of his wife. Th eamazing thing however is that her right breast is still weeping breast milk. He rescues his son and gives his wife a proper burial. This becomes the shrine, for the miracle provides the saint and since then, people have been coming to the grave of the mother and asking for wishes to be fulfilled, wombs to be quickened, marriages to be held and so on and so forth.

The author treats each character with their national characteristics, the difficult to understand Irishman, the inscrutable Japanese, the reserved Englishman, the exuberant Italian, the secretive but open Egyptian, the confused mixed race British Tunisian translator, the organised German, the natives and so on and so forth. She writes very well. You can almost taste the dust,  feel the oily roll of the riverside waves,  hear the biting insects flit about in the dark heavy almost oppressing hot night under the mosquito nets, feel the thud of the pickaxe in the archaeological trenches and the susurration of the sieves which are checking the dust and mud for any piece of archaeological value.

But while the above bits spoke to me, I found some of the passages of writing too abrupt, almost like staccato. To me it felt wrong. This is Egypt she is writing about and there nothing happens abruptly. Everything takes its time, there, where millennia have passed slowly and gently like the flow of the Nile.

In some of the passages her writing is also very dark, and there is no brightness to it. I like some of the nobility of the spirit to show, like for example in The Sunbird by Wilbur Smith. That showed nobility of spirit, despite the protagonist being a hunchback. He had a soaring vision and ideas. This book also had a similar soaring vision, but instead of going up in the sky as a glorious huge condor or a giant eagle, it became like a furtive magpie, skittering around in the shadows.

I was also bit disappointed at the rather limited historical information provided. She talks a bit about the Caliph’s court, some very basic archaeological techniques, some bits about pottery but nothing much there. It was like layman historical writing about. If you are writing historical fiction, I would have liked to have felt that you have more command over that period and more details to make the experience of the flight of fantasy deeper. I dwhidn't get that feeling. Finalile ly, not giving away the end, but I found it to be a very limp ending. Here I was hoping that the end would be akin to flying Pegasus to the skies and instead I ended up with being savaged by a dyspeptic sheep.

I was a bit disappointed and not very impressed, but I suppose it's alright. To her credit I have to say that she handles language very well. SHe definitely has a flair for using words and she describes the translator's work with a passion. To the translator in the book, words are alive and build bridges or walls, and change with the development of the plot, but I don't want to give away too much. Wait for the next essay where I review another book which is a bit similar but boy-oh-boy did that one knock my socks off....

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!