In a place where people knew only traditional medicine until the late 1950s, news of Dr. Thoms’s medical miracles reverberated through every grand palace, every house, every tent. Everywhere, people were talking about his operations—sewing up bellies, mending all sorts of fractures, and bringing the light back into eyes gone dark. The eye operation he performed on Imam Muhammad al-Khalili in Nizwa Town was a turning point: hearing of this success, people were newly ready to have faith in his modern medical miracles. The news revived their hopes of regaining the eyesight they’d lost to the excesses of ignorance and the lapses of neglect.
Bint Aamir undid her little cloth bundle. She unfolded the cloth with the crumpled brown rings whose color had faded, and extracted the silver anklet she had inherited from her mother and the gold earrings that Athurayyaa had given her one year when times were good. The cloth also enfolded the small Qur’an that she couldn’t read, but which she had entrusted to Salman when he was about to go on the hajj, so that it would garner the blessings of Mecca; a glossy photograph of the Kaaba; a picture of Buraq, the blessed mount of Muhammad, with the face of a beautiful woman and the body of a horse; and a camel-bone writing tablet that dated all the way back to her brother’s childhood, when he was a pupil at the village Qur’an school. The writing tablet was rescued from a fire in her father’s house. A neighbor sent it to her—the same neighbor who told her, when she was aged twenty, that her father had rejected a man who presented himself as a suitor for her hand. She undid a small knot at the other end of her cloth and took out ten qirsh coins—her silver Maria Theresa thalers, earned from embroidering the trims on the sleeves of women’s robes in the light of a kerosene flame in the evenings once Mansour had fallen asleep.
Her hand closed over five of the coins. She tied them back into the edge of her cloth and went to meet Bakhash, the owner of the Bedford truck that made the trip from Jaalaan to the Muscat region once a month, picking up people and goods along the way. Bakhash turned her down, saying his truck had filled up long before he reached her village and he still had a long road ahead, and many villages where he had to stop. But Bint Aamir wouldn’t budge. She stood there in front of the vehicle while Bakhash and his aide, the oddly named Walad al-Kazz—who was also called al-Ma‘yuni because that’s what he was, a Super Helper—were piling sacks of rice, water tanks, and cartons of various goods onto the truck bed, stuffing them into every conceivable empty space. When they began hoisting the canisters of benzene, Bint Aamir picked up one herself. Bakhash yelled at her. “That’s petrol, don’t touch it! There are no petrol stations on the way.” He snatched it from her. Near noon, when al-Ma‘yuni went to the governor to secure a letter of permission to take the Bedford into the nearby villages, Bint Aamir followed close behind. The soles of her slippers had worn thin but she did not feel the sting of the hot stones. She stood at the threshold of the governor’s residence until al-Ma‘yuni came out with the military escort assigned to accompany—and watch—him. The two of them walked off and she followed behind. Finally Walad al-Kazz turned to her and said, “It’s no use, you know. Bakhash isn’t going to take you.” She answered in a firm voice, “You take me.” He cackled, his mouth opening enough that she could see his rotting teeth. “I’m just hired help. I load the thing, I haul up goods, I get permissions and I write down everyone’s names, and I cook the meals. I make repairs, and I keep an eye on the tires.” She answered him without so much as a faint smile. “Then you will write down my name.” It annoyed him that even though she needed him, she didn’t even bother to be nice. She didn’t make any effort to feign astonishment at how many tasks he could do—why, he was the driver’s aide, a cook, a mechanic, and a clerk. He swore to her—he’d divorce his wife if it wasn’t true—that he could not convince Bakhash. That the list of people’s names accompanied by the reasons they were traveling and could go into Muttrah was already settled, and that any trip on a large truck was difficult and uncomfortable and might even be dangerous. The truck would already be very heavy, and if they became mired in swampy ground, they would lose a whole day trying to get it out; and if they ran out of fuel, they would be stuck; and any passenger who rebelled against the conditions they were traveling in would be left on the side of the road. And if the governor of that region was irritated in any way, he would not give them a license to enter the town. When they reached the truck he pointed out the number hung on its side, and the letter B beside it, and he completed his tirade by asking, “Do you know what this is? Can you solve the puzzle?. . . It’s a B for barra. Outside. The truck only has permission to stop outside Muscat. It can’t go beyond Derwazat al-Hatab, and in case you didn’t know, that’s the enormous gate that leads into Muttrah City. You don’t know, of course, that Sultan Sa‘id bin Taymur imposes licenses on every single vehicle. If we wanted to sell this Bedford’s license on the black market, we’d make more than the truck itself is worth. And then you come along and you think you can just put yourself in the middle of all these big important things, just because you want to get yourself to Muttrah or Muscat?” He was breathing hard, because of the heat but also because of the steady stare she was giving him. She undid the knot and pulled out the five silver coins.
“And I pay like anyone else does.”
A little before sunset, Bakhash and al-Ma‘yuni had finished loading and inspecting the truck, and the passengers who had been with them already were waiting to climb back in. The new passengers waited to have their names recorded. Bint Aamir stood at the back of the line. Walad al-Kazz whistled into her face in exasperation but he didn’t dare throw her out. “Reason for travel?” he asked her. “Medical treatment with Thomas,” she said firmly and clearly. She took her place in the truck next to a cage of live chickens that were to be slaughtered the next day for their midday meal.
Three days later, the Bedford arrived in Muttrah. It cleared the Gate of Tithes, where the taxes were imposed on all goods coming in or going out of the city. The truck joined others, coming from Sharjah, Dubai, and Fujayrah, all branded with the letter B to announce that they were not permitted beyond the Muttrah City boundary line. The list of passengers and their reasons for traveling here was dispatched, in order to procure permission to proceed. After that, the passengers were allowed to spread out to their respective destinations on condition that they meet exactly one week later in this exact spot in Derwazat al-Hatab.
The farmers hurried off to sell their harvest of dates and dried lemons to the big merchants, who would repack them for export to India. The shop owners sped to the Muttrah suq to buy stock for their shops back in the remote villages: rice, coffee, spices, crates of tinned pineapple, mint breath-freshener lozenges, brightly colored fabric, and beads. The young men hurried off on their heroic attempts to travel to Bahrain for employment, or to Iraq for studies. But first they had to obtain that rare precious jewel: a passport, known as the Sa‘idi passport because Sultan Sa‘id had to agree personally to its being issued. The men and women who had gotten places on the truck because they needed treatment hurried to the missionary hospital in Muttrah, which eventually, after a decade or so of existence, came to be called al-Rahma, the Mercy Hospital.
Dr. Wells Thoms treated around eighty patients every day. Among them, on this day, my grandmother stood, taller than most, erect in her thirty-nine years, waiting for her name to be called. They told her that first she would see the Khatun. She was ushered into a room where a blond woman in a white uniform stood. “Are you the Khatun?” my grandmother asked. The American woman smiled and said sweetly, “My name is Beth Thoms.” Her smile and her voice gave my grandmother a sense that the miracle must finally be near, for this was the famous doctor’s wife. Beth gave her a printed, loose-bound book which my grandmother took with both hands as though she were receiving a divine gift. She did not tell the blond lady that she could not read or write. Or that this book—which she later learned was the Gospels—was only the second book she had ever held in her life, the first having been the Qur’an. Once home, she would place it among her treasured belongings as a memento of her meeting with Thomas.
My grandmother met Dr. Thoms like a lowly mortal meeting a saint or a holy man or a revered miracle worker who had turned people’s dreams into reality. But it was a short appointment they had. This famous missionary doctor, who had performed the successful operation on the eye of the imam only a few years before, took only two minutes to examine my half-blind grandmother’s eye before he informed her that the harm caused by the herbal treatments of her childhood was irredeemable, and no light would ever shine from this eye again. The nurse made a motion to conduct her out, but she refused to go. The doctor felt for her. He gave her a card on which he wrote her name, his diagnosis, and his prescription for antiseptic eye drops.
When I was on the threshold of twenty, on the threshold of traveling, impatient to follow my path, on a buoyant tide of confidence in life and brimming with plans and desires; when my grandmother was dying, and I was collecting her clothes and her few, simple belongings, packing them before taking her to the hospital, I came upon this card, and I read the print on the back, a line from the biblical book of Proverbs. FEAR OF THE LORD IS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM.
A judge who had been among the passengers tried to delay their return trip. It seems he was still hoping against hope, despite the letter with its official seal that he had stuffed inside his clothing. But Bakhash and Walad al-Kazz would not hear of it; they held to the time they had set for the truck’s departure. And so the judge had to take his place meekly among the sacks of coffee and the tins of jelly sweets. Humiliated, he was making every effort not to meet anyone’s eyes, for these villagers were all witness to his disgrace, even if indirectly. The qirsh coins filling his cloth bag to the point where its seams were straining could not prevent his slide from grace. Those coins were lucre amassed through his many years as a judge working to further the interests of Sultan Sa‘id bin Taymur, including coins acquired from selling the many baskets of eggs and cages of chickens that those he had judged guilty dispatched to his home during the night, hoping he would give them light sentences. No, in spite of his bulging bag and the metallic thud of one coin against another, he had not managed to find a cure for his ailing eye. Thoms told him flatly that it could not be treated anywhere in the region of Muscat. If he were to travel to Bombay, on the other hand, he would find options for treatment there. It was possible to have an operation there that might save the eye. The judge was nonplussed. True, his long-practiced facility with the art of bribery meant he had a bag of money that could carry him to Bombay. But there was one problem. He needed a passport. To go to India, he needed permission from the sultan. The judge wrote a letter to the sultan, explaining his circumstances. He had all the money that might be necessary, his letter intimated. The only thing lacking was the passport—and the permission needed to secure it. The response came immediately, with bureaucratic efficiency and brevity, and with the signature of Sultan Sa‘id bin Taymur himself, along with his seal. The sultan was hardly blind to the judge’s ways. “No permission to travel granted. We are confident that one eye will be adequate to your needs until the moment of your death.”
On the return trip, al-Ma‘yuni’s throat opened in song. All the way home, they were nourished by dates and dried shark. They got out at the Muqayhafa well for a rest break shaded by a lotus tree, and he urged them to have a good, long drink. One of the women whispered to the other women that as she had napped, on the way, she saw her child in a dream, garlanded in jasmine. She had left the nursing infant at home. Bint Aamir’s good eye teared up. The dream told her that the newborn had died and was already buried in the ground.