The Anthologies: East: The Anthologies

By Tahir Shah

During a career of thirty years, Tahir Shah has published dozens of books on travel, exploration, topography, and research, as well as a large body of fiction.

Through this extraordinary series of Anthologies, selections from the corpus are arranged by theme, allowing the reader to follow certain threads that are of profound interest to Shah.

Spanning a number of distinct genres – in both fiction and non-fiction work – the collections incorporate a wealth of unpublished material. Prefaced by an original introduction, each Anthology provides a lens into a realm that has shaped Shah's own outlook as a bestselling author.

Regarded as one of the most prolific and original writers working today, Tahir Shah has a worldwide following. Published in hundreds of editions, and in more than thirty languages, his books turn the world back to front and inside out. Seeking to make sense of the hidden underbelly, he illuminates facets of life most writers hardly even realize exist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Secretum Mundi Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jun 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781914960369

Book preview

For my friend Jamie Tinklepaugh –

The most inspired and inspiring traveller I have had the good fortune to know.

If there’s anyone out there who can say with certainty that they have ‘been East’,

it’s Jamie.

The Anthologies:

Africa

Ceremony

Childhood

City

Danger

East

Expedition

Frontier

Hinterland

India

Jungle

Morocco

People

Quest

South

Taboo

By Tahir Shah:

Travel

Trail of Feathers

Travels With Myself

Beyond the Devil’s Teeth

In Search of King Solomon’s Mines

House of the Tiger King

In Arabian Nights

The Caliph’s House

Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Journey Through Namibia

Novels

Jinn Hunter: Book One – The Prism

Jinn Hunter: Book Two – The Jinnslayer

Jinn Hunter: Book Three – The Perplexity

Hannibal Fogg and the Supreme Secret of Man

Hannibal Fogg and the Codex Cartographica

Casablanca Blues

Eye Spy

Godman

Paris Syndrome

Timbuctoo

Midas

Zigzagzone

Nasrudin

Travels With Nasrudin

The Misadventures of the Mystifying Nasrudin

The Peregrinations of the Perplexing Nasrudin

The Voyages and Vicissitudes of Nasrudin

Nasrudin in the Land of Fools

Stories

The Arabian Nights Adventures

Scorpion Soup

Tales Told to a Melon

The Afghan Notebook

The Caravanserai Stories

Ghoul Brothers

Hourglass

Imaginist

Jinn’s Treasure

Jinnlore

Mellified Man

Skeleton Island

Wellspring

When the Sun Forgot to Rise

Outrunning the Reaper

The Cap of Invisibility

On Backgammon Time

The Wondrous Seed

The Paradise Tree

Mouse House

The Hoopoe’s Flight

The Old Wind

A Treasury of Tales

Daydreams of an Octopus & Other Stories

Miscellaneous

The Reason to Write

Zigzag Think

Being Myself

Research

Cultural Research

The Middle East Bedside Book

Three Essays

Anthologies

The Anthologies

The Clockmaker’s Box

The Tahir Shah Fiction Reader

The Tahir Shah Travel Reader

Edited by

Congress With a Crocodile

A Son of a Son, Volume I

A Son of a Son, Volume II

Screenplays

Casablanca Blues: The Screenplay

Timbuctoo: The Screenplay

Secretum Mundi Publishing Ltd

Kemp House

City Road

London

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First published by Secretum Mundi Publishing Ltd, 2019

THE ANTHOLOGIES: EAST

© TAHIR SHAH

Tahir Shah asserts the right to be identified as the Author of the Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Visit the author’s website at: www.tahirshah.com

ISBN: 978-1-914960-36-9

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Contents

Introduction

Bukhara, 2007

Where Widows Go to Die

The Myth of Miki Suzuki

Training It to Tibet

The Lost Hoard of Kublai Khan

The Clockmaker’s Bride

At Hotel Paradise

The Greatest Show on Earth

Hunting Kashikoi-bakka

The Bombay Blues

An Arab Miscellany

The City of Light

Little Lhasa

The Unicorn’s Tear

In Cambodia’s New Killing Fields

Learning the Hard Way

The World Has Forgotten Us

Running Amok

Queen of Assamese Hearts

A Problem with Secrets

Introduction

HAVE YOU EVER

reflected on how something can mean totally different things to different people?

I have.

It’s something I dwell on a lot of the time, turning over in my mind how a certain person will grasp hold of a definition which, to me, seems utterly misguided and wrong. Of course, there’s every possibility that someone else is right and that it’s me who’s wrong. But the way I see it, one of the great joys of life is experiencing something that changes your definitions, prejudices, and perceptions.

All of this comes into play, as I sit here at my desk, reflecting on the word ‘East’. It’s arbitrary of course, because there’s no such thing as East or West, North or South, up or down. It’s a label meted out centuries ago by crusty old colonials in Europe to delineate a region fit for plunder.

For me, the word ‘East’ is loaded with connotation, a word representing two distinct streams of emotion and thought.

My father was half Afghan and half Scottish, and my mother was half Parsi Indian and half English. Throughout my childhood we were based in England, although we frequently travelled to Morocco and Europe. Never once did we go to the ‘East’ – east of Europe, that is.

In place of actual travels, my father would fill the void with a dream-like extravaganza of information – most of it presented as stories. We learnt of the East in a way that had little bearing on the actual place, but in a way that fulfilled my father’s own needs.

As far as he was concerned, his children had to know where they had come from as per the Oriental method – not through an A to Z appreciation, but rather in fits and bursts, layer upon layer, in a way that seemed dangerously random.

The result was that I imagined I knew the East long before my feet ever reached it. I knew how it smelled and sounded, what the people were like, how the sun felt on my skin, how the mountain ranges looked in winter, and all the rest. My interpretation was of course a fragmentary and bizarre fabrication of what actually existed.

Rather like a child who’d never seen a magnificent ocean liner, but had it described to them, I’d built up a picture laid detail upon detail – through sight, smell, taste, touch – but most of all through the words of stories.

So, when I finally arrived in the so-called ‘East’, it was a considerable shock.

The version of Eastern reality presented to me through a prolonged childhood was certainly a skewed representation of reality. As I soon found for myself, the genuine article is far more glorious than something understood by observing reflections.

Since my teens I’ve crisscrossed landscapes that my father regarded as the ‘Oriental’. He tended to use the word in the widest possible fashion, infusing it with an ancient methodology and knowhow.

The extraordinary thing about having known the East in an inside out and upside down kind of way – before I knew it in reality – was that I found myself perceiving patterns invisible to those not primed the way I had been.

Through the alchemy of my childhood, I was prepared to pick out threads of culture and behaviour, beauty, emotion, and horror, invisible to others from the Occident.

A life of travel has taught me not to presume to be an expert, but rather to be a consummate admirer. Seeing visitors from the throes of Europe or elsewhere traipsing through Eastern lands, railing with rage at what they regard as shortcomings, saddens me. I’m terribly impatient with impatient people. I can’t bear moaners and groaners. Instead, I delight in those who can see magic levels that everyone else has missed. The Oriental realm is awash with layers and details galore.

Four years ago, I visited Myanmar with Ariane and Timur. I was delighted to have been granted a visa as, only a year before that, I’d been firmly refused.

One morning we visited a particular shrine at Bagan. Through its long history, pilgrims had visited it in the hope of having their prayers ­answered. On the day we arrived, it was inundated with tourists from Russia. Hundreds and hundreds of them, they’d turned up in a huge group. Posing for selfies, they didn’t appear to be taking in the awe-inspiring beauty of the place.

Fortunately, they surged away as quickly as they’d come, leaving us alone at the shrine. When they were gone, we spent time in silence taking in the layers of life and history.

As I paced around the shrine, my attention was drawn to a certain marble stone on which a handprint had been sculpted in counter-relief. Observing it, I marvelled at the genius of the artist who’d created such a lovely thing. It was so subtle one hardly realized it was there.

Ariane found me caressing the stone with my own hand.

She pointed out that it wasn’t sculpted but rather it had been created over centuries. Every time a pilgrim passed that spot, they would touch the stone to steady themselves, as the ground beneath it was uneven.

‘If the ground was flat that stone wouldn’t have ever been touched,’ Ariane said.

‘Thank God the ground is uneven,’ I replied. ‘And that the builders of the shrine were too lazy to chip away at that chunk of rock at ankle-height.’

Ariane slipped me a sideways smile.

‘What if the builders left the rock down here on the ground,’ she replied, ‘knowing that over centuries people would have to touch the stone as they passed?’

‘That’s forward thinking.’

‘It’s more than that,’ Ariane said. ‘It’s thinking inside out.’

Tahir Shah

Bukhara, 2007

ALMOST A YEAR

after my visit to the green man of Notting Hill, I arrived in Uzbekistan.

In the preceding months I’d read all I could find on the connections between Nasrudin and the former Soviet Republics. Eventually, I’d discovered the life of Leonid Solovyov, the Russian author whose novel, The Tale of Hodja Nasreddin, formed the basis for the film I’d watched in the private screen room the year before.

Born in 1906, Solovyov’s adolescence was played out against a backdrop of turmoil, as the Revolution’s anarchy gave way to purges, and the road to war.

As a young man, Solovyov had been immersed in the folklore of Soviet Central Asia – which had got into his blood in a way I fully understood. Recognizing the precariousness of the time in which he lived, it seems as though he grasped hold of Nasrudin, as a way of effecting change from the outside in.

Three years after the triumphant release of the film based on his book, Solovyov was arrested and charged for conspiring to wage terror against the Soviet State. Along with so many other writers of his generation, he was charged and imprisoned. During his confinement in a gulag at Dubravlag, he completed the second part of his Tale of Hodja Nasreddin. In 1954, eight years after his arrest, Leonid Solovyov was released without explanation or charge.

And so it was that I arrived in Bukhara on a chill spring morning, overwhelmed with the same sense of wonder that has wowed wayfarers for centuries. As I see it, no one can claim to be a traveller until they’ve set eyes on Uzbekistan.

My father always asserted that Nasrudin was Afghan. Indeed, a great many Afghans I’ve met claim the wise fool, too. However, from the moment I arrived in Bukhara, and stood at the foot of its colossal fifth-century fortress, I felt as though I had at last arrived in the Land of Nasrudin.

Perhaps I shall come to my adventures in Uzbekistan later, but for now there’s an encounter that’s coaxing me to record it here.

Ever since it took place, it’s hung in my subconscious. Observed from every angle, I’ve dissected it a thousand times, drawing parallels and conclusions with my own life.

The event took place in a small town on the road from Bukhara to Samarkand.

My translator and guide was an enthusiastic man with no neck and overly muscular hands called Abdullo. With the perfect physique for a nightclub bouncer, he’d been a champion wrestler in his day. It was no surprise when he told me he had been selected for the 2004 Olympics. Alas, though, injured a week before the competition, he’d been forced to withdraw.

Abdullo had a great deal to say about the history of his country, or at least elements of its history connected to his obsession with wrestling. I didn’t bring up the subject of Nasrudin until the second day of our journey.

‘He was a wrestler,’ Abdullo revealed sternly, as the vehicle trundled north-east on the road that eventually led to Samarkand.

‘Was he?’

‘Oh yes, everyone knows it.’

‘Was he any good?’

Abdullo grinned.

‘A champion, even though he was terrified.’

‘How did he overcome his fear?’

‘He used to put strong industrial glue on his fingers and jab them up the opponent’s nostrils.’

‘Did the move help him win?’

‘Yes and no.’

‘Huh?’

Abdullo winked.

‘His challengers used to pass out from the smell, but Nasrudin couldn’t ever receive the trophies because his fingers were still glued up the opponent’s nose!’

Although I liked Abdullo, I feared that by the time we reached Samarkand I might be super-saturated in wrestling talk.

Late on the morning of the second day, he phoned a cousin who lived in a small town just north of where we were driving. I listened as Abdullo erupted in joy at hearing news of the family. One by one he asked after every relative, only moving to the next when sufficient information had been received on the last.

Suddenly, the wrestler-guide’s voice seemed to crack with sorrow. His face flushed beetroot-red, he ended the call abruptly.

‘Everything OK?’ I asked.

A single tear welled in Abdullo’s right eye and tumbled down his cheek.

‘Yes. OK,’ he said tautly.

‘Really OK?’

A tear welled in the other eye and began the journey south to Abdullo’s chin.

‘Family,’ he