The Anthologies: Danger: 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Spanning a number of distinct genres – in both fiction and non-fiction work – the collections incorporate a wealth of unpublished material.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: 9781914960352

Book preview

For Ian McEwan

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

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First published by Secretum Mundi Publishing Ltd, 2019

THE ANTHOLOGIES: DANGER

© 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: 978-1-914960-35-2

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

Memoir of a Torture Jail

Keeping the Machiguenga Happy

All Swallowed Up

Rats Killing Cats

At the Gold Mines

Terror on the River

Jail Break

Down and Out in Paris

Bombs in Casablanca

The Treasure Map

Kill or Be Killed

Put Out Extra Chairs

Black Market Wood

In the Desert Jail

Land of the Testicle Hunters

On the Glacier

Steep Learning Curves

Rough with the Smooth

Torture Time

Palace Attack

Run for Your Life

Jungle Fear

Honneur et Fidélité

Introduction

I OFTEN THINK

of the medieval pope who hated cats more than anything else.

He gave an order for every last one to be hunted down and killed. This was done. Cat-lovers wept while, I assume, the Pope danced. In the weeks and months that followed, the lack of cats led to an immediate and startling rise in rats.

And the abundance of rats meant that fleas prospered like never before.

This in turn led to plague...

Black Death, which swept through Europe, killing millions... all because one powerful man loathed cats.

There is of course no way the Pope could have known that exterminating our feline friends might have brought society to the brink of annihilation.

But it did.

In the same way, removing danger from society, or at least reducing it as much as possible, has an effect.

I have noticed this with my own children, Ariane and Timur.

They have been raised with care and attention, in a way that every parent would wish for – which is of course good and right. After all, the last thing any one of us wants is to expose our children to potential harm.

My take on danger is this:

When someone has been protected from danger whenever possible, they don’t recognize its shadow. In the same way we must learn how to identify poisonous berries on a bush, we need to appreciate all forms of danger, and know how to recognize them.

This is something I frequently turn over in my mind.

One of the reasons I took Ariane and Timur to live in Casablanca when they were very small, was to expose them to a realm in which danger was an ever-present shadow.

In Europe I’d witnessed accidents and tribulations take place, all because endangerment had been eliminated lock, stock, and barrel. In my opinion, Occidental society is becoming weaker because it’s coddled and protected.

We live in a time preoccupied with safety – in which nothing is quite so important as eliminating danger.

And, what’s wrong with that?

Nothing at all.

Since the beginning of history our ancestors were preoccupied with survival. To survive they had to avoid being swallowed up by wild animals, poisoned, or slain in battle. For them, danger was a well-known abhorrence – one that was never more than an arm’s length away.

Peer into the lens a little deeper and it’s easy to consider danger differently.

One of the family, his siblings are risk, fear, mayhem, and disaster. None is particularly pleasant, but each one is vital in its own right.

My argument is that by lessening the circumstances in which danger arises, we create a situation in which a hazardous knock-on effect takes place. Change one element in the wider scheme of things, and dominoes begin to fall.

Once in a while during my travels I encounter someone who personifies an idea that’s gripped me for a good long while. Best of all is when I come across the same individual again and again – allowing me to draw wider conclusions.

During the ’nineties I was a frequent visitor to Istanbul. I was fascinated by the way the city was changing – affected as it was by the recent breakdown of the Soviet Union. All kinds of fantastical characters were washed up there at that time – including a great many Kazaks, Uzbeks, and Turkmen.

A chance encounter at a café introduced me to the life and ways of a man called ‘Sukhan’. A raw, sinewy brute, he hailed from the Turkmen capital, Ashgabat, and had been drawn to Istanbul by the prospect of a great future.

Sukhan and I met because he robbed me. Or, rather, he tried his level best to do so while I was scribbling notes in the winter sun. Lost in my own world, I felt a hand slipping into my jacket pocket with the dexterity of a viper slithering silently into a hole.

In an overly dramatic reaction, I snatched the thieving hand, holding it tighter than tight. Panning up from the knuckles, I found it led to an arm, the arm to a body, the body to a head, and the head to the most charming of faces, dominated by a Charlie Chaplin grin.

‘Do you have a cigarette lighter?’ the thief asked.

‘No, I don’t smoke.’

‘OK.’

‘You were trying to rob me!’ I declared heatedly.

‘Cigarette lighter. I was searching for cigarette lighter.’

‘Well, you could have asked me rather than go through my pockets!’

‘You were writing in book. Didn’t want to disturb.’

Narrowing my eyes, I regarded the thief with hatred.

‘I am Sukhan!’ he cried out, as though the name excused his sins.

The next thing I knew, we were sitting together, drinking apple tea, and talking about life. Sukhan revealed how he had come to Istanbul to become a fight club champion in the anything-goes bouts held each night in the Gülsuyu Quarter.

‘I like fighting,’ he said, the words followed by his signature Charlie Chaplin grin. ‘Fighting is good!’

‘Do you get injured?’

Sukhan cackled at the question.

‘Yes! It’s good. Getting injured is good.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes!’

‘Why?’

‘Because getting injured makes muscles grow.’

Having paid my bill, I checked my wallet and my wristwatch, and bade Sukhan the bare-knuckle fighter farewell.

‘We will be friends forever,’ he said with certainty, as I turned to leave.

I doubted it, but it was a prophecy that seems to have come true.

Over a period of seven or eight years, we would meet at the same table, in the same café, whenever I was in town. I would tell Sukhan about my travels, and he would show off his scars. I was no expert in fight club tactics or rules, but it struck me as though my friend from Ashgabat was getting injured a great deal.

On one occasion he showed off a torn ear. The next he had railway track stitches down his right cheek. Another time, his ribs were bandaged and, at yet another meeting, he grinned with delight at having sustained a broken ankle.

‘Why don’t you stop this madness and get a job?’ I begged one late spring afternoon.

‘Because I like fighting!’ Sukhan grinned. ‘Fighting makes me happy.’

‘But how?!’

The Turkmen from Ashgabat ran a fingertip down the train track stitches on his face.

‘Because life with danger is good life!’ he said.

Tahir Shah

Memoir of a Torture Jail

I SCANNED THE

room.

It was arranged for torture.

There was a rack for breaking feet, a bar for hanging a man upside down, rows of manacles, straps and batons, and pliers for extracting teeth.

There were syringes with used needles, smelling salts, a medical drip, electrocution equipment, and dried blood strewn over the