Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family

One afternoon Ni’mati returned to the Chalabi house troubled by a story he had heard from a merchant friend he had visited in Kazimiya’s main bazaar, Soug Istrabadi. The merchant’s neighbour had lost her temper one morning when she couldn’t find even a scrap of bread in the house with which to feed her children. She had grabbed her abaya and marched down to the cafés by the square. There, her husband, a carpenter by trade, was sitting idle (as had been his habit for months), complaining to his friends about his lack of work and money because of the war, as he whiled away the hours playing tawli, backgammon, and smoking his nargilleh.

Undeterred by the decree that the cafés were a male-only domain, the carpenter’s wife stormed over to him and harangued him about his attitude in the loudest voice she could muster. She had sold the last of her few gold bangles so that she could feed the children, she shouted, and her fingers were worn out from all the sewing jobs she took on to keep the house going while he sat about in the square, drinking tea.

Her husband, shocked and humiliated, turned a strange shade of aubergine. The men sitting nearby pretended to be invisible; they’d never witnessed such a spectacle, as domestic woes were always dealt with in private, never in public. The man’s wife took advantage of his confusion to carry on. She told him in no uncertain terms that jobs were in plentiful supply now, since so much building work was being commissioned by the British – and he had to get one, now. On that note she stormed out, leaving him to pick up the pieces of his shattered pride.

Men in a popular café, sitting on traditional high wooden benches.

Ni’mati was sure that the woman’s uncommon boldness had been inspired by the sight of all the British soldiers around the place. He shook his head in disapproval, and concluded that – as if it were not bad enough that they had commandeered the country – the British presence was now threatening the masculine basis of authority in the town.

Still, as the furious wife was aware, the British presence in Baghdad was creating an economic and cultural boom, as it already had in Basra. Suddenly, there was so much more to purchase and even more to build, sending many enterprising Baghdadis into a frenzy of activity as they adapted to their new circumstances and familiarized themselves with the rupee paper notes that had replaced the Ottoman coins – the akce, para and kurus?.

Unlike the Ottoman administration, which had openly looted from the people in its troubled days, the British were keenly aware of the pacifying power of money, and ensured that the abuses of their predecessors were not replicated. The recently empty shops were now bustling with activity, as merchants competed to supply the British army with food, cloth and building materials. Unlike their Turkish predecessors, the British had cash and they spent it.

Even Bibi wasn’t immune to the effects of the economic revival the British inspired, as she was very conscious of the fact that Hadi and his brothers had taken to exploring the resuscitated bazaars, hungry for novelty and ideas. Bibi, aged only eighteen, felt vulnerable when she watched her husband go off on these expeditions.

Her fears of infertility had proved to be ill-founded, for at long last, after many supplications at the shrine, she was expecting her first child. Upon discovering she was pregnant she had rushed to the shrine to thank Imam Musa, to whom she had prayed again just as Saeeda had suggested. Standing by the shrine’s north-west Murad gate with other believers whose wishes had been fulfilled, Bibi had distributed coins amongst the sea of urchins who gathered there, while Saeeda inspected the livestock to be donated, chiding one man for his emaciated sheep. The slaughtered sheep would be translated into food for the poor.

Now that she was pregnant, though, Bibi worried that Hadi might no longer find her attractive as she had put on weight. She noticed that her husband had started to come home later in the evenings, singing tunes that she had never heard before. Sitting alone in her bedroom, she worried about his absences, biting her nails as she let her fertile mind carry her off to dark places. Imagining the worst, she became determined to find out where he was, and drew upon all the resources that were available to her, foremost among them the steadfast Saeeda.

Following some tactful enquiries, Saeeda was able to inform Bibi that Hadi had been spending his evenings at the Shatt Café, a café chantant in Baghdad where two sisters – Rosa and Lilu Numah – sang and danced to popular music played by a live band. Before the outbreak of the Great War, such cafés had started cropping up around the Maidan Square, near the bazaars and departmental buildings. Now reopened, these establishments were thriving, and once more offered performances by women singers who came from near and far.

Other cafés offered more traditional performances, in which travelling hakawatis – professional storytellers – narrated the tales of Scheherazade and her king, of warriors and beautiful maidens. Many of the stories were adapted from old Arabian epic poems. Entranced, men of all ages let the hakawatis transport them to a bygone age.

However pleasing these performances were, they were but a faint memory of the ninth and tenth centuries, when Baghdad had flourished under the rule of the Abbasids. Then, wine had flowed, poets conversed in courtyards and the sound of lutes filled the air. Highly valued female entertainers had sung, danced and played music for the delectation of their audiences; words of love were inscribed in henna on their bare limbs, calligraphy that came to life when they moved, bending the words and letters with their curves, like waves in the sea. Something akin to geishas, these women came from many lands, such as southern India, Sind, Georgia, Bosnia, Armenia, Aleppo, Ethiopia and Egypt. Known as the Qian, they were trained by specialist merchants and kept in grand city houses, where they courted the attentions of wealthy patrons. The Qian could be more ruinous than gambling, and many men’s fortunes were lost on them.

The young sisters to whom Hadi came to listen now were of a different world: free women, yet still performing exclusively for male audiences, since there were no public places in which the sexes could mingle. For all Bibi’s fears, Hadi would never linger to watch the sisters for long – just long enough to be carried away by the music and the atmosphere, and to lose himself in the gaze of the singers.

As much as Bibi fretted over Hadi’s new pastimes, she too was intrigued by the changes taking place all around her. New goods flooded the bazaars, and businesses were flourishing. However, her mother, Rumia, soon began to view the British arrival in Baghdad as a curse. Rumia had always looked up to her eldest brother, Abdul Raouf, especially after their father’s death, but in June 1917 he was banished by the British to Sumerpur in India for his pro-Turkish activities. Abdul Raouf was a cultured man whose social milieu had been strongly Persian. Some years earlier, he and his peers had formed a circle called the Akhuwat-i-Iran in support of the constitutional revolution in Iran of 1909, and had published a newspaper of the same name. The group was suspected by the British of promoting Turko-German propaganda, distributing pamphlets among Kazimiya’s inhabitants which called for all Muslims to heed the Sultan’s call for jihad. As a result, Abdul Raouf was now a prisoner of war.

Perhaps it was partly a question of age, but mother and daughter couldn’t agree on the presence of the British in their city. To a degree, the divisions between them reflected the general feeling among Baghdadis. In the wake of her brother’s banishment Rumia feared that the British would completely overturn the world as she knew it, in all its religiosity and ritual. Bibi, on the other hand, ever apprehensive of chaos, was relieved when order was imposed under the new regime. But she too was upset by her uncle’s imprisonment, concluding that the British were just as draconian as the Ottomans had been when they had banished Hadi’s uncle al-Uzri a couple of years earlier. She was also concerned by the fact that her father-in-law was attending many more political meetings. Ever prone to paranoiac imaginings, she was afraid that the British might expel him from his homeland too – and perhaps Hadi as well, since he would sometimes accompany Abdul Hussein to the gatherings. Whatever stability the British had restored to society, Bibi feared that the retribution of their justice might fall upon the heads of her family, swiftly and arbitrarily, at any time.