The Year of Rice and Salt

'That's why China won,' said Hasan, his one eye gleaming with mischief. 'They turned out to be right. Earth congealed out of cosmic dust, life appeared and evolved, until a certain ape made more and more sounds, and off we went. Never any God involved, nothing supernatural, no eternal souls reincarnated time after time. Only the Chinese really faced that, leading the way with their science, honouring nothing but their ancestors, working only for their descendants. And so they dominate us all!'

'It's just that there's more of them,' one of the questionable women said.

'But they can support more people on less land. This proves they are right!'

Naser said, 'Each culture's strength can also be its weakness. We saw this in the war. China's lack of religion made them horribly cruel.'

The Hodenosaunee women from the class appeared and joined them; they too were acquaintances of Kirana's. Kirana welcomed them, saying, 'Here are our conquerors, a culture in which women have power! I wonder if we could judge civilizations by how well women have done in them.'

'They have built them all,' proclaimed the oldest woman there, who up till now had only sat there knitting. She was at least eighty, and therefore had lived through most of the war, start to finish, childhood to old age. 'No civilizations exist without the homes women build from the inside.'

'Well, how much political power women have taken, then. How comfortable their men are with the idea of women having this kind of power.'

'That would be China.'

'No, the Hodenosaunee.'

'Not Travancore?'

No one ventured to say.

'This should be investigated!' Kirana said. 'This will be one of your projects. A history of women in the other cultures of the world their actions as political creatures – their fates. That this is missing from history as we have been given it so far, is a sign that we still live in the wreckage of patriarchy. And nowhere more so than in Islam.'

FIVE

Budur of course told Idelba all about Kirana's lecture and the after class meeting, describing them excitedly while they washed dishes together, and then sheets. Idelba nodded and asked questions, interested; but in the end she said, 'I hope you will keep working hard on your statistics class. Talk about these kinds of things can go on for ever, but numbers are the only thing that will get you beyond talk.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, the world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills. Speaking of which, I think I can get you a job washing glassware in the lab. That would be good, it will give you some more money, and teach you that you want some job skills. Don't get sucked into the whirlpool of cafe talk.'

'But talk can be good! It's teaching me so many things, not just about history, but what it all means. It sorts it out, as we used to do in the harem.'

'Exactly! You can talk all you want in the harem! But it's only in institutes that you can do science. Since you've bothered to come here, you might as well take advantage of what's offered.'

This gave Budur pause. Idelba saw her thinking about it, and went on: 'Even if you do want to study history, which is perfectly sensible, there is a way of doing it that goes beyond cafe talk, that inspects the actual artefacts and sites left from the past, and establishes what can be asserted with physical evidence to back it, as in the other sciences. Firanja is full of old places that are being investigated for the first time in a scientific manner like this, and it is very interesting. And it will take decades to investigate them all, even centuries.'

She straightened up, held her lower back and rubbed it as she regarded Budur. 'Come with me for a picnic on Friday. I'll take you up the coast to see the menhirs.'

'The menhirs? What are they?'

'You will see on Friday.'

So on Friday they took the tram as far north up the coast as it ran, then changed to a bus and rode for half a watch, looking out at the apple orchards and the occasional glimpses of the dark blue ocean. Finally Idelba led the way off at one stop, and they walked west out of a tiny village, immediately into a forest of immense standing stones, set in long lines over a slightly rolling grassy plain, interrupted here and there by huge mature oak trees. It was an uncanny sight.

'Who put these here? The Franks?'

'Before the Franks. Before the Kelts, perhaps. No one is quite sure. Their living settlements have not been found with certainty, and it's very difficult to date the time when these stones were dressed and stood on end.'

'It must have taken, I don't know, centuries to put this many up!'

'It depends on how many of them there were doing it, I suppose. Maybe there were as many then as now, who can say? Only I would expect not, as we find no ruined cities, as they do in Egypt or the Middle West. No, it must have been a smaller population, taking a lot of time and effort.'