In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale

Soon after arriving in New York, Ghosh called Nabeel, who was shocked to hear from him in America. They gave each other updates and Ghosh said that he was going to India soon. He would try to visit Baghdad on the way. However, he never managed to do this. Instead, he set himself on going back to Egypt in 1990, by which time he felt sure Nabeel would be back. Bomma’s story, Ghosh says, ends in Philadelphia, where a scrap in the Annenberg Research Institute shows a set of accounts written by Ben Yiju. It appears to have come from Fustat, and it mentions a sum of money owed to Bomma—proof that he was a part of the business in Egypt. Ghosh muses on the humor that he thinks Bomma might have found in the last record of his life being in Philadelphia, so removed from his life.

Ghosh left Calicut for Cairo three weeks after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. While the coalition army was being prepared, Ghosh was travelling and reading about the flood of Egyptian workers leaving Iraq. He had heard that Jabir had been trying to travel there until the invasion itself, and that Mabrouk was still in Iraq, which worried