Samakt by Pinaki

Samakt

The city's hundred million wait / Their eyes deep into the Sun / And the each of the hundred million / Gazed and wept as they saw it come / The Fifth Face of Ishtar / Blinding them all each in turn
Vishal, Ishtar

July 20, 2008

It is 45 degrees, and there's so much noon sunlight bouncing off the rock face you can see how Nasser al Hadi has burned his skin a deep chocolate over a lifetime spent facing mountains. You will find the Hadis in the nooks and crannies of the rock here, sheltered from the outside world at the end of wadis, where the dried remnants of waterfalls come collapsing down the jebels.

Exactly why they are here has been lost over the centuries. But someone, a long while ago judging by the shards sticking out of ancient graveyards, got a channel to bring down water from a natural reservoir in the mountains, and a village sprung to life. That water, still flowing, sustained fields of grass for the goats and a few knobbly onions for man, even the inevitable grove of date palms. But that was in another time.

Now, all that's left is the memory of past greenery, the stubs of crops arrested midway out of the soil, and the baked and abandoned plots surrounded by barbed wire twisted around sticks. Samakt itself is a ghost town, after an entire generation left home for Muscat. Drive through it during the day and chances are you will be the only one around.

"The young ones go to Muscat, the old stay here," says Nasser, as we bite into watermelon in his almost painfully ordered majlis. Nasser himself followed the trend, getting a job in the electricity company in the capital, while moonlighting with his taxi after. His father used to chop wood and sell it when he was a young man, and attended to matters of the village as rashid. "A rashid is a bit like a sheikh, but for a smaller area, like Samakt. Each settlement might have a rashid, while the tribe as a whole has a sheikh." A rashid is appointed either by the sheikh or by the government, holds the position all his life and passes it on to his son. If the villagers aren't happy with him, they can vote to have him removed, and a new rashid is appointed. Like the sheikh, he will act as a bit of a middleman between the people and the government, putting his stamp on papers like passport applications, getting births and deaths registered and passing on disputes to higher authorities if they are beyond his scope.

Nasser will become rashid one day, but there might not be anyone to administer or look after by then. There are only ten young people in the village, two old men and a few children. After hundreds, if not thousands of years of settlement, water diversion and agriculture, the village is down to 12 adults. It is so small and so much an old story it never was worth a clinic, or a school. Both are kilometres away, down another offshoot closer to Muscat, at Hajar.

But the fortunes of Samakt might be rising again. Barely a handful of kilometres away, millions of rials worth of new road has just been laid out, on its way from Muscat to Quriyat, where it will join the new highway to Sur along the coast. "Five years ago no one would take this land if you offered it free. Now, a 600 square metre plot sells for RO20,000. In time, this won't be a village. It'll be a city."

You never know. For now, though, that seems laughable, a tale that echoes hollow against the wadi walls, bouncing off locked doors, goats huddled in the shade of a thatch porch, goatskins hanging from thorny trees like some horror movie left too long in the sun, a pair of lithe, very wild donkeys around a few corners, and the scratchings of gazelle hoofs in the wadi dust.