The lady looked surprised but carefully set down her work and adjusted her headscarf before approaching the door. Always it was furtive, and often in code. No one in the Street Rat district knocked like that. Her clothes were clean, as was the pair of pants she was carefully mending in the spotted shaft of moonlight that came through the window.Ī loud knocking sounded on her door. If they peeked through the wooden screen, they would see her: a kind-eyed woman who wore her rags with the grace of a queen. Through a keyhole-shaped window, passersby could hear the soft sounds of a woman humming. A proper rug, albeit in tatters, lay in front for visitors to leave their sandals on-in the unlikely event they owned a pair. A broken urn outside the door contained a clutch of desert blooms, kept alive by someone’s regular application of precious water. Its mud walls looked like they had been whitewashed at least once in the past decade. It was a whole other Agrabah.Īmong the huts and hovels, the falling-down public buildings, and the decaying houses of worship was one tiny home that was slightly better kept up than the others. The orphaned, the unlucky, the sick, and the discarded. The children no one wanted, the adults no one would hire for any kind of honest work, all of them made their homes there. This was where thieves, beggars, murderers, and the poorest of the poor lived. Now the skeletal remains of his grand plan whistled in the desert wind like corpses hanging from gibbets.
After he was poisoned, the whole project was dropped. Half-built timber structures were the only evidence of an ancient sultan’s dream to improve the district, to widen the roads, to bring in water. Here the white walls of the buildings were faded and pitted, mud peeling away from their brick underlayers in great swaths. Even the locals tended to stay indoors or stick to the unseen alleyways and secret passages that riddled the area out of view from the streets. It was not safe for any of the gaily dressed people to be there. In another part of town, the streets were silent as shadow and black as death. Life was noisy and exuberant in moonlit Agrabah. Men and women bought rose-flavored ices and trinkets from nighttime vendors. Old men played chatrang on boards set up outside cafés children stayed up long past their bedtimes playing their own games on the sidewalks. The streets filled with people drinking tea and gossiping, laughing, and visiting friends. The heat of the day had long since retreated into the desert, and the city, which had drowsed through the hot afternoon, was finally coming alive. The golden onion domes of the capital glittered like a dream against the pale dunes and the dark, starry void. White mud-brick buildings gleamed like pebbles from a faraway beach. A HIGH WHITE MOON cast its light on the city below as brightly as the sun was said to shine in northern countries.
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