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It was November, one of the relatively good months in a city where most of the year wasn’t in the least bit good or even reasonable. There were months for boredom, depression, and various obsessions. Months when flies, lice, and diseases were rampant. Barga, which caused exhaustion and lethargy, blindness, and sometimes death from too much sleep, was endemic. Its main cause, so it was said, was excessive vice, but I knew people who’d caught it who’d never done anything indecent in their lives. Everyone who knew the priest Tony, a shepherd of the Christian flock in Sur nicknamed Father Afreet, who almost died of barga three years ago, or Sheikh Jahfal, muezzin at the Grand Mosque, who died of the disease last year, would have to discount vice as a cause, or at least not the main one.
