A Beggar at the Gate (16 page)

January 14, 1841

W
hen Hassan Ali Khan's foreign wife had arrived at Qamar Haveli days earlier after a two-year absence, all the Waliullah women, even Safiya Sultana herself, had hurried to the windows to look down past the filigreed shutters and onto the scene in the courtyard below.

Little Akhtar had stood with the other servants at a window with a lesser view, sharing the ladies’ pleasure as they watched a small child who resembled Hassan Ali Khan climb out of the palanquin, then gallop around the canvas baffle and into the arms of his waiting father. But it had been Hassan's foreign wife who interested the girl most. Revealed in a horse-groom's dream as a lioness, she had rescued Saboor twice from Maharajah Ranjit Singh, thus meriting the honor of becoming Shaikh Waliullah's daughter-in-law.

While the ladies exclaimed over Saboor's beauty, his healthy energy, and his father's obvious joy at his return, Akhtar had wondered about the woman who had performed those feats of bravery and won the family's heart. Who was she, and what did she look like? Surely she must be tall and queenly, as elegant as her husband, someone whose superior character was written in her every gesture. …

Akhtar had been stunned at the disheveled figure that emerged from the palanquin next—a figure so odd that Akhtar had thought she must be dreaming. The woman's boldly striped garment, shockingly tight at the bodice, had been so wide from the waist down that her legs might have been terribly deformed for all anyone could tell. A basket headdress obscured her face. Escaped hair tumbled carelessly onto her shoulders. She was the strangest creature Akhtar had ever seen, but when a foreign man in black dismounted and disappeared with her into the Shaikh's sitting room, it was plain that this woman was indeed Saboor Baba's legendary guardian.

The ladies and the other servants had drifted away after that, to await the woman's arrival upstairs, but Akhtar had not left her post at the window. Anxious to see the extraordinary creature again, she had watched Shaikh Waliullah and two foreigners emerge from the sitting room, to be replaced shortly afterward by Hassan Ali Khan himself, who swept over the threshold in his long embroidered coat, the child Saboor in his arms.

It had been Akhtar who had witnessed Hassan's foreign wife emerging from the Shaikh's sitting room. It had been she who had reported that, instead of climbing the stone stairs to the family quarters, the foreigner had reentered her palanquin and left the haveli.

That unexpected and disappointing departure had been explained later, when Hassan Ali Khan brought his son upstairs and lowered himself to the sheet-covered floor beside his aunt while the other children, boys and girls, clustered, crooning, about Saboor.

“The British are asking for our marriage to be dissolved,” Hassan had told his aunt quietly, overheard only by Akhtar, who should have removed herself from the room when he entered, but who had remained instead, wrapped to her eyes, for decency's sake, in a large veil. “They say Mariam agrees, but I believe they are forcing her.”

He gestured tiredly as Saboor rushed away with two older children. “Those people have been meddling in all our affairs. …”

Safiya Sultana had laid a plump hand on his knee. “Do not worry, my dear,” she had said in her husky voice. “Allah is kind. Let her come here. Let us see what can be done.”

When the same palanquin returned the following morning, the ladies crowded the windows once again. This time Hassan Ali Khan's wife did not depart. Instead, she disappeared into the doorway that led upstairs.

Moments later, a rustling in the verandah announced her arrival.

Akhtar stared openmouthed at the creature who stood uncertainly in the doorway on none-too-clean stocking feet, her skirts billowing about her, her bodice revealing the swell of her breasts, a headdress decorated with dusty ribbons dangling from her hand.

Close up, she was startlingly unattractive. Her features appeared sharp and intense. The front of her hair was dry, and her skin looked chapped. Akhtar, who had been studying the beautification of ladies for months, found herself longing to do something about the woman's hands. But for all the foreigner's plainness, when Saboor Baba ran to her and she knelt in the doorway to embrace him, her face softened and took on a curious beauty.

“Peace,” rumbled Safiya Sultana, approaching them, the silk-wrapped Qur'an in her hand, “and welcome to your home.”

Hassan's wife jumped to her feet and saluted Safiya respectfully, the closed fingers of her right hand to her forehead, while Saboor darted ahead of her into the room. “Peace upon you, Bhaji,” she replied in slow, perfect Urdu. “Forgive me, I—”

“There is nothing to forgive.” Holding the book high, Safiya Sultana motioned for her to walk under it. “Come,” she added as she tucked the book beneath her arm and moved to her usual place against one of the walls. “Sit with me.”

As she poured a tumbler of water for the new arrival, Akhtar glanced up to see the woman sitting stiffly upright beside Safiya Sultana, as if her clothing would not allow her to rest.

Why, Akhtar wondered, did the lady's people want to dissolve her marriage? Although Hassan Ali might be an unsatisfactory husband, a wife-beater, or an impotent man, there had been little time for these difficulties to make themselves known. Everyone knew the lady had left Qamar Haveli the morning after her wedding and had not returned until this moment.

If she divorced Hassan, she would leave him wifeless for the second time in two years. If she remained, her frayed intensity would certainly jar the calm atmosphere of the Shaikh's household.

Apparently untroubled by the oddness of the woman beside her, Safiya Sultana gave a satisfied sigh and reached over to pinch Saboor Baba's cheek when he returned to embrace his stepmother.

What special information did Safiya have about Saboor's guardian? Akhtar wondered. If so, was it really she, not some lesser person, who was the caster of spells?

For all her close observation, Akhtar had not yet learned anything of Safiya Sultana's healing methods, although she had seen their effect. She had recently witnessed the return of the barren woman who had come a few months earlier—now pregnant and offering tears of gratitude and a gift of honey from her village. Akhtar had seen the calming of a little boy who had suffered frightening dreams after his father's death, and a number of other lesser cures, but she was still no closer to the truth of how these healings occurred. Nothing had yet explained the sense of peace that she had felt from the moment she fell down the stairs and into Safiya Sultana's care, her need to offer her prayers when Safiya did, or her desire to emulate Safiya's every move.

“Akhtar,” Safiya ordered, “take Mariam Bibi's things from the trunk in my room, and help her choose something to wear.”

While the foreigner stood in the doorway, Akhtar tugged the trunk from its corner and raised its lid. Inside were twenty-one sets of clothes, each one basted into a neat, individual packet. Akhtar counted them as she laid them out on Safiya's spartan string bed. They were all alike—a pair of loose, baggy trousers, a camisole, a long shirt to go over it, and a wide, sheet-like
dupatta
to be worn over the head and upper body—but they varied in the weight of their fabric and the elaborateness of their decoration. Some were made of starched, embroidered muslin for summer, and others were of thicker cotton for the colder months. Eight sets were silk, of varying degrees of formality, each with a delicately embroidered design on shirt and
dupatta.
There were shawls of many colors. Everything was of the finest quality.

“I shall wear this one.” Hassan's wife pointed to a set of yellow clothes, and a fine pale yellow shawl, fully embroidered in green and violet. When Akhtar looked closely, she saw she had been mistaken about the shawls. This one was old, with a tiny brown stain at its edge. She tried to conceal her shock at this discovery. How terrible, to give old things to a family bride

She tore open the basting threads holding the suit of clothes together, shook out the camisole, shirt, and
dupatta,
and laid them on top of the other things. Then she threaded a waist-cord into the trousers, nodded, and closed Safiya's double doors behind her, leaving Hassan's wife to struggle alone with the many fastenings of her foreign clothing.

It would not take much to smooth the frizz from the lady's forehead or relieve her chapped lips and roughened hands, but the lady had refused the offer Akhtar had made while she prepared the clothes.

“I have no need of your help,” she had said, politely enough, pushing dry curls behind her ears, “I will not be—” Here she had stopped in mid-sentence with a little intake of breath, leaving Akhtar knowing that it was true, that she did not intend to stay.

Her refusal had disappointed Akhtar, who had seen an opportunity to display her arts, for in the past months it had become her duty to maintain the family women. Although there was little idleness in the Waliullah household, all the ladies needed the basic attentions—their body hair removed, their eyebrows shaped, their hair and skin oiled. For years this work had been done by Safiya's ancient servant Firoz Bibi, but it had now fallen to Akhtar and her scarred, delicately touching hands. She performed each task with her usual energy, perfecting her skills as she worked.

There was plenty to do. With no rain for the past month, the winter air of Lahore had become so dry that even Safiya Sultana, who never wasted time on such activities, had asked Akhtar to massage oil into her thinning, iron-gray hair.

The ladies, who had been talking eagerly among themselves, fell silent again as the doors opened and the foreign woman stepped smiling into the room, then stopped short, her eyes on the place where she had been sitting. No longer empty, it was now occupied by two small girls who knelt beside Safiya Sultana, their shoulders touching, nodding as the older woman spoke to them.

The lioness looked better in normal clothes, Akhtar decided. Her movements were more graceful than Akhtar had thought they would be, but she clearly did not know how to wear her old, used shawl, and her hair that should have hung down her back in a single plait was still pinned loosely to her head, with much of it escaping onto her neck. She paused, her mouth turning down, her eyes sweeping the room, then went to sit beneath a window, while around her the ladies made space for her.

“An-nah!” Saboor Baba threw himself into her lap. “Where did you go? Why have you put on new clothes?”

His guardian said nothing, but only embraced him, her faraway gaze on the open window. When he leaned against her breast, she began to croon some rhyming nonsense to him in a foreign tongue. As she sang to her stepson, Hassan Ali Khan's green-eyed wife gave off such sadness that the other women looked away, as if they were unwilling to intrude upon such pain. If anyone had asked Akhtar, she would have said that of all the women in Lahore who required the mysterious services of Safiya Sultana, the one who needed them most was Safiya's own nephew's wife.

M
ariana bent over Saboor, ignoring the glances of the whispering figures around her. It was silly to feel hurt because those two little girls had usurped her place beside Safiya Sultana. It was perverse to want Safiya to stop talking to the girls, to look up, to smile, to notice her in her native clothes.

But silly or not, as she sat beneath the latticed window, she ached with an all-too-familiar loneliness and humiliation.

It had not occurred to her that this might happen. Early in the morning, having at last received permission to stay at Qamar Haveli, she had thought only of Saboor, and of her soon-to-be-satisfied fascination with the Shaikh and his twin sister. Imagining Saboor sitting on her lap while great vistas of mysterious knowledge opened before her, she had flung her hairbrushes and a change of clothes into her smallest trunk and waved a cheerful good-bye to her bewildered aunt and uncle.

It must be a rare household that boasted both a respected Sufi Shaikh and a person like Safiya Sultana. How many Englishwomen, she had wondered as her bearers huffed along the dusty road from Shalimar, had spent even a morning with such a family?

Her head full of dreams, she had been halfway up the stairs to the ladies’ quarters before it occurred to her that there would be more to this reunion than she had imagined.

They knew of her request for a divorce. Safiya and all the family must already be aware that she had returned from Calcutta only to reject Hassan as her husband, and to abandon Saboor.

Her thoughts racing, she had bent to untie her boots outside the sitting-room doorway. How would the family treat her? Would they refuse to acknowledge her presence, then speak loudly and disparagingly of her within her hearing, as the English had done? Despising Calcutta society, she had managed to survive those cruelties, but this haveli, with its mysteries and magnetism, was no Calcutta bungalow.

Rejection by the Waliullah ladies, she feared, would hurt her more than she could bear.

But Saboor had come running, and Safiya Sultana had followed, marching toward Mariana on flat, purposeful feet, the wrapped Qur'an in her hand.
There is nothing to forgive,
she had intoned as she held up the Qur'an for Mariana to walk under as she entered the room.

At Safiya's side, under the silent scrutiny of a score of dark-skinned women and as many children, Mariana had felt herself overtaken by a desire to gain Safiya's calm power for herself. Too self-conscious to question the older woman in front of everyone, she had sat mutely upright on the sheet-covered floor, her stays biting into her ribs while she waited for someone to speak.

Later, the bird-like servant named Akhtar had been attentive as she took out Mariana's new native clothes. She had even offered to oil Mariana's hair. Buoyed by the girl's courtesy, Mariana had emerged with renewed confidence from Safiya's room, the questions she would ask forming in her imagination, to find her place of honor usurped, and only Saboor for company.

Now the women murmured to each other, too softly for her to hear. No one spoke to her, only Saboor, who wriggled off her lap when a curly-haired child approached and beckoned to him.

Across the room, Safiya Sultana cleared her throat. “It is time,” she declared, her gaze sweeping the room like that of an experienced governess, “for us to speak of beggars.”

The two children danced away. Mariana bit her lip. Perhaps she should not have come.

“I am certain,” Safiya began in her man's voice, “that all of you remember our agreement some time ago that all beggars, however filthy or ill, offer something beautiful to those who give them charity. While we recognized that some offer thanks or blessings, we also asked what the beggar offers who neither thanks nor blesses.

“Aliya here has found the answer.” She nodded to one of the two girls who had taken Mariana's place beside her. “Speak,” she ordered. “Tell us what you have learned.”

Hand in hand, the two children turned solemnly to face the room. “Even the most dirty beggar,” piped the smaller of the two, “offers an opportunity to please God.”

Safiya nodded again. “That is correct. No one offers that opportunity as plainly and simply as the beggar does. It is his purpose in being a beggar, whether he has asked for that duty or not. And of course, God's pleasure is hidden in our good deeds, and his blessings are far better than any human bounty, thanks, or praise.”

Mariana gnawed her lip. How many good deeds had she done recently? She certainly had offered no charity to any of the ghostly, unnerving beggars she had seen outside the gate at Shalimar.

Do not give them anything,
the Vulture had instructed her.
If you do, hundreds more will come.

“But what if a beggar only pretends to be poor?” asked a boy who looked like Aliya's elder brother.

Safiya smiled. “In that case, Munawar, we remember our Prophet, who said: ‘Give to those who deserve, and to those who do not. It may be that God will give you something you do not deserve.’ We must be kind to all God's creatures,” she added, “for we remember that those who are in need do not always ask for help. We must also remember that each one of us is a beggar before God.”

Mariana shrank into her yellow shawl, aching for this wise woman to include her, to meet her eyes.

“And now,” Safiya continued, “I will tell you a story, or rather, the first part of it, for it is too long to tell all at once.”

Around Mariana, women murmured with anticipation. Across the room, a fat, serious-looking girl dragged Saboor onto her lap.

Safiya looked about her, signaled for the frail little servant girl to sit and listen, and then for a brief moment, looked straight into Mariana's face.

“Far away in the north,” she began in a singsong tone, shifting her gaze from Mariana, “lived a king whose rich palace overlooked a teeming city. When his three sons were grown, feeling the need to choose his successor, the king called his eldest son to his side.

“The king gave the prince, who was a fastidious fellow, two silver coins and the garb of a merchant,” Safiya continued. “ ‘Go into the city, my son,’ he said, ‘and observe the comings and goings of the people. If Allah wills, you will gain knowledge that will one day help you rule this kingdom. You may return to the palace when you have found a worthwhile use for your two silver coins.’

“The oldest prince put on his disguise and set off, but before the sun had set he returned to the palace. ‘Father,’ he said sadly, ‘I wanted to do as you told me, but in all the city I could find no clean, sweet-smelling place to sit while I watched the comings and goings of the people. All I found were dirty upturned stones or the worn steps of houses to sit upon. As I could not follow your first instruction, I never came to the second.’ ”

An elderly, round-backed lady near Mariana sniffed. “Silly fellow,” she murmured, “what did he expect to find in a city?”

Mariana glanced at her, surprised. Surely this lady had never looked out of her closed palanquin, even when traveling through Lahore's cobbled lanes….

“Disappointed in the eldest prince,” Safiya continued, “the king sent for his second son, a person of exemplary behavior. He gave the young man the same merchant's clothing, the same two silver coins, and the same advice that he had given his first son.

“The younger man set off as his brother had done, but he, too, returned before the evening. ‘Father,’ he wept, ‘I wanted to observe the comings and goings of the people, but wherever I went I saw thieves and cutpurses, gamblers and dishonest merchants. Distressed by the vices of the city, I found nothing to buy with my two silver coins.’

“The old king sighed and sent for his third and last son, a playful, inquisitive young man. ‘My boy,’ he said sorrowfully, ‘I have failed to teach my sons enough of the world beyond this comfortable palace. Had I foreseen how much the city would disappoint them, I would have warned your brothers before sending them there. But having given them no advice, I cannot favor you. Go, wear this merchant's garb and observe the comings and goings of the people. When you return, you must tell me what you learned there, and what you found to do with your two silver coins.’ ”

The women nodded and exchanged glances. Mariana fidgeted, uncomfortably aware that she, the children, and the bird-like servant girl who listened openmouthed were the only people in the room who had not heard this story before. Had there had been a veiled message in Safiya's expression when she looked into Mariana's face before beginning her recitation?

Safiya shifted her bulk against her satin bolster. “As his brothers had done,” she told them, “the youngest prince set out for the city. There he found cobbled streets lined with houses whose latticed balconies nearly touched each other, so narrow was the passageway. In those streets he met musicians, jugglers, tinsmiths, thieves, and rich men. He saw baskets heaped with bright-colored spices, and shopkeepers weighing mouth-watering fruit with iron scales. Customers lounged on carpets while barefoot merchants unrolled jewel-colored silks for their inspection. Gold and diamond merchants displayed their wares in tiny stalls near fragrant shops selling attar and incense.”

So this was how the round-backed lady had received her knowledge of the walled city she had never seen

“At nightfall,” Safiya continued, “tired and hungry, the prince sought rest in a teashop. As he sat enjoying his tea, a beggar shuffled toward him. The man was bent nearly double, and smelled so foul that the people moved out of his way, grimacing with disgust.

“ ‘Alms,’ the beggar whined, crouching beside the prince, ‘alms to help me pass the night.’

“Moved to pity, the prince smiled. ‘My friend,’ he replied, ‘I have only two silver coins. The first will pay for this bread and tea, but you are welcome to the second. As for passing the night, I, too, have nowhere to sleep.’ ”

“But how did he have nowhere to sleep, Bhaji?” inquired a small boy, his voice full of concern.

Safiya smiled. “He had stayed too long in the city, Rehman. But you must wait for the rest of the story.

“The prince gave the beggar his second coin,” she continued. “At once the beggar reached into a sack he carried and drew out a lovely silk carpet, woven in many colors, more fine and supple than any in the king's palace. ‘Offer your prayers on this carpet and give regular charity,’ he said, handing it to the astonished prince, ‘and you will always have enough to eat, and a fine resting place.’

“And with that, he was gone.”

“Bhaji, Bhaji,” little Aliya burst in, “the youngest prince pleased God and then received a blessing, did he not?”

“Indeed he did, my darling,” rumbled Safiya Sultana. “But you must let me finish.

“That night the prince spread his new carpet in a doorway, offered his evening prayers to Allah, the Sender of Blessings, and lay down. At once the rank, gutter smells of the city vanished, and the air was filled with the scent of jasmine and roses, amber and musk. The shuttered silence of the street was gone, and in its place was the sweet sound of playing water and the bubbling cry of the nightingale. Beneath the carpet the prince felt soft grass. Too tired to wonder about such mysteries, he closed his eyes, and in an instant fell deeply asleep.

“The next morning, as he stood to offer his dawn prayer to Allah, the Satisfier of Needs, he found two silver coins lying on the very edge of his beautiful carpet.”

Safiya dropped her hands, indicating that she was finished.

A satisfied murmuring filled the room. Mariana glanced about her, startled to realize that in her imagination the prince, soberly disguised in coarse wool and a plain, starched turban, had been Hassan Ali Khan.

“When I get married,” announced little Aliya, “my husband will be exactly like that prince.”