A Beggar at the Gate (4 page)

Mariana stared through the window at the champa tree. She had no need to read the letter. The fact of its arrival told her all she needed to know: that more than one person had plans to take her and Saboor to Lahore. The albino's letter, she was certain, contained the information that Saboor's father, her native husband, would soon be on his way to collect them both and return them to the walled city house where he lived with his mysteriously powerful father and the rest of the Waliullah family.

When it is safe, I will come for you,
Hassan had promised on her last evening in the Punjab, before the Governor-General's camp crossed the Sutlej River into British territory. A moment later, he had gone.

In the weeks that followed, she had expected him to come, but he had not. As the distance grew between them, she had put his promise from her mind. She tried to picture him, but found she could remember only a blurred, bearded face and a long embroidered coat.

For eighteen months she had heard nothing from him.

She could not remember when she stopped imagining that she would ever see Lahore again, but during the difficult months after her return to Calcutta, she had begun to imagine a different ending to the story. She dreamed of some chance happening that would allow her to take little Saboor back with her to England when her aunt and uncle left India for good. She imagined Sunday lunch at her father's country vicarage, and Saboor sitting in a high chair at the table, eating roast mutton beside her little nephew Freddie. She pictured the neighbors patting him on the head, nodding approvingly as he grew up, exotic and lovable, the pride of Weddington village.

Now she must face the loss of the babe she had kept safe for so long and loved so passionately, who woke her each day crying, “An-nah, morning has come!” as he clambered onto her bed.

She must also face her husband, and perhaps his family as well. They would be upset at the news of the divorce. After all, it must be an enormous honor to have an Englishwoman in the family. But it could not be helped, and when it was over, Hassan would keep Saboor, and she would be left with a broken heart.

The only person who might ease her pain was Harry Fitzgerald, who had once admired her for speaking several native languages, who had not seemed to mind when her clothes were buttoned wrong, who had offered her hot, hasty kisses in the shadow of her tent when no one was looking. But after starting for Afghanistan with his heavy, wheeled guns, her handsome lieutenant had sent her only one bitter letter, from a camp near the Bolan Pass.

Who will dare to be your friend now?
he had written.

Since then he had traveled hundreds of miles through deep mountain passes and over barren, waterless land. He had fought battles: real ones, not the imaginary scenes they had conjured up together over breakfast in the dining tent at Lord Auckland's camp. He must have felt terror. He must have seen horrible things.

He might have changed. Perhaps he drank too much now, after all his bloody campaigning. Worse, perhaps he had proved a coward in battle. Even if he were still the same, could he ever love her again?

Your path lies to the northwest.
The Hindu from the Charak Puja rose again in Mariana's imagination, pointing into the distance.

Afghanistan, of course, was far to the northwest, but so was the Punjab. Tangled among thoughts of her fair-haired lieutenant were other memories, vivid, jolting ones of a room strewn with roses, of herself in red wedding silks, her skin oiled and perfumed, lying terrified on a bed while her husband bent over her, his breathing filling the room. She tried to put the memory away and recapture the feeling of Fitzgerald's lips on hers, but instead she saw Hassan's bearded face change, saw him pull away from her.

She had not saved herself on her marriage night. Seeing her terror and exhaustion, Saboor's father had spared her himself.

Sleep,
Hassan had told her, before padding back to his own bed.
Go to sleep.

June 23, 1840

T
he walled city of Lahore had always smelled of roses. Discernible even in the cool winters, the scent turned impenetrable in the still, baking heat of the Punjabi summer, filling the tiny, stifling shops that lined the city's narrow alleyways, rushing out of its many mosques and temples. Sometimes sweet and mysterious, often corrupted and rotten, the perfume reached into every quarter of the city, permeating everything: the food, the water, even the offal swept into heaps in the city's neglected corners.

The only part of the city where the scent did not reach was the red brick fort that took up the northwestern quarter of the city's walled area. There, in a guarded tower room inside the marble palace that occupied the northwest corner of the Moghul Citadel, Maharajah Kharrak Singh of the Punjab had begun raving again. Bent double on the golden throne that had belonged to his legendary father, he rocked from side to side, watched by his few remaining loyal courtiers, his hands clutching his midsection, his feet drumming on the floor.

“I
want
the magical child, the grandson of Shaikh Waliullah. I
want
him,” the little maharajah repeated, his ugly face creased with pain. “And I want to leave this place,” he added, peering about his ill-ventilated apartments. “This is no living quarter for a king. I must live in the best part of the palace.”

“You will, Mahraj, you will,” crooned a black-bearded gentleman from his place on the marble tiles beside the throne. “But the child Saboor is not here. He left Lahore more than a year ago, before your father died.”

Kharrak Singh's bejeweled courtiers stood along the walls, their bright silks adding life to the stifling room. They nodded in agreement. Smiling encouragingly, the bearded gentleman held out his hand. “Come, Mahraj,” he coaxed, “you must rest.”

“My father would still be alive if that child had not been stolen from him. Everyone knows it was the Shaikh's baby grandson who protected my father with his magic.

“No one tells me the truth,” Kharrak Singh added, glaring at the man. “Not even you, Faqeer Sahib. You know I am being poisoned, and you know that the poisoner is my own son, the usurper of my power. If my father were still alive,” he gasped, his damp face gray, “he would help me.”

“We have not lied to you, Mahraj—”

“And what of your assistant, the child's father?” Kharrak Singh stabbed a quivering finger at a tall man who stood unobtrusively against a wall. “What of
him,
with his English wife? He should send me his healing child. I am dying in front of him, and he does nothing.”

“But Hassan Ali Khan does not have the child either, Mahraj,” the Faqeer assured him. “The boy is in Calcutta. And how is Prince Nau Nihal poisoning you? The food tasters have yet to show signs of illness.” Beneath his neatly tied turban, the Faqeer's forehead glistened with perspiration. “Every precaution has been taken to protect you.”

Spittle crawled from the corner of Kharrak Singh's mouth. He looked up, his eyes unfocused, at his assembled nobles. “You want me dead, all of you,” he cried. “Hah—I know what you want, but you will
never have it.
”

Nervous silence fell over the small, crowded apartments. “Is he cursing us?” whispered a young man whose emerald necklaces covered him from his neck to his waist.

“You want to believe that your future is safe,” Kharrak Singh croaked, “that you will keep your riches, but I can tell you this—the Kingdom of the Punjab, built by my father, is
finished.”

Eyes fixed on their suffering king, his courtiers scarcely breathed.

The Faqeer spoke at last. “No, Mahraj,” he offered, hunching his shoulders, his voice a conciliatory singsong. “Surely you do not mean to say these terrible things. Surely you do not mean to curse our beautiful Punjab?”

The Maharajah pushed the Faqeer's hand away. “It is finished,” he insisted. “You will see. Ranjit Singh's heirs will kill each other, as my son Nau Nihal is killing me.”

As his shocked guests began to withdraw, the little man on the throne threw his head back, his tightly wrapped beard exposing a knobby throat. “Opium,” he howled, “I want my opium!”

T
hat same day, in the eastern part of the city, near the mosque of Wazir Khan, a small shrouded figure had crouched anonymously for hours outside the tall, double doors of Shaikh Waliullah's house.

The figure sat silently, huddled among the garbage left by a careless sweeper, a chador the color of dust exposing only her pointed childlike face and a small, damaged hand that clutched the cotton sheet together under her chin.

Moving only her eyes, the girl watched three ragged men cross the cobbled square and approach the carved doors of the haveli, moving slowly, for one of the men appeared to be in considerable pain. She listened silently as the boldest of the three pounded heavily on the doors.

“How is it?” he asked, glancing with concern at his suffering companion as the doors’ heavy bolts slid noisily aside.

The friend did not reply. Instead, he shook his head, his breathing shallow and noisy.

With a great creaking sound the doors swung open. A pair of guards stood back to let the three men pass inside. “What have we here?” asked one, his voice echoing in the vaulted brick entrance-way as he peered at the injured man. “Is it snakebite, or a scorpion sting?”

“Whichever it is,” put in the second guard, jerking his chin toward the interior of the haveli, “you should take him to Shaikh Waliullah at once, but you will not find the Shaikh in his courtyard in this heat. On days like this he sits indoors among his companions. After you cross the inner courtyard, you will see a doorway facing you. Call out, and someone will show you the way.”

While the guards studied the injured man, the silent hunched figure rose to her feet and stole past them and into the entranceway, and then, without pausing, entered the first courtyard.

The girl had felt weak for days. Throughout the morning as she squatted near a festering pile of mango skins and rotting vegetables, her illness had clutched nauseatingly at her middle, threatening to overcome her. Now, as she crept past Shaikh Waliullah's horse and elephant stables and pushed open the gate leading to his quiet family courtyard, faintness gathered in the corners of her brain.

She had taken a great risk in coming this far. Long before the predawn call to prayer had awakened her farrier husband and his harsh-faced mother, Akhtar Jahan had raised herself in cautious stages from the floor where she and her husband slept. Once on her feet, avoiding her mother-in-law, who snored on the hovel's only string bed, she had groped along the wall until she found the older woman's chador hanging from its nail, then felt her way out of the crumbling quarter that had been her prison for three long years.

Following her instincts, she had stumbled along the lightless alleyway outside the door, powered only by a chance remark she had overheard the week before from a passerby outside: that in a house near Wazir Khan's Mosque there lived a woman who knew how to cast spells.

What spells they were did not matter to Akhtar as she braced herself, a hand to her head, against the inner courtyard wall. What mattered instead was the hope she had felt at hearing those careless words, spoken by a stranger whose face she had not even glimpsed.

Spells.
The word suggested mysterious happenings and sudden, miraculous cures. It suggested something darker, too: wicked spells, wasting away, even death. From the moment she heard it, Akhtar had known that this magician lady possessed what she urgently needed: a remedy for the agony she had endured since her marriage—brutalized by her husband, reviled by her mother-in-law, worked to exhaustion, trapped in their tiny, airless quarter with no means of escape.

The mosque was not far from her own, miserable home. As the fiery sun rose, and people appeared in the stifling lanes and alleys, she had tried to ask the women among them where the lady she sought might live, but had been too ashamed to explain herself properly. Misunderstood, terrified her husband would find her before she reached her goal, she had wandered fruitlessly until a sad-eyed hunchback who guarded visitors’ shoes outside the mosque had asked who or what she sought.

“Ah,” he had said when she tried to explain, “you seek Begum Safiya Sultana, the sister of the great Shaikh Waliullah. She is no magician, my dear child, but her name is well-known. She will help you.” He had pointed across the square to a wide brick haveli. “Wait outside the Shaikh's house,” he had told her. “In time, they will let you in.”

No magician.
Unwilling to believe him, Akhtar had crouched down near the carved doorway, telling herself that the hunchback could not know the truth, for he was not a normal man.

She did not know how long she had waited in the heat without food or drink, but for all her discomfort, and as ill as she felt now, her fright was gone, for the doors of this grand house had closed safely and decisively behind her, shutting out her husband, her mother-in-law, and everything else that might harm her.

For now, however, she could walk no farther. She sank to the courtyard floor beneath a carved balcony, rested her forehead on her upraised knees, and closed her eyes.

Moments later, the injured man and his two friends passed hurriedly through the gate. Nearly invisible in her dust-colored cloak, Akhtar lifted her head in time to see the three men rush by, the injured man now sobbing aloud as his two friends half-dragged him through the courtyard, past closed doors and shuttered windows, past the courtyard's lone, dusty tree, until they halted beside an open doorway.

The heap of discarded shoes outside the entrance told Akhtar that a number of men were inside. The leader of the trio called out a greeting. After an interval, he left his friends and vanished through the doorway, then reappeared, followed by two men, one of them an elderly gentleman with a very wrinkled face and a tall starched headdress.

The girl held her breath. This old man must be Shaikh Waliullah himself, for he radiated power. Even in her illness, she recognized the force of his presence, which seemed to reach all the way across the courtyard to the patch of shade where she huddled.

The injured man's friends lowered him to the ground, where he rocked, keening, from side to side, one ankle clutched in both his hands. The old man glanced briefly at the wound. “Yes, it is a scorpion sting,” he announced in a light, pleasant voice, then turned to his companion and held out a hand, asking for something. “A stick, Javed,” he ordered. “Yes, that one will do.”

The stick in hand, the old man bent over, his headdress tipping dangerously forward, and made several marks in the dust of the courtyard floor. Then, apparently satisfied with what he had written, he threw down the stick and searched through the pile of discarded shoes, poking at them with one foot, while the injured man's wails rose behind him.

At last, the old man picked up a leather slipper. His back to the victim, he began to strike the marks he had made in the dust, gesturing impatiently for silence when the victim's friend tried to speak. The loud cracking of the shoe against the ground attracted other men from inside. They stood in the doorway, craning to see. Shadowy figures of women appeared in an upstairs window behind filigreed shutters.

Within moments it was over. The old man straightened and dropped the slipper among the other shoes. “Well?” he inquired in his light voice, dusting his hands together and turning his attention once again to the victim.

The injured man had ceased keening. “It was here,” he said in a wondering tone, rubbing a hand over his anklebone, “but now it's gone.”

Akhtar pushed herself to her feet, trying to see more. What strange event had she witnessed? This house must be filled with sorcerers and magicians.

The old man nodded several times. “Well, that's that,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. “You should drink something.” He nodded toward the guarded entrance. “You'll find water and sherbet over there. And now, Javed,” he added, turning to his companion, as the three men backed away, saluting deferentially, “let us return to our conversation. It is not every day that I meet someone who is acquainted with Ghalib. My sister finds his poetry quite exceptional. She will be very pleased to hear that he is to visit Lahore. …”

His voice faded as he stepped over the threshold and disappeared from view.

Akhtar stared after the two men. She wished she could follow the old magician into his sitting room and pour out all her troubles, but how could she speak in front of all the other men whose shoes lay heaped beside the door? No, she must go to his sister instead, for perhaps she was the lady who knew how to cast spells.

Supporting herself with one hand, Akhtar groped her way toward a promising-looking canvas screen that stretched along the wall ahead of her, supported by thick bamboo poles. Such screens, she knew, were designed to shield ladies from the eyes of men. Women must have gathered somewhere behind that screen, perhaps even the lady she sought.

She crept around its edge. After negotiating a wide fold in the canvas, she found a doorway, then a brick staircase leading downward into darkness, as if to a subterranean room. Women's shoes lay beside this door.

Akhtar scuffed off her own shabby sandals and crept down the staircase.

The courtyard had been bright and fiery hot. As she stepped downward into the cool darkness, dizziness bloomed in her head and her knees buckled. Shocked, tangled hopelessly in her dirt-colored chador, she plunged downward, twisting an ankle, banging her knees and elbows as she fell, cracking her head, until she landed at last in a pained heap on the brick floor at the bottom of the stairs.

Dizzy and stunned, she heard female voices raised in surprise. Bare feet approached, then stopped beside her. A deep, authoritative voice penetrated the fog in her brain. “Tell Khadija to bring a sheet,” it commanded. “This girl is hurt, whoever she is.”

Was it a eunuch who spoke? Or a woman? “Please,” Akhtar managed to say, without opening her eyes, “I don't want anything. I only want to meet the lady who casts spells.”

“Don't move her yet,” the voice continued, as hands laid hold of her. “I want to see her in the light.”

Too weak to resist, Akhtar let someone remove her chador and push back the dirty sleeves of her
kameez.
Too ill for shame, her eyes squeezed shut, she did not care what they saw.

Above her, someone gasped. “As if this ill-treatment were not enough,” the voice announced, “her liver has been affected. Look at the color of her skin.”

Someone shooed children away. Akhtar forced her eyes open. Women stared down at her, their mouths open. Some of them were young. One was fair, with a high-bridged nose. One or two, including a white-haired serving woman who clucked loudly with dismay, looked very old.

The powerful-sounding voice, Akhtar discovered, belonged to a stout, elderly woman with iron-gray hair, who studied Akhtar with an experienced eye, nodding to herself much as the old man in the courtyard had nodded over his scorpion-sting victim. But unlike the old man, this woman gave off no magical power, only the authority of one accustomed to being obeyed.

Disappointed, Akhtar searched among the crowd for the sorceress she had come to find.

“Let her lie there.” The gray-haired woman gestured toward a dark corner of the cool corridor where Akhtar now lay. Through a wide doorway that let in the light from the top of the stairs, Akhtar could see more ladies of various sizes and ages. Amazed at the kindness of the hands that lifted her, she allowed herself to be led to a sheet-covered mat that someone had spread on the floor. “Drink this,” the stout lady told her gruffly. “It will help your nausea.”

Akhtar tried to raise her head. “But I want to find—”

“Not now, child. Whatever is troubling you, it will, Inshallah, be resolved. But first you must recover your strength.”

Akhtar Bibi drank, and as she did, the pure, lovely taste of roses filled her mouth, driving away the rottenness and filth she had breathed in the street. Later, while she slept, she dreamed that she lay in a cool garden, breathing in beautiful scents, while women's voices murmured pleasantly in the distance.

A deep voice penetrated her dream, speaking rhythmically in a singsong tone, drawing some vowels out, shortening others, reciting poetry in a language Akhtar did not understand. A different voice offered an Urdu translation whose words echoed in her half-sleeping imagination:

Akhtar slept, imagining a pair of ragged beggars crouching by a tall ornate door, their hands extended for alms, while beside them, a heap of gold and jewels gleamed and shone.

SEVERAL HOURS later, a heavyset man fidgeted impatiently as he watched a dust-covered laborer enter the Shaikh's sitting room and approach his padded platform. Yusuf Bhatti, a fighter and a man of action, hated to sit still. It was only by ill luck that he had arrived at the haveli looking for his childhood friend Hassan Ali Khan in time to be waved inside to sit among the Shaikh's followers.

The laborer wiped dirty hands nervously on his long, unclean shirt. “I have never beaten my wife, Shaikh Sahib,” he declared loudly. “Never, I swear it.”