The Honey Thief (29 page)

‘Our gift,’ he said, ‘will be this: that we have no gifts but the life God has given us, and each other.’

12

The Cookbook of the Master Poisoner Ghoroob-e-astab of Mashad

Some princes are never nervous; some are nervous every day. And it can happen that even a bold prince on the battlefield will suffer certain fears. Mirwais Hotak of Kandahar was a nervous prince. He was both ferocious and clever in combat, but he had studied history and knew that most princes die with a knife in their throat. He himself had become Prince and Emir of Kandahar by this means, killing with his own hands the Safavid Prince of Persia who had ruled before him. And so Mirwais Hotak only ever walked about the palace guarded by six powerful soldiers specially trained to kill quickly.

The leader of the bodyguards in the Kandahar palace was a man known as Thunderclap, for his sudden way of dealing out punishments. He had given thought to all of the methods an assassin might employ to murder his prince and had taken steps to avoid such calamities. Confident though he was of preserving the Emir’s life from violence, Thunderclap remained worried about poison. He persuaded Hotak to employ not one but twenty food tasters, each one obliged to eat a spoonful of anything destined for the Emir’s table. Twenty food tasters each taking a spoonful from every one of the prince’s dishes took time but at least the plan ruined the opportunities of any poisoner.

Any poisoner except for one, a certain Ghoroob-e-astab, meaning ‘Nightfall’ in English, the greatest poisoner of his age or any other. Over a lifetime of distilling and mixing, Nightfall had so mastered his craft that he could prepare poisons that were almost an honour to die from. And victims died not by digesting his poisons only; Nightfall fashioned mists that drifted on the breeze and sought out one man alone in a gathering of a thousand. At the height of his powers, he could command a cloud of poisoned gnats to float from his home in Mashad, Persia, to a city as distant as Kabul and settle on the sleeping lips of a prince and all his court.

So against the craft of the poisoner Nightfall there was no defense. If the intended victim concealed himself in a guarded chamber surrounded by servants, still he was not safe. And if he lived only on water and wild berries and his body was washed in warm water and oil twenty times a day, still he was not safe. If he sat in the sunshine or the moonlight under a fine gauze fashioned of Isfahani silk, still he was not safe. Sunshine and moonshine, the air itself – all were allies of Nightfall.

The captain of Hotak’s bodyguard understood this. With the king’s permission, he travelled secretly to Mashad in Persia and offered Nightfall gold in exchange for counter-poisons. Nightfall was charmed by the thought of making money by curing the very people he had poisoned but the difficulty was this: there were no antidotes for his poisons; that was part of their beauty. Yet the great poisoner was reluctant to give up the captain’s gold and so he took a day to write out a number of elaborate recipes for Persian dishes. If these dishes were prepared in exactly the manner described, he told the captain, they would guard the Emir against all the poisons in the world.

Now it was far from true that Nightfall’s dishes would guard those who ate them from poison. But since Nightfall’s craft had cleared Persia and Afghanistan of any rivals in the fraternity of poisoners, there was little risk that the Emir would be assaulted in such a way. He would be free to think that the recipes were preserving his life. And Nightfall’s scheme went much further: he would trade his recipes for gold to every court in Persia, to every court in Afghanistan. It would become known that the master poisoner had set an infallible shield between princes and poisons, and that commissions to kill by means of potions were now a waste of time. Nightfall would retire, as he should, for he was by this time an old man with troublesome wives to deal with and bickering sons and daughters.

The myth of the recipes lasted fifty years, well after the master poisoner had gone to his reward. The dishes were carefully prepared in palaces and mansions for all of that time, and even in small households when the secrets of the first cookery book in the history of Afghanistan were smuggled out by kitchen workers. Only one copy of the book still survives. It has passed through many hands over the centuries and is now kept in a vault in Kabul together with a document revealing the ingredients of Nightfall’s two thousand poisons.

*   *   *

With the permission of the Governors of the Bank of Kabul, Nightfall’s counter-poison recipe for
khoresht aaloo
is displayed below. The dish is to be prepared by an adult male.

Khoresht Aaloo

Let the chicken be brown of feather with a proud bearing. In life it must feed on the seeds of wild grasses and insects such as the harlequin beetles that live on the leaves of the
castanea sativa
and hazelnut. Take care that the bird does not dine on ants or green locusts! See that it is slaughtered one hour past sunrise on its first birthday. Organs and head are not employed in the recipe. Allow the cleansed body of the bird to stand in the morning sun on a plate of white porcelain for fifteen minutes and no more. Be precise! Employing a blade with a keen edge, cut the bird into ten pieces. Be sure that the blade in its history has had no contact with undomesticated flesh such as that of the hare. Wash the ten parts of the bird separately in rain water. Do not make use of water that has run in a channel but only water that has been gathered from Heaven.

Take two onions each the size of a green apple of Naishapur. Let the skin of each onion be identical in hue to that of the feathers of the bird. Remove the skin of each onion in one piece. If the skin breaks, take a new onion and peel it. Place the peeled onions in the sunlight on a plate of white porcelain for fifteen minutes and no more. Again, be accurate! Slice each onion into three pieces. Warm each piece of onion between the toes of a white camel mare for one hour. If a white camel cannot be found, it is acceptable to whiten the coat of a brown camel with clay. Wash the onion pieces in rain water. Do not make use of water that has run in a channel but only water that has been gathered from Heaven. Slice each piece of onion as finely as the width of the Line of Saturn on the palm of the hand. Use a keen blade. Be sure that the blade in its history has had no contact with vegetables that grow above the soil, such as the pumpkin, or with fruits that grow from trees with a divided leaf, such as the pomegranate.

Pause to soak twelve prunes in a white porcelain bowl. Do not make use of water that has run in a channel but only water that has been gathered from Heaven. Let the prunes come from the upper branches of a sloe gage such as those that flourish on the banks of the rivers flowing from the Elburz to the Caspian. Build a cooking fire outdoors of walnut wood.

Take a frying pan with a heating surface the width of the left and right hand outstretched with the tips of the thumbs touching. Scour the interior of the frying pan with sand until no blemishes remain. Be warned! A single blemish, whether of rust or of char, will mar the potency of the counter-poison.

Place the scoured frying pan on the walnut fire. Pour a quantity of sesame oil into the scoured pan sufficient to cover the heating surface to the depth of a caraway seed. Allow the sesame oil to heat for two minutes and no more. Place the onion slices in the oil in arabesques. After one minute of cooking, turn each onion slice. The onion must be the gold of a bangle on the wrist of a Shirazi palace dancer. Fry the chicken pieces with the onion for twenty-five minutes and no more. The flesh of the bird must now bear comparison with the dusky skin of the Adyghes of Syria, known falsely as Circassians. Now pour the water in which the prunes have soaked onto the chicken and the onion. Do not be foolish. There would no longer be any point in preserving the arabesques. Add salt from the Desert Land of the Tuaregs. Let the grains of salt be numbered and not exceed four thousand. Allow the chicken, the onions, the prunes and their water to simmer on the walnut fire.

Make a selection of six potatoes from the fields of Sherbaghan. Let each potato equal in size the fist of a child of the age of five years. Wash the six potatoes in rainwater. Do not make use of water that has run in a channel but only water that has been gathered from Heaven. Place the six potatoes in a white porcelain bowl in the sunlight for fifteen minutes and no more. Be exact! From the six potatoes select the most perfect two. Peel the most perfect two potatoes with a keen blade. Make sure that the blade has not in its history come into contact with fruits or vegetables that grow in stalks, such as rhubarb. Slice each of the two most perfect potatoes into segments no greater than the distance between the Head Line and Heart Line on the palm of the right hand. Place the segments of the two most perfect potatoes in the scoured frying pan with the chicken, the prunes of the sloe gage and the juice in which the sloe gage prunes soaked. Just so.

Now take a quantity of the saffron that the Buddha-Worshippers of Bamiyan use in their ritual of the New Moon and sprinkle it on the potato slices. Within one minute the potato slices will take on the gold of spring daisies in the mountain pastures of the Reshteh-ye Alborz. (If the potato slices do not take on the gold of spring daisies in the mountain pastures of the Reshteh-ye Alborz, start again with a fresh bird.) Allow the potato slices to simmer for twelve minutes in the scoured frying pan and no more. Be scrupulous!

Prepare Basmati, in the Afghan manner. Wash your body from head to toe with rainwater. Do not make use of water that has run in a channel but only water that has been gathered from Heaven. Dress in garments freshly laundered. Recite what verses you know of the Gulistan of Abu-Mohammad Muslih al-Din bin Abdallah Shirazi, known as Saadi. Serve the
khoresht aaloo
and Basmati. Eat.

13

Thoughts on Growing and Eating

Growing

In my country of Afghanistan everything is arranged in such a way that your heart is broken again and again. It is not only wars that break your heart; it is the arguments that last a thousand years, the age-old jealousies, and of course, the poverty.

Not that Afghanistan is without beauty; not at all. I could take you to places in the north close to the Oxus River that would steal your breath away; places that you would not believe could exist as I lead you through an arid landscape of broken rock and red sand and stunted bushes. Then you would suddenly find yourself gazing down from a mountain pass on the river shining under a blue sky and a green carpet climbing up the slopes. And you would think, ‘Ah! This is Paradise!’ I could take you to Faryab in the spring; to the plain of Dasht-i-Laili and show you wildflowers of a hundred colours spread so densely over the sand that it would only be the giant dunes rising above the flowers that would make you believe that this was a desert. Or I could take you to Kandahar in the early morning, approaching the city from the west, and the sky would be so broad above us and the air so crisp that you would believe what I had whispered to you: that the walls of mud-brick coming into view were built only a generation after Adam and Eve left Eden.

I could show you many other types of beauty: the smiles and laughter of children who might have little to smile about, nothing to laugh about; the courage of women who gather their children about them and teach them what they will need to know in life, even when the rice bag is all but empty and the sheep are bleating in hunger; I could show you five hundred feasting at a wedding in Mazar-e-Sharif, toasting the groom, singing in praise of the bride, and not one of the five hundred confident of lasting through a further year of war. We are a people who should never have survived our history of five thousand years; we are a people who should no longer exist. And yet we do, and there is beauty in that fact alone.

Most importantly, what of the mystery of our Afghanistan? Is there not great beauty in the mystery? For we are a very mysterious people, we Afghans. We come from the long-ago, our roots go down so deep in the sand and soil and rock that we can be said to be as much a part of the land as the gundy trees and marsot bushes; we are both wild and gentle, full of anger and full of love. This is where the world began, in Afghanistan. The world of townships, at least, and I say it was an Afghan who first put brick on brick, and an Afghan who first sowed soil with wheat.