Companions of Paradise

by Thalassa Ali

  That night, at the sound of a string bed creaking in the darkness of her bedchamber, Shaikh Waliullah's twin sister opened her eyes.

  Hassan was awake. He sat hunched over on the edge of his bed, his hair tangled, his bearded face scarcely visible in the starlight from the window, his heavily bandaged leg at an awkward angle from his body.

  Dawn was far off, Safiya Sultana guessed, for she felt no instinctive urge to rise and wash for the pre-sunrise prayer. Instead, she raised herself on an ample elbow and studied the nephew she had nursed for the past nine weeks. “What is it, my dear?” she inquired. “Are your wounds troubling you?”

  “No, Bhaji,” Hassan Ali Khan replied softly. “I am thinking of Yusuf.”

  Safiya nodded. “May Allah Most Gracious bless and keep your dear friend.”

  “It was my fault,” he said abruptly. “It was I who killed him.”

  Fully dressed, as always, in a comfortable shalwar kameez, Safiya sat up and cuffed her bolster into a more comfortable shape. “Nonsense,” she declared. Her voice, as deep as a man's, echoed in the small chamber. “You and Yusuf were both shot in the Hazuri Bagh. You lived and Yusuf died. That is all there is to it.”

  He dropped his head. “They shot him because of me.”

  So that explained why Hassan's wounds were taking so long to close. Remorse was certainly no aid to healing. Needing time to think, Safiya offered her nephew a noncommittal grunt.

  Memories of the recent civil strife that had led to Hassan's wounds and Yusuf's death were still raw in the walled city of Lahore, indeed in the whole kingdom of the Punjab.

  It had taken Maharajah Sher Singh, the present king, three savage January days to wrest the throne of the Punjab from his hated rival, Rani Chand Kaur. While Sher Singh's gunners shot down into the Lahore Citadel from the high minarets of the old Badshahi Mosque and his artillery sent cannonballs through its smashed-in Alamgiri Gate, damaging the royal palace and military buildings and slaughtering courtiers, soldiers, and servants, thousands of his own hungry, unpaid soldiers found their way into the old city that shared the Citadel's ancient, fortified wall. There they had rampaged, uncontrolled, through the city's bazaars, invading its houses and murdering its citizens.

  The wounds remained.

  It was only through Allah's Grace that the Waliullah family's old haveli had been spared.

  Hassan's odd English wife had proved useful more than once during that time. For all her odd behavior, the girl had her good points.

  During the battle for the throne, an ambitious Englishman had tried to murder Maharajah Sher Singh. Learning of the plot, Hassan Ali had braved the fighting in the Hazuri Bagh with his friend Yusuf and two Afghans. Together, they had managed to thwart the assassination, but at the cost of Yusuf's life.

  The Afghans had since disappeared, leaving the wounded Hassan the only witness to what had happened that day.

  Afterward, wracked by fevers, Hassan had left that story to the imaginations of others. Too ill to care, he had ignored the speculation about his complicity in the assassination attempt, and the gossip that his English wife had sided with the British plotters and persuaded him to kill the Maharajah himself. Later, after Sher Singh had learned the truth, and the city had covered him with glory, he had still remained silent.

  He had borne without complaint the surgeries that had rescued his left hand and cleaned out the wide, putrefying flesh wound on his leg. He had cried out, of course, as the surgeon plied his knives and his cauterizing tools, but to Safiya's ears, Hassan's groans had sounded like those of a man who knew he deserved punishment.

  “I should never have gone to the Hazuri Bagh that day,” Hassan said harshly. “I should have let Yusuf, Zulmai, and Habibullah do the work of stopping the assassination. Unlike me, they were well versed in the art of killing.”

  “It is true that you are no soldier,” Safiya agreed, “and that the battlefield is no place for the Assistant Foreign Minister. And it is also true that Yusuf was a fighter, but what of your Afghans? I thought they were mere traders, men who come to Lahore every year, bringing saffron, rubies, and horses.”

  “Zulmai and Habibullah are merchants, but they are hard men, and expert shots.” Hassan shook his head in the dimness. “If I had stayed in this house and not insisted on joining them, Yusuf would still be alive.”

  “Then why did you insist?”

  He made a tired gesture. “I do not know, Bhaji. I thought they needed me—”

  Whatever Hassan's secrets might be, they were doing him no good. “Speak of that day, my boy,” Safiya Sultana ordered. “Tell me your story.”

  He sighed raggedly. “The Hazuri Bagh, where the battle took place,” he began, describing from habit a place that Safiya, a lady in purdah, had never seen, “is the rectangular walled garden lying between the entrance to the Badshahi Mosque and the main, Alamgiri Gate to the Citadel. It is a small garden, only about a hundred paces broad and fifty paces deep, filled with old trees and ruins, with a pavilion at its center. With its high, surrounding walls, it is a dangerous place for a battle.

  “We knew the four assassins would arrive early, and hide in the garden, and so we went there the night before Sher Singh began his attack on the Citadel. At first light, as the fighting began, we paired off and began to search for them. Within an hour, three of the four were dead, killed by Zulmai, Habibullah, and Yusuf.

  “I saw the battle with my own eyes,” he added. “Sher Singh's cannon fired first, splintering the huge wooden doors of the Alamgiri Gate. Then his best Nihang soldiers tried to storm through, but the Rani's guns had been set up just inside the gate. When they fired, hundreds of Sher Singh's soldiers were killed instantly.” He shuddered. “There were great billows of smoke. The timbers of the gate caught fire. Severed limbs and heads flew into the air and fell to the ground. It was deafening and horrible.

  “Sher Singh fought on that morning, but he had lost control of his assault. When the defenders began to fire down into the garden from the surrounding wall, Sher's troops realized they were trapped. They panicked and ran, climbing over each other to get out through the side gate of the Bagh.”

  He fell silent.

  Only two things disturbed Safiya Sultana's customary stout calm: lack of food and lack of sleep. Although she would never admit it, the difficult work of nursing Hassan had nearly exhausted her strength.

  “Go on,” she urged, “tell the rest of it.”

  “We were now desperate to find the fourth sniper. Sher Singh had kept out of sight until then, but we knew he would want to see the disaster at first hand. At the exact moment that he appeared under the arches of the garden's pavilion, Yusuf and I found the last assassin. He was crouched behind a tree, a child too young to wear a turban, his musket pointed straight at Sher Singh.”

  He shifted uncomfortably on the edge of his bed. “We both raised our weapons, but Yusuf, may Allah bless him, must have wanted me to have the glory of saving Sher Singh's life. He held his fire and told me to shoot.”

  “And then?”

  “I could not do it, Bhaji. The child was dressed in rotting rags. He was shivering with cold. I wondered what he had been offered to do this terrible thing. He was in my sights, an easy shot, but I was powerless to pull the trigger. I could not breathe. Yusuf repeated his order to shoot, but I could not move even one of my fingers.

  “In the end, Yusuf killed the boy, but not before he got off a wild shot that wounded someone near Sher Singh. When the guards looked to see where the ball had come from, they must have seen us, not the dead child. Yusuf shouted, but it was too late. They all fired at once. I was knocked to the ground. From where I lay, I could see only Yusuf's foot, but even then I knew he was dead. Zulmai and Habibullah came running, and pulled me to safety. If they had not done so, a second volley from the guards would have killed me.” He raked his fingers through his hair. “If I had been less of a coward, Yusuf would still be alive.”

  Safiya held out a hand. “There is no point in
—”

  “I am not a hero,” he interrupted, “whatever they say in the bazaar. Of the four of us, I alone did nothing to stop the assassination. My only contribution was to get poor Yusuf killed.”

  “I did not know you could shoot,” Safiya remarked, to divert him. “I thought you were all brocades and diplomacy.”

  “He taught me.” Hassan's voice broke. “We were fourteen.”

  “And what happened after that?”

  “I do not remember,” he said curtly.

  Safiya did not reply. Both of them knew well that Hassan's story had not ended when his Afghan friends dragged him, shocked and bleeding, from the Hazuri Bagh. Both knew that, guessing where he lay wounded, his wife had rushed out into the dangerous city streets that night, and found him in a house by the Delhi Gate.

  Without her, he would have died of infection as Sher Singh's soldiers rampaged through the streets outside.

  For all his misplaced guilt and the loss of his burly, good-natured friend, Hassan had been a fortunate man.

  “ Al-Hamdulillah, Allah be praised,” Safiya murmured.

  “I see no cowardice in your story,” she went on in a normal tone. “You, a courtier with no history of soldiering, risked entering a battle to stop an assassination. When the moment came, you felt your opponent's humanity, and could not bear to take his life. Do not forget, Hassan,” she added, her deep voice echoing in the small bedchamber, “that you have served the Punjab and this city for seven years. I remember the day you went to join the great Faqeer Azizuddin at court.

  “How many Punjabi Muslims have worked as you have, side by side with the Sikh and Hindu nobles of the court, to bring peace and well-being to this kingdom? How many have negotiated with the Pashtuns in the north, the British in the south? How many have spent night after sleepless night struggling against the ill luck that has brought one wrong person after another to the throne since Maharajah Ranjit Singh's death?”

  Hassan made a small, disbelieving sound.

  “You should have told me this story weeks ago. And now,” she added, yawning, “I need my sleep. Your explanation of why you went to the Hazuri Bagh in the first place must wait until tomorrow. ”

  Hassan drew in his breath. “Bhaji, I—”

  “Not another word.” So saying, Safiya Sultana stretched out on the groaning bed and closed her eyes. A moment later she began to snore.

  “WHAT GIBBERISH are you talking, child?” Safiya demanded the following afternoon of the four-year-old in rumpled muslin clothes, who bounced beside her on the sheet-covered floor, babbling aloud in a foreign tongue. Around them in the upstairs ladies’ sitting room, women fanned themselves and talked in low tones as they waited for the afternoon meal.

  “An-nah taught it to me,” Saboor said gravely. “It's called ‘Hey, Diddle Diddle.’ It is about a cat who plays a sarod and a cow that jumps so-o-o high!” He flung his arms over his head. “And a small dog who—”

  “Enough, child!” Safiya rumbled. “I am too tired to listen to such nonsense. Ah,” she glanced through the curtained doorway, “your father has come. See how well he is walking now.”

  Watching her nephew approach, Safiya rejoiced in Hassan's improvement since the previous night. He had bathed. Someone had washed his hair and combed it back, so that it curled behind his ears. His beard was neatly trimmed. Dark circles still lay beneath his eyes, and his broad, fair-skinned face had thinned, making his broken nose more prominent than before, but in his fine, embroidered muslins, he looked almost like himself.

  Allah be praised, his wounded thigh was no longer hugely swollen and inflamed, with pustules breaking out all over it. For the past week, he had been able to sleep on his back, not stretched out on his stomach. All that was needed now was for the open wound to finish closing safely. He had also begun to use his injured left hand.

  It had taken all Safiya's healing arts to keep him alive after he had been brought into the haveli, sixteen hours after his battle. It had taken all the family's prayers to drive away the illnesses that had later threatened his life.

  As Hassan stepped out of a pair of embroidered slippers with upturned toes, Saboor ran to him. “Abba!” he cried, flinging his arms around his father's waist. “You are all dressed! You are wearing your nice shoes!”

  “Yes, I am, my darling.” Hassan stroked his child's curls with a hand that would have been beautiful, had it not lost its middle finger.

  Safiya's heart went out, as it always did, to the man she had adored from the moment he was born. Her twin brother's only child, Hassan had been the one she turned to after cholera had killed her two little daughters and left her starving for a child to love. Only six years old then, and with a mother of his own, Hassan had understood her need. For hours at a time during the first terrible days, he had sat beside her, one small hand resting on her knee.

  Saboor, two years younger than his father had been then, already promised to be as loving as Hassan.

  She caught the scent of musk. Hassan was wearing perfume. That, too, was a good sign. Of course if he were in the Maharajah's presence, he would also be wearing jewels: his heavy, waist-long pearl necklaces, kundan earrings set with rubies and emeralds, enameled bracelets, gold rings…

  Jewels gave elegance and power to a man who knew how to wear them.

  “You need feeding,” she said gruffly, enjoying the perfume's forceful, heady sweetness. “You are a skeleton under those fancy clothes.”

  “Yes.” Safiya's gap-toothed sister-in-law nodded vehemently. “He must have plenty of yakhni and meat dishes to strengthen him.”

  “You are going to Peshawar when you are well again, are you not, Bhai Jan?” asked one of the children.

  “I do not know, Mueen, I may go there, or to Multan, or somewhere else.” Hassan grimaced as he settled himself on the floor, his little son at his side. “But I will not go anywhere until I can ride again.”

  Saboor sat up. “When my Abba goes, I will share his saddle,” he announced, his eyes bright. “We will ride and ride on his beautiful gray horse, and then we will send for An-nah, and she will live with us!”

  Safiya saw Hassan's fingers stiffen on the child's shoulder.

  “Will you take me with you, Bhai Jan?” asked Mueen.

  “I do not know, my dear.” Hassan smiled carefully. “I am not sure you should come with me. I will be traveling much of the time while I am there.”

  “But I can help you,” the boy insisted. “I can carry your things.”

  “I'll carry Abba's things, too!” Saboor looked eagerly from face to face.

  Hassan did not reply.

  Safiya, too, kept her silence. Keeping the peace in the restive Punjab was an unsafe and thankless enterprise, especially now, with so much turmoil at the Citadel. Wherever he went, Hassan would have to deal with never-ending complaints about taxes and the unpaid soldiery. Dealing with angry landowners and villagers would mean taking an armed guard when he left Lahore, not a pair of children.

  Saboor peered eagerly at his father. “When will we see An-nah? Will we go to Kabul to bring her home? Will it be soon, Abba?”

  Hassan smiled vaguely. “I do not know yet, my darling.”

  “But I want to see An-nah now. I want to tell her—”

  Unable to bear the pain on Hassan's face, Safiya made a kissing sound. “Do not worry, my darling,” she said in the singsong tone she reserved for pacifying children. “Inshallah, you will see your An-nah soon. Go to my room.” She pointed to the verandah beyond the curtained doorway. “You will find a paper on my bed, with my newest poem written on it. Take it downstairs and show it to your grandfather.”

  Saboor's face had begun to crumple. “But, Bhaji, I—”

  “Take him with you, Mueen,” she said firmly.

  As the child shuffled away, bent-shouldered, his cousin holding his hand, two or three of the ladies looked up from their conversations. Safiya's sister-in-law leaned forward eagerly, sucking on her teeth. “What did the child say?” she
demanded. “Is Hassan not going to bring his wife back from Kabul?”

  Ignoring the questions, Safiya raised a hand. “Hassan and I,” she announced pointedly, “have an important matter to discuss.”

  As soon as the ladies had removed themselves disappointedly from earshot, Safiya turned to Hassan. “And now,” she said, tugging a bolster toward her, “you and I will finish our conversation of last night. Your ill-considered presence at the Hazuri Bagh had something to do with your wife Mariam, did it not?”

  He looked at her hollowly. “It did, but, Bhaji, this is a very painful—”

  “Out with it,” she ordered. “For nine weeks you have had poison in your mind. You must tell me what it is.”

  He sighed. “Very well, then. I was not in my right mind when I insisted on joining Yusuf and the others. I was very angry with Mariam. Earlier that day, she had overheard me speaking to Yusuf about the assassination attempt. Without waiting to discover the truth, she had made up her mind that I was—”

  “Plotting to kill her uncle and aunt and her other English traveling companions at their camp in the Shalimar Garden.” Safiya nodded. “Yes, I know all that. She told us herself. She has admitted her evil suspicions and recanted her accusations. I myself was horrified to learn how stupidly and badly she had treated you, but she was so remorseful that I forgave her.

  “Of course,” she added meaningfully, “it was not my forgiveness, or your father's, that she wanted most.”

  “She demanded to know whether I planned to kill her, as well.” Hassan's eyes blazed. “How could Mariam have believed that of me, of us? How could she have uttered those ugly, hysterical words on the morning after—”

  He dropped his gaze.

  Safiya did not need to ask what he was referring to. The entire Waliullah household knew what had occurred between Hassan and his beautiful, difficult wife on the night before her mad outburst. What a fool she had been to throw away her success

  “She accused me of only pretending to like her, of luring her into this house with lies.” He opened his hands. “In my rage, I consented to the divorce she had asked for, and then I insisted on going with Yusuf to the Hazuri Bagh.”