by Thalassa Ali
From that moment he had been convinced that she was a powerful sorceress, a modest one, to be sure, since she very rarely used her abilities, but a sorceress nonetheless.
He sniffed as he scuffed his shoes off outside her door. As for Yar Mohammad and his calm magnanimity, he would feel the boy's presence more than anyone. For all that he was a groom by trade, Yar Mohammad had loved and served Munshi Sahib faithfully for two years, bringing his tea, washing his clothes, and seeing to his food.
He, of all people, must have noticed how the boy had clung to Munshi Sahib from the moment he entered the gate.
Dittoo would have been willing to bet that Yar Mohammad had just lost his position.
September 20, 1841
All summer in Kabul had been a delight. The days had been pleasantly hot, the evenings balmy, and the air so clear that one could almost read by the light of the moon. The cantonment had reveled in the city's apricots, its cherries, its great, purple mulberries and milky nuts.
Now that summer was ending, the days were cooler, and the markets were beginning to fill with fresh grapes and melons.
Sir William Macnaghten had arranged an excursion to the tomb of Babur Shah, the cultivated founder of the Mughal Empire, whose memorial garden stood on the western slope of the Sher Darwaza south of the city. After leaving the cantonment, a large, variously mounted party of officers and ladies had followed the Kabul River upstream, past formal gardens and orchards, then between the Sher Darwaza and Asmai heights, where the river emerged from the hills onto the flat Kabul plain. There, the party had crossed the river near a little painted shrine with pennants waving, and followed an uphill dirt track to the garden. Wild roses and jasmine covered the mountainside, perfuming the air and lifting the spirits. The usual grumbling and irritation of such a trip were absent. No one had complained— not Lady Macnaghten, who, for all her elegance, was a poor horsewoman; not Aunt Claire, whose palanquin bearers had patiently dragged her up the steep slope in an open sedan chair; not even the gout-ridden General Elphinstone, who had also been carried up, for it was hoped that the mountain air would do him good.
Now, after strolling in the tomb's terraced garden, with its elegant little mosque and cascading water, the party picnicked at folding tables beneath spreading plane trees, while bees buzzed around them and doves cooed in the branches overhead.
Mariana yawned behind her hand. If only she were here with someone she loved
“I hear we have put down another revolt in Kandahar,” Alexander Burnes said lazily, as he helped himself to the boiled mutton.
“We have indeed,” Sir William replied. “Some people have been saying that Afghanistan cannot be settled at the point of a bayonet, but I could not disagree more.” He signaled to a servant to pour the wine. “The situation in the south proves my point exactly. Since Shah Shuja came to the throne, his disappointed relatives have been pouting like spoiled children. They seem to think we should be giving them money, too. But it seems that as soon as we put one naughty boy in a corner, the rest become terrified.”
Lady Macnaghten's nephew cleared his throat. “Of course,” he put in hesitantly, “they are quite dangerous in their own—”
“Dangerous?” General Sale stared at Charles Mott. “What do you mean? The Afghans are great braggarts, but they are cowards at heart, every last man of them.”
“Quite right,” agreed his wife, as Mott shrank into his beautiful riding coat.
“Did you say the revolt was in Kandahar?” Lady Macnaghten leaned forward eagerly.
“I did,” replied her husband.
At her significant glance, Aunt Claire nudged Mariana. “I hope your lieutenant is all right,” she whispered.
“Could someone,” General Elphinstone said faintly, “please take me away? I believe I must lie down.”
Brigadier Shelton looked up from cutting his chicken with one hand. “Man's an invalid,” he commented to no one in particular.
AN HOUR after the party had returned from its outing, three men stood at the foot of General Elphinstone's bed.
“I am done up, sir, done up in body and mind,” the old man announced mournfully. “As you have seen, one simple excursion has caused me a violent attack of gout and fever. I have no strength left, and my mental capacity is quite gone. Why, I can scarcely remember the names of my officers.”
His one-armed second-in-command snorted audibly. “I hope he remembers mine” he muttered.
“I have written once more to Calcutta,” the general added, “asking them to send me back to India. Perhaps this time the Governor-General will take pity on an old man and instruct General Nott to come up from Kandahar and replace me.”
“I quite understand, sir.” Sir William Macnaghten nodded as he drew a gold timepiece from his waistcoat pocket. “In my next communication with Lord Auckland, I shall add my own plea to yours. But let me reiterate, sir, that Afghanistan is at peace. We have no reason to anticipate any military action more than a foray or two, to keep the peace. In fact, it is so quiet that it has been suggested we send General Sale and his First Brigade back to India. And now, sir, we must leave you to rest.”
“I cannot understand why Elphinstone is so bothered,” Macnaghten confided to Brigadier Shelton as they descended the stairs. “He has practically nothing to do. Why does he not simply enjoy the lovely weather?”
“The man is a fool,” snapped Brigadier Shelton. “A hopeless, doddering fool.”
THE NEXT morning, Mariana sat in her room, Fitzgerald's latest letter in her hand.
Kandahar, he had written, is a desert wasteland. If it were not for our recent military success, I should be very glad to be gone. The whole landscape is parched and hostile. The walled, irrigated gardens northwest of here provide us with fresh fruit and vegetables, but they, too, are dusty and full of stones. Sometimes I like to imagine that a lush paradise lies beyond the spine of mountains I see from my window, but even if such an Eden did exist I would take little pleasure in it. What would be the worth of cool breezes or the scent of mint and lavender underfoot to a man with no other companions but his fellow officers?
Formal and distant at first, the lieutenant's letters had begun to show discomfiting signs of romantic longing. Mariana hoped no one else had seen this latest one arrive. Nothing would be more awful than to have Aunt Claire discover its existence and demand that it be read aloud.
She pictured Fitzgerald, powerful shoulders bent over a makeshift desk, choosing his words, imagining the moment when he saw her again. Whose fault was it that his letters had taken this new turn? Her own had given him no encouragement.
She folded the paper and shut it into her writing box. If Fitzgerald did love her, as her family in England and Aunt Claire had dreamed, it was dishonest to let him hope, but what else could she do?
She could not deny that his presence at Lady Macnaghten's party had given her reassurance. If she did marry him, she would somehow swallow her grief and make him happy. She would lay aside her memories of a gifted child and a graceful man with sharp-scented skin, and forget her dream of learning the Waliullah family's mystic secrets while her darling Saboor leaned against her knee and her own precious, dark-haired babies played at her feet.
If she did marry him, everyone but her would be relieved beyond measure.
She stood and walked to the window, imagining her mother in Sussex, speaking to a fellow parishioner after church. “Oh, yes,” Mama would say, her voice, so like Aunt Claire's, carrying all the way across the churchyard. “My daughter, Mrs. Fitzgerald, is very happy in India.”
To her mother, Fitzgerald must seem like the Archangel Gabriel.
Outside Mariana's window, a bowlegged water carrier crossed the garden, a full goatskin on his back, splashing the bare ground to quell the ever-present dust. Beyond the wall, past the Residence compound, the looming mountains, as always, stared her down.
She turned from the window, poured cold water into her basin, and splashed it onto her face. If Hassan did writ
e to her after all, if he asked her to return to Lahore, her family would never understand the joy his invitation would give her.
A paper lay on her dressing table. She dried her face and glanced at it.
It was her translation of Jalaluddin Rumi, whose most famous verses she had quoted so dramatically in her letter to Hassan, thanking him for the gift of his gold medallion:
Listen to the reed flute, she had written, hear it complain,
Bewailing its separation:—
“Ever since I was torn from my reed bed,
My plaintive notes have caused men and women to moan.
Search out a man whose own breast has burst from severance,
That I may express to him the agony of my love-desire.”
The agony of my love-desire. She winced at the memory.
She had only one, faint hope for that humiliating letter—that it had been lost on its way to Lahore.
She sighed as she put her towel away. She needed distraction now, but never had her life felt so empty of adventure. Fitzgerald's letters complained of the dullness of Kandahar, but her life in Kabul was not much better.
Each morning, accompanied by Ghulam Ali and the silent Yar Mohammad, she rode out of the Residence compound and turned toward the great, fortified Bala Hisar, whose outstretched protecting wall climbed uphill and over the steep Sher Darwaza, and reached down to encircle the irregularly shaped walled city at its feet. Each day, instead of crossing the Kabul River and entering the city, she turned and rode toward the harsh mountains she had crossed the previous March.
“You must not enter Kabul proper without a European escort,” her uncle had warned her once again. “While I am certain the Afghans will treat you decently, I cannot afford to take that risk.”
A year earlier, Mariana would have ignored her uncle's instructions. On her very first day, she would have passed without hesitation through the nearest gate and into the fascinating fortified city that stood at the crossroads of the world. There, mingling with people from the far corners of Asia, she would have wandered its narrow lanes, its gardens and caravanserais, and admired its bazaars and their merchandise from China, Russia, Arabia, and India.
But this was different. This country had a faintly menacing flavor.
Each day she rode past the tempting city gates, with their throngs of laden porters and shouting sellers of grapes and watermelons. Each day she followed the dusty road along the river, past fruit gardens and the high, frowning bastions of the Bala Hisar, then between rows of poplar balsam trees toward the bare mountains.
After lunch, she wrote to her mother and sister of the picnics, amateur theatricals, and dinner parties she had attended with her aunt and uncle. To her father, she copied Fitzgerald's accounts of skirmishes with insurgents in Kandahar, and described the conversations she had overheard about fighting in the north.
To Fitzgerald, she wrote about nothing.
We have enjoyed one pleasant night after another, she had written yesterday. Last evening, we dined under a full moon in Lady Macnaghten's garden. Brightly colored Indian cloth lanterns glowed like jewels from every tree. It was quite lovely.
The garden had been lovely to look at, but the dinner conversation had revolved tediously around Sir William's recent appointment as Governor of Bombay, presumably to repay him for his work in Afghanistan. He and Lady Macnaghten were to leave within two months. Macnaghten's successor, Alexander Burnes, his face reddened from the wine, had prattled endlessly about the smoked salmon and cigars he ordered weekly from India for his parties in the city.
Burnes's neighbor, Captain Johnson, who had also drunk too much, had talked on about the wonders of living in Kabul without replying properly to any of Mariana's questions about the city.
“I can scarcely bear to leave town,” the captain had announced to the table at large, his pale face animated after she asked him to describe the city bazaars. “Now that I keep the cash for Shah Shuja's soldiers in my house, I hardly need to go anywhere.
“To me,” he had added rapturously, exchanging a glance with Alexander Burnes, “the beauties of the countryside are nothing compared to the pleasures of the city.”
As they walked home afterward, Uncle Adrian had shaken his head. “Johnson may enjoy living in the city, but he is a fool to keep Shah Shuja's cash there.”
In a moment the brass gong would sound, announcing lunch. Mariana straightened her back and returned to her desk. She snapped open her writing box and withdrew a letter she had written a week before.
It was probably full of mistakes, for she had not asked her teacher to correct it, but the time had come to send it on its way, and then to take the consequences.
I hope you have recovered fully from your wounds, she had written. I ask your forgiveness for my past mistakes. Nothing would make me happier than to know that there is still a place for me at Qamar Haveli.
I long to see you and your family once again, and to embrace my dear Saboor.
She had not had the courage to write more. With her first letter greeted by silence, she probably should not have written at all.
If it were meant for an English person, this letter would travel by official courier. Moving swiftly by relay in a pack of official dispatches, it would reach Lahore within ten days. But this letter, whose graceful, right-to-left Urdu script was intended only for native eyes, must be carried on foot.
She took in a long breath. It was now or not at all. She put her head round the door and shouted for Dittoo.
“Call Ghulam Ali,” she ordered.
She emptied her cash box onto her bed, then, fearing the pile of coins would not be enough, she added to it two gold rings that had once belonged to her grandmother.
“Make certain you give it into Hassan Sahib's own hands,” she said a few moments later.
“I do not need the rings,” the courier declared brusquely, waving a sunburned hand. “I know how this work is done. Will you need a reply to your letter?” he added, almost kindly, his pink eyelids narrowing in the bright light from her window.
She felt herself blush. “Yes, if possible.”
She watched him tuck the letter into his clothes and leave her.
A moment later, the gong rang.
What would happen now, she wondered, as she shut her door and marched down the tiled corridor toward the dining room.
Only Munshi Sahib could tell her. From the poetry he chose for her lessons, it was clear her teacher often read her mind. If he read hers so easily, then surely he could read Hassan's, for what barrier was distance to a soul in flight, especially that of her munshi, the great interpreter of dreams, and also, it seemed, of thoughts?
But she had never found the courage to ask him if Hassan had read her first letter, if he longed for her as he waited for sleep, if he loved her still.
“And now, Bibi,” her teacher said, two hours later, in his instructive voice, “read me your translation from yesterday.”
Before she began to read, Mariana looked warily toward the dining room window.
Her munshi's visits had lost some of their luster in recent months, for he no longer came alone from his small room near the servants’ quarters. Instead, he was accompanied on that short, daily journey by the disturbing young Afghan asylum-seeker, whose three days of asylum had since lengthened to five months.
Each day they approached the bungalow together, the boy clinging to the old man like a well-meaning limpet, gripping his ancient elbow, frowning with concern as he pointed out loose stones along the pathway.
In the beginning, Mariana had waited impatiently for Nur Rahman's three days to end. Unnerved by the pollution on his face, wondering how the munshi could bear his presence, she had looked away whenever the boy hurried past her in the garden or on the avenue, carrying plates of fruit or pots of hot tea to the old man's room.
Her servants had appeared to feel the same. Dittoo had pretended the boy did not exist. Ghulam Ali had spat onto the ground at Nur Rahman's approach. Tall Yar Mo
hammad, whose former place at Munshi Sahib's side had been usurped, watched the boy with unreadable eyes.
On his third afternoon, when he accompanied Munshi Sahib to her lesson, Mariana had thought Nur Rahman had come to say good-bye.
“I hope all will be well with you after you leave here,” she had offered when he greeted her as usual, a hand over his heart.
“I am sure you will find your way,” she added, when he raised his head and stared into her face, his fringed eyes filled with curiosity and hope.
Her teacher had raised a wrinkled hand. “There is no need for farewells, Bibi,” he had said gently. “Nur Rahman will be staying here.”
“But Munshi Sahib,” she had protested, horrified at this change of plan, “how can he stay? My aunt is bound to notice him. When she does, she will have him thrown onto the road—” She shifted from Farsi to Urdu and lowered her voice. “I do not want him here.”
“He will look after me,” her teacher had decreed. “He will sleep outside my door,” he added serenely, as if that somehow made all the difference.
Today, as always, the two had arrived together. As always, the boy stayed behind, watching as the munshi entered by the front door, as befitting his station as a learned native, and stopped to remove his shoes before entering the dining room.
Munshi Sahib's real name was Mohammad Shafiuddin. Long ago in Bangalore, he had taught native languages to Mariana's uncle and a number of other young British officers. When Uncle Adrian had rediscovered him twenty years later, walking peacefully along the Mall in Simla, a thousand miles north of the city where they had been teacher and student, he had engaged the old man on the spot to teach Mariana Urdu and Persian, the court languages of northern India.
Uncle Adrian had not known then, and still did not know, that Munshi Sahib was a dear friend of Shaikh Waliullah.
