by Tamim Ansary
At last the halwa was thick and hot. They left it in the pot while they got properly dressed, putting on their loveliest dresses and blouses—the women from the other compounds ran home for their finest fineries and came back quickly with their clothes stuffed into bags. Some decked themselves out in jewelry taken from private dowry boxes. Much chattering took place, many witty back-biting jibes were exchanged during the commotion, the ceremony, and the excitement of dressing up.
Finally they put on cloth coats that covered their plumage. Over the coats they dropped their chadaris, pleated sacks that covered them from skull to ankle, so that no one could see the glamorous garments under their body-veils. The women had dressed up for one another alone.
Khadija ladled a healthy portion of the rice-flour pudding into a bowl. The rest would be distributed to other households as celebration. She wrapped the bowl in cloth, and set the cloth in a basket on a layer of straw to keep the pudding warm. Now they were ready for their expedition.
“W’allah!” Soraya’s mother cried out suddenly. “What are we thinking? We can’t go up there without an escort.”
“But we’re wearing chadaris. What’s the harm?”
“The harm! As if anyone who sees us won’t know we’re women. What if marauders come along? What if they’re hiding behind the hill? No one will ever know what happened to us! We’ll just be gone.”
Soraya bit her lips, spots of color appearing on her pale cheeks. Her narrow nostrils pulsed. She glared at her mother with the hottest hatred. She wanted to visit the malang but dared not oppose her mother. Khadija would have to do it for her.
“Don’t you think any raiders would have shown themselves by now?” she scoffed. “This malang has been up on our hill for weeks!”
“Easy for you to laugh, Khadija,” Ibrahim’s aunt said. “You weren’t here when the raiders came.”
Khadija’s lips tightened. Yes, when the raiders came, she happened to be in Sorkhab, at a cousin’s wedding. They never tired of telling the stories, never failed to remind her that she wasn’t there, she had missed the drama and the tragedy, one more proof that she might live in Char Bagh but was not of Char Bagh. The raiders were Pushtoons, probably men who had gotten separated from some army or other and had gone into banditry for themselves, a throwback to the grim days after Emperor Ahmad Shah died and his offspring started scrabbling for his throne. The gangs spawned in that era had roamed the land for years and years.
The band of scoundrels that hit Char Bagh had come specifically for women. They needed women. They must have watched the village for days, memorizing its patterns and habits. Then one summer afternoon, when the women were puttering in their gardens around the compounds and the men were all in the fields by the river, the raiders struck. Khushdil’s mother bashed one of them with her short spade and knocked him off his beast, but two of his companions ran her down, and she later died. One of the Haidari boys came running out of his compound house with a poker, but he was just a boy and they were men. He darted among their horses for a few brave minutes, but they wrestled him to the ground and hit him with a stone until he stopped moving. By then, the others had dragged seven girls onto their saddles, and they all galloped away with their haul.
The survivors of the raid went screaming to the fields. The men set off at once on mules and donkeys and on their very few horses, but they lost the trail on the stony ground beyond the Red Pass. No one ever learned where those marauders had come from or where they went, and no one ever saw them or any of those girls again.
The people of Char Bagh still grew uneasy when raiders and marauders were mentioned. Khadija knew better than to dismiss their anxiety or make light of it. If she was one of them, she would feel it too, so she made every show of feeling it. She spotted Ahmad and a couple of those do-nothing Asadullah boys playing in the courtyard, those big, cheerful fellows. “Boys!” She pushed the window open. “Come here, you. Take us up to the malang.”
As soon as she had secured an escort she felt better. The other women had a point, you could never be sure who might see you if you left the village limits. On the path, one of the women began singing to keep up her courage. The others joined in, for they all knew the song. Then suddenly it was exciting to march along in the open like that, feeling a breeze through one’s eye mesh, a breeze that cooled one’s forehead and diluted the stuffy heat inside one’s chadari. Some of the younger girls had never been this far from home. They found the malang sitting against one wall of the shelter the men had built for him. When he saw the women coming, he bent over his prayer beads to shield himself from their femininity but, within minutes, they had him surrounded, their chadaris fluttering. Now and then, the breeze lifted the hem of a veil just enough to reveal a foot or even an ankle. The malang muttered audibly, refusing to look up.
Ghulam Haidar’s girl Shahnaz, who was just then ripening into marriage age, a girl whose mischievous ways had already caused her mother much disturbance, broke into the shrill teasing tone that girls took with each other as a way of flirting with any boy cousins who might be looking on: “Malang-sahib, won’t you lift your head. Are you 'fraid of us? We’re not going to bite you. We’re not going to eat you. We might take just a little nibble of you, just a wee little taste, but it won’t hurt.”
The malang turned away from Shahnaz, and his muttering rose higher.
“Malang-sahib,” Shahnaz teased on, “if you could have any one of us—”
“Hush!” cried her shocked sister.
“—which one would you pick?” Shahnaz finished merrily. Under her chadari she muffled a giggle with her hands.
Some of the younger ones joined her in giggling, but Soraya’s stern mother let out a chuff and turned to glare. Cloaked though she was in her chadari, she let the others feel her disapproval, and the chuckling died away. The women stood silently, then, surrounding the holy man like spectators ringed around a bird fight, but there was nothing to watch, and none of them knew exactly what to do next..
“Malang-sahib,” Khushdil broke out finally, “will you give me an amulet? My ankles hurt constantly!”
The malang looked up. “An amulet won’t do you any good. You weigh too much and you work too little. Get up early every morning and carry water for your family. Stop eating halwa. After a year, your ankles will stop hurting.”
The women gaped, astonished to hear the malang speaking, and at such great length—and with medical advice too boot—advice that displeased its recipient. Khushdil clapped her hands to her hips indignantly, making her chadari ripple. The malang went back to his prayer beads, shrinking against the wall as if cowed by these fluttering females.
“Malang-sahib, did you decide which of us you want to marry?” naughty Shahnaz sang out again. “Do you need to see our faces, the better to judge us?”
She made as if to lift her chadari. The women on both sides of her gasped and jostled close to pin her arms. Her sister hit her veiled head. “You filthy little devil! You’re out of control!”
“I was only joking,” the girl protested. “Malang-sahib knows a joke. Don’t you, malang-dear? Tell them”
“Don’t joke with Malang-sahib!” her sister scolded. “You never joke with a malang.”
Khadija frowned. “Malang-sahib, the girl is very young, forgive her, she’s suffering from a fever too, she doesn’t know what she’s saying, what comes out of her mouth is no different than the sounds that come out of a donkey’s mouth when it is braying.”
Soraya kneeled next to Khadija. “Malang-sahib,” she whispered, “my husband came to see you the other day—he’s our headman, you know? He loves you soooo much! We all love you. Will you stay with us forever?”
Khadija wished she had thought to say those words. She set the basket down in front of the malang. “We brought you some halwa, respected sir.”
His head snapped up, making his long locks jiggle. “Who died?”
Even Khadija found herself chuckling. “No one, sir. It’s not funeral halwa, just
our way of saying welcome. It’s still warm. We’ll leave the bowl.”
Just then, however, horse hooves sounded. The women clumped together with frightened little shrieks as half a dozen horsemen came over the pass. Then Khadija recognized several of her relatives from Sorkhab. The group pulled up on the pass and dismounted. Three of them came down the path toward Baba’s Nose.
“Rashid!” Khadija exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”
He grinned, recognizing her voice. “Is that you, Khadija-jan? We’ve come to pay our respects, we heard about Malang-sahib.” The young man from Sorkhab gazed directly at the women of Char Bagh, anonymous in their chadaris, then committed an act of flirtatious daring he never would have attempted if someone older than Ahmad and his cohorts had been escorting the women: he nodded to them! He didn’t push it, though. He didn’t address a remark to any of the unknown girls, nothing that extreme. His gaze settled on Khadija’s cloaked form and he said, “After all, you Char Bagh folks are not the only ones who could use a malang’s blessings.”
Khadija nodded. “May you live long. We entrust you to God’s care. We must go back to the village now. Convey our salaams to your people.”
She led the women down the slope without further words. Not until they had gotten out of earshot did they begin to buzz. Sorkhab had sent a delegation to see the malang? What did it mean? Would they try to lure him to their village? What would they offer him? What might tempt a malang?
10
Nothing distinguished the mosque from any other building in the village except the skinny tower rising from one corner, a minaret just big enough to accommodate a ladder inside. Farmer Ghulam Haidar squeezed himself into this shaft and climbed to the top, where shutterless windows faced each of the four directions. There, he began to chant the call to prayer.
The village relied on him for this service because he had a loud voice and thanks to three reliable roosters, he was never late with his azaan in the morning. It was evening now, just past sunset, and he rarely chanted azaan for the evening prayer; most of the men performed this prayer at home; but today was special. And as soon as Ghulam Haidar’s voice wafted through the valley, men began leaking out of all the compounds.
The mosque filled up quickly. The men washed their hands and feet in the antechamber, their chatter filling the whitewashed room with a ringing din. They lined up in rows behind Ghulam Haidar, who led the communal ritual efficiently. He was no mullah, but he knew several dozen verses of the Quran by heart, and the village made do.
After prayer, the men seated themselves in a circle. Woven reed mats covered the floor, which Ghulam Haidar had swept clean (for he also acted as caretaker of the mosque.) The ten or twelve leading men formed a tight central ring. The others arrayed themselves in looser rings around the core.
Malik Ibrahim launched the meeting with “Bismillahi rahmani rahim.” In the name of God, the generous and merciful. Then he gave a short speech about his intended visit to Sorkhab, but Ghulam Dastagir broke in before his voice had even quite stopped sounding. “I’ll go with you, Ibrahim. No, no, it’s settled. If this thing comes to blows, you’ll need a strongman.”
Anyone could see that this offer was not entirely welcome to the headman, nor proffered entirely in a friendly spirit. But Ibrahim gave the older man a respectful nod. “Certainly. You must come,” he agreed. “You and others. We’ll form a delegation.”
”A show of strength,” someone shouted. “Bristling with knives, That’s how we’ll come.”
“Perhaps not this time,” the headman counseled. “This time, let us arrive as if we’ve come to negotiate. If they won’t negotiate, may the consequences be on their heads, but let us not be the ones to start a fight. After all, we’ve celebrated Eid with these people. Some of us have kin there.”
“You have kin there.”
“I and others.” Ridges of muscle bulged on Ibrahim’s sallow cheeks. “Our forefathers shared these waters and besides, kinship aside, are we not all Muslims?”
Ghulam Dastagir slapped the clay floor, raising a billow of powder. “This attitude of yours, Headman-sir. This attitude is dangerous, it’s dangerous.” His breath blew swirls in the chalky dust that his slap had raised. “You and your family are men of words, we all respect your words, but sometimes, son, courtesy can look like cowardice.”
“I am no coward,” Ibrahim declared. Nor your son, he thought.
“And God forbid I should ever imply such a thing!” Ghulam Dastagir protested. “Out of respect for your great, great brother, God forgive him, I would never! But the men of Sorkhab! What will they think when you come to them wheedling softly—”
“No one spoke of wheedling—”
“—appealing to their sense of mercy like a humble servant? Forgive me, Malik-sahib, but in martial matters you must let me be your teacher. A fight is won or lost the moment the two fighters cross eyes. One bears down, the other looks away, and it’s all over but the blows. And let’s be blunt, boy, this will come to a fight. It’s water we’re talking about here. If a man is not ready to fight for water, what will he fight for? Now let’s think about strategy. We’ll be fifty or sixty men of fighting age, they’re two or three hundred—how can we win? I’ll tell you how: with ferocity, boy! We have to burn hotter! Talk, by all means, but let it be warrior’s talk. From the moment we walk in, we have to make them know in their bones what it will cost them to say no to us.”
“We walk in like that and there will be a fight for sure,” said Ibrahim.
“From which I will not back away,” Ghulam Dastagir scowled. .
“Nor I,” boasted his cousin.
Ibrahim struggled to keep his voice level. “Nor I, if it comes to a fight. But let me be clear, men. I intend to greet the elders of Sorkhab with respect. The first discourtesy will come from them, not from me. That is my way. Whoever objects to my way, speak now. If you want another man as your malik, this is the time.”
Throughout the silent mosque, men bowed their heads in thoughtful contemplation. All avoided the youthful headman’s eyes.
“We put our faith in Allah,” someone muttered finally.
And then Ghulam Haidar burst out: “Ibrahim, we’ve chosen you, we stand behind you. When you go to Sorkhab, you speak for all of us. You alone will decide what to say and how to say it, but I beg you to remember, to consider, to never forget that a malik is like a father to his village, even if a young one like you. I know a father’s obligations, I have babes at home right now weeping for milk. If I can’t keep my fields irrigated through the summer…those babes…oh, Hajji-sahib, we’re entrusting our very lives to you. with our lives.”
Ibrahim understood. The decision would be his, but if things went wrong all the blame would be his too. “Allah is generous,” he said. “Who will go with me? Ghulam Dastagir, and who else?” Glancing around the room, he quickly picked out two men he could trust to counterbalance Ghulam Dastagir.
***
The next morning, after bread-and-tea, a group of five set out for Sorkhab on foot. They arrived in the early afternoon. At the headman’s compound, a teenaged boy opened the gate. Ibrahim recognized Khadija’s nephew. The boy bowed to them all, greeted Ibrahim by name, and led the whole group inside.
Then with a lurch of the heart, Ibrahim saw a brace of horses tied to a tree in the courtyard. Malik Mustapha had guests, important ones, it seemed: men who rode horses. Men from far away.
The boy showed them into a sitting room where four men sat drinking tea around a cast iron pot filled with glowing charcoal. Ibrahim recognized two of them at once, Mullah Yaqub and Malik Mustapha, but the other two men were strangers—and what strangers! They wore resplendent vests, their beards were precisely trimmed, and both sported expensive caps made of baby lambskin. Only city men owned such hats.
All four men got to their feet, but the two visitors rose with the languor of high rank. When Ibrahim reached out, the nearest one, a lanky man, extended his hand palm down as
if expecting it to be kissed. And Ibrahim complied because you never know.
Malik Mustapha introduced his guests, but Ibrahim caught only the phrase “—from Kabul.” He could scarcely follow the rest, for he was too busy bowing, kissing lordly hands and blurting out courteous, even unctuous, rhetoric—“Your excellencies… what service can we…? Oh, your graces!… welcome, welcome…”
“These great men have come on the king’s business,” the malik of Sorkhab warned.
“The king! Ah!” Ibrahim exclaimed. “I see! Yes! How is our beloved Dost Mohammed Khan? We pray for his Excellency’s health, your lordships. Every day! Around here, we call him Dost Mohammed the Great—” but the ardor leaked from his voice as he felt a chill rising in front of him. How had he offended the men from Kabul?
Malik Mustapha came to his rescue. “Dost Mohammed Khan has been overthrown, God be praised. The true king has reclaimed his throne at last, Ibrahim-sahib. We can finally stop pretending to revere that worthless cuckold and reveal our true allegiance. After thirty years, his majesty Shah Shuja is back on the throne.”
Thirty years. So he must have held the throne around the time Ibrahim was born. He must have been one of those many kinglets who rose and fell during the bloody years of civil war that still figured in the elders’ whispered horror stories.
“Isn’t it wonderful? Rejoice, Ibrahim, rejoice. The age of justice is at hand!”
“I do! We do rejoice! Oh, most heartily,” Ibrahim stammered, trying to remember what he knew about this Shah Shuja. “God is great!”
“Our beloved emperor must be smiling,” the portlier of the two city men agreed. “His mighty grandson is back on his throne. Every traitor will suffer now! You fortunate men have this early chance to proclaim your loyalty.”
