by Tamim Ansary
Ghulam Haidar raised a timid hand. The poor fellow spoke hesitantly, for his daughter’s catastrophic transgression had broken him. His head always drooped now, and his eyes bore a permanent stamp of humiliation, but he forced himself to squeeze out his ominous thought. “Malik-sahib, even if you catch up with them, what can you do, one man against a pack of twenty, thirty—and you heard their Pushtoon that first day. It’s the biggest tribe in the world. Kill these ones, their kinfolk will come after us.”
Ibrahim fingered his beard. “You’re right. You’re right. In the end, I see no choice—I’ll have to go to Kabul and petition the king himself.”
“The king!”
Several young men snickered at the audacious thought.
“Will the king consent to see you?” Ghulam Haidar was only posing the obvious question. “No disrespect,” he added. “Your blood is equal to any man’s blood but … the king?”
“I can knock on his gate. The poet Sa’di once described a king who—”
“We don’t have kings like that anymore,” Ghulam Dastagir interrupted. “You saw the color of this king at Sorkhab. Now you plan to pound on this bastard’s very gates?”
“I’ll do anything to save our Sheikh. Companions, I am telling you right now, I will bring him back safe or leave my dead body on the field!”
A storm of voices rose and faded. “Well,” said Ghulam Dastagir into the silence. “If you can be so bold, Hajji-sahib, so can I. What’s a king, after all? Just another mortal. In a hundred years, we’ll all be dust. I’ll go along, Ibrahim. You’ll need a strong sword arm. Everyone knows the love I bore your brother. I’ll back you as I backed him. You’ll get through to the king if I have to wade through blood to clear your path!” The jirgah cheered.
After the meeting dispersed, Ghulam Haidar made the rounds of the village, collecting money. Nearly every man had taken money from the Engrayzees. Every one of them was glad to contribute those filthy coins to a clean cause: a purse for Ibrahim and Ghulam Dastagir to fund their epic journey.
Karim, meanwhile, followed his father and Ibrahim to the central crossroads and crowded in between them like a little man entitled to a share in men’s discussion.
“What are you doing, you knave?” Ghulam Dastagir glared at his boy. “How dare you push your elders about?”
“I want to go with you!” Karim flinched from the expected slap but held his ground. “Take me along, Papa. I want to help.”
Ghulam Dastagir lowered his hand with unaccustomed gentleness. “You’re too young, boy. This is man’s work.” But he couldn’t help fluffing his son’s hair with awkward pride.
“I have my sling, Papa. Let me come,” Karim insisted. “I won’t eat much..”
Ghulam Dastagir looked at the headman, but Ibrahim shrugged. This was not his decision. Karim gazed up at his father with anxious longing. “All right,” his father conceded. “Run home and tell your mother to pack enough bread for both of us. Get the stallion ready, and a donkey too. We’ll need a pack animal. You can ride on the bags.”
Karim let out a chirp and raced off toward his clan’s compound. The boy’s excitement sent a twinge through Ibrahim. Ahmad would have begged to come along on such a journey too. Ibrahim remembered his own voyage to Mecca with his father when he was younger than Karim. His unrequited longing for God had begun in the closeness he enjoyed with his father during that journey. Ghulam Dastagir did not appreciate how fortunate he was to have a son with whom to share a journey like this. Ibrahim longed to unburden his heart, and he didn’t even know what was in his heart, but whatever it was, he couldn’t tell Ghulam Dastagir. His gaze drifted up to the compound on Baba’s Nose. It struck him that he ought to say goodbye to Khadija before he departed.
30
It took two days to reach Baghlan, for their way lay through steep gorges, often on mere goat tracks, with the donkeys setting the pace. Once they reached the city, Karim rubbed his eyes in disbelief and even the men gawked a bit, especially in the bazaar—not that stores astonished them, they had seen stores before: one of Mullah Yaqub’s nephews kept a store in Sorkhab, stocked with everything from snuff to skull caps, but the bazaar in Baghlan had literally dozens of merchants’ stalls, and each one bristled with literally hundreds of items: unthinkable abundance!
But the malang was no longer in Baghlan. Several idlers had seen a company of red-coated soldiers ride into town with a trussed-up prisoner slung over a horse, but others had seen the whole troop ride out again the next day, on the road to Kabul; so the travelers kept going.
The next leg of the journey took four full days. Toward the end, they kept arriving at substantial towns, but each time they asked if this was Kabul, people greeted them with hoots of scornful laughter and pointed further south. Each new settlement seemed bigger than the last, and they saw ever more numerous cultivated fields, until finally one town scarcely gave way to wilderness before another one appeared in the distance.
Late on the fourth day, with the sun sinking below the mountains, Ghulam Dastagir suggested they find shelter for the night, but Ibrahim insisted they perform their sunset prayers and push on, because Kabul simply had to be the next clump of houses up the road.
And it was a road now, a broad track of pounded earth topped with gravel, wide enough to accommodate a dozen men walking abreast, ascending toward a distant notch between two hills. They started up, and daylight drained out of the air as they climbed. Upon reaching the crest, they paused for breath—and at that moment caught their first glimpse of the other side. The men gasped. Karim let out a cry of wonder. The entire valley below them twinkled with lights! For one vertiginous moment Ibrahim felt as if the sky had been inverted and he was looking down into a bowl of stars.
Three or four mountain ridges thrust into the light-spattered bowl and the valley meandered out of sight among them. Even in that gloaming, the travelers could make out walls and houses filling up every scoop and groove and crack, every hole and hollow of the valley, each compound abutting directly on another and another and still another, with no fields or farms between them, and indeed no fields or farms to be seen anywhere below, making it difficult to imagine what people in this city ate and where they got their food. Even from so high above, the villagers could see dozens of streets dividing the sprawling fabric of human habitation into patches and could see thinner, darker lines too, alleyways that sliced the various patches into smaller sections. A river bisected the entire valley, and it too meandered out of sight east and west among the hills. Across the river, on a promontory just touched by the last of the light they saw a gigantic fortress.
“There’s your king, I suppose.” Ghulam Dastagir gave a jerk of his head.
Ibrahim nodded. He was trying to imagine knocking at the gates of that castle.
“Father?” Karim pointed to a structure on their side of the river, a compound so enormous, all of Char Bagh could have fit inside it easily. “What’s that?”
All three stared silently for a moment. Whoever owned that compound must stand nearly eye-to-eye with the king himself. “That, my son, is where the Engrayzee live,” Ghulam Dastagir declared softly.
Somehow, Ibrahim knew he was right. Another long moment passed in silence. Then Ibrahim said, “Well, are you ready to go down there?”
Ghulam Dastagir wore a mask of indifference, but it was only a mask. Karim shuffled in place, stroking his donkey’s broad grey side and glancing uneasily at his father’s hesitation.
Finally Ghulam Dastagir said, “I’m ready.”
***
Later, thinking back, Ibrahim tried to connect the events of those first few days into a story he could tell people back home, but his memories of them were just a jumble of random fragments, shards of a shattered pot: vivid images jumped to mind readily enough but they felt as meaningless as dreams: the three of them sleeping in the street, for example, huddled against one another, clutching the horses’ reins. How many nights did they pass that way? Three
? Two? Seven? Once, Ibrahim woke out of a restless dream, convinced that someone was trying to steal the donkey, and found himself staring into a shock of darkness through which, disturbingly enough, city men were hurrying purposefully, even at that hour, as if midnight were the same as midday here. God only knew what purpose men could have at any time in a place like this, where no one even had fields to tend.
He remembered day-lit moments too: trying to strike up conversation with strangers who shrank away from them as if from men with smallpox. One of them said, “Get away from me, you beggar!” Who was begging? Worse yet, another time, someone pressed a coin into Ibrahim’s hand: “Here, you poor vagabond. Be in Allah’s care.” By the time Ibrahim realized what was happening, his humiliating “benefactor” had disappeared.
As for directions to the palace, people only laughed when they asked. One day, Ghulam Dastagir popped the question to a young boy and within minutes a ragged band of urchins collected around him, hooting ridicule: “Bumpkin’s come to see the king. Oh yeah! Step right up to the palace, gentlemen! King’s been expecting you clodhoppers!” How could Ghulam Dastagir deal with a bunch of jeering boys? What good was his muscular ferocity against children? When he tried to slap at them, they scattered like minnows, still hooting. And when Ghulam Dastagir looked up, people were staring at him with contempt: a grown man trying to hit kids. Even much later that day, Ibrahim noticed how his companion carried his head tucked down between shoulders hunched in shame. Karim felt his father’s disgrace, and he sullenly threw rocks at feral dogs.
Everywhere they went in that maze of a city, they found themselves flanked by high compound walls. They lost their bearings, lost track of which way the big compound lay, lost sight of the king’s fortress. Quite by accident, they stumbled across the river one day, only to scare up a flock of women washing clothes along the banks. “What are you gawking at, oafs?” the women yelled. The travelers scuttled away before the women’s relatives could come after them with sticks and knives. How did so many clans and tribes manage to live squeezed together like this, especially if they let their women wash clothes outdoors, in plain view?
Then one day, as they rested by a bridge, Ghulam Dastagir said the dreaded words. “Ibrahim, my boy, we should never have come. This was a mistake. You’ll never get in to see the king, and even if you do, he’ll never take your side.”
“We can’t be sure of that,” Ibrahim objected. “Our cause is just.”
“Our cause. Who gives a damn about our cause, except you and me? As for justice? In this world, everyone sides with his own kind, Malik-sahib, the great with the great, the small with the small. We are the small.”
Ibrahim felt betrayed. Hard enough to keep a grip on his own resolve! How could he prop up his companion’s confidence too? “Don’t talk like that, Ghulam Dastagir. We must stay strong.”
“My father is strong,” Karim blurted. “He’s always strong. He’s the strongest man of all.”
“My boy’s right. If I’m not strong, there is not a strong man left on Earth.” Ghulam Dastagir spat out snuff and wiped his gray beard. “But what good is strength in a place like this? What we need is good judgment. It’s what we needed from the start.”
“Are you questioning my judgment? “ Ibrahim demanded resentfully. “I never asked you to come along, you know. You made your own decision.”
“Yes, I share the blame,” said Ghulam Dastagir, “but so what? Only a fool never reconsiders a decision.”
“Only a fool,” Karim parroted.
His father reproved him with a glare, but turned back to Ibrahim. “I share the blame, but I’m man enough to ask what we were thinking. What were we thinking, Ibrahim? For God’s sake, leaving our homes behind, our women unprotected, our fields untended—we lost our heads. Marauders might be hitting Char Bagh even as we speak. And here we stand, seven day’s journey from home and kin.”
Ibrahim wished he could shut out these poisonous but indisputable words. The thought of going home, cloaked in failure, after all his big talk—the thought of facing Khadija—even Soraya would look at him with diminished respect—and the village….? He could not live with such humiliation. “You and Karim go home. Tell the others I would not give up.”
“Nonsense. I can’t leave you here. Who would look after you, youngster?”
Ibrahim’s jaw clenched, and then it burst out of him. “Let that be the last time you call me ‘youngster’!”
“Why?” grinned Ghulam Dastagir. “It’s the simple truth.”
“It’s disrespectful,” said Ibrahim. “I am the malik of Char Bagh.”
The big man knew he had his malik on the run now. “Don’t be so touchy, Malik-sahib!” he said savagely. “Good heavens, if you can’t take a little ribbing, what will you do on the field of battle? I never meant to offend you. Why, the respect I bore your brother, may his memory be green—”
“My brother,” Ibrahim interrupted sharply, “was a great man, Allah forgive him, but he’s gone now. So’s my father. I’m malik now, and I’m telling you, respect me, respect what I am, or tell me that you don’t and we can have it out right now. Then we’ll see who’s strong and who’s weak!”
Karim let out a soft whimper, looking anxiously from one man to the other.
“Since you bring it up,” his father said, “let’s stop pretending. Do you really want to hear the truth? The only reason the village accepted you as malik—”
“Accepted? They didn’t ‘accept’ me, they acclaimed me!”
“Acclaimed your bloodline, you puppy, not you.”
“Since you bring it up, Ghulam Dastagir, let us be completely honest. You always thought the men should have chosen you. When they chose me instead, it embarrassed you. It made you angry. That’s why you call me youngster every chance you get.”
“I’m not angry, just disappointed. The village went mad that day, by God—choosing a whelp like you over a seasoned elder like me. I’m just concerned about the village, that’s all, concerned for all of us, you hear? They call you ‘malik-sahib,’ but I’m the one who really has the village in his care. I came along to look after you and keep you out of trouble. I can’t shirk my duty just because the village went mad one day.”
“The village knew exactly what it was doing that day. You don’t have the qualities to be malik, and everybody knew it. That’s the real truth, and I’m glad I said it finally.”
“I—?” Ghulam Dastagir sputtered. “I don’t have…? I don’t…? Why, I could break your head open like a melon!”
“Yes, breaking heads is all you know. All you can think about, you fool! That’s why no one chose you. There’s more to being malik than breaking heads.”
“Let’s just see about that!” Ghulam Dastagir started toward Ibrahim. Karim grabbed at his father’s skirts, but his father slapped him to the ground and wrapped a corded arm around Ibrahim’s neck.
Karim jumped right back up, and grabbed his father’s leg. “Look, Papa! Look! That man on the bridge is staring at us. Look at him, Uncle! He’s staring at us!”
The men stopped wrestling and both looked toward the bridge. Both were panting, both still ruffled. On the bridge, a short, round man with cherubic cheeks and substantial biceps lolled against a stone balustrade. “What the hell are you staring at?” Ghulam Dastagir cried out.
“You three.” The man gathered himself up and started forward. “Friendly gaze, brother. Just a friendly gaze. You’re newcomers., aren’t you? I can tell. City’s got you topsy-turvy, eh? I know how it feels, I was new here myself once. I’m Abdul Haq the woodseller. Abdul Hak of Wardak, they call me. I sell wood when I have wood to sell. My first day in Kabul, by Quran, I fainted dead away. That’s what the city did to me at first.”
A sudden hope warmed Ibrahim. “But you live here now? You know your way around? Could you help a traveler, brother?”
“I’m a Muslim. Of course I’ll help. What do you need?”
Ghulam Dastagir flashed his headman a warning: why should
this man be so friendly? He must be up to some big-city trick. But Ibrahim ignored the look. “A good night’s sleep, a little shelter, some bread and tea—that’s all we want. We can pay. And also, directions to the palace. We’re here to see the king.”
For once, this announcement sparked no ridicule. "What do you want from him?”
“Justice,” said Ibrahim, and he told his story. This was the first time anyone had let him tell it start to finish. He kept it as short as he could, but his voice betrayed him finally, with its tremble.
When he was done, the short man nodded. “Forget about the king. I know a mosque that lets travelers sleep in the back. Come along, you fellows, I’ll take you there. This malang of yours … they call him the Malang of Char Bagh, I suppose. You’re from Char Bagh, I think. Isn’t that what you said?”
“Yes. Have you heard of our malang?” Ibrahim exclaimed.
“Almost,” said the other. “Very nearly. I came this close to hearing about him the other day. My friend Hakim Shamsuddin the hat merchant has heard of him. He’s an expert on geography, is my friend. He knows every place, and everyone who lives in every place—everyone important, that is. My father knew his father, we’re this close, so anyone he’s heard of, I’ve almost heard of. You’ve heard of Hakim-sahib, surely?”
“Oh, surely, surely,” Ghulam Dastagir and Ibrahim stammered politely.
“Healer, hat merchant, scholar—what a man! Do you suffer from snakebite? Hakim-sahib’s the man to see for that! One chuff of his celebrated breath and you’ll thank God for the serpent that sent you to this doctor because Hakim-sahib doesn’t just restore a man, he improves a man. Forget about the mosque, in fact, why don’t you fellows stroll with me to the Grand Bazaar? I’ll introduce you to Hakim-sahib. He takes an interest in malangs and such. No man alive outdoes him in hospitality. He’ll get you out of the rain. Oh, he’ll see to that, he will!”
Ibrahim and Ghulam Dastagir exchanged a glance. The unfinished business they had broken open hovered between them, but this prospect of shelter pushed it to a back shelf. They fell in beside Abdul Haq, who chattered on as he led them through a network of streets, past occasional mounted men, a great many pedestrians, a team of donkeys dragging logs, a string of six camels, each one connected to the next by a rope.
