The Feast of Roses

by Indu Sundaresan

  The old woman grinned, showing a gaping mouth; she had only two teeth left in her upper and lower jaws.

  The guard eyed her suspiciously. “What’s so funny? What did you put in the chai?”

  “Drink it,” she snapped. “And give me my money.”

  He leaned over and knocked her on the side of her head. As she lay in the dirt, arms around her breasts, crooning in pain, he helped himself to another cup of chai. He took a sip and spat it out. Then another, which he also spat out, as if to show her how easily he wasted the chai. The third he drank. The woman sat up, massaging her head, and watched as another man stood briefly in the light of the moon above the garden’s walls and then began climbing down. His kurta was a patch of white against the murky walls, moving surely and speedily.

  The guard deliberately drank his chai, and then he stood up, lodged his toe under the lip of the vessel on the fire, and upended it. The old woman sat there, rocking and moaning, her eyes flashing with hatred. A smile gathered around her mouth. She let him go, with the anna coin folded into the cloth of his turban, and saw him pick his way through the land, gaze downward, stepping carefully to avoid snakes and scorpions.

  By the time the guard had kicked at the chai urn, the second man had descended to the ground.

  * * *

  Shah Shuja jumped the last three yards, landing on the balls of his feet, the shock sending a jar of pain through his sore legs. He flitted closer to the wall. “Where is she?” he hissed into the gloom.

  Ibrahim Khan limped up, trailing a foot; he had crushed an ankle during his fall from the rope and eaten up the yelp that had come bursting from him. His face was wan in the moonlight, his hair shining in a cloud of curls. “It’s a bad night to escape, your Majesty. Too much light. Are these people to be trusted?”

  They turned to the two men standing against the wall, their clothing blurred and indistinct in the shadows, the cloths of their turbans wrapped around the lower halves of their faces. One of them had pitched the rope to Shuja, and he had heard quiet grunts as he heaved upward. Since, neither of the men had spoken, or helped them descend.

  The letter tied around the rock that Wafa Begam had read and shown to her husband had come from Elphinstone. In it, he had offered to rescue them from the Shalimar Gardens, but it had to be tonight, in a few hours. Elphinstone had already spent too much time in Lahore, any longer and the Maharajah would begin to get inquisitive. Would his Majesty, Shah Shuja, trust that the British had his best interests at heart?

  For once, Wafa, more suspicious about almost anything than her husband, had not advised caution. “We must go tonight,” she said. Shuja, awakened from a dreamy sleep, the muscles of his arms, legs, and shoulders fiery raw from the wrestling, had shaken his head to clear the fog. All those years of plotting, scheming, wondering who would help them, how that help would appear . . . had come to this. An imperative in the middle of the night. Leave now. How? he had asked. But the letter only said in two hours, not how.

  They had woken Ibrahim, drawn him from his cot, doused his head in the waters of the central pool in the upper terrace, and whispered the news in his ear. Shuja and he had padded all around the upper and middle terraces in search of an escape route, or some indication that, suddenly, there was one. They did not descend into the lower terrace, where the Maharajah’s guards kept watch, and all their movements were stealthy, quiet, so that no noise filtered downward.

  Then that whistle had come again from beyond the walls, sweet and lucid, like the song of a bird. A violinist had accompanied Elphinstone’s embassy to Peshawar, and one spring evening, Shuja had invited this man’s music into his palace. The music had a strange yet beguiling sound for all of them—a violin concerto by a composer named Bach—and he had asked for it to be played often, and tried to get his own court musicians to imitate that sound.

  “Here,” Wafa had said, pulling them up the stairs to the top of the wall. They couldn’t see anything of the men below, but they heard them throwing the rope and saw it a moment later, twisting temptingly just beyond reach. Both Shuja and Ibrahim had held back, too exhausted to make real sense of what was happening, and it was Wafa who had leaned over the parapet and caught the rope. She who had yanked it to one of the pillars and wrapped it around. But she could not tie the knot and sat there, trembling, her face drenched with tears. “Come, my lord. Are we going to stay here forever? Do you want to lose the Kohinoor to Ranjit Singh?”

  At that word, Shuja ran to her, knotted the rope, and tugged at it to check that it was secure.

  “Where is the diamond?” he asked.

  In response, she bent to kiss his hand, used his fingers to wipe away her tears. “Go, Ibrahim and you must go first. Even if they catch us doing this, I will be safe; they will not dare touch me. Go!”

  As she pushed him away, Shuja resisted. Go without her? What was she saying?

  She sensed his hesitation. “I will follow right after. After I get the Kohinoor, that is. Go now!” And with that she fled out of the pavilion. He heard her running down the stone pathway alongside the long water channel, and then heard the soft, successive thuds of her feet as she descended the stairs to the middle terrace.

  Shuja had never given a thought to where his wife had hidden the diamond; better not to know until he actually wanted it. If he had considered it at all, if he had been asked where, he would have thought it was somewhere in her harem quarters. But, to conceal it in the middle terrace, with the gardeners working there, the guards roaming around every now and then, in so public a place . . . why, it was brilliant. Galvanized into action, he shoved Ibrahim over the edge of the wall and listened as he made his way down. Just for a moment, before he went over himself, he tarried again. Where was Wafa? Why was she taking so long? Then, he swung over, wrapped his hands around the rope, and slid down the wall, his toes grabbing onto footholds in the dark, the rope ending far too soon, leaving him swaying above nothing.

  “Where is she?” he whispered now, glancing up with a growing worry. He said to one of the two men, “Whistle that song again.”

  The man shook his head, didn’t seem inclined to speak at first, and then he said, in a hoarse voice, “Too dangerous, your Majesty.”

  Just then, Shah Shuja saw his wife dangle a leg over the parapet. She hung over the edge on her stomach for a sickening moment, and Shuja urged her in a whisper, “Grab on to the rope, Wafa.”

  She reached for the rope and let her weight down. It took her a long time to descend, almost five minutes; at times she hung in the moonlight, at times her body banged into the wall, but slowly she came down to the end of the rope and swung there in a circle. “What do I do now?” she asked, terrified.

  “Let go,” Shuja said firmly. Ibrahim and he linked their arms under Wafa, and when Shuja waved to the two men to help them, one shook his head. Wafa Begam undid her tight grasp around the rope and fell into the net formed by her husband and Ibrahim. She was shaking, teary-eyed, and trembling. But she still smiled. Her thin chiffon veil was pulled tight around her face and tied at her nape, enclosing her head in a pale blue.

  “Do you have it?” Shuja said in her ear, holding his wife tight by his side.

  She nodded.

  And then, one of the men said in a deep, cultured voice, “Perhaps then you will allow me to take it from you, your Majesty, and give it to my Maharajah.”

  * * *

  As dawn cleaved a line of lilac on the horizon, slitting open another day, a row of slaves toted loads of firewood upon their backs toward the Shalimar Gardens. The slaves were bent under the weight of the sticks, which were swaddled in cloth, strung with ropes around the tops of their heads like headbands.

  They flung each stack near the door at the southeastern corner of the middle terrace, by the side of a huge brick stove. The firewood was shoved into the stove’s black and yawning mouth, burning balls of newspapers were thrown in, each setting fire to one part until the whole roared to life.

  Water from the Hasli Canal,
which fed the fountains and pools in the gardens, was diverted in a little stream to the top of the stove and into a permanently built brick-dome-covered stone cauldron. Pipes ran from this dome into the Shalimar, releasing clouds of steam into a series of closed pavilions on the southeastern corner of the middle terrace. This was the bathhouse, the hammam that Emperor Shah Jahan had built for the pleasure of both the ladies of his harem and himself. The only entrance into the hammam was from inside the gardens, in a series of three pointed archways that were tucked into the corner.

  Shah Shuja lay on the wet floor near the pool in the center of the hammam, stripped down to a small pair of shorts and nothing else. His face rested against the stone, his left arm hung into the pale and green waters of the pool. Wafa Begam sat astride his back, clad in very little herself, merely a small cloth covering her breasts and another piece of cloth fashioned into underwear.

  She dug the heels of her palms into Shuja’s back and ran them over the length of it, from his waist to his hairline. She made fists and pummeled the spent muscles. She kneaded his arms, pulled the strain out of every finger, bent to kiss his sweaty cheek, the hair on his beard scratching her face.

  Smudged light streamed around them in sharp bars from each of the skylights above. One lit the center of the pool, and the water glowed like a gathering of emeralds. Others cast their radiance around, lighting up the steam as it swirled through, taking on ghostly shapes at one moment, dispersing into flatness the next.

  Shuja and Wafa lay in the path of one such shaft of light, which glanced off her slender shoulders, dabbed at Shuja’s hair, turning it into glittering ebony, painted its way over his outflung arm, and dripped into the pool.

  He made a movement, and Wafa rose on her knees and allowed him to flip onto his back before settling down over him again. They gazed at each other for a long while, not speaking, not knowing, perhaps, what to say. They had tried to escape in the middle of the previous night, had been captured and brought back into the Shalimar soon after—merely a few hours had passed before they ordered the hammam fires lit.

  “What now?” Shuja said, cupping his palm over his wife’s cheek.

  She leaned into his hand, her eyebrows meeting in distress. “Now,” she said slowly and clearly, “we wait and see what the Maharajah will do.”

  Shuja felt an ache blossom inside his chest, and he rubbed at it unconsciously. Seeing that, Wafa caressed him, taking his hand away, replacing it with her own. He kissed her hand, felt the warm skin on his lips, felt a well of tears rise behind his eyes. Even Wafa had lost hope.

  In these past five years, whether in the dungeons under the Hari Parbat Fort in Kashmir, or here in the golden cage of the Shalimar, it had always been Shuja who had been doubtful, or pessimistic. Wafa, with her laughter, her joy, her belief that everything would go her way or no way at all, had a spark of hope lighting her from within. Oh, she had cried before, in distress, or frustration, or hatred, but she had never swerved from their purpose—Shuja would be freed and one day he would return to Afghanistan to be king.

  Shah Shuja swiped at the tears that ran in thin lines around the edges of his face and hoped that his wife wouldn’t notice them. “Sweat in my eyes,” he said hoarsely.

  She nodded, wrapped her arms around his, brought his palm back to her face again, and buried her nose in it.

  What had happened last night had devastated them. Only because it was so unexpected, something they were so little prepared for. The shock was not of the unanticipated but of the fact that they ought to have known better.

  At first, when the voice had come out of the darkness, Shuja had propelled Wafa behind him, his eyes roving around, wondering where it had come from and who had spoken.

  And then, one of the peasants hired by Elphinstone to help them escape had stepped forward and, with great deliberateness, stripped the turban cloth from the lower half of his face. In the distorted play of light—the silver from the moonlight, the dimness of the walls, the dull white glow of the turbans— for just a moment, Shuja had strained to see the man’s face and, for another moment, hadn’t recognized him.

  He had whipped around to Ibrahim, who said quietly, “It’s the old gardener, your Majesty. We’ve been hoodwinked.”

  Shuja had felt a strain around his chest then. All of this had been a trick? Nothing but a ruse to bring them out of the Shalimar Gardens with the Kohinoor? And, who was this man who had played at being a gardener in their midst?

  He’d raised his chin with a pointed, silent question.

  The man had bowed. “I am Fakir Azizuddin.”

  Ah, Shuja had thought, the Maharajah’s foreign minister—this was no ordinary minion but one of his most powerful courtiers. At his side, he’d felt Wafa shaking and he’d put an arm around her, turned his back upon Azizuddin so that he could hug his wife. When he lifted her face to his, he had realized that she was laughing, not crying.

  “What?” he had whispered.

  “Let me handle this,” she’d said. “I’ll talk to the fakir.”

  He had turned to face Fakir Azizuddin.

  “Your Majesty,” the other man had said, “we could make this very easy, dignified for all of us, if you will only permit yourselves to be searched. After that, you are free to return to the Shalimar Gardens. With the Kohinoor in his possession, the Maharajah will be delighted to outline some very lavish terms for you; he has already spoken to me of an annuity, and a substantial lump sum.”

  “What about me, Fakir Azizuddin?” Wafa Begam had said in a strong voice, stepping out from behind her husband. The light was faint, Wafa’s veil was swathed around her head; all Azizuddin could see was a shape, nose, the bones above the eyes, the jut of cheekbones—and he’d seen much more before of Shuja’s favorite wife in his guise as a gardener—yet etiquette demanded, so he’d bent his gaze to the ground.

  “You too, your Majesty.” His voice had been deferential, but trailed into something very like indecision.

  Wafa Begam had pounced on that uncertainty and cut Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s famous and powerful foreign minister into tiny pieces and strewed his carcass around. “You don’t have a woman on staff, do you? I refuse to be searched by a man—you wouldn’t dare do this to me.” She had straightened her back, become queenly, regal, her pale hands fluttering in the semidarkness. “In fact, I refuse to submit to a search by any woman.” Easy to say because there wasn’t any woman around, unless Azizuddin counted the chai lady, even now packing up her belongings and getting ready to close for the night, since her tea had been spilled by the guard.

  With that, Wafa Begam had strolled past all of them— a line opened in the middle of the group of silent soldiers guarding the southern gateway into the upper terrace—and went back inside the Shalimar Gardens.

  Shah Shuja had begun to laugh, mirth shaking his frame. He still hadn’t said a word to Azizuddin, and Ibrahim hadn’t spoken either.

  The minister had bowed to the erstwhile ruler of Afghanistan, and gestured toward the entrance to the gardens. He didn’t want to search them at all, because he was sure that Wafa Begam had the Kohinoor.

  While the night had eaten up the rest of the hours, there were two groups of people awake, one on either side of the Shalimar’s walls. Inside, Shuja and Wafa knew that this small victory meant nothing, that this was the beginning of the end for them.

  And outside, Fakir Azizuddin pondered and paced. He had come back to the Shalimar with another set of guards, only to find the escape was already in progress. For a brief few seconds, a cold hand had wrapped around his heart. Mentioning Elphinstone to the Maharajah had been almost an afterthought; he hadn’t thought it important then. Even an hour ago, preparing the guard, during the trip through the scrub, a journey he had already made twice today, Aziz had doubted the wisdom of haste. But when Ranjit Singh gave an order, it was obeyed. As simple as that. And then, to see the two men in Elphinstone’s employ whistling a snatch of a violin concerto, the blows on their heads, bundling them out of t
he way before Ibrahim Khan came snaking down the rope . . . waiting for Wafa Begam to also descend . . . Azizuddin had thought himself brilliant in allowing it to happen so that he could corner them and snatch the Kohinoor and end all these years of futile waiting.

  But then Wafa had walked away with the diamond, and Azizuddin knew that it was she who was brilliant. He was just a fool who had thought only to the edge of the pit, not beyond it, and so had fallen in.

  The wily Wafa would have hidden the Kohinoor again by now. They had searched the gardens many times in the past few years, and it had never been discovered. He knew how much his king wanted the diamond. And Azizuddin wanted to be the man who brought it to him. He had thought for a while longer, and then walked around the perimeter of the Shalimar Gardens, looking up at the walls as the light rose, giving a new set of orders to the guards.

  * * *

  “I’m hungry,” Wafa Begam said. All of their worries seemed to have leached away with the steam; the tiredness had left their bodies, and they both lay back on the edge of the pool, their feet in the water, looking up at the skylights.

  Shuja ordered the steam to be stopped, and the hiss died down into a quiet nothingness. The light from the sun seemed to burn away the mist and created dark shadows in the shade, a golden transparency where it touched.

  Perhaps things were not so bad after all, Shuja thought, his fingers entwined with his wife’s. He had one more thing left to give Ranjit Singh if he became too demanding. He didn’t know anymore if Elphinstone was truly in Lahore, if his offer to help was genuine, if the night’s adventures had been an elaborate ruse.

  “Let’s go have breakfast,” he said, rising from the floor and helping Wafa up.