The Mountain of Light
Page 6
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 the 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.
They went out into the middle terrace, paused for a moment at the pool. The fountains were silent now, and water lay without a ripple, placid, the tinted stones underneath the surface throwing rainbows of glittering color upon the face of the water.
When they ascended to the upper terrace, all was quiet. No smoke from the kitchen fires, no aroma of cooked chicken and lamb, no fragrance of freshly baked naans. Every morning, through the south entrance of the upper terrace, Maharajah Ranjit Singh sent in a mass of supplies—clucking hens driven in a cluster, fresh vegetables, spices in covered jars, butter and ghee in urns. But today, the gates had been firmly shut. The Maharajah of the Punjab intended to starve them until Shah Shuja gave him the Kohinoor diamond.
• • •
For the next two days, Shuja, Ibrahim, and Wafa ate the ripening guavas in the trees, and then the unripe ones, their stomachs protesting. When the guavas were gone, they washed the green mangoes, cut them into slices, sprinkled on salt and chilli powder, ate them until their tongues became sour.
Desperate, Shuja sent the Maharajah his last jewel, a stone as big as his fist, hued in pale yellow, and said that it was the Kohinoor. A long eight hours passed on that third day as they waited. Ranjit Singh had never seen the Kohinoor; he did not know what it looked like, or how big it actually was, or anything about it at all.
A letter came from the king to Shah Shuja in which he thanked him for the pukraj, the wonderful topaz, he had sent him, but it wasn’t the Kohinoor, was it?
On the fourth day, a slew of gardeners came into the Shalimar and cut down every tree. They drained the pools, shut off the water source from the Hasli Canal, and the stones in the central pool of the middle terrace lay twinkling reproachfully at them in the harsh sun.
A few hours later, Wafa Begam picked her way over the stones in the pool, went to the fountain spout that was the third one from the northwest corner, toward the wrestling platform, bent down, and picked up the armlet hidden there.
She was weak, rabidly hungry, shaking from a want of water and food. Shuja took the armlet himself to Fakir Azizuddin, who waited at the northernmost end of the middle terrace, his face turned away from Wafa Begam. Shuja’s steps were halting, dragged on the ground.
Azizuddin examined the armlet and the enormous stone in the center, which caught fire in the light from the sun and shed its lovely glow over his dark face.
“Thank you, your Majesty,” he said.
Within the hour, servants had brought in covered dishes wrapped in red satin cloth and laid them out on a carpet in the Aiwan pavilion. Shuja, Wafa, and Ibrahim ate everything in sight, drank cups of wine, and fell onto the carpets sated and full.
The next day, they found all the entrances to the Shalimar thrown wide open, no guards around, the heated air from the plains rolling in. Freedom, Shah Shuja thought, as he watched the Englishman, Mountstuart Elphinstone, ride his horse into the lower terrace and bow his head. More horses were brought in; they jumped into the saddles and rode away south toward the Sutlej River. When they had crossed the river and entered the lands of British India, they were guided to a splendid haveli in Ludhiana.
Roses for Emily
December 1838
Twenty years later
What is her name?”
A doubtful silence tarried behind her, until she almost turned—unused to not being answered immediately—and then thought better of it.
Fakir Azizuddin said, “Imli.”
Her voice was resonant with laughter. “She’s named for the tamarind?”
“No,” he said, “surely not, your Majesty. It’s just that . . . these English names . . . they are so difficult. So short, sometimes so meaningless. I’ve only seen it written down, and my English, you know, is of such newness. Perhaps Em-ee-lee.”
Maharani Jindan Kaur pondered on that, tapping her slender foot upon the ground. She, and the fakir, stood on the northern bank of the Sutlej River, on the very boundary of the lands ruled by Maharajah Ranjit Singh. Behind her, and him, spread the royal encampment, some hundred thousand souls, tents laid out in a refined grid, dirt pathways hammered and smoothed in the dust, bazaar streets that sold spices, oranges, ghee, and copper vessels. In front of her was the mighty Sutlej itself, which found its source thousands of miles away to the east and north, in the Himalayan mountains and the kingdom of Tibet. Here, in the Punjab, the same river that had earlier thundered through rock and mud, carving out sheer gorges, plummeting in deep waterfalls, had spent its force and lay in a wide, tranquil band of water. So serene was the Sutlej on her way to joining the Indus River and emptying out into the Arabian Sea, that the land grew lush and green in parallel stripes around the waters, buffaloes nibbled in the grass and waded in the river to rest upon sudden sandbanks, their black heads bowed under the weight of their curved horns.
“It’s a funny name,” Jindan said. “But then all these English names are incomprehensible to me.”
Fakir Azizuddin was half-turned from his Queen, almost facing into his own king’s camp, but not quite, because he couldn’t look obviously upon the woman, and couldn’t present his back to her. So, he shifted in little semicircles, swinging his body this way and that. He allowed his gaze only to fall upon the skirts of her ghagara, noted the smooth heel that lifted one edge of it, the sole painted orange with henna. She was young, this wife of his Maharajah, perhaps not even eighteen years old yet. And Ranjit Singh, this year, was fifty-eight years old. Aziz let his eyes move upward, taking in her graceful figure under the gossamer, sea-green veil, that tight waist, that thinly muscled back bared beneath the strings of her choli, that long, curved neck bent under a mass of opaque indigo hair. On her right arm, just above the elbow, and gathered in the fabric of the veil, the Kohinoor diamond glowed softly. The ties of the armlet were pink-tasseled and hung to her waist. Aziz, who had seen and held the diamond in his hand when he took it from Shah Shuja over two decades ago, was mesmerized as the radiance of the sun percolated through the green of the veil and set the stone on fire. The two surrounding diamonds were like paste beside it. She had ensnared the heart of his king, this woman, so firmly that he had given her the Kohinoor to wear. And, there was another reason. The baby she held, whom Ranjit Singh had named Dalip Singh, Prince of the Punjab Empire. A baby who could one day be king.
“This Emily, she is the Governor-General’s lady?”
He didn’t answer immediately, and a young girl standing beside the Maharani turned and poked him in his chest. Azizuddin, who hadn’t really noticed her until then—because the women of the harem insisted upon having so many people hanging on to them—frowned and bent down to peer into her face. She grinned, flashing pristine white teeth at him, her cheeks deepening on both sides into dimples. Her blue-gray eyes were long and sloping, but it was her eyelashes that fascinated him—thick and so long that they brushed the tops of her arched eyebrows. She couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve years old. Wah Allah, Aziz thought, this child will grow up to break many men’s hearts. Who was she?
She tugged hard at his beard, within her reach now, and whispered, “Answer the Maharani.”
Aziz yanked his hair from her grasp; there was almost no one in the Punjab Empire who would dare to touch his person; he was the man who had the Maharajah’s ear, some said his affections also. He rubbed his burning chin and said, hurriedly, “Yes, your Majesty. He has another one, named”—that faltering again as he tried to decipher the word in his brain, “Fan-ee.”
“He’s a brave man to bring both of them along with him to meet the Maharajah. He doesn’t worry about them fighting? Or wanting his attention?”
Jindan Kaur had been the only one of Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s wives who had accompanied him to the Sutlej River for this encounter with Lord Auckland, Governor-General of India. The others he had left behind at the fort at Lahore—time enough for them to satisfy any curiosity they might have about the British embassy to the Punjab, because the British encampment was to travel through Punjab lands to Lahore, and perhaps beyond, as Ranjit Singh’s guests. The British wanted something from Ranjit, and it would take more than a mere meeting over the muddy waters of the Sutlej for that; this was diplomacy at its lengthiest best. In any case, in India, no decision was made either quickly or lightly, and it was often delayed so much as to not be necessary at all in the end, and the demanding side would be left with not a smidgen of discourtesy to be angry at, only a bafflement that it had all taken so long and yet they were where they had first begun . . . and damn it, everyone had still been so nice.
“He doesn’t, it would seem,” Azizuddin said with a trace of humor in his voice. The Maharani understood the politics of the harem well. And he knew, and she knew also, that it was the child Dalip who had been responsible for bringing her here with his king.
The young Maharani swayed, rocking her baby. The infant pursed his lips, and turned his head to burrow into his mother’s breast, his arms and legs suddenly loose and puppetlike in sleep. She rested her nose upon his fragrant hair, thick and sleek already, just three months after his birth, in long fingers of ebony silk around his oval face, one cluster spearing downward on either side of his plump cheeks.
The little girl by her side sneaked a hand under the veil, and under Jindan’s arm, and clasped the baby’s tiny foot. Aziz stood watching them surreptitiously—this girl was very familiar with the Maharajah’s new wife. Who was she? It seemed to him that he knew, or had heard, and as Jindan cooed to her baby, he rummaged through his memory.
Jindan had waited for these last two days to make the long trek through the Maharajah’s camp and come to the riverside, hoping that she would be able to take a measure of these English people, even from this far. But she wanted something more. So she said, “Fakir Azizuddin, make arrangements for the ladies of the Governor-General to come see me, will you?”
“When, your Majesty?” He had managed to speak fast enough to cover his surprise, not much hesitation there, but his voice came out in a revealing squeak.
She grinned, and when she spoke it was in the coarse Urdu of the camp soldiers, deliberately reminding him of her so-common origins. “In a couple of days. At my convenience, not theirs.”
The girl by the Maharani’s side turned again to Aziz and stuck her tongue out at him. So there, Fakir Azizuddin, she seemed to be saying. Aziz knew that the very young could be very stupid, that this girl didn’t know just how important he was, or she would be more afraid of him. And then he saw the small gold disc suspended on a gold chain around her neck. The medallion, more like a gold sovereign, was the size of a small dinner plate against her stomach, and on it was impressed the coat of arms of the Punjab Empire—two curving daggers, a double-edged sword, a quoit in the center. So, this girl had the Maharajah’s favor, he thought. Ranjit Singh had a propensity for taking into his fort, his harem, anyone who came to him for help, or could claim any kinship to him. The Maharajah also loved children, and so he had adopted a boy, Sher Singh, from a distant branch of his family, and a few years ago brought this girl, Roshni, who was Sher Singh’s much younger sister, into the safety and shelter of his zenana quarters.