by Thalassa Ali
Praise for
“A sweeping pageant of life in the British Raj, and one woman's attempt to realize her destiny. Mystical and romantic in a way that recalls The Far Pavilions.”
—Stephanie Barron
“An excellent book, beautifully researched and charmingly written, which does justice to both English and Indian cultures. I was particularly impressed by the matter-of-fact mysticism and spirituality. Lovely.”
—Barbara Hambly
“A rare book indeed. It combines extraordinary characters, a riveting plot, a rich historical backdrop, Sufi mysticism, and the allure of an exotic oriental court, and is eminently readable…. The reader will be tempted to devour it in one reading. …Outstanding…We breathlessly await the sequel.”
—She Magazine
“[A] distinctive setting… [and an] intriguing first novel.”
—Washington Post
“This mesmerizing tale helps readers better understand a vitally important area of the world.”
—School Library Journal
To the memory of my English mother,
Thalassa Cruso Hencken
and
my American father, Hugh O’Neill Hencken
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The great Arthur Edelstein, who died in the summer of 2003, taught me the craft of fiction. Thank you, Art.
I would also like to thank my hardworking agent, Jill Kneerim at Kneerim and Williams; my extraordinary editor at Bantam, Kate Miciak; Caitlin Alexander; and peerless Bantam managing editor, Kathleen Baldonado.
I would also like to acknowledge the help and kindness of my writing group: Lakshmi Bloom, hostess to the stars; Elatia Harris, who cooked for me through several unexpected crises and worked especially hard on this novel; Cathie Keenan, Kathleen Patton, Pamela Raskin, and Jane Strekalovsky, all of whom were good friends to me and godmothers to A Beggar at the Gate. I had exceptional readers: Gillo Afridi, Deborah Barlow, Diane Franklin, who also worked hard on my website, Kamar Habibi who corrected my Afghan mistakes, Zeba Mirza, Ala Reid, my patient, generous sister, and the inimitable Jonathan Soroff.
My website designer was the talented Peter Cepeda, and my assistant was the fabulous Danielle Charbonneau.
There are those who have been helpful in many other ways as well: Faqeer Syed Aijazuddin, Asad and Farida Ali Khan, Shelale Abbasi, the British Council of Karachi, Susan Bachrach, Helene Golay, Heidi Fiske, Rifa'at Ghani, Eva and Shikhar Ghosh, Mahnaz Fancy, Samia Faruque, Jaime Jennings, Tariq Jafar, Marjorie Junejo, Judy and Bazl Khan, Tahireh and Zafar Khan, Janet Lowenthal, Kyra and Coco Montagu, Cecily Morse, Zubeida Mustapha, the Pakistan Diplomatic Mission to New York, Susan Paine, Samina Quraeshi, Sam and Juliet Reid, Shakeel and Rehana Saigol, Muneeza Shamsi, the Sind Club, Serita Winthrop, and Pinkie and Haroon Yusuf.
I would also like to thank the British Library, whose India Office Collection has been a vital resource to me for many years.
Last of all I must thank my dear children, Sophie and Toby.
HISTORICAL NOTE
n 1840 the Punjab was still proudly independent. Standing between British India and Afghanistan, irrigated by five rivers and boasting a great treasury of gold and jewels, it was the second-richest kingdom in the subcontinent.
But for all the Punjab's success, it had lost its powerful unifying leader. The legendary Maharajah Ranjit Singh, who had brought the Punjab under one rule and created a strong disciplined army, died in 1839, leaving the throne to his only legitimate son, the weak, half-witted Kharrak Singh.
By July 1840, Kharrak Singh was out of power, imprisoned by his son, Prince Nau Nihal Singh. The atmosphere at the Lahore Citadel, the Maharajah's palace and fort, had turned poisonous as opposing factions struggled to gain control of the country.
As these divisions deepened, the British government watched, biding its time. The British, who had recently invaded Afghanistan and installed their own puppet king on the throne of Kabul, were deeply interested in the Punjab, not only for its wealth, but also for its geographical position, for the shortest line of supply between the British territories and Afghanistan lay across the Punjab's well-watered plains.
Although most of the British representatives in India, including the Governor-General, believed it important to promote a stable government in the rapidly disintegrating Punjab, there were some who had other ideas.
Lady Macnaghten is a real historical figure, as are Maharajah Kharrak Singh, his son Prince Nau Nihal Singh, and Faqeer Azizuddin, the Punjab Foreign Minister.
Lady Macnaghten did travel to Afghanistan in 1840 to join her husband. The unfortunate events at Lahore in January 1841 also took place, much as I have described them.
Mariana Givens, her aunt and uncle, Russell Clerk the Political Agent, and Saboor and his family are all products of my imagination.
PROLOGUE
March 21, 1840
No one knew when the city of Lahore, with its tight, airless lanes and thick, defensive walls, had first arisen beside the Ravi River on the flat plain of the Punjab, but everyone agreed that the city's foundations rested upon the ruins of many older, now forgotten versions of itself, and that the Lahore of the seventeenth century had been the finest and most beautiful of them all.
Two hundred years after the Moghul emperors had embellished it with their elegant architecture, the old city still boasted a grand marble palace within its red brick fort, and a glorious red sandstone mosque. Beyond the city walls, tiled gateways, irrigated gardens, airy pavilions, and the delicately carved and inlaid tombs of the royal dead were witnesses to the grandeur of a city that had once been the northern capital of a great empire.
In the eastern part of the walled city, near the Delhi Gate, stood another architectural masterpiece of the Moghul era, the mosque of Wazir Khan.
Inside the mosque, the morning air was cool, and faintly scented with roses. Sunlight poured in from the courtyard outside, illuminating the dust that hung in clouds, softening the colors of the high-ceilinged prayer chamber. Near a wall densely decorated with Arabic calligraphy, Shaikh Waliullah Khan Karakoyia knelt, shoeless, on a Persian carpet, an illuminated Qur'an open before him on a carved wooden stand, his tall starched headdress lending him a dignity he did not require.
There was no part of the Muslim holy book that Shaikh Waliullah, spiritual guide of the Karakoyia brotherhood of mystics, had not already committed to memory, but even so, he never failed to perform the ceremony of removing the book's silk wrappings and setting it open on a carved stand before chanting the familiar Arabic in his quiet singsong.
Today he would rehearse the beloved verses from Sura Nur, the chapter entitled “Light.”
Allah is the Light
Of the heavens and the earth.
The parable of His Light
Is as if there were a Niche,
And within it, a Lamp:
The Lamp enclosed in Glass:
The glass as it were
A brilliant star:
Lit from a blessed Tree,
An Olive, neither of the East,
Nor of the West,
Whose Oil is well-nigh
Luminous,
Though fire scarce touched it:
Light upon Light!
After sitting for some minutes, his lips moving, his eyes half-closed, the Shaikh returned the book to its wrappings. Tucking it beneath his arm, he rose to his feet and strode barefoot through the vaulted archways of the prayer chamber, then across the mosque's square courtyard, past the ablution tank with its burbling fountain, returning the salutes of other men as he passed them, his forceful expression softened by the passage he had been reciting.
At the entrance, he greeted the hunchbacked Keeper of Shoes, then waited while the little
man brought the slippers he had kept carefully aside from those of ordinary men. His dreaminess gone, the Shaikh pushed his feet into his shoes and strode down the mosque's long flight of steps and into its small, cobblestone square.
His family's ancestral home stood fronting the square, at a right angle to the mosque. As the Shaikh approached its tall, carved doors, three men who had been squatting outside leapt to attention, and the great doors swung open.
The main courtyard of the comfortable old haveli, with its animal stables along one side, was as warm as the square outside, but it was quieter. The sun caught its frescoed walls, painted with the crescent moons that had given the old house its name, and fell upon the inner courtyard's lone, dusty tree, and onto the platform where, on pleasant afternoons, the Shaikh was accustomed to sit among his followers.
He crossed the small courtyard, turned into a doorway and climbed a flight of winding stone stairs to the family quarters of his house. Women and children sat clustered on the floor of a large upstairs room, their heads turning as the Shaikh marched past them along a bright corridor and into the small whitewashed chamber where his twin sister sat waiting for him.
He returned her half-smile of greeting. “I was reciting from Sura Nur,” he offered as he lowered himself to the sheet-covered floor. “For some reason,” he added, “that Sura never fails to remind me of my daughter-in-law.”
Safiya Sultana shifted her stout body against one of the bolsters that lined the walls of the little room. “ ‘An Olive, neither of the East, Nor of the West,’ ” she repeated in her well-measured Arabic, easily identifying the verse her brother referred to, for she did not often need to be told what he was thinking. “Yes,” she agreed. “I think one could say that about the English girl.”
“Inshallah,” the Shaikh said softly, “she and our little Saboor will soon return safely.”
“Inshallah, God willing,” his sister agreed, nodding gravely.
ON THAT same afternoon, twelve hundred miles southeast of the Shaikh's house, Mariana Givens nudged her mare through a crowd of gaily dressed natives, her eyes on the scene before her.
The air around her smelled of frying and spices. Harsh, rhythmic music came from somewhere she could not see. She turned her head to and fro, taking in the scene, promising herself she would remember it forever.
This was not the first time Mariana had left the broad avenues of British Calcutta behind her. A dozen times during the previous six months, she had escaped her uncle's large house on Chowringhee Road and ventured alone into the native part of town, for she had discovered that when she lost herself in the real India, her misery and boredom lightened for a time.
She had gained this opportunity to see the interesting and macabre Charak Puja only an hour earlier. As she crossed the broad drive in front of Government House on her afternoon ride, several young British officers had ridden past her, talking animatedly among themselves.
“—a cross between a Maypole and a whirligig,” one of them had been saying. “A man is attached by ropes to the top of a mast. A group of men then rotate the mast, allowing a rider to spin about in a great circle. But what distinguishes it from a real whirligig is that the rider is suspended by meat hooks that have been forced through his body.”
“We must go there at once!” another had cried. “We must not miss a moment of it!”
Hoping no one would see her leaving the respectable environs of Government House, Mariana had waited until the young officers were some distance away, then clucked to her mare and set off to follow them, a solitary female figure riding sidesaddle through the native shantytown, where naked babies played in the dust and unrecognizable smells filtered through the air.
The temple grounds at Kali Ghat were filled with a swelling, festive crowd. The cries of sweetmeat sellers competed with the clashing of native music. Dancing girls whirled before prosperous-looking onlookers. Ragged creatures with great gashes through their upper arms danced wildly to the same music while running swords or spits through their wounds. Others held withered arms over their matted heads, their fists clenched, filthy, overgrown fingernails protruding from the backs of their hands.
The tall, silent poles at the center of the grounds promised even more fearful sights.
The drumbeats began to intensify. The crowd cleared a wide circular space, leaving only a dozen half-naked men standing by the two tall masts. Mariana rode forward, craning to see which one of them had hooks through his body, but saw only that several ropes trailed along the ground behind the group, then rose to the top of the pole.
All but one of the men strode to the pole. Like bullocks turning a waterwheel, they began to push the arms of a turnstile attached to the pole's base. As they ran faster and faster, in a tight, shouting circle, the ropes tautened and the last man rose slowly into the air and began to fly.
He swung in a wide circle, held nearly upright by the spinning of the mast, his lips moving as he threw flowers onto the crowd below. As he flew past her, Mariana saw plainly that four hooks had been forced through the muscles of his chest, and another four through his back. His wounds did not bleed, but remained sickeningly raw and open for all to see.
A male English voice laughed loudly somewhere in the crowd. Mariana gazed upward, unable to look away, a hand shading her eyes. Was it agony or joy that made the flying man draw back his lips into that mad smile? Had he taken bhang to lessen his pain? What had driven him to make this extraordinary sacrifice?
She searched the crowd for someone to ask, but before she could do so, the man swung toward her, reaching into a cloth bag as he approached. A moment later he sailed over her head, his expression concentrated and ecstatic. A handful of flowers fell around her as he flew away.
The first one, a yellow marigold, became entangled in her horse's mane. She reached out, but before she could touch it, a male hand appeared suddenly and swept it to the ground, where it lay, bright as a jewel, in the dust.
“You should not be here,” the owner of the hand said firmly.
Shocked, Mariana stared down from her saddle. The man who had spoken was clearly Hindu, since his shirt opened on the right side. He stood beside her, clean-shaven and neatly turbaned, his waistcloth flowing to his feet, a white dot marking the space between his eyes.
“This is not your path,” he continued in a resonant voice, speaking in Urdu, a language Mariana understood, not in the Bengali that rose and fell about them. “This way,” he added, gesturing at the dreadful figure soaring above them, “is for others, but it is not for you.”
The crowd had thickened around her, blocking her escape. The Englishman laughed again, his voice a distant guffaw.
“Your path lies to the northwest.” The stranger pointed an authoritative brown hand away from the crowd. “You must return there to find your destiny. Until then, do not attend festivities such as these. Do not touch the flowers. Do not look again at the man overhead.”
How had he known? Mariana swallowed, searching for a brave, offhand response, but nothing came. When he did not move, she followed his gaze toward a line of distant green hills.
“Leave this place,” he commanded. “Go.”
The men at the turnstile shouted. Overhead, the wounded man's ropes and pulleys creaked and sang, telling Mariana that he still whirled above the crowd, dropping his flowers, like blessings, on their heads. But she did not look up again. Instead, she clucked to her mare and pushed her way without a backward glance past mendicant scarecrows, dancers, and food stalls until she reached the road leading back to her uncle's comfortable English house on Chowringhee Road.
It had not been the Hindu stranger's abrupt appearance beside her or the oddness of his message that had driven her, trembling a little, from the temple grounds. She had seen at once that there was no reason to fear him, that he was no charlatan or trickster. He had been too cleanly dressed, too dignified. He had asked for nothing in return for delivering his message. What had sent her away had been his words.
Y
our path lies to the northwest, he had said, pointing in the direction of the Punjab, the proud, unconquered kingdom that lay beyond the northwestern frontier of British India: the same kingdom that called to Mariana even now, its faint siren song offering elusive, wondrous things and a world entirely alien to her own, where no word of her language was ever uttered, no morsel of her native food ever prepared. In the venerable walled city house she had left behind in Lahore fifteen months ago, there were no balls, no amateur theatricals, no dinner tables with silver candelabra and lively conversation. Instead, Shaikh Waliullah's family ladies and a score of their children occupied themselves day after day in an upstairs room that, in Mariana's memory, had seemed to encompass the entire world.
But of her path there had been no sign. How could there be a path, when those ladies scarcely ever left the house?
She rode home lost in thought, her face hot and gritty beneath her top hat. She stared at a brightly caparisoned donkey in front of her, trying to distract herself from her memories of Lahore.
Whatever path the soothsayer had meant, it could not lead there. After fifteen long months, Mariana had come to believe she would never again visit the Punjab.
June 20, 1840
Three months later, still in Calcutta, Mariana sat beside her aunt six pews behind the Governor-General and his two spinster sisters, watching a short, red-faced man make his perspiring way toward the pulpit steps of St. John's Cathedral.
Around her, the congregation twitched and whispered. A woman nudged her husband. Another woman, in black, who had appeared to be sleeping, sat up and began to fan herself vigorously. Two rows away, a newly arrived girl and her sharp-faced companion turned in their seats to look back at Mariana, smug satisfaction on their faces. Like her, they knew what was coming. Unlike her, they were enjoying themselves.
Beneath her wilting gown, Mariana's stays felt as if they had been ironed onto her torso. Her hair, difficult at the best of times, had escaped her straw bonnet, and now hung in loose brown curls on her neck, causing her skin to prickle in the June heat.