A Beggar at the Gate

by Thalassa Ali

  The dean stopped climbing and mopped his face. He leaned over the carved wooden rail of the pulpit, his eyes drifting toward Mariana, who yawned deliberately behind a gloved hand, her body tensing against the hard wooden pew.

  “I find it delightful to see how much our numbers have grown in the past year,” he began in his high voice. “It gives me such pleasure to see how many eligible young ladies from Home have found suitable matches here in India. As I look out over this congregation,” he added, fastening his eyes upon a square-shouldered officer, his moonfaced wife, and their overdressed, squirming baby, “I am filled with joy at the sight of so many happy little families, and I look forward to many, many more.”

  “I know someone who will never be married in this cathedral,” someone behind Mariana said clearly, as the dean looked pointedly in her direction.

  It would do no good to let the woman know she had heard. Instead, Mariana picked up her aunt's hymnal and began to leaf through its pages.

  It came as no surprise that the dean had aimed his remarks at her, for he had done the same in every one of his sermons for the past six months.

  The gossip about Mariana's experiences in the northwest had begun to surface in the verandahs and drawing rooms of the British capital six months earlier, immediately after she had returned, along with the rest of the Governor-General's vast camp, from his lengthy visit to the Maharajah of the Punjab. After Lord Auckland's state tents had been struck for the last time and the officers who had accompanied him had returned to their families and living quarters, the story of Mariana's shocking behavior at Lahore had spread rapidly from bungalow to bungalow, defying Lord Auckland's order of strict secrecy and swiftly eclipsing all previous scandals. For, the gossip ran, while in the Punjab, Mariana Givens had done the worst thing an Englishwoman in India could do: she had entangled herself in a disgraceful, ruinous liaison with a native man.

  Confirmed by the energetic, brown-skinned presence of her two-year-old stepson Saboor and embellished with ever more damning detail, the scandal had clung to her like sticky, invisible clothing, uniting all of Calcutta society against her, and turning her overnight into an outcast among her own people.

  Worse still, Mariana's ruin had fallen upon her aunt and uncle, neither of whom had been present in Lahore during that tumultuous time.

  From the moment of her return, Aunt Claire and Uncle Adrian, the only family Mariana had in India, had been excluded from the cheerful dinners and the spirited balls and fetes that had made Calcutta the gayest city in India, especially the celebrations that had attended the Governor-General's triumphant return from his visit to the north. A few loyal friends still paid surreptitious visits to the Lambs’ comfortable bungalow, but the rest of society had drifted away, fearful of being caught by association in the sticky web of Mariana's disgrace.

  “But these people know nothing of what really happened,” Mariana had insisted to her tearful aunt when they had been cut dead for the third time while buying muslin in the bazaar. “Why should we care what they think, Aunt Claire?”

  But Aunt Claire cared very much what people thought. Moments after Mariana had carried little Saboor through the front door of number 65 Chowringhee Road and begun a halting, uncomfortable recital of her experiences in the Punjab, Aunt Claire had swooned, semi-conscious, onto a sofa, eyes shut and mouth open.

  Choking tragically from a whiff of smelling salts, she had waved Mariana away and refused to listen to a word of explanation. “What have I done to be punished so?” she had sobbed later to Uncle Adrian from her pillows, while Mariana eavesdropped in the hallway outside. “Why has she done this unmentionable thing? And why has she brought a native child into my house? Make her take it to the servants’ quarters, Adrian. Oh, what will become of us?”

  “You should never have brought that baby into the drawing room,” her uncle had told her tightly a while later, as he stood, his back to her, staring out of his study window. “Is it not enough that you have ruined yourself? Must you also parade a native child in front of your aunt?

  “Since you insist he has lost his mother, and is of high station among his people,” he added grimly, “the child may remain with you. But you are not to let him into the front of the house, and you are forbidden to mention Lahore or the Punjab again in your aunt's presence.”

  Shocked at this angry reception by her normally mild uncle, Mariana had been unable to reply.

  He turned from the window and glared at her. “You knew perfectly well,” he added, “why we accepted Lord Auckland's invitation for you to join his train. You were well aware that it had nothing to do with translating local languages for his sisters. Given such a signal opportunity, why did you not marry one of his officers while you were in the Punjab?”

  “But I tried to marry one of them,” she put in, “and then it all fell to pieces because he was supposed to have—”

  “Instead of doing your duty and marrying an Englishman,” her uncle barked, his bald head flushing with emotion, “you kidnapped the Maharajah's baby hostage, and then, with a recklessness I cannot even begin to conceive, you married its father. How could you have done it? How?”

  “It was a mistake,” she replied stiffly. “I did not mean to marry him.”

  “You might have thought of the consequences to us,” he went on, his voice rising. “Before you abandoned your own race and entangled yourself with a native family, you might have considered my dear brother-in-law, who so generously sent you out here with very different expectations.”

  He sighed. “We must, of course, extract you from this most unfortunate marriage and return the child, but when and how that is to take place, I have no idea. It will do you no good, of course,” he added, waving an impatient hand at Mariana's tears, “but in the meantime you must bend over backward, and behave like everyone else. Do nothing to attract comment. Do you hear me?”

  He had been right but it had been far too late for Mariana to bend anywhere. Snubbed and ignored for the next six months, barred from society's pleasures, she had lived quietly with Saboor and her aunt and uncle at Chowringhee Road, reading Persian poetry with her elderly native language teacher and escaping occasionally to the native part of Calcutta, telling herself it was not an unpleasant way to live, for unlike her Aunt Claire, Mariana had never been interested in parties.

  The only things she hated about Calcutta were the knowledge that she would one day lose Saboor, and going to church.

  “Put on a pretty morning gown and get into the carriage,” Aunt Claire had snapped that morning, after bursting into Mariana's room and finding her still in her dressing gown. “There is no need for you to feed it,” she had added, averting her eyes from the round-eyed child who sat beside Mariana, eating his breakfast. “It can have its breakfast with the servants.”

  “I loathe church,” Mariana argued, as she deliberately handed Saboor a piece of buttered toast. “I hate everyone who goes there, and they hate me. St. John's Cathedral must be the most unchristian place in all of India.”

  “It is not,” her aunt had replied sharply, “and you shall go there. If you would only make the slightest show of contrition,” she added wistfully, “I am sure you would be forgiven.”

  The dean now raised his voice, interrupting Mariana's thoughts. “And there is still better news,” he announced grandly. “Churches are being constructed all over India. The latest, at Allahabad, is nearly complete.

  “What wonders these churches will do!” he added, spreading his arms wide. “We are all breathless with expectation, for it is now certain that the conversion of the natives is very near at hand.

  “We must keep in mind, however,” he intoned as he leaned over the pulpit rail, “that until they have seen the Christian light, the natives must be avoided. There is terrible degradation in the native's present character, and vice in his every word and deed. And we must remember,” he added, dropping his voice and favoring Mariana with a sidelong glance, “that for those who associate intimately with
them, there awaits their same vice, their same degradation, their same perdition.”

  Degradation. Perdition. The hymnal Mariana was holding came alive in her hands. As if by itself, it slammed shut, making a noise like a thunderclap that rang satisfactorily throughout the cathedral's stone interior.

  The dean jerked upright. A stringy woman turned in her pew and glared at Mariana.

  Aunt Claire's finger jabbed into Mariana's side. “What are you doing?” she whispered, scowling. “Put down that hymnbook and attend to the sermon.”

  People stared. The sharp-faced girl nudged her friend.

  Now recovered, the dean began to quote the Acts of the Apostles, his florid voice rising and falling. Below his pulpit, Mariana sat erect, giving no outward sign of discomfort as her mind wandered to the message she had received the previous March from the mysterious pointing man.

  He had spoken with urgent authority, but Mariana could not fathom what he had meant. What destiny could possibly await her in the direction he had pointed?

  She blinked. Could the man's message have had anything to do with the poem her old teacher had given her to translate on the day before he began the long journey home to his native Punjab?

  My moon of Canaan, the throne of Egypt is thine, the poem had read. The hour is near. The time has come to bid farewell to the prison.

  As she translated those Persian words, her munshi's feverish old face had brightened with some emotion she could not read, but the old teacher had not told her why he had chosen that particular poem for their last day.

  There was no question that he knew more than he revealed, for he had long belonged to the Karakoyia brotherhood, and he knew the mysterious Shaikh Waliullah well.

  What was the meaning of that verse? Did the prison represent Calcutta for her? If so, where was her promised throne of Egypt? She found her handkerchief and blew into it, trying to imagine herself as beautiful as Joseph, with his coat of many colors.

  The dean had stopped speaking at last. As he descended from the pulpit, the wooden stairs set up a great creaking and groaning, accurately voicing Mariana's sentiments. She longed to jump to her feet, pink-faced and shouting, and teach the old hypocrite a lesson in Christian charity.

  Half an hour later, as she followed her aunt toward the cathedral's main entrance, she heard a male voice behind her in the crowd. “She wouldn't be bad-looking, you know,” the smug voice said, “if she ever smiled.”

  When they reached the driveway, Aunt Claire hoisted herself, panting a little, into her new carriage and fought her parasol open against the Calcutta sun. “What is the matter with you, Mariana?” she demanded, one hand clutching the side of the carriage for balance. “Why did you bang your hymnal shut in the middle of the sermon? You will never redeem yourself with Calcutta society if you behave like a lunatic.”

  Mariana snapped open her own parasol. “I could not bear to hear one more syllable about my supposed sins, Aunt Claire.”

  “And why should he have mentioned your sins, Mariana?” Aunt Claire sniffed, settling into her seat. “I am quite certain he did not. In any event, no one can make out what is said in that great, echoing cathedral. I, for one, caught no more than one word in three of that sermon.”

  An English family drove past them, wedged into another carriage, the husband stuffed into his frock coat, the children looking wan and ill in the heat. As they passed Mariana and her aunt, all turned their heads away. Mariana winced at the miserable little sound that came from her aunt's corner of the carriage. Aunt Claire might pretend she had not heard the sermon, but there had been no avoiding the Broderick family's collective snub.

  The houses along Chowringhee Road stood up squarely, each in its large, walled compound. As she always did, Mariana studied the brass nameplate on each gate. All save two were English.

  They had arrived at number 65. The scarlet-turbaned durwan waved his bamboo pole. Four men in loincloths appeared and pushed open the wrought-iron gate, and the carriage with its matched horses swung through.

  In the echoing entrance hall, Aunt Claire handed her bonnet and parasol to a servant. “I must look in on your uncle,” she said over her shoulder as she puffed her way up the stairs.

  Mariana waited, listening anxiously at the foot of the stairs. Worse than the punishing heat of Calcutta, its mosquitoes, its gossip, or even the squalor and starvation of many of the natives, were the illnesses whose sudden descent could wipe out entire families in a matter of hours.

  She did not think she could bear her life without Uncle Adrian, who now lay, ill with fever, in an upstairs room. Unlike most of the English, her uncle knew something of the Indian life she craved to understand. An avid student of military strategy since her childhood, she had always cared more for her uncle's stories than for her aunt's silks, laces, and gossip. It had been Uncle Adrian who had introduced Mariana to her munshi, the old man who had taught her both Persian and Urdu, the court language of India.

  Unlike his wife, Uncle Adrian had forgiven Mariana's sins.

  A sound came from the dining room, followed by a high-pitched hiccupping giggle. Forgetting her worry, Mariana tore off her bonnet and rushed through the archway in time to see a small figure in white erupt from under the table and race through the pantry door, his clothes flying.

  “Come here, Saboor, you nuisance, you pest!” Her hair falling from its pins, she burst into the pantry, and found a curly-haired child dancing with excitement, half-hidden behind a china cupboard.

  Half a dozen men sat on the kitchen floor, eating rice heaped on freshly cut banana leaves. They looked up, chewing.

  “Saboor, my little cabbage, my little cauliflower!” she cried as she scooped the child into her arms.

  He wriggled and bounced as she kissed him, his broad face alight. “An-nah, put me down, put me down,” he shrieked. “I want to run and run!”

  As she followed his galloping three-year-old figure through the doorway, her aunt's voice rang in the hallway. “Mariana, come upstairs. There is something we must tell you.”

  Mariana had heard that demanding tone before. She climbed the stairs reluctantly, in no hurry to hear what Aunt Claire had to say, for it almost certainly had to do with Saboor, who now sat on the pantry floor, eating his lunch.

  The Battle of Saboor at 65 Chowringhee Road, joined by Mariana and her aunt on Mariana and Saboor's first day in Calcutta, was now in its seventh month, but the child still lived in the house, not in the servants’ quarters, still ate breakfast with her, and she still sang him to sleep in her bedchamber. Confident of victory in the upcoming skirmish, she now squared her shoulders and turned toward her uncle's bedroom. She had, after all, protected her little hostage in the past from more dangerous opponents than one poor, snobbish, unhappy kinswoman.

  Out of habit, she leaned cautiously forward before entering the room, trying to divine the course of the conversation she was about to join, but heard only the raucous cawing of crows outside her uncle's bedroom window.

  “Come in, Mariana, and shut the door.” Still wearing her creased church gown, Aunt Claire fanned herself in an upright chair beside an open window, while Uncle Adrian smiled from his bed, his usually ruddy face now yellowed and drawn.

  “We wanted to tell you of this earlier,” Aunt Claire began in her usual ringing tone as Mariana lowered herself into a seat beside the bed, “but with your uncle's illness there has been no time.”

  Mariana nodded. Perhaps this conversation would not concern Saboor after all.

  “Your uncle,” Aunt Claire announced, “has been posted to Afghanistan.”

  “Afghanistan?” Mariana sat straight. “But I thought he was going home to Sussex.”

  “Well, he is not. The British Envoy in Kabul has particularly asked for him.”

  “It is quite flattering, really,” Uncle Adrian put in from his pillows. “We shall be leaving in a month or two.”

  “But I thought you hated travel, Aunt Claire. I thought—”

  “It does not
matter what you thought, and in any case, it is all decided. We are at last to be rid of that native child, and you are to be divorced.” Aunt Claire closed her fan with a snap. “On our way to Kabul, we shall stop at Lahore, end your marriage, leave the child with his family, and travel on. It's as simple as that.”

  Rid of Saboor? But she was not ready to lose him. Mariana's hand flew to her mouth.

  “Think, child,” her aunt was saying. “That baby is small now, but in no time at all he'll be a full-grown native man. What on earth will you do with him then? This brings us, of course, to my next point. In his same dispatch from Kabul, the Envoy has revealed something unexpected about you.”

  “Sir William Macnaghten mentioned me in a government dispatch?”

  “He did,” Aunt Claire replied, in the grand tone she reserved for government matters. “Several days ago, immediately after your uncle's new appointment to Afghanistan, he was summoned to Government House, but to his surprise it was not to discuss either Afghanistan or the Honorable East India Company. Instead, Lord Auckland's two sisters told him privately—and in strictest confidence—that there was something you have not revealed to us about that horrid native ‘marriage’ of yours.”

  There was something odd about her aunt and uncle's faces. Suspicion dawned in Mariana. “What have I not revealed, Aunt Claire?”

  “That you are still, shall I say, chaste. That you are married in name only.”

  “What?” Mariana, who had never spoken aloud about such matters, looked hastily away from her uncle. “And the Governor-General and his sisters know this?”

  “Of course they do,” Aunt Claire rejoined impatiently. “Sir William has just finished telling them.”

  “But how does he—”

  “As you no doubt remember,” Uncle Adrian put in gently, “every Government of India officer who was present at Lahore that evening was forced to attend your ‘wedding,’ including Lord Auckland. The next morning, Sir William Macnaghten kindly offered to fetch you from Shaikh Waliullah's house and take you back to the English camp, but when he arrived in the walled city, he found that you had vanished upon some silly native errand.”