A Beggar at the Gate

by Thalassa Ali

  “It was not silly,” Mariana protested, stung. “The Maharajah's armed men came for Saboor, and they had to let him down from a window in the rain, and—”

  “Never mind about the child,” snapped Aunt Claire.

  “When Sir William inquired as to your whereabouts,” Uncle Adrian went on, his eyes averted from Mariana's, “the Shaikh indicated that events of the previous night had not unfolded as expected. Sir William then asked one or two questions of his own, and divined the truth of the matter.

  “He wrote in his dispatch that he had put the whole story from his mind, but thought of it after he requested my appointment to Kabul.”

  Aunt Claire glared at Mariana. “Why did you not tell us this yourself?”

  Mariana found her handkerchief and mopped her face. Saboor's grandfather knew what had happened that night? Who had told him? Did they all tell each other everything?

  “I do not understand,” she said stiffly, “how Sir William could even mention such a delicate—”

  “Don't be a goose, Mariana,” interrupted Aunt Claire. “You had no reason to hide this information. We cannot think how you managed it, but we have all agreed that saving yourself on your marriage night was the first sensible thing you have done since you came to India.”

  “If it is true,” added Uncle Adrian, “then it may be possible to salvage some small part of your reputation. While you behaved foolishly, even provocatively, toward the natives, you may not have been entirely unchaste.”

  “Not entirely unchaste?” Mariana sprang, hot-faced, from her chair. “If it is true?”

  “Sit down at once. There is more.” Aunt Claire leaned back in her chair. “The Eden ladies have told your uncle that they want to apologize.” She peered at Mariana over her fan. “To you.”

  “They said that on the way to the Punjab, you had wanted to marry a certain Lieutenant Fitzgerald of the Horse Artillery, and that they had forced you to sever that friendship. They said that all this occurred just over eighteen months ago. They implied that you took the loss badly, and that the disappointment you felt may have affected your judgment and led to your later entanglement with Saboor's father.”

  Affected her judgment indeed. Mariana glowered at her aunt as she subsided into her seat.

  “The ladies said that they forced the parting after hearing that Fitzgerald had jilted a young lady here in Calcutta. They now understand that the story was false, and that Fitzgerald had, in fact, behaved very well.” Aunt Claire paused dramatically. “Why did you tell us none of this?”

  Mariana averted her face. It caused her too much pain even to think of Fitzgerald. What was the use of talking about him?

  Fitzgerald's smile had been crooked and knowing. His uniform coat had smelled deliciously musty. At first, the Governor-General's sisters had put no obstacle in the way of her infatuation. Nodding like two bonneted birds, the two spinsters had watched her blossom, watched her follow her young horse-gunner with her eyes until the lies that had traveled all the way from Calcutta reached the Punjab. Then, abruptly, they had changed their minds. With no thought of Mariana's feelings or of Fitzgerald's, they had issued instructions that the two were to be separated.

  The loss of him had been agony.

  Four weeks later, Lord Auckland's much-desired treaty of alliance with the Punjab had been signed and celebrated with Mariana's unexpected native wedding. The next day, Harry Fitzgerald and all the other officers she might have married had marched off with their great army to Afghanistan and victory, leaving her behind them in disgrace.

  “The Eden ladies wish to make amends,” Aunt Claire announced. “Now that this new information has emerged, they believe they can help you. They have quite generously offered to let it drop in certain circles that your behavior in Lahore was not as shocking as people suppose. They are willing to suggest that you have been wronged.”

  “That is, of course, the great benefit of my appointment to Kabul,” Uncle Adrian added seriously. “It may be that we, and particularly you, my dear, will be able to make a fresh start there. I understand that Kabul has every chance of becoming a delightful station for our officers, with its superior climate and its wonderful fruit.” He nodded with satisfaction. “Fortunately for all of us, among Muslim natives an unconsummated marriage is easily dissolved.”

  Aunt Claire cleared her throat. “Of course, this brings up the question of your future. Once we are in Kabul, it may be possible to arrange someone for you. A widower, perhaps.”

  A doddering old man with children older than herself? Mariana opened her mouth to speak, then closed it.

  “But then,” her aunt went on eagerly, “one never knows what might occur. After all, Kabul is full of unattached men, including Lieutenant Fitzgerald.”

  “No one will marry me, Aunt Claire, and Fitzgerald hates me after what happened.”

  “But my dear girl, your news must be well-known there already. You know how gossip travels. For all we know, the lieutenant may be waiting breathlessly for your arrival. After all, he has had his own experience with unfair gossip and scandal. But if he does not marry you, someone else may. You should have children of your own.” She sighed wistfully. “You have no idea how happy that will make you.

  “But of course,” she added, “if nothing takes place in Kabul, we shall take you home to England when we leave here permanently.”

  Uncle Adrian nodded. “Your aunt is right, Mariana. Whatever happens will be better than this. You shall, thank God, be free of your native connections before the end of the cold weather.”

  And free of Saboor. Mariana stared numbly at her uncle.

  BACK IN her room, she wiped her hands on her skirt and raked back her hair. She had more on her mind than her uncle's mortifying news and surprising plans, more than the tiny flame of hope her aunt had caused her to feel for her own future, for outside her window, beyond the shutters, past the champa tree with its yellow showers of bloom, past the compound wall, a man waited to see her: a courier who had come twelve hundred miles to deliver a letter into her hands.

  He had arrived at night, and had made such a noise banging the gate with a stick, that the durwan, woken from sleep, had taken him to task for disturbing the English sahibs. But this courier was not a man to be stopped. He had insisted that he had orders to deliver something immediately to the lady who kept a native child with herself inside the house.

  In the end, Mariana's own manservant, Dittoo, had been summoned to resolve the issue. Recognizing the courier's clothing and speech as Punjabi, and understanding that he must have come all the way from the house of Shaikh Waliullah, Dittoo had gone to fetch an unused charpai, and instructed the man to wait on it until the morning. Instead, the courier had announced his hunger, forcing a nervous Dittoo to take the risk of stealing bread, butter, and a mango from the pantry.

  When he had eaten, the courier had once again demanded to see Mariana, who, like her aunt and uncle, had slept through the drama at the gate. Unprepared, she had started up at the sight of Dittoo outside her bedroom door at four o'clock in the morning, a lamp in his hand, rumpled and close to tears.

  “There is a courier outside,” her manservant had whispered hoarsely. “He has brought a letter from Lahore. He says he will give it into your hands only.”

  She had sat up and reached for her dressing gown. “You are sure?” she had asked, knowing as she spoke that he was.

  The lamp had jerked in Dittoo's hand, sending moving shadows onto the wall. “He is very ugly, Bibi,” he said, his face bunching. “He is an albino. I told him I could not bring such a strange-looking man into the house in the middle of the night. I said he must wait until the morning, but he is insisting, and his voice is becoming loud.

  “I begged him to give me the letter,” he had added, “but he said he would kill me first.” He had drawn his hunched form as straight as he was able. “He says he has not traveled all this distance to give the letter to a servant.”

  Mariana had crept down the stairs
after Dittoo and followed him to the side verandah, where she quickly took in the shadowy form of a burly man in a thick, Punjabi-style turban. The man's beard was as pale as corn silk. She had blinked in surprise at the sight of his scabbed and blistered feet on the tiled verandah floor. Although they clearly belonged to him, they were as white as her own.

  She had returned the man's greeting, but said no more. She had not even asked his name. Instead, she had taken the sealed letter from his outstretched hand and turned away toward the stairs. Reaching her room, she had slid the letter into the bottom of one of her tin storage boxes and crawled onto her bed.

  For two days she had avoided reading it. For two days the albino had sat on the string bed outside the gate, waiting to collect her reply before starting on his long journey home.

  Mariana stared through the window at the champa tree. She had no need to read the letter. The fact of its arrival told her all she needed to know: that more than one person had plans to take her and Saboor to Lahore. The albino's letter, she was certain, contained the information that Saboor's father, her native husband, would soon be on his way to collect them both and return them to the walled city house where he lived with his mysteriously powerful father and the rest of the Waliullah family.

  When it is safe, I will come for you, Hassan had promised on her last evening in the Punjab, before the Governor-General's camp crossed the Sutlej River into British territory. A moment later, he had gone.

  In the weeks that followed, she had expected him to come, but he had not. As the distance grew between them, she had put his promise from her mind. She tried to picture him, but found she could remember only a blurred, bearded face and a long embroidered coat.

  For eighteen months she had heard nothing from him.

  She could not remember when she stopped imagining that she would ever see Lahore again, but during the difficult months after her return to Calcutta, she had begun to imagine a different ending to the story. She dreamed of some chance happening that would allow her to take little Saboor back with her to England when her aunt and uncle left India for good. She imagined Sunday lunch at her father's country vicarage, and Saboor sitting in a high chair at the table, eating roast mutton beside her little nephew Freddie. She pictured the neighbors patting him on the head, nodding approvingly as he grew up, exotic and lovable, the pride of Weddington village.

  Now she must face the loss of the babe she had kept safe for so long and loved so passionately, who woke her each day crying, “An-nah, morning has come!” as he clambered onto her bed.

  She must also face her husband, and perhaps his family as well. They would be upset at the news of the divorce. After all, it must be an enormous honor to have an Englishwoman in the family. But it could not be helped, and when it was over, Hassan would keep Saboor, and she would be left with a broken heart.

  The only person who might ease her pain was Harry Fitzgerald, who had once admired her for speaking several native languages, who had not seemed to mind when her clothes were buttoned wrong, who had offered her hot, hasty kisses in the shadow of her tent when no one was looking. But after starting for Afghanistan with his heavy, wheeled guns, her handsome lieutenant had sent her only one bitter letter, from a camp near the Bolan Pass.

  Who will dare to be your friend now? he had written.

  Since then he had traveled hundreds of miles through deep mountain passes and over barren, waterless land. He had fought battles: real ones, not the imaginary scenes they had conjured up together over breakfast in the dining tent at Lord Auckland's camp. He must have felt terror. He must have seen horrible things.

  He might have changed. Perhaps he drank too much now, after all his bloody campaigning. Worse, perhaps he had proved a coward in battle. Even if he were still the same, could he ever love her again?

  Your path lies to the northwest. The Hindu from the Charak Puja rose again in Mariana's imagination, pointing into the distance.

  Afghanistan, of course, was far to the northwest, but so was the Punjab. Tangled among thoughts of her fair-haired lieutenant were other memories, vivid, jolting ones of a room strewn with roses, of herself in red wedding silks, her skin oiled and perfumed, lying terrified on a bed while her husband bent over her, his breathing filling the room. She tried to put the memory away and recapture the feeling of Fitzgerald's lips on hers, but instead she saw Hassan's bearded face change, saw him pull away from her.

  She had not saved herself on her marriage night. Seeing her terror and exhaustion, Saboor's father had spared her himself.

  Sleep, Hassan had told her, before padding back to his own bed. Go to sleep.

  June 23, 1840

  The walled city of Lahore had always smelled of roses. Discernible even in the cool winters, the scent turned impenetrable in the still, baking heat of the Punjabi summer, filling the tiny, stifling shops that lined the city's narrow alleyways, rushing out of its many mosques and temples. Sometimes sweet and mysterious, often corrupted and rotten, the perfume reached into every quarter of the city, permeating everything: the food, the water, even the offal swept into heaps in the city's neglected corners.

  The only part of the city where the scent did not reach was the red brick fort that took up the northwestern quarter of the city's walled area. There, in a guarded tower room inside the marble palace that occupied the northwest corner of the Moghul Citadel, Maharajah Kharrak Singh of the Punjab had begun raving again. Bent double on the golden throne that had belonged to his legendary father, he rocked from side to side, watched by his few remaining loyal courtiers, his hands clutching his midsection, his feet drumming on the floor.

  “I want the magical child, the grandson of Shaikh Waliullah. I want him,” the little maharajah repeated, his ugly face creased with pain. “And I want to leave this place,” he added, peering about his ill-ventilated apartments. “This is no living quarter for a king. I must live in the best part of the palace.”

  “You will, Mahraj, you will,” crooned a black-bearded gentleman from his place on the marble tiles beside the throne. “But the child Saboor is not here. He left Lahore more than a year ago, before your father died.”

  Kharrak Singh's bejeweled courtiers stood along the walls, their bright silks adding life to the stifling room. They nodded in agreement. Smiling encouragingly, the bearded gentleman held out his hand. “Come, Mahraj,” he coaxed, “you must rest.”

  “My father would still be alive if that child had not been stolen from him. Everyone knows it was the Shaikh's baby grandson who protected my father with his magic.

  “No one tells me the truth,” Kharrak Singh added, glaring at the man. “Not even you, Faqeer Sahib. You know I am being poisoned, and you know that the poisoner is my own son, the usurper of my power. If my father were still alive,” he gasped, his damp face gray, “he would help me.”

  “We have not lied to you, Mahraj—”

  “And what of your assistant, the child's father?” Kharrak Singh stabbed a quivering finger at a tall man who stood unobtrusively against a wall. “What of him, with his English wife? He should send me his healing child. I am dying in front of him, and he does nothing.”

  “But Hassan Ali Khan does not have the child either, Mahraj,” the Faqeer assured him. “The boy is in Calcutta. And how is Prince Nau Nihal poisoning you? The food tasters have yet to show signs of illness.” Beneath his neatly tied turban, the Faqeer's forehead glistened with perspiration. “Every precaution has been taken to protect you.”

  Spittle crawled from the corner of Kharrak Singh's mouth. He looked up, his eyes unfocused, at his assembled nobles. “You want me dead, all of you,” he cried. “Hah—I know what you want, but you will never have it. ”

  Nervous silence fell over the small, crowded apartments. “Is he cursing us?” whispered a young man whose emerald necklaces covered him from his neck to his waist.

  “You want to believe that your future is safe,” Kharrak Singh croaked, “that you will keep your riches, but I can tell you this—the Ki
ngdom of the Punjab, built by my father, is finished.”

  Eyes fixed on their suffering king, his courtiers scarcely breathed.

  The Faqeer spoke at last. “No, Mahraj,” he offered, hunching his shoulders, his voice a conciliatory singsong. “Surely you do not mean to say these terrible things. Surely you do not mean to curse our beautiful Punjab?”

  The Maharajah pushed the Faqeer's hand away. “It is finished,” he insisted. “You will see. Ranjit Singh's heirs will kill each other, as my son Nau Nihal is killing me.”

  As his shocked guests began to withdraw, the little man on the throne threw his head back, his tightly wrapped beard exposing a knobby throat. “Opium,” he howled, “I want my opium!”

  That same day, in the eastern part of the city, near the mosque of Wazir Khan, a small shrouded figure had crouched anonymously for hours outside the tall, double doors of Shaikh Waliullah's house.

  The figure sat silently, huddled among the garbage left by a careless sweeper, a chador the color of dust exposing only her pointed childlike face and a small, damaged hand that clutched the cotton sheet together under her chin.

  Moving only her eyes, the girl watched three ragged men cross the cobbled square and approach the carved doors of the haveli, moving slowly, for one of the men appeared to be in considerable pain. She listened silently as the boldest of the three pounded heavily on the doors.

  “How is it?” he asked, glancing with concern at his suffering companion as the doors’ heavy bolts slid noisily aside.

  The friend did not reply. Instead, he shook his head, his breathing shallow and noisy.

  With a great creaking sound the doors swung open. A pair of guards stood back to let the three men pass inside. “What have we here?” asked one, his voice echoing in the vaulted brick entrance-way as he peered at the injured man. “Is it snakebite, or a scorpion sting?”