Текст книги "Salt and Saffron"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Zain had heard of Babur’s homesickness and so he sent his envoys with this message: ‘I, too, am from the Timurid family, and there are many still in Samarkand and Bukhara who tremble in awe at the name of my ancestor, Nur-ul-Jahan, founder of Dard-e-Dil, a prince of Transoxania by birth. We are brothers, you and I, and brothers must help brothers. My armies are at your disposal to recapture Samarkand, land of fabled beauty and honey-sweet melons, where the power of the Uzbek is weaker than it outwardly seems. In return, I ask only that I may administer your lands in Hindustan, and rely upon you to help me defeat the infidel forces of Rana Sanga.’ (I blush, of course, to know my ancestor used the religion card to claim an alliance.)

The throne of Samarkand in return for his portion of India? Babur did not hesitate to say, ‘Let us meet, my brother, to talk of this.’ Zain’s envoys galloped home to find Zain assassinated, and Ibrahim on the throne. By the time Ibrahim had consolidated his position and cooled his rage towards his brother sufficiently to realize what a brilliant offer Zain had made the Mughal, Babur had decided that a mango in the hand was worth two melons in his dreams. I did not intend for that to sound vulgar.

Dard-e-Dil was absorbed into Mughal territory soon after, with little fuss or fanfare, and spent most of the next two centuries reduced to an administrative unit of the Mughal empire.

‘Those Johnny-come-latelies,’ my relatives are wont to say when the Mughals are mentioned. ‘You know, their empire could have been ours. Those not-quites!’

(And here, again, we must pause to account for the history books which show that the Mughals were certainly not willing to allow powerful rulers to remain powerful once the Mughal Empire was established. And Dard-e-Dil was a northern state, not one of the Deccan kingdoms out of Mughal reach. So why don’t we hear of any marriage alliances – except fairly minor ones – between the Mughals and the Dard-e-Dils? Why don’t we hear of Mughal plans to cut the Dard-e-Dils down to size? Before answering those questions, consider this one: Why don’t we see the kingdom of Dard-e-Dil on maps of pre-Mughal India? The truth, according to the history books, is this: the founder of Dard-e-Dil, Nur-ul-Jahan, was indeed from the royal Timurid line, but after his victory in the Battle of Surkh Khait he failed to consolidate his power, and the Dard-e-Dils remained minor figures in the power game, so minor you wonder if Babur could have taken Zain’s proposal seriously, so minor it’s no surprise the Mughals allowed the Dard-e-Dils (on an on-again, off-again basis) to administer the land which Nur-ul-Jahan and his descendants sometimes held and sometimes didn’t in the years between Surkh Khait and Paniput. The sad truth is that Nur-ul-Jahan’s so-called kingdom was little more than a patch of land and it was only after the fall of the Mughals that his descendants gained control of enough of the surrounding areas to claim real power (and to confer upon their ancestors the posthumous title of ‘Sultan’ which those early Dard-e-Dils never really held in their lifetimes – and later, when the British invented the term ‘Nawab’, the Dard-e-Dils decided they preferred that title, and airily replaced ‘Sultan’). That’s what the history books say, but they also acknowledge that the Dard-e-Dils were among the first northern kingdoms to throw off Mughal rule, soon after the eighteenth century had dawned and Aurangzeb, the last Great Mughal, had died, which is not explicable if they really were as insignificant as the historians make them out to be. Who says it’s true just because it’s in print?)

Still, given our family’s belief that it was the not-quites alone who prevented us from replacing the Mughals, Rehana Apa was kind to point out the obvious: those sad, sad eyes of an emperor deposed could have been Dard-e-Dil eyes. So perhaps, in the case of Ibrahim and Zain, the not-quites indirectly brought about a blessing. That’s what Rehana Apa was trying to say; but, of course, taking the throne of the Mughals would not have meant replicating the actions – and the downfall – of the Mughals. I know what prevented us from being deposed, and worse, after the débâcle of 1857. It was not the fact that we didn’t sit on the throne of Delhi. It was all down to Taj’s mother. Yes, the woman whom Dadi had compared to Leda.

All right, let me clarify. Skipping ahead over three hundred years from the days of Babur, let’s consider what happened to the Dard-e-Dils during the Revolt or Mutiny or War of Independence, or whatever your preferred name for the events of 1857. Near the start of the fighting, when Bahadur Shah Zafar, last Emperor of the Mughals, found himself whisked away from his poetry and music to become the figurehead around which the Rebels banded, the then Nawab of Dard-e-Dil sent his heir apparent to meet the Emperor’s representatives and assure them of Dard-e-Dil support. The heir apparent dawdled. Not because he thought joining the Revolt was a bad idea, but because he was lazy, dedicated to pleasure, and saw no reason to be galloping around the country like an ordinary messenger. He feared if he proved too efficient his father would make a habit of sending him off on such expeditions. He couldn’t dawdle around the palace, of course, because his father’s spies were everywhere. So he rode into the fields around Dard-e-Dil instead, where he saw Taj’s mother who looked him in the eye.

Why do we know this and nothing else, except what we can naturally assume given Taj’s birth, nine months later? Her elbows were not tantalizing, but she looked him in the eye. That’s the one line the family devotes to Taj’s mother, the woman without name. Did she look him in the eye to let him know she thought him worth looking at? Or to show she was no bowing and scraping royalist? Or to clarify that he was not worth a bow or a scrape? Did he find her gaze attractive? Offensive? Diverting?

She died in childbirth, so even her daughter could do nothing more than speculate. But the Dard-e-Dils don’t speculate, because motives and emotions aren’t pertinent. What is pertinent is that Taj’s mother delayed the prince, giving the Nawab’s chief messenger those few extra seconds needed to intercept him just before he extended a hand of support to the Revolt. The Nawab had dithered after his son rode away. Unable to decide whether to back Bahadur Shah or the British, he told his messenger, ‘Leave now. If you reach my son before he delivers a promise of assistance, then tell him to return at once. If he has made the promise, tell him we will stand by it.’ Taj’s mother looked straight at the prince, slowed his progress by … minutes … seconds, and thus we were spared the hangings, the stripping away of titles and possessions, the sad, sad eyes.

I know the prince’s name, but I will not mention it. This gesture is meaningless in the grand scale of things, but sometimes we need to be less than grand.

We were all too grand in the most petty of ways towards Taj. Her mother saved our family, in a manner of speaking, and even if she hadn’t … even if she hadn’t …

Taj’s mother gave birth near the entrance to the palace ground. Then died. It must have been those days of standing in the sun, waiting for the prince or the Nawab to allow her an audience, that sapped from her all energy except that needed to give her daughter life. Her family took Taj away, raised her, and kept her far, far away from the palace.

Such tales are common amongst royal families. But not ours. Taj’s mother is an exception and that’s what makes me think that Dadi was probably right when she said that Taj’s mother, and later Taj, came to symbolize that fateful decision to turn away from the Revolt. It was a decision that saved the Dard-e-Dil family, but we were too ashamed to rejoice. From the roof of the Dard-e-Dil palace you could see trees in neighbouring states from which the Rebels were hanged. And not just the Rebels. What was the name of that Englishman who, in the wake of 1857, said he wanted to see a Muslim hanging from every tree in India? Better he remain nameless, too.

There was one tree in particular which the Dard-e-Dil royals could not bear to look at – the tree from which the Nawab’s fourth cousin, ruler of a neighbouring state and participant in the Revolt, had been hanged. In Dard-e-Dil you could hear the creaking rope as his body swayed in the breeze. So the story goes. The British hanged all his heirs, too, of course, and annexed his lands. A portion of the lands was given to the Dard-e-Dils in recognition of their loyalty. It was a small portion, far less than that doled out to many of the royals who stayed out of the fray. That seems confirmation enough that the British knew how close we came to switching our allegiances, and wished us to always have a subtle reminder of what happened to the lands and lives of errant princes. And, now that I think of it, couldn’t they have hanged him from another tree, one less visible from miles away in a north-westerly direction?

No surprise then that we wanted no further reminders of that message intercepted and reversed. So we shunned Taj’s mother and we shunned Taj. Until the unnamable prince, who was by now a bare-handed killer of tigers, became Nawab and his wives bore him no children who survived the trauma of birth. As a last resort, one of his courtiers told him of a peasant girl, only fifteen, who was already skilled in midwifery. The Nawab called for her, and when she looked him in the eye with eyes that were his eyes he knew his children would live only if she delivered them and received royal favours for doing so.

For forty-eight years Taj delivered Dard-e-Dils. Delivered her brothers and sisters, her cousins, her nephews and nieces, her great-nephews and great-nieces. Received gold and umbilical cords in return. What did she do with the cords? She took them, that’s all. More to the point, in taking the cords she gave the Dard-e-Dils something her mother had never given them: a reason to remember her name. And then the three boys were born near midnight. At what times exactly? Only Taj knows, and maybe even she didn’t. Of course she left the palace immediately after that. She’d delivered them, announced the timings of their births, taken their umbilical cords. Without a doubt, no question of it, she’d secured a place in the family story.

I looked at the picture that Rehana Apa had sent with her letter. Dadi and the three boys, laughing in the palace grounds. If they knew they were fated to bring misery to the family you wouldn’t know it by looking at the photograph.

I showed Dadi the photograph that evening. She rested it on her lap and hung her head low. I waited for her to look up and when she didn’t I walked over to her and placed my hands over two of the brothers so that all that remained visible was Dadi angling her body towards the boy in the centre.

‘That’s the most romantic picture of you and Dada I’ve ever seen,’ I said.

‘That’s not your grandfather. It’s Taimur.’

She wouldn’t say any more about it, and no matter what I said the rest of the evening I couldn’t make her laugh.

Chapter Fifteen

‘Aliya, sweetoo, you must come over right away. Futafut. On the double take.’ It was Older Starch on the phone, disrupting my evening cup of tea with Sameer.

‘I would have loved to, but Sameer’s over.’

Older Starch clicked her tongue. ‘Bring him also. Where’s the problem? Don’t answer, I’ll tell you. The problem is here. I have out-of-town guests coming for tea with their children who are your age. First, Raunaq and Rusty were coming to keep them company but now Raunaq has piles, poor baby. Have you ever had piles, Aliya?’

I put her on speaker phone. ‘Piles? No. I didn’t think Dard-e-Dils suffered from piles.’

‘Arré, what a thing to say! Although, no, actually, you’re right. Usman is the only one among us who’s had them and that must be from his father’s side. He’s got Pathan blood, you know. But anyway, I said to Raunaq that last week there was an ad in the paper for a doctor who has a herbal cure for piles. No operation and also no need to show the doctor any part of your lower body. What’s that noise?’

It was Sameer choking on his tea. I promised we’d drop in, and hung up. Afterwards, I wondered if Older Starch was wilier than I gave her credit for. Because if I hadn’t been so amused by her comments I would never have agreed to entertain her guests. But with my head full of images of Older Starch, boasting that she comes from a royal family which once owned vast tracts of land and never suffered from haemorrhoids, I walked right into her trap. And walked into it alone, because Sameer took off for a game of squash at the Club, declaring that he’d have to see more than enough of the Starched Aunts once festivities for Kishwar’s wedding to the Ali Shah son got under way.

‘Well, I’m avoiding the wedding,’ I said. ‘Kishwar said some things about Mariam Apa—’

‘Everyone said some things about Mariam Apa.’

‘Okay, more to the point, I’m not getting involved in the Aunts’ ploys to get me married off.’

‘Weddings breed weddings,’ Sameer laughed, and twirled his racket in farewell.

‘Aliya!’ The Starcheds rose to greet me, minutes later, as I entered Older’s drawing room. ‘Have you met the Ali Shahs?’

Starched Aunts-1. Aliya-0.

Mind you, the four-wheel drives parked outside with their tinted windows and armed bodyguards should have tipped me off.

My aunts introduced me to the Ali Shah parents and daughters, then turned in triumph to the two boys. ‘This is Khurrum, Kishoo’s fiancé. You know Kishoo, Aliya. She couldn’t be here, unfortunately.’

Younger Starch whispered, ‘Stays at home when the sun’s out. Wants to look fair on her wedding night.’

‘And this is Murtaza. Just graduated from an Ivy League. Aliya was also in America, Murti. You two have a lot to talk about.’ And with that, both the Starched Aunts pushed me down on the sofa beside Murtaza.

Murtaza and Khurrum’s sisters caught my eye and turned away, giggling. Their father, engaged in a discussion with Older Starch’s husband about the dangers of allowing the masses to have access to Internet porn, gestured to his wife in a manner clearly meant to indicate that she was responsible for seeing to it that her daughters behave themselves. Younger Starch pulled a little bottle out of her handbag and, after instructing the Ali Shah boys to admire the painting on the wall, hastily rubbed concealer over the pimple just above my eyebrow.

Oh, please Scotty, beam me up. I’d rather face Klingons than this.

‘So what did you major in at college?’ Murtaza said.

‘English,’ I replied, quite confident that he would be unable to follow up on that.

‘Really?’ Khurrum leant forward. ‘That was my minor.’

Older Starch distracted him with a plate of sandwiches, and Younger Starch said, ‘Murtaza studied World Politics.’

‘Whirled Polly Ticks.’ Khurrum made a spiralling motion with his finger.

‘The revolving parrot is really a bomb!’ I laughed back.

‘Khurrum, please go and call Kishwar. I need to know who will be at dinner tonight.’ Now Mother Ali Shah was getting in on the act. Attack from all quarters.

Khurrum raised his shoulders helplessly and disappeared from the room with a mobile phone.

‘Always Murtaza was standing up to his professors. Always!’ His mother beamed at me and nodded.

‘Really?’ said a Starch. ‘American professors?’

Murtaza nodded. ‘They’re all idiots there. When they talk about Pakistan, which they almost never do, they say such stupid things. One of them said our biggest problem is feudalism. Other than the usual rubbish about paying taxes, he said we treat the peasants badly. I made him look like such an idiot in front of the whole class.’

‘What did you say? Aliya, did you hear? He took on his professor.’

I smiled benignly at my aunt and hid behind a samosa.

‘I told him he should come to Pakistan. See how my family looks after the people on our lands. We’ve built medical facilities; every year we bring in someone from the cities to talk to the women about birth control; if anyone has a dispute they come to us and we resolve the situation without bribery or favouritism. And they are so grateful they want to kiss our feet. But we tell them they don’t have to do that. Then I said, “Professor, sir, has anyone ever tried to kiss your feet?” That really shut him up.’

‘Tell them what you said about cities,’ his mother urged.

‘Hanh. I also said the poor people on our lands are much better off than poor people in the city, who have to rely on the government for justice and medical care and things like that’

This was too much for me. ‘But you are the government! The National Assembly is teeming with landowners. Both on the government and the opposition benches. And incidentally, in all your talk of the largesse you provide to these benighted souls, you never mentioned education.’ Masood so often said he wanted to learn to read and write English, and I never even offered to teach him. Worse, the few scraps of English I threw in his direction were worthless words such as ‘thyme’.

Murtaza shook his head at me. ‘You citywallahs. You don’t understand. I thought at least you, because of your family background … For centuries your family ruled over its people with the same attitude as we have. What happened to you?’

‘Evolution.’

I would have won that point except that, just as I spoke, one of the Ali Shah girls whispered, quite audibly, to her sister, ‘Her cousin married the cook.’

How can I justify the shame I felt at that moment?

‘I should be going,’ I said, putting down my teacup quite calmly. ‘Only stopped in for a few minutes on my way to see Dadi. She’ll start worrying if I’m late. Nice to meet you all. No, no, no need to see me out.’

Khurrum was laughing on the phone, near the front door. ‘Going?’ he said. ‘No, not you, Kishwar. Hang on.’ He lowered the phone away from his ear. ‘But we haven’t even discussed Othello and cultural relativism.’

I put a hand on his arm. ‘Nice to know we’ve got people like you in the National Assembly.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, your vote’s frighteningly easy to come by. Are there more like you? Can you all register to vote in my district?’

‘Only if you treat me like any other voter and bribe me.’

‘I promise you a goat for a vote. See you at the wedding?’

I made some non-committal motion with my hand and opened the door. A hawk-nosed man was striding up the driveway and we nodded to each other as I exited and he entered.

‘Jahangir Bhai!’ I heard Khurrum say.

The Underpants Man? I turned round but the door had closed.

I got into my car and rested my head against the steering wheel.

What did he think of the whole Mariam-Masood affair? In four years we’d heard, either directly or second-hand, innuendoes and gossip and vicious conjecture aimed at Mariam, but none of it originated from Jahangir and, consequently, he’d acquired the status of a demi-god in our house.

He’d been unfailingly gracious right from the start, over four years ago, when Auntie Tano called him up to say that Aba and Mariam Apa were planning a trip to the town adjoining his lands to have a look at a mosque. ‘A mosque?’ Aba mouthed in horror as Auntie Tano chirped down the phone to Jahangir.

‘For architectural purposes,’ Auntie Tano added. ‘A client of Nasser’s wants the tiles of the outside wall replicated in his courtyard. So Nasser’s coming to have a look, and Mariam is going to sketch the tiles for the workmen in Karachi. They’re staying overnight. Do you know of any hotels …?’

‘Don’t be absurd,’ Jahangir said. ‘Tell them to stay with me. I’ll have my driver pick them up at the train station.’

It was that simple.

By the standard of the Ali Shahs, Jahangir was just a small landowner without the trappings of feudal power, but Aba was struck from the first by the deference of his servants. ‘It made me think that Masood must be a misfit here,’ Aba told me afterwards. ‘Oh, he was never anything but polite, but you always knew that he knew he could leave and get a job anywhere else if we crossed certain lines. Of course, maybe he couldn’t because of Mariam, but we never knew that.’

They arrived on Jahangir’s lands in the early evening, and before sunset Aba had forgotten his reservations about Jahangir, a man he’d been on nodding terms with for twenty years, but had never spoken to until that day.

‘He looked at Mariam when he talked. Didn’t act as though her silence meant she wasn’t part of the conversation. And he could interpret her gestures, her facial expressions, remarkably well. I thought, I really thought, maybe. But then dinner was served.’

When Aba told the story we all, all of us who’d ever eaten a meal prepared by Masood, put aside our reaction to the elopement to imagine, just for a moment, how it would feel to be in the presence of Masood’s food again. Aba, too, closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, said, ‘Chicken vindaloo,’ and we all sighed.

‘Of course, you know my cook,’ Jahangir said. ‘I would say I regret taking him away from you, but you’d know that’s a lie.’

Mariam Apa did not fall upon the food as Aba had expected, given how long she’d been without eating. She brushed a hint of the vindaloo’s sauce on to her lower lip, and tucked the lip inside her mouth. She held it there for a few seconds, and then smiled. After that she ate with her customary delicacy, but her eyes were bright as she savoured each morsel, and when she finished her first helping she gasped at the incremental burn of the spices on her tongue.

Masood did not appear during the meal; he did not double as bearer here, but stayed confined to the kitchen. At the end of the meal, however, Jahangir said, ‘You’ll stay for lunch tomorrow, won’t you? You can see the mosque in the morning and then come back. We’ll have Masood cook whatever you want.’ He turned to the bearer and told him to call Masood. ‘Stay all weekend, in fact. Longer! I had forgotten that it was possible to enjoy company so much. ‘

Aba was already imagining the wedding, and hoping it wouldn’t be a dragged-out series of ceremonies over two weeks.

‘Nasser Sahib,’ he heard behind him, and there stood Masood. Aba stood up and shook his hand warmly, thereby missing the expression on Mariam Apa’s face as she saw Masood for the first time since he’d left.

Masood turned to Mariam. ‘What will you have tomorrow?’ he said. Mariam cupped her palms and pointed them towards Masood. It’s in your hands.

The next morning when Aba went to see why Mariam was sleeping so late her suitcase was gone and a photostat of a wedding licence was on her bed, the print smudged here and there. People said, ‘She just left a copy of the nikahnama without any sign of goodbye or sorry or take care,’ but I knew the smudges were the only gesture of farewell that would allow me to forgive her for leaving. After all, how could I be angry when confronted with her tears?

Aba had no choice but to show his host the nikahnama, and Jahangir said, ‘If you think it best I’ll send my men to find them. It won’t be a problem.’

‘Thank you,’ Aba said. ‘Thank you for making that optional. No, please, I have no right to make this demand, but please don’t do that, not now, not ever.’

‘Bibi?’

I lifted my head from the steering wheel, and ran my palm along my forehead, trying to smooth away the latticed pattern imprinted on my skin.

‘Bibi, is everything all right?’

‘Yes. Yes. Thank you, I’m fine.’

The man peering in at me smiled. He had been sitting with the group of servants – drivers, bodyguards, Older Starch’s mali and chowkidar – when I walked out of the Starched gate.

‘You don’t remember me, Aliya Bibi. I almost didn’t recognize you either. You were very young when I last saw you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Are you one of my aunts’ servants?’

He shook his head. ‘I saw you sometimes when I lived in the city before. I’m Jahangir Sahib’s driver.’ When I still looked confused he added, quite gently, ‘My brother used to work for you.’

Things I wanted to do: push his hair off his face; shave off his beard; straighten his shoulders; hear his laugh. Anything to find a resemblance to the man Mariam had left all of us for. Or if not that, at least to talk to him, to hear how Masood seemed during those days after he left Karachi, what he said about Mariam, what he said about all those things that he must have said things about but about which I never asked. Things like what he dreamt about, and why he never married, and how come he left his village and whether he was happy.

Instead I said, ‘Did Masood really have to return to the village when your father died?’

‘No.’ His brother looked at me as though I’d asked him about a mystery that he couldn’t quite solve. ‘I was there to look after the family. Masood was gone so long we thought he’d never return. He was too much a Karachiwallah.’

I looked at that man and I knew that I could talk to him for ten minutes or ten hours and he would never mention Mariam, never allude to the fact that our families were connected now and maybe he had nieces who were my nieces too, though we would never, no, not even if we knew where they were, we would never sit together, he and I, at a table watching those nieces blow out candles on a cake. How could we, when even now I could not stay and talk because the other servants were watching and maybe visitors who knew who I was and knew who he was would be arriving. What’s more, I couldn’t go and squat on the ground with him and he couldn’t sit with me in my car, both of us in the front seats like equals, and the longer we stayed as we were, he bending his back to catch my words, the more obvious it would be to both of us that we couldn’t sit together, not in my car, not on the ground, and if not there or there then certainly not across the table from each other in a room filled with balloons and streamers.

I had time, I felt, for one question. ‘What was he really like?’

His brother stepped back. ‘I was going to ask you that.’

I nodded and started the car engine. ‘I pray he’s well. If you ever have any contact with him …’

‘I don’t think I will. He had a passport. He took it with him.’