A Beggar at the Gate (8 page)

“Marry her?”

When Dittoo nodded his assent, Ghulam Ali shifted his body closer to the fire, his eyes on the passenger flat with its darkened windows. He had heard nothing of sorcery from others at Qamar Haveli, but that was not unusual. He never heard the gossip that flew from mouth to mouth in the haveli's kitchen courtyard.

But a sorceress? This was extraordinary news. It was surprising enough that Hassan Ali's foreign wife had made Saboor Baba disappear into the air, but it was truly astounding that she had, with one glance, persuaded the great Maharajah Ranjit Singh to
propose marriage.

She must indeed be a great enchantress, this foreign woman, for Kharrak Singh's father, unlike his son, had not been mad. Far from it. The creator of the Kingdom of the Punjab with its armies and its riches must have seen for himself that this female was much too old for marriage, and very plain. Beautiful women, after all, had large, liquid eyes, soft faces, and plump bodies. This one had none of those good features, nor was she attractively shy and placid. Already cursed with a high-boned face, square shoulders, and tumbling hair, and much too old to attract a man, she also indulged in unseemly behavior. This afternoon, for example, she had rushed headlong to where she was not needed, and then had fallen backward, her skirts flying, revealing an indecent expanse of white leg to anyone who might be looking. If he, Ghulam Ali, had not already been running, knife in hand, toward the terrified horse, he would have turned back and run in the opposite direction.

“She has a good heart,” Dittoo added firmly. “It was her heart that led her to rescue Saboor Baba two years ago, and to interfere just now with the saving of the horse.”

Ghulam Ali yawned. These people were incomprehensible. First, no lady of Shaikh Waliullah's household would think of having a male servant, and yet here was Dittoo, clearly the established personal servant of Hassan Ali Khan's English wife. Did Shaikh Waliullah and his son know that this man brought coffee to her room each morning, that he counted her sheets and towels for washing, that he served her meals, that he defended her with a loyalty reserved for a master, not a mistress?

Ghulam Ali himself did not care. Dittoo might be seedy-looking and a Hindu, who would never eat with a Muslim like himself, but at least he treated Ghulam Ali like a normal person. It felt good to have companionship with someone who bore him no ill will, who could be trusted, even if it was only for this journey. After he returned to Qamar Haveli, Ghulam Ali would once again be alone, with only his gruff manner to prop up his pride.

“Ajit, oh, Ajit!” The call came from downriver. The men around the fires stared into the half-darkness as the voice came nearer, following an invisible path along the riverbank, accompanied by the clopping of a horse's hooves.

Fifty servants scrambled to their feet. A moment later, Ali Baba's tired groom appeared from the darkness, leading a beautiful, chastened Arab horse.

“At first I was certain I would drown,” Sonu offered as he tied Ali Baba to a large stone, “but in the end, the water pushed us both toward the bank. We have walked for hours. Is any food left?”

“So the Burri Memsahib will have her horse back,” said someone a little later, as the weary Sonu stuffed cold bread into his mouth.

“She will,” someone else agreed, “but it will do nothing to improve her temper.”

THAT EVENING, after the servants and the horse had been poled back to the baggage flat by two laborers from the steamer, Ghulam Ali lay awake, rolled in his blanket beside a pile of bagged salt. For all Dittoo's praise of his memsahib, and for all his revelations about her unusual abilities, Ghulam Ali still had reservations about the woman.

She was foreign, and therefore suspect. Her evening dresses bared the skin of her shoulders and chest so scandalously that Ghulam Ali made it a point never to look at her or any female member of the British party after sunset.

She seemed to have no sense of propriety. He had seen no shame on her face after she had fallen onto the deck of the baggage flat. She seemed not to care how she looked, appearing on the deck of the passenger flat with her hair loose and her boots untied.

But she had courage. He had seen it in her face the first time they had met. Her actions of the afternoon had shocked but not surprised him. Furthermore, she never ignored the natives. In fact, she looked at them all, including him, with a curious intensity, as if they had something she wanted. She spoke properly to them, unlike most of the other foreigners, who could scarcely make themselves understood.

Whatever, he wondered, would become of this odd female and her hunched-over manservant when they arrived with Saboor Baba at Qamar Haveli?

October 14, 1840

A
khtar Jahan squatted in the kitchen courtyard of Qamar Haveli, a brass bucket filled with the ladies’ washing at her side. Four months of rose water and proper food had improved her condition, but she was still very thin. Her white Turkish trousers, a gift from Safiya Sultana, still bunched thickly on their waist cord and a plain shirt drooped from her narrow shoulders, but Akhtar worked hard, wringing out each delicately embroidered garment energetically before adding it to the growing pile on the sheet she had spread in the sun. Safiya Sultana had offered her a home at Qamar Haveli and her daily food in exchange for simple work, and Akhtar was deeply grateful. Only one need marred her happiness—her longing to discover the identity of the woman who cast spells.

She had begun her search immediately after her precipitous arrival at the haveli. Lying on her makeshift bed in the dark hallway, bruised, aching, and nauseated from jaundice, she had tried to divine the truth by listening to the conversations coming from the inside room where the ladies sat, but with no success. The women had spoken of many things: of poetry, of the Qur'an, of various embroidery stitches, of the best ways to cook the buds of the
kachnar
tree, but they had never once mentioned magic.

The spell-caster could be one of the family ladies or she could be among the women who served them. Since those who practiced magic belonged to no single class or religion, she could be anyone, from the Shaikh's sister herself to the ghostly sweeperess who crawled from room to room each morning followed by her stringy-haired daughter, cleaning the floors with her brooms and rags.

Three days after her arrival, too desperate to wait longer, Akhtar had risen unsteadily to her feet and approached a gnarled servant called Firoz Bibi.

“Is there a woman in this house who practices enchantment?” she had asked the old woman, glancing over her shoulder, afraid to be overheard.

Firoz's eyes had widened. “No,” she had declared firmly as she poured out drinking water for the ladies. “There is no jadoo practitioner in this house. If anyone were found practicing magic here, they would be sent away at once.”

“But I heard a man talking about it,” Akhtar insisted. “He said there is a lady at Qamar Haveli who knows how to cast spells.”

“People in the bazaars and on the streets know nothing.” The old woman shook her head as she arranged the tumblers on a tray. “This world is full of ignorance, child. The lady Safiya Sultana is well-known for her wisdom and her healing arts, but she is not known for magic.”

Healing arts
—that phrase could mean many things. From that moment, Akhtar watched the Shaikh's sister closely during the days, sidling along the wall to stand close to the lady's customary seat in the underground room. At night, anxious to miss no word of the ladies’ conversation, she remained as long as she dared on the sheltered rooftop where the family slept.

Observing Safiya Sultana, Akhtar had found her no idle person who spent her days taking opium, having her legs kneaded, and sleeping her life away as great ladies were reputed to do. At the first hint of dawn, as the first chanted note of the muezzin's call to prayer echoed through the darkness, Akhtar would jump from her string bed on the servants’ part of the roof and run to the family quarters to find that Safiya had already performed her own ritual ablutions and was now supervising those of the children. Once satisfied with everyone's cleanliness, Safiya stationed herself in front of her household women to lead them in the predawn prayer. Akhtar stood behind the rows of children and ladies, following the movements of Safiya's stout body as she stood, bent, then bowed her forehead to her prayer mat, her posture denoting surrender before God. Only after each Muslim household lady, servant, and child had completed that simple observance did Safiya retire to her own room to perform her own spiritual exercises, whatever they might be.

Akhtar would have given much to know whether those exercises involved magic.

Every grain of rice, every inch of ginger, pod of cardamom, clove of garlic, every nut, sweetmeat, and piece of fruit served at Qamar Haveli was measured out daily by Safiya Sultana. Each morning, watched carefully by two of the family's unmarried girls, Safiya ordered sufficient food for everyone in the house, and for twelve extra people, in the event guests arrived. If the food was not eaten, Safiya herself determined to which needy family the remainder would be sent.

She also oversaw the education of the family girls, not only in the household arts, but also in the Qur'an and its meanings, and in the works of the Persian and Urdu poets.

In that busy household, there were clothes to be made and embroidered, carpets to be beaten, and weddings to be planned, for the Shaikh's family was large, and many of its members counted upon Safiya Sultana to know the best prices for shawls, silks, and jewels.

There were also the sick and the injured to be treated. Only the day before, as the ladies were finishing their afternoon meal, a breathless male voice outside the curtained doorway had announced that the man who tended the new female buffalo had cut his arm open on a piece of jagged metal.

Safiya Sultana had swallowed her last chunk of melon and risen, puffing, to her feet. “Akhtar,” she had ordered, “bring one of our torn
dupattas
and come with me. Firoz, you know where I keep the dried
neem
leaves. Take two handfuls to the kitchen for boiling. And Rahima,” she told one of the younger women, “bring my chador.”

Moments later Safiya Sultana tramped down the stairs, a plain sheet of white cotton covering her clothes and shielding her face.

Akhtar had not had time to cover herself with her own dirty chador, forgotten on a shelf in a faraway part of the house. Instead, she wrapped her thick cotton veil over her head and face as best she could, afraid of revealing too much of herself to the stable hands.

“Never mind all that,” Safiya ordered, reading Akhtar's thoughts as she pushed open the gate leading out of the family courtyard. “Your clothes are modest enough for the work we are going to do.”

The scene at the stables had been disconcertingly bloody. The buffalo driver gaped with shock, cradling his dripping arm while a dozen men clustered around him, bloody straw at their feet, offering advice and staring in fascination at the open wound, through which muscle and bone were visible.

“Stand back,” one of them had told the others as Safiya Sultana and her nervous acolyte approached the stable. “Begum Sahib has come.”

While the men watched from a careful distance, Akhtar had learned that Safiya Sultana treated open wounds by packing them with boiled
neem
leaves before wrapping them in cotton rags torn from old clothes. But Akhtar had learned nothing of magic. Safiya Sultana had been brusquer than ever once the wounded man had been taken away and the sweeper sent to clean the blood from the stable floor.

“You will learn far more from watching me than you will by asking endless questions,” she had rumbled. “I cannot take the time to teach you when our men keep leaving their work half-finished. Look at those doors to the elephant stables. They are half rotted away, and no one has told me.”

Across the courtyard from where Akhtar worked, the
dhobi
and his wife appeared, their arms full of sheets and floor cloths for washing. Akhtar stood up, her bundle of wet clothes in her arms, remembering how important she had felt, steadying the cooking pot while Safiya poured tepid
neem
water into the injured man's wound as he hissed with pain, then holding his arm out straight so that Safiya could tie on the strips of bandage. She raised her chin, recalling Safiya's gruff compliment.

You have a nice, gentle touch,
she had told Akhtar.

As Akhtar spread the clothes out to dry on the upstairs verandah, a fragile-looking woman appeared at the head of the kitchen stairs and stood uncertainly, one hand on the wall, as if waiting to be addressed.

“Salaam aleikum,
peace be upon you,” Akhtar offered.

“And upon you,” the woman murmured. She lowered her head so that her veil obscured her face. “Is the lady Safiya Sultana available?”

Putting down her wet clothes, Akhtar straightened. This woman's manner suggested a need, but was it for something as ordinary as money or clothing? If Akhtar had not been so ill when she came looking for magic to save her, she would have behaved exactly as this woman did. Here, perhaps, was someone else who required magic. Her heart pounding, she ran for the ladies’ sitting room.

“Send her in.” Safiya Sultana beckoned from her place on the floor.

While the assembled ladies whispered, the frail woman sat down cross-legged in front of the Shaikh's sister, her head bowed. “I have been married for two years,” she murmured, her chin on her chest, “but still I am not with child.”

“And your husband has brought you here?”

When the woman nodded, Safiya Sultana reached out to lay a hand on the woman's knee, then closed her eyes.

Was she reciting a spell? Akhtar crept along the wall, trying to see if Safiya's lips were moving.

After several minutes of silence, Safiya sighed and opened her eyes. “Come back in three days,” she ordered. “I will give you something to keep under your pillow at night.”

The woman, who had not moved, now reached out quickly, seizing Safiya's fingers and holding them to her lips.

“Do not offer me gratitude,” Safiya rumbled, reclaiming her hand. “Inshallah, God Himself will help you.”

That night, instead of leading the
isha
prayers herself, Safiya deputed that duty to a gap-toothed old lady, then retired to her room and closed the door.

Later Akhtar Jahan lay sleepless on her new string bed in the women's servants’ quarters, wondering what Safiya Sultana had done behind that door. What would the barren woman receive when she returned? Whatever it was, would it work?

The next morning, engrossed in those questions, she nearly missed Safiya Sultana's words as she spoke instructively to the assembled girls and ladies of the family.

“That is because every beggar has a secret,” Safiya was saying as she sat on the white-sheeted floor, one elbow resting on a thick bolster. “Each beggar, no matter how ill or ragged he may be, always gives something beautiful in return for the charity he receives.”

Beggar.
As Akhtar remembered her dream of the two ragged men with their pile of gold, Safiya Sultana frowned and motioned for her to seat herself.

Among the women, several little boys sat watching Safiya's face and her eloquently moving hands, their mouths open in concentration. “But,” one of them asked, his small face puckering, “what does a
beggar
have to give?”

“Perhaps he offers thanks, or a blessing,” offered a young woman.

“Exactly.” Safiya nodded. “And some beggars do not thank or bless, but even those have their gift to offer.”

“What gift is that, Bhaji?” piped a little girl.

Safiya Sultana smiled, her eyes crinkling. “Aliya my darling, you must think for yourself what that is. Once you have decided, you must come and tell me.”

Beggars who do not thank or bless.
The words cut Akhtar to the heart. Hadn't she herself been a beggar when she tumbled down the stairs ill and friendless, possessing only her torn clothes and her mother-in-law's stolen chador? Although her husband had been a farrier, not a whining beggar of the streets, she, who had run away, could not claim his honor as her own. Until this moment, she had not thought even to bless those who had lifted her up and fed her and kept her safe.

What gift had she, the beggar, to give? Unlike the men in Safiya's poem, she, empty-handed, had brought no treasure to the king's door.