Companions of Paradise (14 page)

October 20, 1841

I
t had taken Ghulam Ali longer than it should have to reach the Punjab. Parched and filthy from the dust of the road, the courier had emerged from the Khyber Pass and into the hilly Peshawar valley a little more than four weeks after he had tucked the English lady's letter into his clothes and bidden her good-bye.

His heart lifted at the knowledge that he was now in his home country, but with that lifting came new anxiety. He had serious work before him.

At the beginning of his journey, aware of the dangers of solitary travel, he had fallen in with a large Tajik wedding party on its way to Jalalabad. Jovial and celebrating, the family had moved unhurriedly through the first several passes between Kabul and their destination, bringing with them forty camel-loads of bride gifts and trade goods, and scores of horses and donkeys. Small children in brightly embroidered clothes had ridden in baskets tied to the backs of donkeys. Live chickens had hung upside down, tied uncomfortably by their legs to the backs of the loaded camels.

Ghulam Ali had enjoyed the family's company, especially after they killed a sheep at Butkhak and enjoyed roast meat and music until the stars overhead began to fade. He had been grateful for the good humor of their chief, a man with a thick beard and curly mustache, for the route to Jalalabad had not improved since he had taken it to Kabul six months earlier with the English party. The six-mile-long Khurd-Kabul gorge had not lost its forbiddingly steep sides, the icy stream that rushed along its floor, or the narrow, stony pathway that crossed the little river no fewer than twenty-three times. The perpendicular basalt walls of the Jagdalak Pass had been unchanged; at its narrowest, the Jagdalak, with its right-angle turns and frighteningly narrow bottlenecks, had still been only six feet wide.

He had enjoyed himself with the Tajiks, but after taking three leisurely weeks to cover half the hundred-and-forty-mile distance to Peshawar, he had tired of their slow progress. When he met a group of Eastern Ghilzai nomads outside the city of Jalalabad, he had fallen in with them, grateful to learn that they expected to cross the Khyber Pass within ten days.

Had the Tajiks offered him the news that he learned from his new Ghilzai hosts, Ghulam Ali would never have taken time to savor their smoky kababs or enjoy the beauty of their music and the sight of the men stamping their feet as they danced in the firelight. He would instead have abandoned them, and hurried on alone, toward India.

The Ghilzais, who were driving a great, bleating flock of fat-tailed sheep down to the Punjab, had been sinewy and rough-featured, with untrimmed beards and hair that fell to their shoulders beneath carelessly tied turbans. Like all tribesmen, they had been conspicuously armed.

Ghulam Ali had joined their party as they prepared to travel across the flat desert between Jalalabad and the Khyber Pass. They were prodding their charges with long sticks while a dozen camels stood waiting, already loaded with black woolen tents and cooking vessels.

He had kept his distance at first, staying out of their way, waiting to be included. They, honoring the Pashtoon law of hospitality, had made room for him beside their cooking fire at the noon halt.

One of them, a handsome, lanky fellow, had gestured for Ghulam Ali to join him as he kneaded dough beside a cooking fire. “Where are you traveling?” he had inquired in accented Punjabi, after learning that Ghulam Ali was from Lahore.

“My cousin is getting married in Lahore,” the courier had lied, not revealing his real purpose, for everyone knew that couriers carried cash.

The man's name was Qadeer. The men in his group came from two families. They were the first of their tribe to start the annual migration to India, for it was autumn, and time for the Ghilzai nomads to travel from their summer quarters in the high, brutal mountains of Central Asia to the hot, fertile Indian plains, through passes that brought some of them to Peshawar and the Punjab beyond, and others to the great towns of the Dera Jat, in the south.

Qadeer and his fellow tribesmen had, as always, gone ahead, driving the sheep. The rest of their families, their camels, donkeys, women, and children would join them after a month. Other groups would do the same at their own pace. The last of the Ghilzai nomads would leave Kabul by early December.

“The last families go only as far as Peshawar,” Qadeer said. “They like the cold weather, but we continue on as far as Lahore. That is where I learned to speak your language. We take what we need on the way.”

He offered Ghulam Ali a satisfied smile. “I stole a lovely horse in Sargodha two years ago. It is a good life.”

Ghulam Ali kept to himself, sleeping near their fire, eating the food Qadeer pressed on him with fierce hospitality.

On the third evening, one of the other men folded himself down next to Ghulam Ali, his ragged shawl trailing in the dust. He said something in Pushto and smiled harshly into Ghulam Ali's face.

Qadeer tipped his head toward his friend. “Shah Gul here wants to know whether you are really going to a family wedding,” he said matter-of-factly, his hands moving with gentle precision as he wedged a four-legged iron plate over the fire and adjusted the kettle among the coals.

“He thinks you are a servant of the British feranghis.”

“I am not with the foreigners.” Ghulam Ali raised his chin and lied for the second time. “I came with a kafila bringing indigo and cotton cloth from India. Now I am going home.”

“That is good,” Qadeer replied. “If you had been a servant of the feranghis, I would have killed you after you left us.”

Killed?
Ghulam Ali swallowed.

“The British should not have come,” Qadeer added, as he dropped a flat round of dough onto the hot metal plate. “And now that they have cheated us, their time here is finished. The night of long knives has begun.”

Cheated? Long knives?
Ghulam Ali's mind reeled. How could this be? Why, the English lady and her family had gone picnicking in the hills only the day before he left, with their cotton umbrellas and hampers of food…

Shah Gul spoke at length, his raptor's face expressionless.

“You are fortunate to have come through when you did,” Qadeer explained. “My people killed thirty-five British soldiers at Butkhak a few days ago. We plundered a rich caravan from India at Tezeen a few days ago, and killed everyone in it.” He spat into the fire. “It was carrying goods for the British, their cursed
sharab
and other things. No one will dare to use the passes near Kabul now. When it is time, we will be ready—here in the east, to the west, to the north, and the south. As soon as we settle our flocks we are going back.” Smiling, he patted the knives whose handles protruded from his sash.

He gestured with a long arm at the plain with its other camps, flocks, and black tents. “All our warriors are gathering.”

Ghulam Ali was unable to think of a suitable reply.

Later, his stomach full of flat bread and yoghurt, pomegranates and tea, he stretched out on the ground, needing sleep, his small bundle of belongings beneath his head, his shawl spread over him for warmth, but his eyes did not close. The long-bladed Khyber knife he had carried since he was a child had seemed weapon enough when he embarked upon this journey, but it would be useless if the tribesmen attacked him together. He would be dead, or worse, dying slowly of many cuts, before he had time to draw it from its sheath.

As he listened to the stirring of the flock and the quiet voices of the men who guarded them, he reached into his clothes and touched the Englishwoman's letter with careful fingers.

The next day, one of the ewes went lame. Qadeer carried her across his shoulders as they crossed the stony Lowyah Dakkah plain.

“So,” Ghulam Ali said carefully, “a rebellion has begun against Shah Shuja and the British?”

Qadeer gave a curious, giggling laugh. “Of course it has, my friend,” he had replied as he strode along, the ewe wrapped around his neck like a great, shaggy collar. “Wazir Akbar Khan is no coward like his father, Dost Mohammad, who threw down his arms before the British and ran away to India. The Amir's eldest son is a man of courage and honor. All will happen quickly, now that the
shabna-mas
, the night letters, have gone to every part of the country and the people are ready.”

That night they reached the old fort at Haft Chah, the last stop before the Khyber Pass. There, while the camp was asleep Ghulam Ali slipped away from the Ghilzais, and ran.

In the end, he crossed the Khyber with a group of heavily guarded Hindu merchants bound for Peshawar with a cargo of dried fruit, musk, and caged Persian cats. The merchants and their long file of shaggy, jingling donkeys were part of a steady stream of men and animals following that narrow, stony track through the foothills of the Suleiman Koh range.

The Khyber Pass had been in use for countless centuries. Aryan invaders had traveled it long before history began. Barefoot Buddhist monks had crossed it two thousand years before, followed by hordes of Huns and the armies of Babur, Nadir Shah, and Ahmad Shah Durrani.

It was not a high pass, for its summit stood only three thousand five hundred feet above sea level, but it was long and dangerous. Sometimes crossing flat valleys, sometimes clinging with hairpin turns to the harsh slopes of the Suleiman Koh, or passing through narrow defiles, the pass stretched for thirty-three miles through territory occupied by Afridi tribesmen, who lived, as the Ghilzais did, by plunder.

The Afridis had no special enmity for the servants of English people, but even so, Ghulam Ali had been glad of the hard-eyed men hired by the Hindu traders, who strode beside the donkeys, long-barreled muskets slung over their shoulders, their eyes scanning the hills on either side of the road.

He strode toward the city of Peshawar with his caravan, the tail of his turban across his face to keep out the ever-present dust, past mud forts and watchtowers, past black nomad tents and flocks of sheep, goats, and cows that grazed between scrubby tamarisk trees.

As he walked, he thought about his first encounter with the Englishwoman.

He had delivered a letter to her in Calcutta, a year earlier. The letter had been from Hassan Ali Khan. Ghulam Ali had, of course, never learned what news or instructions that letter had contained, but shortly afterward the lady, her uncle, and her aunt had packed their belongings and begun the long journey across the width of India, from Bengal to the Punjab, bringing with them Hassan's small, gifted son Saboor, who seemed to be under her protection.

Ghulam Ali had accompanied them on that journey.

There had been no Englishwomen in the Punjab. Ghulam Ali had never before seen the like of Hassan's wife, with her steady, green gaze and oddly revealing clothing. Horrified that the Waliullah family had been saddled with such an unseemly female, he had avoided her as much as possible on that journey.

But she had won him over in the end, for she had somehow understood that he had suffered in his life. Tormented since childhood for his strange paleness and pink eyes, he had never known friendship. She, who did not distinguish between rich and poor, accepted man and outcast, had respected his humanity and given him hope. Together they had saved Hassan Ali Khan from certain death.

Best of all, in her talkative, hunched-over servant, Dittoo, Ghulam Ali had found a man he could trust. Later, he had added Yar Mohammad to that short list.

Ahead of him a concentrated haze stood in the distant sky. They were nearing the Gateway to India, the old high-walled city of Peshawar.

An hour later, the Hindu traders led their animals through the shouting congestion at the city's Kabul Gate, whose name needed no explanation. To their left, in the street of goldsmiths, stood Mahabat Khan's grand mosque, from whose topless minarets the Maharajah's enemies were thrown daily to their deaths. Before them ran the broad Qissa Khwani, the Street of Storytellers, home of Peshawar's tea shops and caravanserais, where all the news of the world was told.

Like all caravanserais, the one they stopped at was no more than a great open square, its perimeter lined with gaping, three-sided sheds with bare rooms above, where a traveler might find shelter. Its huge courtyard was already filled with shouting men, grunting animals, and great heaps of bales and bundles. Ghulam Ali yawned. With luck he would find an empty corner in an upstairs room. With no luck he would sleep with the donkeys.

Abandoning his merchants and their charges, he set off to drink at the courtyard well. After that he would buy something to eat and a moment to himself to consider his situation.

The Englishwoman's letter must be important, for she had sent it all the way from Kabul. But whatever news that letter contained, it was nothing compared to the critical information that he, Ghulam Ali, must now deliver. As soon as he had filled his stomach he would hurry to the market, find a scribe, and dictate his own letter, telling Hassan of the dangers threatening his wife and her family.

He would then hurry to the hilltop citadel of Ghor Khatri at the center of the city, where the Maharajah's appointed governor had built his palace, and find an official relay runner going to Lahore. He would then bribe the man to put the lady's letter and his own into the pouch, for delivery to Hassan.