Companions of Paradise (30 page)

“He does?” The boy's voice brightened. “Do you think He will—”

He fell silent. A short, heavyset woman had entered, followed by a maidservant carrying two steaming cups of green tea on a tray. “Peace,” she offered.

Before Mariana had time to digest the irony of that greeting, the woman said something else, and tipped her chin toward the door.

“Her name is Zahida. She is telling us to have tea in another room,” translated Nur Rahman.

The second room was as cold as the first one, but it had thick carpets and bolsters on the floor. It smelled of burning charcoal. As Mariana sipped cardamom-flavored tea, the woman held out paper, a pen, and a bottle of ink.

“They are sending their men to escort your family here,” Nur Rahman explained. “She wants you to write and tell them to be ready tomorrow morning.”

The woman, who wore a silver nose ring, was old enough to be Mariana's mother. Mariana examined her through the peephole in her chaderi, wondering if she were friend or foe.

She spoke again.

“She wants us to take off our chaderis.” Nur Rahman's eyes were wide behind his peephole.

“Tell her we will do it in a moment,” Mariana replied.

Dear Uncle Adrian
, she wrote,
a local chief has granted panah to our household. You, Aunt Claire, and all the servants are to come immediately to his fort escorted by a body of his own horsemen who are waiting outside the cantonment gate. Please act upon this offer at once.

He would understand the word
panah
, and its significance.

I have asked our host to send us on to India
, she added.
Please extend this offer to Lady Macnaghten, Lady Sale and her daughter, and anyone with small children.

It is our one chance of escape from Kabul. Do not be afraid. The chief will not break the Pashtun Code.

Hoping she was telling the truth, she paused to glance at the boy beside her.

I am sending this letter with Nur Rahman
, she added,
so you will know it is genuine.

She signed the paper with a flourish. “My servant here,” she said, as she handed it to the waiting woman, “will carry this letter to my family.

“May I ask,” she added over Nur Rahman's squeak of relief, “to whom this fort belongs?”

The woman named Zahida stared in surprise. “You do not know?”

Something in her voice made Mariana's jaw tighten.

“You are under the protection,” Zahida announced, “of Aminullah Khan.”

Palsied old creature trying to get up. Deaf as a post.
Mariana shrank against her bolster, remembering the slight tremor in his left hand. No one, not even Macnaghten, had known what the man looked like.

She had put her family at his mercy.

It was too late to escape, too late even to snatch her letter away from the woman who now signaled for Nur Rahman to follow her out.

“Do not worry, Khanum,” he whispered before he left for the blessed, questionable safety of the cantonment. “Your family will be safe here.”

A moment later, numb with fright, Mariana was alone.

Z
ahida returned moments after Nur Rahman's departure. Planted in front of Mariana, she pointed across the small courtyard and repeated the same unintelligible phrase until Mariana understood to her great relief that she was being given an opportunity to visit the family latrine.

After crunching her way back across the courtyard snow, Mariana watched from her bolster as Zahida came and went from the room with the string bed, bringing a lamp, a small carpet, and a jug of water.

The third time she came, a pillow stuffed with cotton wool under one arm, she was followed by three excited girls who rushed into the sitting room, then stood still, staring at Mariana's tangle of unwashed brown curls and her pale, uncovered face, their noses wrinkling with distaste.

Zahida spoke sharply. The girls hurried away.

It took Mariana a moment to understand what was wrong. It was herself. She had gone many weeks without a bath.

Ignoring her reddening face, Zahida made a gesture indicating she would return, then disappeared up a flight of stairs to an upper floor of the building, whose rooms, like Mariana's, overlooked the courtyard.

When she came back, it was already dark. She carried a towel and clean clothes—a folded shalwar kameez, a long shirt and baggy trousers of the same coarse homespun as her own loose clothing, a long, broad veil of thin cotton to put over the head, and a brown woolen shawl. Motioning for Mariana to follow, she led her to a tiny windowless room where someone had left two brass pails of water, one steaming hot, the other cold. A teapot-shaped vessel stood between them. An oil lamp in the corner of the room sent a frail, shadowy light over the scene.

Zahida gestured eloquently, closed the door, and left a shivering Mariana to take her bath.

Later, when Mariana opened the door, well scrubbed and newly dressed, a girl led her to an upstairs room whose arched windows had been blocked with split bamboo blinds.

A pile of discarded shoes lay outside the door. Female voices came from inside. The smell of cooking meat from somewhere in the building brought water to Mariana's mouth.

“This is where we keep the
sandali.”
The girl waited for Mariana to step nervously out of her shoes, then held aside the door curtain.

The middle-sized room was warm and thickly carpeted, its air close from the presence of a score of women and children who sat on mattresses around a large, square table, all of them craning to look at her. A great padded quilt, large enough to cover the table and all their legs, dominated the room.

Zahida came over and led Mariana toward an ancient lady with Aminullah Khan's fierce gray eyes.

As she had seen people do, Mariana laid a hand over her heart and wished the lady peace.

Obeying the old lady's commanding gesture, she sat down, her legs under the quilt, and was immediately greeted by delicious, comforting warmth. A brazier, or several of them, had been pushed beneath the table, their coals well burned and covered with ashes.

Sighing with pleasure, she forgot for a moment that she was among her enemies. She let a small boy pour water over her hands. She sipped green tea.

The old woman offered her a harsh smile.

As a small bowl of roasted almonds arrived in front of her, a bespectacled woman of indeterminate age approached, and signaled for the pregnant girl beside Mariana to move aside.

“I speak Dari,” she said, as she sat down and leaned against the heavy bolster behind her. “I will translate for the others.”

Mariana smiled. Happily, there would be nothing to translate but her thanks.

She was wrong.

“What is your story, Mairmuna?” the woman asked, pushing her spectacles up her nose. Her smile revealed perfect teeth. “Why have you asked us for asylum?”

Mariana swallowed, aware that all conversation in the room had ceased.

What should she tell these enemy women, whose menfolk had slaughtered Burnes and Macnaghten, and killed or wounded so many others? Had she not said more than enough to Aminullah Khan when she asked for panah? Did they expect her to admit to the desperate conditions in the cantonment? Were they looking for another apology?

Perspiration collected along her hairline. A nearby girl with fair skin gazed at her with enormous eyes.

If she said something wrong, if she mistakenly insulted them, would they kill her, or send her back to the cantonment?

“I am,” she fumbled, buying time, “the only Englishwoman in Kabul who wears a chaderi. I have been into the city. There is no country,” she added, remembering the Envoy's picnics in Babur Shah's garden, “as majestic in its beauty as Afghanistan. I have never known poetry more lovely than that of Rumi, of Sa'adi—”

The translator frowned. The women murmured.

Oh no! They were Pashtun! They would despise the classical Persian poets, would think them unmanly compared to their own bards, whose proud verses were as ferocious as they were

“Of course,” Mariana added lamely, “I have yet to read the works of the great Ahmad Shah Durrani.”

“Yes,” pursued her translator, “but why have you asked for asylum? What is your story?”

So this was the price of asylum: the truth. The place of honor at the table, the tea, the almonds, were only the beginning.

The old woman was watching her.

“I pray,” Mariana replied, her stomach churning, “that I have committed no crime terrible enough to require protection from enemies, but I admit that my people have made mistakes that have angered Akbar Khan and caused bitterness among the tribes. It is from the consequences of those mistakes that I seek your protection.”

The ancient lady spoke sharply.

Zahida's nose ring bobbed as she nodded seriously. “You wish to avoid the just punishment that your people's actions have provoked.”

Just punishment?
Mariana recoiled at the calm brutality of those words, but as she looked about the table she saw no trace of triumphant vengeance, only curiosity.

Could it be that these Ghilzai women only wanted information? Did they only seek the details of a story that would be told to their descendants for the next hundred years: of the British people who had tried to invade Afghanistan and betrayed their own honor, and of the Englishwoman who had come to their fort seeking protection from the just wrath of their tribe?

Could it be that they wanted no less than the full story of their victory?

Be honest or they will not help you.

Mariana began to speak. For the next five minutes, as the women leaned forward to catch every word, she described the British plan to protect their holdings in India by putting a king of their choice upon the throne of Afghanistan. She recognized the burden that the huge British force had imposed upon the region's food supply. Her eyes lowered, she acknowledged that taxing the tribal chiefs to pay Shah Shuja's expenses had insulted them, for they regarded themselves as the equals of their king.

When she was finished, the ladies nodded, but kept on looking at her, their faces expectant.

“All that is true,” agreed the translator, “but what of the British fort? If you have come to us to escape the conditions there, you should tell us what they are.”

Mariana's thoughts raced. Any information about the desperate state of the cantonment, the lack of water, the terrible food rationing, or the illnesses that raged among the men, would aid her enemies.

Every word she said would go straight to Aminullah Khan's ears.

She spoke instead of her own family: of her aunt's constant coughing and fevers, of her uncle's exhaustion, even of her munshi's illness. While insisting that they had plenty of food, she admitted her fear that her uncle and aunt, the only relatives she had in India, might not survive the winter.

She shrugged and shook her head when they asked her of Macnaghten's decision to halve the cash payment promised to the Eastern Ghilzais. She offered no hint of the collapse of the British command. She did not mention Alexander Burnes's shocking behavior with Afghan women.

She told them very little about herself. She did not even mention Hassan Ali Khan.

At length, a cloth was spread over the quilt on the table, and a file of maidservants entered, carrying dishes of rice with chicken buried inside and covered with raisins and slivered carrots, lamb cooked with dried Bukhara plums, stewed beans, grilled pumpkin, strained yoghurt, and great, heaping piles of bread.

There were no forks, knives, or spoons. Remembering Safiya Sultana's patient lessons, Mariana ate, messily, with the first two fingers and thumb of her right hand.

By the time she had finished eating, her eyelids had begun to droop. Before the young boy had finished his second round with the ewer and basin, she turned to the translator.

“Forgive me,” she murmured, “for I must sleep.”

Zahida nodded. “Sleep,” she said. “We have arranged for your journey to India. You will be leaving the day after tomorrow.”

Still dressed in her homespun clothes, Mariana wrapped herself tightly in her padded quilts, and laid her head on the cotton-stuffed pillow.

Tomorrow, God willing, Uncle Adrian would come with Aunt Claire, the servants, and perhaps some others from the cantonment. The next day they would be on their way to India.

It was nearly over.

If their caravan took the southern route, they would arrive in the Dera Jat, near the Indus River, a long way southeast of Lahore, but at least they would be out of this terrifying place. After that, she would somehow find a way to return to Lahore, and Qamar Haveli.

There she would learn if she was still Hassan's wife, as Munshi Sahib had seemed to imply.

The lamp flickered, sending shadows across the ceiling. She stared at them, wondering if he would tell Hassan that she had accepted Fitzgerald.

She squirmed inside her quilts at the thought.

Had Hassan read her first, romantic letter, sent so long ago, its words taken from Rumi's “Masnavi” and bent to her own purpose?

Had he ever received her second letter? Possibly not, for Ghulam Ali might easily have perished months ago in the passes, murdered by cousins of Aminullah Khan himself, her undelivered message still hidden in his clothes.

What a reckless fool she had been

She sat up and blew out the lamp.

The women were still awake. Female voices drifted down the stairs, laughing, arguing, talking at once, most likely about her.

These people were her enemies, the enemies of the poor, beleaguered British, and they were happy.

Unable to think any longer, she rolled over on the creaking bed and fell asleep.