The Twentieth Wife (53 page)

At high noon on this day of June 1817, two young men tarried in the central platform of the pool in the middle terrace.

They were both bareheaded, their chests bare also. Each wore only a
kispet
—long, tight shorts of buffalo hide leather, which covered them from their waists down, the ends rucked up over their knees to facilitate ease of movement. The upper halves of their bodies, and their legs and feet, glistened with sesame oil, pungent and aromatic in the sear of the sun. Earlier in the morning—according to the rules of the game—they had smoothed the oil on each other. It was the first and last gesture of amity and goodwill.

For their referee, they had corralled an old gardener lounging in the deep shade of the nearby tamarind tree, a hand-rolled
beedi
wrapped in his fist, smoke coiling out from between his fingers.

“Him?” Ibrahim Khan had asked, thick eyebrows elevated in disbelief.

His sovereign had shrugged, lifting massive, muscled shoulders. “As good as anyone else, Ibrahim. We know the rules ourselves. The only other man around is Zaman, and he’s useless, as you know. Should I have to call upon one of the flowers in my
zenana
instead?”

Ibrahim grinned. “With respect, your Majesty, the women of your harem will only support you. And they’re likely to squeal or curse in horror when I defeat you. Calling on them is not conducive to an even playing field.”

A small smile flitted across Shah Shuja’s face. And when it did, it lightened his features, brought a sparkle to his gray eyes, erased the embedded lines of worry on his forehead. Made him, so Ibrahim thought, more like the deeply powerful man he had known all of his life.

A tiny spear of ache stabbed Ibrahim’s heart. They were far removed from what they had once been. Shuja had been born of a king—Shah Timur Durrani—whose father had established the Afghan Empire in the name of the Durrani dynasty. Timur had had many sons, of many wives, as was the established custom of the time. There was no law of
primogeniture—the eldest son did not automatically inherit the throne. Nor was he gifted with quiescent brothers willing to live out their lives as governors of districts or provinces. At Timur’s death, the throne had changed hands four times, one son or the other claiming it for his own for a brief while, driven from it when another had amassed enough of a threatening army. And so Shuja had lost his kingdom to his half brother Shah Mahmud.

Shah Shuja put a hand on Ibrahim’s shoulder. “First, you will not defeat me. How is that even possible?” When the younger man opened his mouth to protest, he stilled the words with a wave. “It’s true. I might be a little older, Ibrahim, and that only means I’ve been wrestling longer than you have. And second, my wives dote upon you. Although”—and he grinned again, a wicked gleam in his eye—“you
will
not win, they will minister to your injuries with enough of a fuss to make you happy.”

Ibrahim bowed his head. “We’ll see, your Majesty.”

Every now and then, Shuja and Ibrahim indulged themselves in the games and play of their childhood. There was so little else for them to do at Lahore in the Shalimar Gardens, a place where they had spent the last three years as “guests” of the wily Maharajah Ranjit Singh. This wrestling match was one such, conjured up late the night before, when the last cup of wine had been drunk, when the moon had skated downward into the dark sky, when the
nautch
girls had slunk away, and they had both been lying on their divans, twitchy with pent-up energy. What to do on the morrow? How to spend their time? Each day was like the others, the same views, the same fountains, the same watch upon the sun and the moon—to mark interminable time—gliding over that limited arc of sky above the gardens.

The gardener had still been there last night, ensconced in a hollow in the trunk of the tamarind when they had both sprung up, vigorous, shouting for him to come to them.

He was a small, old man, his face carved in deep wrinkles that spanned out around his inscrutable eyes and curved in two semicircles from his nose to his mouth. His skin was a deep, clayey brown. His lower lip was crushed inward—he had no bottom teeth—and when he spoke, it was with slow, measured words that echoed out of the cavern of that mouth. Shuja had tried Persian first. “Do you know the rules of wrestling, my friend?”

He had stared at them, his chin swaying loosely in the lower half of his face. So Ibrahim had spoken to him in Urdu. Again, nothing. “Try Pashto,” Shuja had said in an under-tone in that language. No luck there either. Why would he know an Afghani tongue, similar as it was to Persian, which he was more likely to understand? “Where
does
he come from?” Shah Shuja had said, exasperated. Ibrahim Khan had tried Hindustani last, having exhausted the little bit of Arabic he knew. And then, the old man’s mobile mouth had deepened into his face. “
Ji,
Sahib,” he’d said. And so, pulling words out of their hybrid vocabulary, they had explained that they needed him at the Shalimar Gardens at noon, to referee their wrestling match. They had taught him how to start the match, how to stop it at an illegal hold, how to impose a penalty, how to restart it.

And now they stood at either end of the marble platform in the center of the pool in the middle terrace of the gardens, arms hanging loosely by their thighs. Aware, out of the corners of their eyes, of the old man under the tamarind.

Shuja saw his hand move, and shifted quickly upon his toes. The old man put his fingers into his mouth and let out a tart, prolonged whistle. Shuja veered in surprise—this was not how he was supposed to start the match. In that brief moment of distraction, he heard Ibrahim’s feet smack on the heated marble floor before he flung himself on his king. Shuja fell backward, rocked off his balance. He felt his feet slipping, strained against Ibrahim, until they were locked in an embrace.

Their breaths escaped in harsh puffs. Ibrahim was smaller than Shah Shuja, shorter by a head’s length, and he used that advantage to tuck his forehead under Shuja’s arm and crush his ribs. They spun around the marble platform, holding desperately on to each other.

All of a sudden, Ibrahim’s clutch slackened, and his arm snaked from Shuja’s back to around his right thigh. He heaved. Shuja came crashing down upon his back. As Ibrahim straightened to straddle him, Shuja kicked out with his leg. Ibrahim flew into the air, briefly, before smashing to the floor himself.

When Shuja sprang upon him, Ibrahim rolled away and bounded up. They were already sweating when they started the match, but now moisture poured down from the thick hair on their heads and their beards. Shuja grappled with the slick skin on Ibrahim’s legs—he had shaved his chest and legs that morning, so that Shuja would have no hair to hold on to—and finally wedged his fingers into the waistband of Ibrahim’s
kispet
. Yanked him down.

Ibrahim yelled, “That’s an illegal hold, referee!”

The old man, massaging his face in bemusement, whistled again. In the thick silence of the courtyard, the sound boomed. A flock of parrots in the tamarind rose in a protesting flurry of green feathers and red beaks and disappeared into the pale sky.

Shuja and Ibrahim hurled out of the hold and went to opposite ends of the platform. Their chests heaved; their stomachs caved inward and out as they drew breath into their tired lungs, outlining their ribs and their hip bones. Agony flared in Shuja’s lower back. There was a shock of burning along his right forearm, which he had put out to take the brunt of the fall. Ibrahim stood at his corner, wiping the sweat from his eyes, smiling.

Smiling?
Maybe there was some truth to the fact that he was younger and so stronger, Shuja thought. Although neither
was really that old; Shah Shuja was thirty-two, Ibrahim twenty-nine.

They had not talked since the first whistle; no gibes, no trash, no filling the opponent’s ear—and so his brain—with debilitating words. This was one of the rules of the game. It had to be played, and fought, in complete silence, with only muscle and brawn determining the winner. But the rules said nothing about facial expressions. An intimidating glare, a supercilious grin—like the one Ibrahim wore on his face—these were unaccountable quantities. Shah Shuja’s breathing quieted, he felt his body come to rest again. He flexed the muscles in his arms. A sliver of iron lodged itself in his spine.

When the two minutes had passed, the old man, keeping count of the seconds by beating his crooked foot upon the ground and raising puffs of red mud, whistled again.

Shuja hurtled across and barreled into Ibrahim’s chest. The force of the movement carried them over the knee-high marble lattice railing of the platform and out into the shallow pool. It was only luck that allowed them both to land upon the flat of the pool’s surface and not on one of the lotus-bud-shaped fountains that speared upward.

The pool was littered with these fountains—a hundred and fifty-two in all—each spewing droplets of water that created a thousand rainbows in the sun. Here, the light was fractured, dazzle-bright. Shah Shuja shut his eyes and grappled, following only the sound of Ibrahim’s breath and his groans. At one point, Ibrahim held his king’s head under the water, only six inches deep at any place, but enough to suffocate. Shuja reached out blindly with a long arm to seize his throat, squeezed his fingers tight, until Ibrahim let go and he could heave up to gulp in some air.

Almost desultorily, the old man whistled again. He was learning, Shuja thought, as he climbed wearily back onto the platform and shuffled to his corner. The pool had a pebbled base, strewn with chunks of semiprecious stones—jasper,
agate, carnelian—which created a glitter of colors under the water, and which had left deep gouges on their backs and chests and arms, streaked now with blood.

Two minutes was all they got again until the old man whistled and they met at the center of the platform. The sun had burned off the water and some of the oil; their holds were more secure. As his body spiraled into a bottomless exhaustion, Shah Shuja’s brain snapped alive.

The hours passed. The sun slipped westward. On the pavilion of the upper terrace—the Aiwan—a lone woman came to stand under the arches and looked down upon the two men struggling on the platform, arms fastened around each other, eyes shut against the sweat that streamed down their faces.

Wafa Begam had been married to Shah Shuja for seventeen years. The first of his wives, she was the person he knew best. His mother had been in a harem, and as a boy, he was taken from it early, put into the men’s quarters. There had been no actual friendship with other members of his family. Always lurking behind his half brothers was the silhouette of their father’s crown, impossible to ignore. Shuja loved Ibrahim, but it was a friendship in the outside world.

When he was fifteen, his marriage was arranged with Wafa, also fifteen that year. And all of a sudden, he had found the comfort of home in the arms of this thin girl. Here, within the walls of his harem apartments, the young Shuja had confided in her his fears, his determination, his ambitions—and she had never laughed at them, never considered them impractical. Shuja’s brother Shah Zaman ascended the throne of Afghanistan first, and then Shah Mahmud tore it away from him, throwing Zaman into prison, blinding him in both eyes with a piece of hot wire. And so Shuja built up his own army to overthrow Mahmud, ruled for nine years himself . . . and in 1809, when he moved his court from Kabul to Peshawar,
Mahmud sneaked up and grabbed Kabul and then marched on to Peshawar.

Wafa moved her slender hands restlessly in front of her, entangling her fingers in a veil which came over her head to her waist. To stay on in Peshawar, with Mahmud’s army battering at the door, would have been death for all of them. The only option was to flee, to retreat, to find shelter elsewhere, to regroup and come back for Afghanistan. Shuja had woken her in the middle of the night and hurried her, along with the other women of his harem, to waiting horses and palanquins. “Go safely, my dear,” he had said. At that last moment, when her hand reached out to him, when she swung her head through the gap in the curtains for one more look at her husband—not knowing if she would ever see him alive again—he pressed a packet into her hand and closed her fingers over it. “This will buy my life someday. Or”—his steady gaze met hers—“if I die, it will make you rich.”

When Wafa unwrapped the satin cloth four days into their journey to the lands of the Punjab and Maharajah Ranjit Singh, she saw the armlet of heavy gold Shuja wore upon his person every day. The central diamond was mammoth, built with fire and light, flanked by two smaller diamonds. Shah Shuja had given her—the wife of his heart, the only woman he trusted—the Kohinoor diamond.

Wafa watched awhile, as one man and then the other pushed and jostled, as they fell with loud thuds upon the floor, as they broke the rules by snatching at beards or hair, as Shuja cried out when one of his fingers was caught in the railing of the platform and snapped with an audible crack. She flinched at that sound, but didn’t move as they dragged themselves apart to rest. Her nose quivered and then wrinkled at the old man and his whistling. Wafa’s veil, of a pure silk the color of newly opened pink roses at dawn scattered with dew, lay around her lean shoulders. Underneath she wore a short
choli,
a bodice that covered her breasts and was held together
on her back with two strings; her waist was bare, and she had on pink silk trousers, tight on her hips, billowing around her thighs, caught up around the ankles. This was Wafa Begam’s concession to living in India, adopting a part of the dress that kept her cool in the Lahore summers, and keeping the trousers that she wore normally in Afghanistan.

She shifted against one of the pillars of the Aiwan, resting her shoulder on it, her arms clasped around her waist. Her gaze drifted over the middle terrace to the old man at one side of the pool. He was squatting in the manner of a peasant, and a minute breeze brought the acrid tang of smoke from the smoldering
beedi
held in his hand. He turned, suddenly, to look at her. She stayed where she was. Not caring that her face was uncovered, not bothering to pull the veil over her eyes. What did it matter? The old gardener had never ascended to the upper terrace and the Aiwan, where she stood, because it was the most private part of the Shalimar Gardens, one marked out for the use of Shah Shuja’s
zenana
. Such an old man could hardly have his blood boil at the sight of a woman from another man’s harem . . . or be capable of doing anything about it. He was nothing. Just another servant from Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s court, sent here to serve them.