A Season for Martyrs: A Novel (11 page)

Burnes departed from the court in triumph, back to his ships, and they sailed away, sails heavy with wind, the Union Jack proudly fluttering above. His parting shot to Jeandal Shah before he left: “We have entered, in the course of our voyages,
all
the mouths of the river, and we now have a map of them, and the land route of Thatta besides. I must thank you most sincerely for helping us to overcome our ignorance of Sindh. You are most definitely a friend of the British Empire.” And he bowed low to Jeandal Shah, smiling a cold smile that did not reach his eyes.

“The Honored King requires your presence tomorrow morning in his private chambers to discuss important matters of state. Leave your cortege behind and present yourself at the Hyderabad Palace at seven.”

When Jeandal Shah received this message, a month after the Burnes incident, he was puzzled. Everyone knew that the Mir had lost face in the episode, and Jeandal Shah himself feared that he had lost favor with the Mir, but perhaps the king had had time to reconsider and decided to take Jeandal Shah back into his fold. He said a prayer of thanksgiving to Almighty Allah, then went to his bed, leaving instructions to his servants to wake him just before the
fajr
prayers.

Jeandal Shah arrived before dawn at the palace in Hyderabad, where he was met by a servant who guided him to a darkened chamber and bid him wait. “But you are not to wear your sword in front of the Mir this early in the morning,” the servant instructed him. “He is slightly unwell and the sight of your sword would disturb his harmony.”

Jeandal Shah did not want to give up his sword, a beautiful steel blade inscribed with the names of his father and grandfathers; he was one of the few men allowed to wear his sword in the Mir’s presence. But he was a man of honor, who had sworn obedience to the Mir when he’d joined his
darbar
. He relinquished his sword to the man, who promised to polish it and bring it back to him in even better condition than he had left it.

Jeandal Shah stepped into the chamber and realized that he was not alone. In the darkness, two eyes shone out at him, glowing like amber stones. And from outside he heard the voice of the servant man, who put his mouth to the keyhole of the door and said, “O Sayed Jeandal Shah, this is your reward, for daring to touch a Talpur woman! Now defend your honor or die trying!”

Jeandal Shah’s heart nearly stopped. He knew exactly which woman they were referring to. It was no good pointing out that he had never laid eyes on her; he knew that the accusation was merely a pretext to get rid of him.

As the sun seeped into the chamber, Jeandal Shah could begin to make out the form of the creature locked in with him: the Mir’s pet cheetah. The cat had been circling around in the dark, but now that it was growing light it could see him, too, and it began to lick its lips in anticipation of its next meal.
So this is what honor gets you,
thought Jeandal Shah to himself.

The cheetah hissed at Jeandal Shah, who flattened himself against the wall, cursing at the cheetah to stay back. The animal padded around the room and stared at Jeandal Shah with malevolent eyes, its fangs bared, its powerful muscles tensed underneath the silky yellow coat. It was the favorite plaything of the Mir, who kept it chained to his throne and threw it scraps of meat from his lavish meals. His courtiers liked to whisper that it was the reincarnated spirit of a great warrior, perhaps even one of the defeated Kalhora kings. It never went without meat for more than a few hours, but they’d starved it for two days before putting it in this bare room in the palace and then ushering Jeandal Shah in to face its wrath.

Jeandal Shah edged carefully away from it into a corner of the room, and looked wildly around for something to defend himself with: a chair, a picture frame,
anything
. But the room was completely bare.

The cheetah kept pacing back and forth, back and forth, its powerful shoulders rising and falling with each step. It lowered its head and sniffed the floor, catching the scent of its prey, then stopped and slowly turned to face Jeandal Shah. It lay down on its haunches, head raised, eyes fixed on the man, as if taking the measure of him before deciding when to pounce.

Jeandal Shah avoided looking into its eyes, knowing that a direct stare would be seen by the animal as a challenge. Nor would he call out for help to his enemies, who were standing just outside the door, waiting to enjoy themselves on his pleas for mercy. But he began to pray under his breath: “Allah Saeen, please help me, o Allah, save me from this disaster. Indeed, my lord! I am overcome, so help me …”

Then he looked down at his feet, and saw the means to his salvation: his enemies had left one thing behind in that room. A plain rug, a roughly woven
durree
approximately six feet long and four feet wide. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.

Jeandal Shah murmured one last prayer, then began to recite
Ya Fattah, Ya Fattah, Ya Fattah,
over and over again, growing in strength and volume until the whole room seemed to be filled with the holy name. In one fluid motion he scooped up the rug, then made a running lunge for the cheetah across the room, leaping high as he neared the great cat, who’d risen to its feet and was preparing to spring. But Jeandal Shah’s height gave him the advantage: as he jumped, he unfurled the rug and brought it down onto the cheetah, trapping the animal in its folds. He landed on top of the cat, which struggled wildly to free itself from the rug, and used his enormous girth to pin the animal to the floor. The cat screamed and shrieked, but Jeandal Shah never stopped shouting “Ya Fattah! Ya Fattah!” as he held the cheetah down. And he caught the cheetah’s neck in his bare hands and squeezed until the last breath left the cheetah’s body with a mighty groan.

He was breathing heavily, great ragged gasps, sweating and trembling with the effort of having saved his own life. Only after a full ten minutes had passed did he dare move off the cheetah’s body, which was still warm. But it was perfectly still: he pulled the rug away and saw its amber eyes staring back at him, glassy and unblinking. Then he sank to his knees and wept.

The men who were waiting outside began to tremble when they heard the great tumult coming from inside the locked chamber; they couldn’t tell whether the piercing shrieks and screams were coming from the beast or the man. In the silence that followed, one of the courtiers reached for the lock and undid it, his hand shaking so badly that it took him several minutes to free the bolt. The door swung open, but they all shrank back, too terrified to witness the mayhem that lay behind it.

Suddenly, the cheetah’s body fell out of the door and landed on the stone ground with a thud. And then Jeandal Shah stepped over the body and emerged into the light. His face and arms were scratched, his clothes were torn, and blood trickled from a wound on his head. But he was standing upright, in full possession of all his limbs. He looked at the courtiers and servants, all of whom were staring at him in terror, and spat at their feet.

“Here,” he rasped, still breathing hard. “Here’s the lover of your master’s wife.” And he prodded the cheetah’s body with his foot. “Now bring me what belongs to me.” The courtiers scurried off and ran in different directions, fearful of his revenge. But Jeandal Shah was not interested in revenge, only retreat. He took his sword back, and then he left the Mir’s palace, never to return again.

He gladly gave up the riches and the power that came with a seat at the
darbar
of the Mir, and spent the rest of his life in his village of Matiari, overseeing his farmland and his fruit orchards, ensuring that his
haris
were well taken care of for the rest of his days. Perhaps he married and raised a family; perhaps he died a childless bachelor not long after defeating the cheetah. Either way, it was a far more peaceful pursuit in which to spend his life than dancing attendance in a palace where honor was a commodity to be bought and sold like a bushel of grain.

November 12, 2007

KARACHI

Ali was beginning to feel that the process for obtaining his US visa was going to be as painful, if not worse, than the root canal treatment he’d endured three years ago. It took five trips to the dentist and seven shots of Novocain, and he’d bled so much that he’d considered asking the dentist for a blood transfusion. “This just isn’t normal,” said the dentist, shaking his head, which shattered whatever little bit of confidence Ali had left in the man.

Having to come clean to his family about his plans to study in America was only the first part of the procedure. Looking back on that evening, after he’d turned off the television and had to face the accusing stares of his mother and brother, he could see now that it was not just the first, but the easiest part.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” said his mother, for once her eyes dry as stones. Usually she wept easily, tears trickling down her face no matter where she was, in the middle of preparing dinner or going in a car on the way to a shopping plaza. She just wiped them away with whatever was handiest—the end of a
dupatta,
a tissue, the back of her hand—her tears as natural as digestion or breathing. To see her without the usual rain clouds surrounding her was strange for Ali, speaking to him of days before she’d been weakened by her demanding, larger-than-life husband and boisterous family.

“You know why I didn’t tell you,” Ali mumbled, squeezed into a corner of the sofa, his arms crossed mutinously across his chest. Jeandi had been sent to bed but Ali felt as though he’d taken her place as the youngest, not the eldest, child of the house. It was unnerving, this reversal of roles, with Haris now cast as the most obedient child and Ali himself the black sheep.

“Because you knew I would never agree.”

No, because I knew you would harass me to death about it
. This answer was only in Ali’s imagination; he didn’t dare say it out loud to his mother. The years of living with their father, tiptoeing around his volatile nature like stepping around shattered glass, had made Ali cautious about revealing his true feelings to anyone. It was safer to keep them hidden, even if they festered inside. Better to bear the discomfort of suppressed dreams and repressed hopes than to endure the storm of recriminations they would create, once brought into the light.

“But how could you do this without even asking me—consulting me?” said his mother.

Haris added nothing to the conversation; he just followed the words coming out of their mouths, his eyes moving from one face to the other as if he were watching a tennis match. Ali could see that a sense of grudging admiration for his brother’s daring battled with the huge resentment that once again Ali was making plans to go away, plans that didn’t include taking Haris with him. He’d suffered through that once before, when Ali had gone away to Dubai, and Ali knew well the chorus that would be replaying itself inside Haris’s head right now:
Why does he always have to do this? He’s so greedy, so selfish. Only thinking of himself. Never thinking about how we’ll cope if he goes away.

A similar chorus was playing in Ali’s head, a sort of sibling telepathy between the two brothers. He’d whipped himself enough with the same thoughts for many years, knowing full well that as the eldest child, he was in the best position to claim life’s privileges for himself. At first he’d never even thought about it, unconsciously accepting it as his birthright, but over the years his lack of awareness had given way to the realization that his good fortune left only scraps left behind for Haris and Jeandi—scraps of money, opportunity, his parents’ attention and energies. He desperately didn’t want his brother and sister to hate him for it. It wasn’t his fault. But at the same time, he couldn’t give up on his dream.

“When are you going to Islamabad?” said Haris, who hadn’t looked at the letter; he’d only heard about its contents secondhand.

“The twelfth,” said Ali.

“You should be careful,” replied Haris, glancing at his mother, who had turned her back on both of them and was clearing up dishes from the dinner table. “There’s going to be a lot of trouble up there now that the judges have been kicked out.”

“It’ll be fine.”

Ali’s mother whirled around from the sink and spoke up again. “And does your father know about this?”

It was the one question he hadn’t expected from her. She barely mentioned his name anymore around them, seemed uninterested in the contact her children did or didn’t have with him. But of course Sikandar Hussein didn’t know about Ali’s plans to escape this tired, claustrophobic existence that he’d been forced into. There was no question of permission being granted, blessings received. The day Sikandar had walked out from their lives, his authority over Ali’s destiny had withered away, a tree blighted by a life-draining disease.

Ali rose from the sofa. “I don’t want to discuss this anymore. I’m going to bed.”

“Does he know?” repeated his mother. “You know he’ll never agree to this.”

Ali clenched his fists and muttered in a tight voice, “My father is dead!” It was the first time he’d spoken the lie in front of his family, and it gave him a dangerous, dizzying feeling to bring his two worlds so close together. He cursed his luck for having to split his existence in two, between the outside world where his father was a dead bureaucrat and the inside one where his father was very much alive, and a feudal to boot. For a moment he wondered what it might feel like to live in absolute truth, but he pushed away the fantasy like a gift he couldn’t possibly afford.

“Don’t say such things!” Ali’s mother gave him a furious stare. For a moment Ali thought she might actually slap his face, the way she used to when he was younger and had said or done something unforgiveable—cheated on an exam, lied about being out late at night, smoked cigarettes. He found himself completely flummoxed by her reaction. After everything Sikandar had done to her, why should she care? A sudden feeling of betrayal stung him, made tears spring up unbidden in his eyes. He remembered how he’d had to console his mother through the long months after his father’s abandonment, every month another nail in his father’s imaginary coffin. Why did she harbor such loyalty to him now?