The Years of Rice and Salt (12 page)

Other people were hurrying toward them now, and she slipped away, hearing behind her their cries, shocked and then dismayed, although with that note of triumph or celebration one often heard in monkeys relating bad news—that whatever it was, it hadn't happened to them.

No one would care about that old man, he had left this life as lonely as a male tiger, unregretted even by those in his own hut. It was not his death but the presence of a man-eating tiger that these people lamented. Tigers who learned to like manflesh were dangerous; usually they were mothers who were having trouble feeding their cubs, or old males who had broken their fangs, so that they were likely to do it often. Certainly a campaign to exterminate her would now begin. But she did not regret the killing. On the contrary, she leaped through the trees and shadows like a young tigress just out on her own, licking her chops and growling. Kya, Queen of the Jungle!

But the next time she came to visit her young man, he brought out a morsel of goat meat, and then tapped her gently on the nose, talking very seriously. He was warning her of something, and was worried that the details of the warning were escaping her, which they were. Next time she came by he shouted at her to leave, and even threw rocks at her, but it was too late; she hit a trip line connected to spring-loaded bows, and poisoned arrows pierced her and she died.

4
                                                                                                            

Akbar

As they carried the body of the tigress into the village, four men working hard, huffing and puffing under its weight as it swung by its tied paws from a stout bamboo bouncing on their shoulders, Bistami understood: God is in all things. And God, may all his ninety-nine names prosper and fall into our souls, did not want any killing. From the doorway of his older brother's hut, Bistami shouted through his tears, “She was my sister, she was my aunt, she saved me from the Hindu rebels, you ought not to have killed her, she was protecting us all!”

But of course no one was listening. No one understands us, not ever.

And it was perhaps just as well, given that this tigress had undoubtedly killed his brother. But he would have given his brother's life ten times over for the sake of that tiger.

Despite himself he followed the procession into the village center. Everyone was drinking rakshi
,
and the drummers were running out of their homes with their drums, pounding happily. “Kya Kya Kya Kya, leave us alone forevermore!” A tiger holiday was upon them, and the rest of the day and perhaps the next would be devoted to the impromptu festivalizing. They would burn its whiskers to make sure that its soul would not pass into a killer in another world. The whiskers were poisonous: one ground up in tiger meat would kill a man, while a whole one placed inside a tender bamboo shoot would give those who ate it cysts, leading to a slower death. Or so it was said. The hypochondriacal Chinese believed in the efficacious properties of almost everything, including every part of tigers, it seemed. Much of the body of this Kya would be saved and taken north by traders, no doubt. The skin would go to the zamindar.

Bistami sat miserably on the dirt at the edge of the village center. There was no one to explain himself to. He had done everything he could to warn the tigress off, but to no avail. He had addressed her not as Kya but as madame, or Madame Thirty, which was what the villagers called tigers when they were out in the jungle, so as not to offend them. He had given her offerings, and checked to make sure that the markings on her forehead did not form the letter “s,” a sign that the beast was a were-tiger, and would change to human form for good at the moment of death. That had not happened, and indeed there had been no “s” on her forehead; the mark was more like a birdwing in flight. He had kept eye contact with her, as one is supposed to do when coming on tigers unexpectedly; he had stayed calm, and been saved by her from death. Indeed all the stories he had heard of helpful tigers—the one that had led two lost children back to the village, the one who had kissed a sleeping hunter on the cheek—all these stories paled in comparison to his, although they had prepared him as well. She had been his sister, and now he was distraught with grief.

The villagers began to dismember her body. Bistami left the village, unable to watch. His brutal older brother was dead; his other relatives, like his brother, had no sympathy for his Sufic interests. “The high look to the high, and so they can see each other from a great distance off.” But he was so far away from anyone of wisdom, he could see nothing at all. He remembered what his Sufi master Tustari had told him when he left Allahabad: “Keep the haj in your heart, and make your way to Mecca as Allah wills it. Slow or fast, but always on your tariqat, the path to enlightenment.”

He gathered his few possessions in his shoulder bag. The death of the tiger began to take on the cast of a destiny, a message to Bistami, to accept the gift of God and put it to use in his actions, and regret nothing. So that now it was time to say Thank you God, thank you Kya my sister, and leave his home village forever.

Bistami walked to Agra, and there he spent the last of his money to buy a Sufi wanderer's robe. He asked for shelter in the Sufi lodge, a long old building in the southernmost district of the old capital, and he bathed in their pool, purifying himself inside and out.

Then he left the city and walked out to Fatepur Sikri, the new capital of Akbar's empire. He saw that the not-yet-completed city replicated in stone the vast tent camps of Mughal armies, even down to marble pillars standing free of the walls, like tent poles. The city was dusty, or muddy, its white stone already stained. The trees were all short, the gardens raw and new. The long wall of the emperor's palace fronted the great avenue that bisected the city north and south, leading to a big marble mosque, and a dargah Bistami had heard about in Agra, the tomb of the Sufi saint Shaikh Salim Chishti. At the end of his long life Chishti had instructed the young Akbar, and now his memory was said to be Akbar's strongest link to Islam. And this same Chishti in his youth had traveled in Iran, and studied under Shah Esmail, who had also instructed Bistami's master Tustari.

So Bistami approached Chishti's great white tomb walking backward, and reciting from the Quran. “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful. Be patient with those who call upon their Lord at morn and even, seeking his face: and let not thine eyes be turned away from them in quest of the pomp of this life; neither obey him whose heart we have made careless of the remembrance of Us, and who followeth his own lusts, and whose ways are unbridled.”

At the entry he prostrated himself toward Mecca and said the morning prayer, then entered the walled-in courtyard of the tomb, and made his tribute to Chishti. Others were doing the same, of course, and when he was done paying his respects he spoke to some of them, describing his journey all the way back to his time in Iran, eliding the stops along the way. Eventually he told this tale to one of the ulema of Akbar's own court, and emphasized his master's relation-by-teaching to Chishti, and returned to his prayers. He came back to the tomb day after day, establishing a routine of prayer, purification rites, the answering of questions from pilgrims who spoke only Persian, and socializing with all the people visiting the shrine. This finally led to the grandson of Chishti speaking to him, and this man then spoke well of him to Akbar, or so he heard. He ate his one meal a day at the Sufi lodge, and persevered, hungry but hopeful.

One morning at the very first light, when he was already in the tomb's courtyard at prayers, the emperor Akbar himself came into the shrine, and took up an ordinary broom, and swept the courtyard. It was a cool morning, the night chill still in the air, and yet Bistami was sweating as Akbar finished his devotions, and Chishti's grandson arrived, and asked Bistami to come when he was done with his prayers, to be introduced.

“A great honor,” he replied, and returned to his prayers, murmuring them thoughtlessly as the things he might say raced through his head; and he wondered how long he should delay before approaching the emperor, to show that prayer came first. The tomb was still relatively empty and cool, the sun just rising. When it cleared the trees entirely, Bistami stood and walked to the emperor and Chishti's grandson, and bowed deeply. Greeting, obeisances, and then he was obeying a polite request to tell his story to the watchful young man in the imperial finery, whose unblinking gaze never left his face, or indeed his eyes. Study in Iran with Tutsami, pilgrimage to Qom, return home, a year's work as a teacher of the Quran in Gujarat, a journey to visit his family, ambush by Hindu rebels, salvation by tiger: by the end of the story Bistami had been approved, he could see it.

“We welcome you,” Akbar said. The whole city of Fatepur Sikri served to show how devout he was, as well as displaying his ability to create devotion in others. Now he had seen Bistami's devotion, exhibited in all the forms of piety, and as they continued their conversation, and the tomb began to fill with the day's visitors, Bistami managed to lead the discussion to the one hadith he knew that had come by way of Chishti to Iran, so that the isnad, or genealogy of the phrase, made a short link between his education and the emperor's.

“I had it from Tutsami, who had it from the Shah Esmail, teacher of Shaikh Chishti, who had it from Bahr ibn Kaniz al-Saqqa, that Uthman ibn Saj related to him, from Said ibn Jubair, God's mercy on him, who said, ‘Let him give a general greeting to all the Muslims, including the young boys and the adolescents, and when he has arrived at class, let him restrain whoever was sitting from standing up for him, since neglecting this is one of the banes of the soul.' ”

Akbar frowned, trying to follow it. It occurred to Bistami that it could be interpreted as meaning that he had been the one who had refrained from asking for any kind of obeisance from the other. He began to sweat in the chill morning air.

Akbar turned to one of his retainers, standing unobtrusively against the marble wall of the tomb. “Bring this man with us on our return to the palace.”

After another hour of prayer for Bistami, and consultations for Akbar, who was relaxed but increasingly terse as the morning wore on and the line of supplicants grew rather than shrank before him, the emperor bade the line to disperse and come back again later. After that he led Bistami and his retinue through the raw worksites of the city to his palace.

The city was being built in the shape of a big square, like any other Mughal military encampment—indeed, in the form of the empire itself, Bistami's guard told him, which was a quadrilateral protected by the four cities of Lahore, Agra, Allahabad, and Ajmer. These were all big compared to the new capital, and Bistami's guard was particularly fond of Agra, where he had worked in the construction of the emperor's great fort, now finished. “Inside it are more than five hundred buildings,” he said as he must always have said when speaking of it. He was of the opinion that Akbar had founded Fatepur Sikri because the fort of Agra was mostly complete, and the emperor liked beginning great projects. “He is a builder, that one, he will remake the world itself before he is done, I assure you. Islam has never had such a servant as him.”

“It must be so,” Bistami said, looking around at the construction, white buildings rising out of cocoons of scaffolding, set in seas of black mud. “Praise be to God.”

The guard, whose name was Husain Ali, looked at Bistami suspiciously. Pious pilgrims were no doubt a commonplace. He led Bistami after the emperor and through the gate of the new palace. Inside the outer wall were gardens that looked as if they had been in place for years: big pine trees towering over jasmine bushes, flower beds in all directions. The palace itself was smaller than the mosque, or the tomb of Chishti, but exquisite in every detail. A white marble tent, broad and low, its interior filled by room after cool room, all surrounding a fountain-filled central courtyard and garden. The whole wing at the back of the courtyard consisted of a long gallery walled with paintings: hunting scenes, the skies always turquoise; the dogs and deer and lions rendered to the life; the skirted hunters carrying bow or flintlock. Opposite these scenes were suites of white-walled rooms, finished but empty. Bistami was given one of these to stay in.

That night's meal was a feast, set sumptuously in a long hall opening onto the central courtyard. As it proceeded, Bistami understood that it was simply the ordinary evening meal in the palace. He ate roast quail, yogurt with cucumber, shredded pork in curry, and tastes of many dishes he didn't recognize.

That began a dreamlike period for him, in which he felt like Manjushri in the tale, fallen upward into the land of milk and honey. Food dominated his days and his thoughts. One day he was visited in his rooms by a team of black slaves dressed better than he was, who quickly brought him up to their level of raiment and beyond, outfitting him in a fine white gown that looked well but hung heavily on him. After that he was given another audience with the emperor.

This meeting, surrounded by sharp-eyed counselors, generals, and imperial retainers of all kinds, felt very different from the dawn meeting at the tomb, when two young men out to smell the morning air and see the sunrise, and sing the glory of Allah's world, had spoken to each other chest to chest. And yet in all these trappings, it was the same face looking at him—curious, serious, interested in what he had to say. Focusing on that face allowed Bistami to relax.

The emperor said, “We invite you to join us and share your knowledge of the law. In return for your wisdom, and the rendering of judgments on certain cases and questions that will be brought before you, you will be made zamindar of the late Shah Muzzafar's estates, may Allah honor his name.”

“Praise be to God,” Bistami murmured, looking down. “I will ask God's help in fulfilling this great task to your satisfaction.”

Even with his gaze steadfast to the ground, or returned to the emperor's face, Bistami could sense that some of the imperial retinue were less than pleased by this decision. But afterward, some who had seemed least pleased came up to him and introduced themselves, spoke kindly, led him around the palace, probed in a most gentle way concerning his background and history, and told him more about the estate he was to administer. This, it appeared, would mostly be overseen by local assistants on-site, and was mainly his title and source of income; and in return he was to outfit and provide one hundred soldiers to the emperor's armies, when required, and teach all he knew of the Quran, and judge various civil disputes given to his charge.

“There are disputes that only the ulema are fit to judge,” the emperor's advisor Raja Todor Mal told him. “The emperor has great responsibilities. The empire itself is not yet secure from its enemies. Akbar's grandfather Babur came here from the Punjab, and established a Muslim kingdom only forty years ago, and the infidels still attack us from the south and the east. Every year some campaigns are necessary to drive them back. All the faithful in his empire are under his care, in theory, but the burden of his responsibilities means in practice he simply doesn't have time.”

“Of course not.”

“Meanwhile, there is no other system of justice for disputes among people. As the law is based on the Quran, the qadis, the ulema, and other holy men such as yourself are the logical choice to take on this burden.”