From the moment he entered the garden and found himself wading through high golden drifts of leaves Abdullah Noman began to suffer from misgivings about the event. It was an exceptionally cold October night. Snow had already begun to fall. “By the time the guests arrive in their finery we’ll be in the middle of a blizzard and the air will ice people’s lungs. Will there be enough braziers to keep the guests warm while they eat? And after that? Because a cold audience isn’t easy to warm up. This is not the weather for a garden party. Not even Ram Leela and Budshah can overcome an obstacle like this snow.”
Then the magic of the garden began to take hold. Paradise too was a garden—Gulistan, Jannat, Eden—and here before him was its mirror on earth. He had always loved the Mughal gardens of Kashmir, Nishat, Chashma Shahi, and above all Shalimar, and to perform there had been his lifelong dream. The present maharaja was no Mughal emperor, but Abdullah’s imagination could easily change that, and as he stood at the center of the central terrace and directed his people to their posts, as the theater troupe went off to the highest terrace to build the stage for the performance of Budshah, while the chefs’ brigade headed for the kitchen tents and began the interminable work of chopping, slicing, frying and boiling, the sarpanch closed his eyes and conjured up the long-dead creator of this wonderland of swaying trees, liquid terraces and water music, the horticulturalist monarch for whom the earth was the beloved and such gardens were his verdant love-songs to it. Abdullah drifted toward a trancelike state in which he felt himself being transformed into that dead king, Jehangir the Encompasser of the Earth, and something almost feminine came into his body, an imperial lassitude, the languorous sensuality of power. Where was his palanquin, he dreamily wondered. He should be carried up into the garden in a jeweled palanquin borne on the shoulders of wiry rope-sandaled men; why then was he on foot? “Wine,” he murmured under his breath. “Bring sweet wine and let the music start.”
There were times when Abdullah’s powers of autosuggestion frightened his fellow actors. When he unleashed them he could, or so it seemed, resurrect the dead to inhabit his living flesh, an occultist feat far more impressive, but also more alarming, than mere performance. Now, as on all such occasions, the players of Pachigam brought his wife Firdaus to his side, to talk him back from the past. “The times are growing so dark,” he told her distantly, “that we must try as best we can to cling to the memory of brightness.” It was the emperor speaking, the emperor on his last journey hundreds of years ago, dying on the road to Kashmir without reaching the longed-for haven of his earthly paradise, his hymnlike garden of terraces and birds. Firdaus saw that the time for gentle measures was past and, what was more, she had news of her own to impart. She grabbed her husband roughly and shook him. Soft explosions of snow flew off his chugha coat and his beard. “Have you been smoking something?” she shouted, deliberately making her words as harsh as possible. “This garden has a big effect on small men. They start believing they are giants.” The insult penetrated Abdullah’s reverie and he began to return mournfully to the waking banality of himself. He was not the emperor. He was the help. Firdaus, who knew everything about him before he knew it himself, read his mind and laughed in his face. This increased his groggy dolor and heightened the color in his cheeks. “If you want to prepare to play a king,” she said more gently, “think about Zain-ul-abidin in the first play. Think about being Lord Ram in the second half of the program. But right now there are more important lives to think about. Giri’s baby is coming early, probably just because you said it would.”
His head was clearing. Life-and-death matters were all around him. In the middle of the fifteenth century the Sultan Zain-ul-abidin succumbed to a deadly Disease, viz. a poisonous Boil on the Chest, and would certainly have died, had it not been for the intervention of a scholarly Doctor, a Pandit whose Name was Shri Butt or Bhat. After Dr. Butt or Bhat had cured the King of his Illness, Zain-ul-abidin told him he should ask for a very precious Gift, for had he not given the King himself renewed Life, the most precious of all Gifts? “I need nothing for myself,” Dr. Butt or Bhat replied, “but sire, under the Kings who came before you my Brothers were persecuted without end, and they are in need of a Gift at least as valuable as Life.” The King agreed to cease the Persecution of the Kashmiri Pandits at once. In addition, he made it his Business to see to the Rehabilitation of their devastated and scattered Families, and allowed them to preach and practice their Religion without any Hindrance. He rebuilt their Temples, reopened their Schools, abolished the Taxes that burdened them, repaired their Libraries and ceased to murder their Cows. Whereupon a Golden Age began.
Words reawakened in him and rushed out like panicky sheep. “Pamposh, hai! hai! Pamposh—where is she—what’s happening—is she all right—the baby, will the baby live—where is Pyarelal, he must be wild—my God, didn’t I tell you to stay back—arré, how did she, when did it, what should we do?”
His wife put her hand on his lips and loudly, for public consumption, jeered dismissively. “Listen to my great husband who holds the whole village in his hand,” she said. “Listen to what one new baby turns him into—a panicky little boy.” Then, so that nobody else could hear, she whispered into his ear in quite a different manner. “We have taken sheets and constructed a private delivery area behind the kitchen tents. There are enough women to do the needful. I can help with the baby and the others will keep an eye on the twins and little Anees. But Giri is not so well, and the blizzard doesn’t help. There are doctors on the guest list and some of them live in nearby parts of Srinagar. Pyarelal has gone into the city to fetch one. Everything that can be done is being done. Leave it to me. There is enough on your plate just now.”
Abdullah opened his mouth to speak, and Firdaus saw the words I told you so trembling on his lips. “Don’t say it,” she forestalled him. “Just don’t even bother to try.”
Abdullah Noman was himself again. Yes, the doctor would be brought and Pamposh and the baby would be saved. The intervention of a scholarly doctor, a pandit, just the way it was in Budshah. In the meanwhile there was cooking to supervise and a double bill of plays to prepare for. Abdullah strode about, pointing and ordering, smoothing points of liaison with liveried members of the maharaja’s security guards, as well as service personnel and kitchen staff. The world resumed its familiar shape. On each of the terraces of the Shalimar garden, on either side of the central cascade of water, gaily colored shamiana tents had been erected, and the royal household staff were spreading the Dogra dastarkhans, the floor-cloths surrounded by bolster cushions at which the banquet was traditionally served to guests sitting in groups of four. Abdullah was everywhere, satisfying himself that all was as it should be. The snow fell straight down in large feathery flakes. It was hard to tell if it was a benediction or a curse.
In a tent on the lowest terrace Bombur Yambarzal the waza of Shirmal confronted him with a face whose colors were anything but gay. In spite of the maharaja’s requirement that their rivalries be set aside, this was not a man at peace with his neighbor. “It’s the final humiliation,” he snapped. “We—we, who are the unrivaled wazwaanis, longtime virtuosos of the pulao, maestros of methi chicken and artists of aab gosh!—we have been given the junior terrace, where the least important diners will come to eat. You interlopers—you pickpockets—you ignoramuses who think you can cook this food without even a waza to supervise you, let alone a vasta waza, a grand chef like myself!—have been ranked above us. The insult is apparent to all and will not be forgotten. I console myself that at least your rabble don’t have access to the highest terrace either, because the household chefs threatened to walk out if they didn’t get to feed the top tables. Clearly the maharaja was prepared to insult the whole village of Shirmal but felt obliged to butter up his cooks.”
Abdullah Noman held his tongue. It was true that Pachigam was to feed the middle tier of guests, but later in the evening Abdullah’s troupe of bhand pather actors would perform the history of Zain-ul-abidin, and the
n the Ram Leela, climaxing in the burning of the effigies and the fireworks, before the maharaja himself. “No point rubbing poor Bombur’s nose in his misfortune,” he thought, feeling one of his periodic twinges of guilty compassion for the waza of Shirmal; he inclined his head toward Yambarzal in a manner that was almost apologetic or at least deferential, and went on his way without returning hot words for hot, never suspecting that what lay ahead was not an evening of feasting and theater but one of the great hinge moments of his life and also of the life of everyone and everything he loved, a night after which nothing in the world would continue down its expected path, rivers would change their courses, the stars would turn up in unexpected places in the sky, the sun might as well start rising in the north or south or any damn place, because all certainty was lost, and the darkening began, ushering in the time of horrors, which Abdullah’s dreaming tongue had prophesied without consulting his brain. He went about his business, leaning into the snow, kicking drifts aside with his stout boots; and he was on his way to inspect the progress of the stage construction when Firdaus, staggering slightly, found him by the pond on the uppermost terrace. Exclamatory fountains burst upwards as she clutched his arm for support, as if the garden itself were shocked by the alteration in her demeanor. She looked much less in control of things than before, her face showed evidence of strain, and her lazy eye drifted uncertainly away to the side. “Okay,” she said, and then winced and gritted her teeth, perspiring silently as a powerful contraction hit her, “so, I admit, the situation has become a little more complicated than we thought.”
Two women gave snowbound birth behind the bushes, attended by a well-known local doctor and Sufistic philosopher, Khwaja Abdul Hakim, master of medicine both herbal and chemical, traditional and modern, Eastern and Western. But tonight his skills were useless; life arrived by itself, and death would not be denied. One boy child, one girl child, one trouble-free birth, one fatality. Firdaus Noman gave birth at speed, spitting out Noman Noman like a fruit pip. “Here you are, then, in a hurry,” she whispered into the ear of her newborn boy, neglecting to make sure that the first word he heard was the name of God. “Your father is a shape-shifter who calls his sorcery acting and your mother’s family of desperadoes is pretty suspicious, too, and nothing is at all normal about tonight; but just grow up normal anyway, okay, and don’t give me any reason to be scared.” Then Giri shrieked and Firdaus had to be restrained from jumping up to help her anguished friend. The women of Pachigam tended the living mother, swaddled and cared for the two healthy children and covered the dead woman’s face. They would take the body home during the night on a bullock cart covered with blossom from the garden and tomorrow she would burn in a sandalwood flame. What was there to say about such things? They happened. They did not happen frequently enough to threaten the survival of the species, the statistics were improving all the time, but when it was your turn, you were one hundred percent dead. There was grieving to be done and it would be done, as fully as was fitting. The pandit and his baby daughter needed the village’s support and they would receive it. The village would close around them like a hand. The pandit would live on. His daughter would live on. Life continued. The snow would melt and new flowers would grow. Death was not the end.
The news of a fourth son was brought to Abdullah, whose pride in fatherhood had to be shelved for the moment, there being so much to be done before the guests arrived; and, besides, he was already preparing for the role of Zain-ul-abidin, metamorphosing into the old-time Sultan who represented for him everything that was best about the valley he loved, its tolerance, its merging of faiths. The pandits of Kashmir, unlike Brahmins anywhere else in India, happily ate meat. Kashmiri Muslims, perhaps envying the pandits their choice of gods, blurred their faith’s austere monotheism by worshipping at the shrines of the valley’s many local saints, its pirs. To be a Kashmiri, to have received so incomparable a divine gift, was to value what was shared far more highly than what divided. Of all this the story of Budshah Zain was a symbol. Abdullah closed his eyes and sank ever deeper into his favorite role. As a result he was unable to be present to comfort his friend the pandit when Pamposh Kaul died in the bloody mess of her daughter’s premature birth.
A flight of winged shadows fled from the garden with her soul. Pyarelal wept beneath the illuminated trees while the Sufi philosopher embraced and kissed him, weeping as copiously as he. “The question of death,” said the khwaja through his tears, “proposes itself, does it not, panditji, every day. How long do we have left, will it be kind or unkind when it comes, how much more work can we do, how much of life’s richness will we experience, how much of our children’s lives will we see, et cetera.” Under normal circumstances, the opportunity to discuss ontology, to say nothing of the finer points of Sufi and Hindu mysticism, would have overjoyed Pyarelal Kaul. But nothing was normal that night. “She knows the answer now,” he wept back in reply, “and what a bitter answer it is.” The sobbing khwaja stroked the distraught widower’s face. “You have a beautiful daughter,” he said, choking. “The question of death is also the question of life, panditji, and the question of how to live is also the question of love. That is the question you have to go on answering, to which there is no answer except in the going on.” Then there were no more words. They both wailed long and loud at the baleful, gibbous moon. Before there was a Mughal garden here this had been a jackal-infested place. The weeping of the two grown men sounded like jackals’ howls.
Death, most present of absences, had entered the garden, and from that moment on the absences multiplied. It was dusk, and the appointed hour had arrived, the warm scents of the banquet were rising from the kitchens, and in spite of tragedy everything was ready on time; but where were the guests? It was cold, certainly, and perhaps that put some people off; the first few Dassehra revelers who did arrive were bundled up for warmth and looking dramatically unlike people who had come to have fun. But the expected flood of visitors never materialized, and, what was worse, many members of the royal household staff began to sneak quietly away, the bearers, the guards, even the chefs from the uppermost terrace, the maharaja’s own chefs who had been preparing the food for his personal entourage.
How could the occasion be saved? Abdullah Noman rushed around the garden shouting at people but got few of the answers he needed. Beneath a Mughal pavilion he found the magician Sarkar with his head buried in his hands. “It’s a catastrophe,” said the Seventh Sarkar. “People are too afraid to come out in this snowstorm—and from what I’ve been hearing it’s not only the snow that frightens them!—and so my greatest achievement will only be witnessed by a bunch of village buffoons.”
The shamiana tents, their bright colors glowing in the light of the great heat-braziers and gay strings and loops of illuminations bouncing across the trees, stood almost empty as the evening darkened toward night, looking ghostly as they loomed out through the snow. Bombur Yambarzal, unnerved by the phantom banquet, sought Abdullah’s advice. “What does that sorcerer mean, it’s not only the snow? If people are too scared to show up,” he said, almost timidly, the change in his demeanor an indication of the depth of his uncertainty, “do you think it’s safe for us to stay?” Abdullah’s heart was already in turmoil, the joy of Noman’s birth warring in his breast with his feeling of despair at the death of sweet Pamposh. He just shook his head perplexedly. “Let’s wait it out awhile,” he said. “We should both send people into Srinagar to ask around. Things must become clearer than they are.” Abdullah was not himself. There would be no performance of Budshah that night and he was trying to shake loose the shade of Zain-ul-abidin, pieces of whom were still stuck to his psyche. This was confusing. It was the second time that day that he had needed to exorcise the spirit of a king, and he was spent.
In the absence of the great majority of guests, all manner of rumors came into the Shalimar Bagh, hooded and cloaked to shield themselves against the elements, and filled the empty places around the dastarkhans: cheap rumors from the gutter
as well as fancy rumors claiming aristocratic parentage—an entire social hierarchy of rumor lounged against the bolsters, created by the mystery that enveloped everything like the blizzard. The rumors were veiled, shadowy, unclear, argumentative, often malicious. They seemed like a new species of living thing, and evolved according to the laws laid down by Darwin, mutating randomly and being subjected to the amoral winnowing processes of natural selection. The fittest rumors survived, and began to make themselves heard above the general hubbub; and in the hissed or murmured noises emanating from these survivors, the loudest, most persistent, most puissant rumors, the single word kabailis was heard, over and over again. It was a new word, with which few people in the Shalimar Bagh were familiar, but it terrified them anyway. “An army of kabailis from Pakistan has crossed the border, looting, raping, burning, killing,” the rumors said, “and it is nearing the outskirts of the city.” Then the darkest rumor of all came in and sat down in the maharaja’s chair. “The maharaja has run away,” it said, contempt and terror mingling in its voice, “because he heard about the crucified man.” The authority of this rumor was so great that it seemed to the appalled villagers of Pachigam and Shirmal that the crucified man materialized then and there on the lawns of the Mughal garden, nailed to the white ground, the snow around him reddening with his blood. The crucified man’s name was Sopor and he was a simple shepherd. At a remote hillside crossroads in the far north the kabaili horde had come sweeping past him and his sheep and demanded to know the way to Srinagar. Sopor the shepherd lifted an arm and pointed, deliberately sending the invaders in the wrong direction. When, after a day-long wild goose chase, they realized what he had done, they retraced their steps, found him, crucified him in the dirt of the crossroads where he had misled them, let him scream for a while to beg God for the death that wouldn’t come quickly enough for his needs, and when they were bored of his noise, hammered a final nail through his throat.