Out of admiration for his great skills as a chef and respect for his village headman status, Abdullah had long made an effort to remain on cordial terms with Bombur Yambarzal. At Abdullah’s suggestion the two men had gone fishing for brook trout together from time to time, and spent occasional evenings drinking dark rum, and taken several mountain walks. Abdullah had begun to see glimpses of another, better Bombur beneath the bloated, preening surface that Yambarzal unfortunately presented to the world: a lonely man for whom cookery was his single passion in life, who approached it with an almost religious fervor and who demanded of others the same level of dedication he himself brought to his work, and who was therefore constantly and vociferously disappointed by the ease with which his fellow human beings were drawn away from the ecstatic devotions of the gastronomic arts by such petty distractions as family life, weariness and love. “If you weren’t so hard on yourself,” Abdullah had once told Bombur, “maybe you’d ease off on everyone else and run a happier outfit.” Bombur bristled. “I’m not in the happiness game,” he said sharply. “I’m in the banquet business.” It was a statement that revealed the monomaniacal strain in the waza’s personality, a characteristic he shared with the fanatical Mullah Bulbul Fakh, whose dreams became the two villages’ nightmares.
After the pot war, contact between the two village headmen came to an acrimonious end, until messengers from the maharaja himself arrived in both Pachigam and Shirmal, demanding that to augment the staff of the palace kitchens they set aside their quarrels and pool their resources to provide food (and theatrical entertainment) at a grand Dassehra festival banquet in the Shalimar garden, a feast conceived on a scale not seen in the valley since the time of the Mughal emperor Jehangir. Firdaus Noman, who had picked up a little of Nazarébaddoor’s prophetic ability the way one picks up an itch from a flea-ridden dog, at once concluded that bad trouble was on the way and the maharaja knew it. “He’s partying like there’s no tomorrow,” she told Abdullah. “Let’s hope that just goes for him, not us.”
On the morning of Dassehra, at the end of the nine Navratri nights of singing paeans to Durga, Pandit Pyarelal Kaul awoke with a big smile on his face. “What’s made you so happy?” Pamposh asked him, sulking. Her pregnancy was making her feel very ill that morning, so that her disposition was less than cheerful, especially as her husband’s incessant hymn-singing, with which he persevered doughtily, not only when officiating at the village’s small temple but also at home, had interfered severely with her sleep. “Doesn’t matter how many love songs you sing to the goddess,” Pamposh added sourly, “the only woman in your life is this big balloon.” But the pandit’s blithe spirits could not be deflated, even by his wife’s bad mood. “Just consider for a moment!” cried Pyarelal. “Today our Muslim village, in the service of our Hindu maharaja, will cook and act in a Mughal—that is to say Muslim—garden, to celebrate the anniversary of the day on which Ram marched against Ravan to rescue Sita. What is more, two plays are to be performed: our traditional Ram Leela, and also Budshah, the tale of a Muslim sultan. Who tonight are the Hindus? Who are the Muslims? Here in Kashmir, our stories sit happily side by side on the same double bill, we eat from the same dishes, we laugh at the same jokes. We will joyfully celebrate the reign of the good king Zain-ul-abidin, and as for our Muslim brothers and sisters, no problem! They all like to see Sita rescued from the demon-king, and besides, there will be fireworks.” Giant effigies of Ravan, his son Meghnath and his brother Kumbhakaran would be erected within the walls of the Shalimar Bagh, and Abdullah Noman as Lord Ram—a Muslim actor playing the part of a Hindu god—would shoot an arrow at Ravan, after which the effigies would be burned at the heart of a huge fireworks display. “Okay, okay,” said Pamposh, doubtfully, “but I’ll be the bloated girl in the corner, throwing up.”
At the other end of Pachigam, Firdaus Noman awoke at dawn and noticed that her yellow hair had begun to darken. The baby was almost due and strange juices were running in her veins and because she was full of intimate forebodings the shadow lying on her hair seemed like one more bad omen. Abdullah had learned to trust his wife’s instincts and went so far as to ask her if the Pachigam actors’ troupe and kitchen brigade should stay home and let the royal command performance go to hell, but she shook her head. “Something shitty is beginning, like Nazarébaddoor said,” she answered him, patting her distended womb. “That’s for sure, but the person that’s giving me the shivers right now is still inside here.” It was the only time that Firdaus ever uttered what became the greatest secret of her life, a secret for which she had no rational explanation and to which, accordingly, she had no desire to give voice: that even before his birth her son, whom everyone loved the minute he was born, and whose nature was the sweetest, gentlest and most open of any human being in Pachigam, had started scaring her half to death.
“There’s no need to worry,” Abdullah reassured her, misunderstanding her. “We’ll only be gone one night. Stay here with the boys”—that is to say, the five-year-old twins Hameed and Mahmood, and the two-and-a-half-year-old Anees—“and Pamposh will also wait by your side until we return. . . .” “If you imagine that Giri Kaul and I are going to stay home and miss out on such a gala evening,” Firdaus interrupted, returning her attention to everyday matters, “then men are even more ignorant than I thought. Besides which, if the baby decides to come, don’t you think I’d rather be with the women of the village, instead of staying back in an empty ghost-town?” Like all the women of Pachigam, Firdaus had a matter-of-fact view of childbirth. There was pain involved, but it had to be borne without a fuss. There were risks involved, but they were best faced with a shrug. As to timing, the baby would come when it came and its imminence was no reason for changing one’s plans. “Besides,” she added, conclusively, “who should run the show in a Mughal pleasure-garden if not a direct-line descendant of mighty Iskander the Great?” Abdullah Noman knew better than to go on arguing once Alexander the Great had entered the discussion. “Okay.” He shrugged, turning away. “If you two waddling hens are prepared to go behind a bush and lay your children like eggs while the grandees feast on chicken, there’s no more to be said.”
The Alexandrian fantasy of Firdaus Noman, which caused her to insist that her fair hair and blue eyes were a royal Macedonian legacy, had provoked her most vehement quarrels with her husband, who opined that conquering foreign monarchs were pestilences as undesirable as malaria, while simultaneously, and without conceding that his behavior was in any way contradictory, reveling in his own theatrical portrayals of the arriviste pre-Mughal and Mughal rulers of Kashmir. “A king on stage is a metaphor, an idea of grandeur made flesh,” he said, straightening the flat woolen hat which he wore every day like a crown, “whereas a king in a palace is usually a sot or a bore, and a king on a warhorse”—Firdaus bridled at this gibe, as he knew she would—“is invariably a menace to decent society.” On the subject of the current Hindu maharaja of Kashmir, Abdullah had managed to preserve a position of diplomatic neutrality. “At present I don’t care if he’s a maharaja, a maharishi, a maha-lout or a mahaseer trout,” he told the assembling villagers before the banquet at the Shalimar Bagh. “He’s our employer, and the traveling players and wazwaan cooks of Pachigam treat all their employers like kings.”
Firdaus’s family had moved to Pachigam in her grandfather’s time, carrying, on their sturdy little mountain ponies, the gunny sacks filled with gold dust with which her grandparents had purchased the fruit orchards and grazing meadows which she, as an only child, afterwards brought with her as her dowry when she married the charismatic sarpanch. Before the move her family had lived in the beautiful (but also bandit-infested) Peer Rattan hills to the east of Poonch, in a village named Buffliaz after Alexander the Great’s legendary horse Bucephalus, who according to legend had died in that very spot centuries ago. In that hill town, as Abdullah Noman was well aware, Bucephalus was still revered as a semidivinity, and it was Firdaus’s Buffliazi blood that had risen in her cheeks whe
n her husband jeered dismissively at warhorses.
It was also possible to rile Firdaus by speaking dismissively of giant ants. The historian Herodotus had written about the gold-digging ants of northern India, and Alexander’s scientists believed him. They were not foolishly gullible, these scientists, primitive as science was in those swordlike days: for example, they had swiftly disproved the racist Greek legend that Indians had black semen. (Best not to ask how.) Nevertheless, they believed in the prospector ants, and so did the villagers of the Peer Rattan. Alexander himself, according to the ancients of Buffliaz, had come to these mysterious hills because he had heard that giant, furry, antlike creatures were to be found in that locality, smaller than dogs but bigger than foxes, the size of a marmot, more or less, and in the construction of their outsized formicaries they dug up great heaps of gold-heavy earth. Once the Greek army, or at least its generals, found out that the gold-digging ants actually existed, many of them refused to go back home, settling in the region instead and leading the lives of the idle rich, raising miscegenated families amongst whom children with Grecian noses, blue or green eyes and yellow hair frequently coexisted with darker-haired, differently-nosed Himalayan siblings. Alexander himself stuck around long enough to restock his war chest and leave a few random by-blows behind; from whom there grew a series of accidental family trees, Firdaus’s two-thousand-year-old ancestor being the first shoot of one such plant.
“My people, Iskander’s progeny, knew the secret locations of the treasure-laden anthills,” Firdaus would tell her infant son Noman as he grew, “but over the centuries the gold deposits dwindled. When they finally ran out we filled our gunny sacks with the last dusty remnants of that strange fortune and migrated to Pachigam, obliged by necessity to become actor-counterfeits of the magnificoes we once were.” Firdaus Noman was a third-generation Pachigami and the wife of the headman, and in spite of her lazy eye and her tales of subterranean ant and snake cities she had the protection of Nazarébaddoor, so the village arranged to forget what everyone knew in her grandfather’s time, namely that when a Mr. Butt or Bhat comes to town at dead of night from a well-known bandit region and buys his way into the community by throwing money around and sleeps sitting up with a shotgun across his lap and uses a name that everyone suspects is not his own because he doesn’t know how to spell it, you don’t have to believe in furry, marmotlike, treasure-hunting ants to understand the situation.
Mr. Butt or Bhat didn’t say much to anyone in Pachigam at first. He just sat up every night guarding his sleeping wife and son and in the daytime his eyes looked like they would crack with silent pain. Nobody dared ask him any of the obvious questions, and after five or six years he calmed down and began to act as if he believed that whoever he was running from wasn’t coming after him. After ten years he smiled for the first time. Maybe the bandit chief who had deposed him out there in Buffliaz had settled for his newfound power and didn’t need to finish off his ousted rival. Maybe there really were giant treasure-hunting ants, but they had let him go. It was said in the ancient tales that the ants chased you if you stole their wealth, and woe betide the man or woman who didn’t run fast or far enough. Death by ant horde was a terrible fate. It would be better to hang yourself or cut your own worthless throat. Mr. Butt or Bhat had probably been afraid that the ant army would come after him, but his luck had held, they had lost his trail or found a new motherlode to mine and lost interest in his few pathetic bags of subterranean loot. Anyway, after fifteen years had passed the people who remembered Mr. Butt or Bhat’s arrival started dying off and when the old man himself breathed his last twenty-one years after he arrived in Pachigam, dying in bed like anyone else, without a shotgun in sight, people called it quits and stopped bitching about the family’s shady past. Then Firdaus made her good marriage and after that the subject of the bandit gold became taboo and the ant story was the only one anyone ever told. To doubt this version was to be given the rough end of Firdaus’s tongue and that was a lash only the sarpanch himself could withstand; even he sometimes reeled beneath the ferocity of her verbal attacks. But when Firdaus awoke on the day of the Shalimar banquet and saw that her hair had begun to darken she spoke clouded words about fearing her unborn son, who would be born later that night upon those numinous lawns. “He gives me the shivers,” she repeated to herself both before and after the birth, because she saw something in his newly opened eyes, some golden glint of piracy, warning her that he, too, would have much to do in his burgeoning life with lost treasures, fear and death.
At the entrance to the Shalimar garden, beside the sumptuous lake bobbing with boats that resembled an eager audience waiting impatiently for the show to begin, beneath the whispering chinars and the gossiping poplar trees and in the silent eternal presence of the uncaring mountains, who were preoccupied by the gigantic effort of very slowly pushing themselves higher and higher into the virginal sky, the villagers of Pachigam herded together the animals they had brought for slaughtering, the chickens, goats and lambs whose blood would soon be flowing as freely as the garden’s celebrated cascades, and unloaded their bullock carts and shouldered their loads of cooking utensils and theatrical props, their effigies and fireworks, while, as if for their entertainment, a tiny demagogue standing on an empty oil barrel made a startling claim, which he emphasized by beating a brightly painted stick vigorously against an enormous drum. “There is a tree in paradise,” this little fellow cried, “that gives shelter and sustenance to all those in need. It has long been my belief that here—right here, in our unparalleled paradise on earth!—which, so as not to sound too boastful to the ears of outsiders, we choose to call Kashmir!—there exists a cousin of that celestial tooba tree. According to legend the location of the earthly tooba was revealed by holy pirs to the Emperor Jehangir and he built the Shalimar Bagh around it. To this day nobody knows which tree it is. Tonight, however, through the use of my personal magic, the truth will be revealed.” He was a dark-skinned, glitter-eyed individual with a dancing moustache that seemed to lead a gymnastic life of its own above his mouthful of smiling white teeth, but even with the help of the oil barrel and the absurd cockaded turban on his head he didn’t rise off the ground much higher than a full-grown man, and it occurred to Abdullah Noman that this was a man whose life’s work was a form of revenge for the personal tragedy of his size: he had never fully appeared in the world and therefore wished to make parts of it dematerialize instead.
Firdaus saw more deeply. “He’s ridiculous when he’s banging his drum and yelling like that,” she murmured to her husband. “But look at him in his brief moments of repose. Don’t you think he suddenly looks like a man confident of his authority, calm, unafraid? If he’d just shut up he might convince us he isn’t a cheap fraud.”
“I am the Seventh Sarkar,” shouted the little man, banging his drum. “Ladies and gents!—You see before you the Seventh-Generation Perpetrator Extraordinaire of Illusion, Delusion and Confusion!—In sum, of Sorcery and Jadoo of every type!—And the Unique Exponent and Grand Master of the Most Ancient Form of Magic, known as Indrajal.” Whereupon he banged his drum so hard that he tottered on his oil barrel and people began, unfortunately, to laugh. “Laugh as hard as you like,” stormed the Seventh Sarkar, “but tonight, at the height of the evening’s celebrations, after the banquet, the play, the dancing and the fireworks, I will make the Shalimar Bagh disappear completely for a period of three minutes minimum, and at that time, when the tree of paradise will be revealed, for only a heaven-tree is proof against my wiles, then!—ha!—we will see who is laughing then.” With that he hopped off his oil barrel and, banging his drum with all his might, pushed his way through the mirthful Pachigami crowd.
Firdaus stopped him. “We mean no harm,” she said. “We’re entertainers too and if you pull off this trick, believe me, we’ll be the ones applauding first, loudest and for the longest time.” The Seventh Sarkar was greatly mollified upon hearing these words, but pretended not to be. “You think I haven’t done th
ings already?” he snorted. “Please! Peruse. Regard.” From inside his shirt he pulled out a bundle of yellowing newspaper reports. The villagers crowded around. “SEVENTH SARKAR MAKES RUNNING TRAIN VANISH,” he read, proudly, and, “POOF! BOMBAY’S FLORA FOUNTAIN MAGICKED AWAY.” Then came his greatest credential. “TAJ MAHAL DISAPPEARS UNDER MAGIC SPELL.”
These news reports changed the mood around him. Though he could barely be seen at the heart of the gathering crowd, he had grown greatly in stature. “What is it you do, then?” Abdullah Noman asked, somewhat gracelessly, for his disbelieving laugh had been the loudest of all. “I mean to say, what’s the basis of your act? Some sort of mass hypnotism?” The Seventh Sarkar shook his head gaily. “No, no. Hypnotism totally not involved. I am simply able to keep things away from your eyes. Nothing supernatural or occultist, friends! It is all Science, the Science of the Perfect Illusion and of Mind Control.” Many voices now clamored for further details, but the Seventh Sarkar banged on his drum to silence them. “Bas! Enough! Shall I reveal my secrets in the public street even before I amaze you all? I say only this: that I have the willpower to create a Psychic Balance with the world around me, and this makes possible my Deeds. What is Indrajal? It is a theatrical representation of the wishful dream of living happily—for when you live happily, nothing seems impossible. But be still now my voice and babble no more! Already I have said too much. Perform your play, bhand-folk. Then watch a true master of the art of theater go to work.” Bang! Bang! And off he went, up into the terraced lawns. Pandit Pyarelal Kaul said to his wife, “You wait; by the end of the evening I will unlock the secret of this fancy vanishing trick.” It was a night of dark absentings. Giri Kaul herself would be among those spirited away.