Haveli (28 page)

In response to Shabanu’s command, the
daachii
whirled. As she did, a single shot rang out. Zabo slumped against Shabanu’s shoulder.

“Hang on!” Shabanu shouted back over her shoulder as the old camel picked up her pace. Zabo’s arms tightened slightly around Shabanu’s waist, and she groaned softly.

Praise Allah, she prayed. In Your mercy let Zabo be all right. I would gladly give my own life to save
her. Shabanu thanked Allah for having given her the wisdom to think of alternate plans.

And by the time she heard the jeep start up, they were on the opposite side of the fort, out of sight inside the massive front gate. The camel knelt on the cobbled drive behind the wall. Shabanu pried Zabo’s arms from her waist and climbed down from the hump.

Zabo had been shot through the throat, a neat hole on one side of the soft, pale flesh of her neck and a ragged tangle of flesh on the other. Blood dripped from the side of her mouth.

“Oh, Zabo,” she whispered, and tears burned her eyes. Her tongue felt swollen in her aching throat. “Please, please hang on. I’m here with you. Please fight hard!”

Zabo’s lovely dark eyes were open, but it was as if they were pressed behind glass. They barely moved, and she didn’t blink at all. Shabanu was not sure that Zabo could see.

She lay Zabo’s head against the camel’s massive hump. Her breathing was ragged and bubbly.

She ran to the small door on the opposite side of the cobbled drive from the huge gate, which was pierced through with swords at its top to keep the Rajput princes’ elephants from battering it down in dozens of battles over the centuries.

“Shahzada! Please help me!” she cried, hammering on the door of her father’s friend, the gatekeeper of
the fort of the nawab of Bahawalpur. “Please, someone, let me in!”

At that moment the engine of the jeep whined as it headed off down the track to look for her and Zabo in the desert.

Shahzada, who must have been close to his hundredth year, answered Shabanu’s knock himself.

“Do you remember me? I am the daughter of Dalil Abassi. I beg you to help me!”

“Yes, child, I know who you are and why you’re here,” said the old man through his long and widely spaced teeth. His bare skull was covered with the red felt fez of the nawab’s army uniform. He was tall and thin and straight, with a thick stubble of white beard.

“Come quickly!” said Shabanu, dragging him by the hand to where the camel knelt. Zabo had slumped sideways, her face pressed into the camel’s hump. Her blood had saturated the animal’s fur and now dripped onto the cobbles.

Shahzada and Shabanu lifted Zabo from the
daachii
and propped her up against the animal’s side.

“Please, Zabo, please fight for your life! I haven’t betrayed you! I’m here. We’ll save you,” she whispered against her friend’s hair. Zabo groaned faintly.

“Your sister?” Shabanu asked Shahzada. “Is she still …”

“Yes,” he said. He tore a strip from Zabo’s
chadr
, wadded it, and pressed it against the ragged hole in
her throat. “Hold this. I’ll fetch her.” His sister was a
hakkim
of sorts—a midwife, a preparer of the dead for burial, an herbalist curer of countless ills.

“Can you hear me, Zabo?” Shabanu asked. Her hands trembled, and tears dripped from her chin and the end of her nose. When she lifted her hand to wipe them away, it was slick and red with Zabo’s blood.

Zabo’s eyes were closed now. Her face was so pale it looked faintly blue. Her breaths were farther apart and shallower.

“Hurry!” Shabanu shouted in the direction of Shahzada. “Hurry!”

But Zabo was gone before he returned with the withered old woman, whose only job now would be to prepare Zabo for her grave.

Shabanu was incredulous. Her one friend who just minutes ago had clung to her with strong and healthy arms—they had been on their way to spend the rest of their lives together, free in the desert with Mumtaz and Sharma and Fatima. She couldn’t be dead! Just seconds ago she was alive!

Shahzada lifted Zabo in his arms and carried her quickly to his sister’s quarters, beckoning Shabanu to follow. She was barely able to stumble after him.

“Did anyone see you come here?” he asked.

Shabanu shook her head. “Whoever was in the jeep thinks we’ve gone into the desert.”

“Praise Allah,” he whispered.

His sister darted out the low doorway with a
bucket of water and washed away Zabo’s blood. Then she scrubbed the camel’s fur and pulled the beast inside the nawab’s stable.

Within a few minutes, the desert air had drunk the water and remains of Zabo’s blood, and there was nothing to show that she had died there.

Shahzada and his sister prepared Zabo’s body for burial, bathing her pale skin and praying over her. Shabanu helped them, but she felt as if her hands were ineffectual, that when they meant to tuck the folds of the shroud under Zabo’s shoulders, they merely fluttered. Her lips, when they meant to pray, merely uttered words of grief. Never had she felt so defeated and helpless.

When they had finished, Shahzada lay Zabo, her body wrapped head to foot in a pure white seamless shroud, on a bare wooden table in a back room in his sister’s chambers. He led Shabanu to a tiny dark parlor. His sister brought a plain tray with sweetened tea in a little blue enamel teapot.

“Nazir
-sahib
came directly here to look for you,” he said. “He remembered that your family went to the Desert Rangers for protection from him one other time. And, I tell you, he will not rest until he finds you. I thought you would be alone. He never mentioned his daughter.”

“Where will we bury her?” Shabanu asked. “I remember you buried Grandfather’s fez and sword in the lapis tomb of the army commander.”

“Yes,” said Shahzada. “Your grandfather was a noble soldier and a fine man.”

“I know there was no room in the nawab’s cemetery for a poor desert nomad. But would there be a place for the daughter of a nobleman?”

Shahzada sat back and laid a finger beside his nose.

“Perhaps for the wife of Rahim
-sahib
,” he said. “With all respect to your friend, may her soul rest in peace, perhaps we should say this is your grave. Since her father does not even care to look for her …”

“But then there would be no grave for Zabo, and her spirit would wander about.”

“You must believe me when I tell you your life is in danger,” said Shahzada, his gray eyes wise with age but young as the day he was born. “Nazir will have men all over Derawar keeping watch for you. He thought you would be traveling on foot, and so he was not expecting you as early as you arrived. He had just arrived himself.”

Shabanu’s mind raced. Her stomach churned. What had happened to Omar? Had he too been killed? Too many killings. Oh, I beg of you, Allah, let there be no more! Her heart would hold no more grief.

“Won’t the Rangers help?” she asked.

“Bah!” he said. “The new commander is a corrupt and greedy man. Nazir has befriended him so that he can hunt whenever he likes in the game preserve.”

“I must get to my family and warn them. If the Rangers can’t protect them …”

“Listen, little
Begum
,” said Shahzada. “If Nazir-
sahib
thinks you’re dead, he will not bother your family. If he thinks you are alive, however, he will employ the best desert trackers the Rangers have. He will never rest until you are dead or captured.”

“But my family must know I’m safe …”

“For their sake, I’m afraid they too must believe it was you who was killed.”

“But if everyone thinks I’m dead, what is the point of living?”

“The point is that you
will
be alive. And there is hope as long as you are alive. There is always the possibility that Nazir
-sahib
will—Allah forgive me—not survive for long.”

Shabanu knew that her family would grieve for her. But it was Mumtaz she worried about. It was one thing for Mumtaz to be happy and free in the desert when she also had the security of her home, including a loving mother and father. But suddenly to find herself in a wild and desolate place and to learn that she no longer had a home and that both her parents were dead …

Then Shabanu thought of the alternatives: She might be a prisoner at Mehrabpur, without Zabo, dreading every day that Nazir would come to her bed; or if Omar did rescue her, she and Mumtaz would be enslaved at Okurabad, forever under the
power of Amina and Leyla.

And that decided for her. Never, she thought. Never, never, never.

They buried Zabo that night in a simple grave in a corner of the deserted stable yard. They marked it with a huge mound of straw so that it would be difficult to find, even for someone searching for it. They said the prayers that would speed her on her way to heaven.

And Shahzada and his sister left Shabanu to mourn her only friend quietly until it was time to decide how she would live her life as a ghost.

Shahzada and his sister took her back to the small dark room behind their quarters. It was decided that she would be safer hiding in the fort than trying to leave just now, when Nazir and his men were looking for her. Meals were delivered to her on a covered tray. She was not to go outside the room unless Shahzada or his sister came for her, and that happened only at night.

When she was allowed outside, she searched the stars, the billions of stars that dazzled like diamonds in the sapphire desert sky. These were the same stars, she thought, beneath which Mumtaz slept. And she wondered whether Omar might be looking up at them as well.

She was grateful for the time to concentrate on the thoughts she’d begun but never finished, the hurts
she’d begun to feel but never dealt with before the next catastrophe was upon her in these last weeks.

Shahzada kept watch for danger. And each morning when he visited the well, he and the herdsmen exchanged stories.

It seemed a caravan of nomads had found the body of a small woman, the little
begum
who once was a Cholistani girl. The nomads remembered her—she married a wealthy
zamindar
the year the drought had ended. She was the daughter of Dalil Abassi, the keeper of the finest camels in Cholistan.

A tall, slender girl whose father also was a landowner kept watch over the body of the little
begum
, the nomads said. Her father had beaten her and murdered her husband, and so she asked a family of gypsies to take her into the mountains with them.

That was the story that made its way around Derawar, although nobody was able to say exactly where the story had come from. Shahzada visited the well of a neighboring village, and he heard the same story. And by the time a week had passed, the Desert Rangers had stopped looking for the two young women.

And then something strange happened. A tall, handsome young man came to Shahzada, saying he was the little
begum’s
brother.

Shahzada recalled that Dalil Abassi had not been blessed with sons. The young man blushed and looked down at the ground.

“I loved her very much, sir,” he said to Shahzada. “Can you tell me, please, who would know where I can find her grave so that I might pay my respects?”

Shahzada asked him to come back.

“I will have to go to the village to ask,” he said. “Please come tomorrow.”

That evening he told Shabanu. She asked what the young man looked like. When Shahzada told her, she lowered her eyes. Her eyes, which already this week had shed more tears than she would ever have guessed her body could hold, spilled over yet again.

“Please,” she said. “Please show him the grave. For he is one who will never believe until he sees. But, Uncle, I want to see him,” she said.

And so it was arranged that Shabanu was led to a loft over the stable, where the winter fodder was stored, to wait for Omar to mourn her at her graveside.

When he came late that afternoon, Shahzada told Omar that the nomads had brought her body to him and that he had buried her in the stable yard.

“You see,
Sahib
, no one wants trouble from Nazir. So her grave site must be kept secret. It is only because I knew her—such a good and brave young woman—that I will show you.”

The young man nodded slowly. His eyes held more sadness than Shahzada knew existed in the world.

“I too wish that no one else should know,” Omar said.

Shahzada took him out to the stable yard and moved aside the pile of straw.

“Here?” said Omar. “But my Shabanu must have a fitting grave! A pile of straw will never do! After I have mourned a year, I shall bring a marble marker with inscriptions. Please,” he said, his voice shaking. “Please leave me alone.”

The sun was low in the sky. In its red-gold light, Omar’s dark eyes glistened. He leaned forward and put his hand on the head of the grave. He sat for a moment, his hand over Zabo’s head.

Then he turned his face to the sky. It was wet with tears.

“Shabanuuuu!” he wailed, like an animal in pain. “Shaahh-baha-nuuuuuuuu!”

Shabanu wanted to run to him and fold him into her arms, as she had wanted to do with Mumtaz. Her heart ached, her throat ached, and once again she found herself saying silently, For the sake of Mumtaz. For the sake of Mumtaz. For the sake of Mumtaz. And she stayed hidden in the straw of the loft.

He sat beside the grave until it was almost dark. And then he reached out his hand again.

“For as many seconds as I live on this earth,” he said, “you will always be in my heart.”

And with that he leaned forward and kissed the
ground under which Zabo’s head lay. And then he stood and gathered the straw in his arms and began to cover the grave again. Shahzada came running.

“Here,
Sahib
, allow me,” said Shahzada.

But Omar held on to the straw, spreading it handful by handful until the grave was covered.

S
habanu arrived at the
haveli
late on a chilly night. She got out of the
tonga
at the corner of the lane and paid the
tonga-wallah
. He and his poor old horse looked as if they would fall asleep on the spot.