The Twentieth Wife (3 page)

Masud leaned forward across the rutted wood table of the shop. “Say yes,
Sahib.
Perhaps if I fall to ill times in the future you can assist me.”

“That I would, Mirza Masud, without hesitation, even if you did not do this for me. But this is too much. I am grateful for the suggestion, but I cannot accept.”

Masud beamed. “For me this is nothing much, Mirza Beg. Please agree. You will give me the pleasure of your company on the journey. It has been lonely since my sons stopped traveling with me.”

“Of course I will,” Ghias replied. Then he said, smiling at the merchant’s insistence, “Any thanks I can give will be inadequate.”

Masud gave Ghias the directions to his caravan, and the two men parted in the bazaar. During the next few hours, as Asmat and the children packed their meager belongings, Ghias sat outside the tent, thinking of his meeting with Masud. Once, a long time ago, Ghias’s father had told him that a nobleman was as gracious in accepting help as in giving it. Remembering his father’s words—the only memories he had now of Muhammad Sharif—Ghias thought he would accept Masud’s help and repay him later.

Ghias and his family took leave of the
kuchi
who had sheltered them. In a fit of reckless generosity, Ghias gave away his last three gold
mohurs
to the kindly but poor nomads. They had sheltered his
family when no one else had. To them was his first debt of gratitude, to Masud a lifelong one. He had kept the money to pay for their passage to India; now it was no longer necessary. They made their way to Masud’s camp. There, they were provided with a fine tent, and food from the common kitchen until Asmat was well enough to cook for them.

The caravan, winding almost one kilometer from head to tail, started toward Kabul. As the weeks passed Asmat slowly recovered her strength, color blooming in her cheeks again, her hair regaining its shine. The older children were well fed and happy, sometimes walking along the caravan, sometimes climbing up on the camels to rest. But all was not well. Ghias still had no money to pay a wet nurse, and though Mehrunnisa did drink some goat’s milk, she was growing more and more feeble each day. He thought with a pang of the three gold
mohurs;
they would have been useful now. But then, the
kuchi,
poor as they were, had been helpful to his family . . . no, it had been the right decision. When Asmat asked after the money, Ghias said so, firmly, not looking at his daughter.

One month after Mehrunnisa’s birth, striking eastward from Kabul, the caravan pitched camp near Jamrud, south of the Hindu Kush Mountains in the Khyber hills. The day was just failing, the clean sky ochre-toned. The colors of the land were muted: dull white of snow, smudged blue-black of rocks and boulders, dry brown of dying grass. The slow, biting cold of winter crept in through layers of wool and cotton shawls. Near the camp, lights twinkled from the last village they would come upon for the next few weeks, clinging to the hillside. And farther in the distance lay the first rising path into the mountains through the Khyber Pass.

Ghias helped Asmat collect twigs and dry branches for a fire. Then he sat near her, watching her chop a wilted cabbage and some carrots along with a shank of lamb for the
kurma.
Her hands were raw in the cold, her knuckles white. Mehrunnisa lay wrapped in a bundle
just inside their tent. Muhammad, Abul, and Saliha played with the other children in the twilight. From where he sat, Ghias could hear their screams of delight as they threw snowballs at one another.

“They will get cold and wet,” Asmat said, looking up from her work. She put a cast-iron skillet on the makeshift
chula:
three flat stones in a triangle, holding the twig fire inside them.

“Let them be,” Ghias said softly, watching her. Asmat poured a little oil from an earthenware jar into the skillet, waited for it to heat, and added cardamom pods, a few cloves, and a bay leaf. The lamb meat went in next, and she browned it deftly with a wooden spoon.

“When did you learn to cook?” Ghias asked.

Asmat smiled, tucking in a stray lock of hair behind her ears. She watched the meat on the skillet intently, her face red and glowing in the heat from the fire. “I never learned, Ghias; you know that. Meals were always brought to me. They appeared like magic, out of nowhere. But the woman in the next tent taught me this
kurma.”
She turned to him anxiously. “Are you tired of it? I can learn something else.”

Ghias shook his head. “No, not tired of it. Even though,” he smiled wickedly, “we have eaten this every night for one month.”

“Twenty-two days,” Asmat said, as she added the vegetables to the meat and poured water into the skillet. A few pinches of rock salt from a gunnysack, a sprinkling of pounded masala of cloves, chili powder, and cardamom, and Asmat covered the skillet and sat back. She looked up at Ghias. “At least I do not burn the
kurma
anymore.”

“Asmat, we have to talk.”

Asmat turned away from him, pulling out a copper vessel. She dipped her hand into another sack, poured five handfuls of wheat flour into the vessel, and started to knead the flour into dough for
chappatis
with some water and oil. “I have to make dinner, Ghias.”

“Asmat . . . ,” he said gently, but she would not look at him. Her back was stiff, her movements jerky.

From inside the tent, Mehrunnisa cried. They both turned to the sound and waited. She cried again, feebly, without strength. Then, as though exhausted by the effort, the sound stopped. Asmat bent over the dough again, her fingers kneading it with a vengeance. Her hair fell over her face, sheltering her from her husband. One tear, then another fell into the dough, and she kneaded them in. Ghias rose and came over to her. He took her in his arms and she burrowed into him. They sat there for a few minutes, with Asmat leaning into Ghias, her hands still in the flour.

“Asmat,” Ghias said quietly, “we cannot afford to keep Mehrunnisa.”

“Ghias, please,” Asmat raised her face to his. “I will try to feed her. Or she will take to the goat’s milk, or we will try to find her a wet nurse. The women were talking the other day of a peasant who just had a child. We could ask her.”

Ghias looked away from her. “With what would we pay her? I cannot ask Malik for money.” He gestured around him. “He has already given us so much. No,” his heart strained as he spoke, “it is better for us to leave her by the roadside for someone else to find her, someone with the means to look after her. We cannot do so anymore.”

“You should have kept . . .” Asmat pulled away and started sobbing. But Ghias was right. He was always right. The
kuchi
had needed the money. Now they could not possibly look after the child, and Asmat’s tears would not stop.

Ghias rose, leaving his wife near the fire, and went into the tent. He had thought about this for a long time. Asmat could not feed the child because her milk had dried up, and at every cry her heart broke, for her child cried for milk, and she had none. They were feeding Mehrunnisa sugar water, into which they dipped a clean cloth and gave it to her to suck on, but it was not enough. She had lost weight at an alarming rate and was now much smaller than she had been at birth. Ghias was deeply ashamed that he could not take care of his
family, that he had brought them to this. And he was terrified about this decision. But in his mind, it had to be done. He could not watch as Mehrunnisa became weaker and weaker each day. If he left her for someone else to find, they would bring her up and look after her. Others had done this, Ghias knew. Others had found children on the wayside and brought them into their homes as their own children. He picked up the baby and an oil lantern. She had fallen asleep again, a fretful sleep of hunger. When he came out of the tent he said to Asmat, “I should do so now, when she is asleep.”

Leaving Asmat with silent tears running down her face, he walked away from the camp. When he had reached the outskirts of the village, he wrapped his shawl around the sleeping baby and laid her down at the base of a tree on the main highway. Then he turned the wick of the lantern up high and set it near her. Surely someone would chance upon the baby soon, for it was not dark yet, and this was a well-traveled road. With a prayer on his lips, Ghias turned toward the village, which straggled up the mountainside. A sharp gust of wind brought the aroma of wood smoke from the village chimneys. Perhaps someone from the village, please Allah, someone with a kind heart. He looked down at the baby again. She was so small, so slight; her breathing hardly made a dent in the shawl.

Ghias turned to go. As he did a small whimper came from the bundle on the road. He went back to the baby and smoothed her cheek with his finger. “Sleep, precious one,” he murmured in Persian. The baby sighed, soothed by his voice and his touch, and went back to sleep.

Ghias glanced down at Mehrunnisa, then swiftly walked away. Once, just once, shivering now in the cold, at a bend in the road he turned back to look. The light from the lantern flickered in the approaching darkness; the tree loomed over, gnarled arms stretching in winter bareness. Mehrunnisa, wrapped in a bundle, he could barely distinguish.

•   •   •

A
S DUSK SETTLED
, the mountains took on purple hues in anticipation of the coming night. The white of the snow gleamed briefly and then dulled, and silence laid its gentle folds over the camp. Voices were tempered with fatigue. The campfires spit bits of wood and ash in sparkles. A wind from the north picked up tempo, whistling through the barren trees. A musket shot reverberated through the mountains and faltered in soft echoes. Just as the last sound died, a sharp wail filled the air.

The hunting party stopped in surprise, and Malik Masud held up his hand for quiet. They were near the camp, and for a moment the only sound they heard was from the crackling campfires. Then they heard it again.

Masud turned to one of his men. “Go see what that is.”

The servant kicked his heels into his horse’s flanks and rode toward the cries. In a short while he came back, holding Mehrunnisa in his arms. “I found a baby,
Sahib.”

Masud looked down into the bawling face of the child. He thought he recognized her; then he was sure. The shawl she was wrapped in belonged to Ghias Beg; he had given it as a gift to the young man.

He frowned. How could Ghias abandon such a beautiful child? As the hunting party returned to camp his expression became meditative. He thought back to his first meeting with Ghias. He had judged the young man quickly, as he had other men all his life, but correctly as usual. Looking beyond the young man’s torn clothes and grimy face, Masud had seen intelligence and education—two qualities he knew Emperor Akbar would appreciate. And there was something endearing about him, Masud thought. Over the last month, the two men had spent a few hours together almost every night; for Masud it was as though his eldest son, now settled in Kurasan, was with him again. When the hunting party returned to camp, Masud dismounted
and commanded a servant to bring Ghias to him.

A few minutes later, Ghias entered Masud’s tent.

“Sit down, dear friend.” When Ghias was settled, Masud continued, “I have had the good fortune to find a child abandoned nearby. Tell me, hasn’t your wife just had a baby?”

“Yes, Masud.”

“Then will you request her to nurse this child for me?” Masud brought forward Mehrunnisa. Ghias looked at his daughter in surprise, then at Masud. The older man smiled at him.

“She is now like a daughter to me,” Masud said, as he drew out a richly embroidered bag and took out some gold
mohurs.
“Please take these
mohurs
for her upkeep.”

“But—” Ghias started, holding his arms out for Mehrunnisa. At his touch, she turned her eyes to him.

Masud waved away his objections. “I insist. I cannot burden your family with another child without providing for her.”

Ghias bowed his head. Here was another debt he would find impossible to repay.

Asmat was in the tent when Ghias entered with Mehrunnisa. She stared at the bundle in his arms, knowing it was her daughter, reaching out for her instinctively. “You brought her back?”

“Masud did.”

Asmat hugged Mehrunnisa. “Allah wants us to keep this child, Ghias. We are indeed blessed.” She smiled fondly at the gurgling baby. “But how—”

Ghias silently pulled out the gold
mohurs.
The coins gleamed dully in the light from the lantern. “Allah does want us to keep this child, Asmat,” Ghias said softly.

The next day, Dai Dilaram, who was traveling with the caravan, agreed to nurse the baby along with her own. The caravan traversed the Khyber Pass safely, then went on to Lahore. From Lahore, Malik Masud guided his caravan toward Fatehpur Sikri, where
Akbar held court. Almost six months to the day after Mehrunnisa’s birth, in the year 1578, the caravan entered Fatehpur Sikri.

A few weeks later, when Masud went to pay his respects to Emperor Akbar during the daily
darbar,
he took Ghias along with him. At Masud’s home, while the other children played in the street, Asmat waited for her husband in an inner courtyard, holding six-month-old Mehrunnisa in her arms. Mehrunnisa babbled at her mother’s solemn face, trying hard to draw a smile. Asmat, deep in thought, did not notice. She wondered whether they had reached the end of their long, tiresome journey, whether they could put down roots and survive in this foreign land, whether India would be home now.