The Years of Rice and Salt Read online

  Some days later, when the Emperor came to the tomb at dawn, it felt strange to sweep the shadowed courtyard of the tomb with him. Bistami swept assiduously, trying not to meet Akbar’s gaze.

  Finally he had to acknowledge the sovereign’s presence. Akbar was already staring at him.

  “You seem troubled,” Akbar said.

  “No, mighty Akbar — not at all.”

  “You don’t approve of the execution of traitors to Islam?”

  “Not at all, yes, of course I do.”

  Akbar stared at him in the same way one of his falcons would have.

  “But didn’t Ibn Khaldun say that the caliph has to submit to Allah in the same way as the humblest slave? Didn’t he say that the caliph has a duty to obey Muslim law? And doesn’t Muslim law forbid torture of prisoners? Isn’t that Khaldun’s point?”

  “Khaldun was just a historian,” Bistami said.

  Akbar laughed. “And what about the hadith, that has it from Abu Taiba by way of Murra Ibn Harridan by way of Sufyan al-Thawri, who had it related to him by Ali Ibn Abi Talaib, that the Messenger of God, may God bless his name for ever, said, “You shall not torture slaves?” What about the lines of the Quran that command the ruler to imitate Allah and to show compassion and mercy to prisoners? Did I not break the spirit of these commandments, O wise sufi pilgrim?”

  Bistami studied the flagstones of the courtyard. “Perhaps so, great Akbar. Only you know.”

  Akbar regarded him. “Leave the tomb of Chishti,” he said.

  Bistami hurried out of the gate.

  The next time Bistami saw Akbar was at the palace, where he had been commanded to appear; as it turned out, to explain why, as the Emperor put it icily, “your friends in Gujarat are rebelling against me?”

  Bistami said uneasily, “I left Ahmadabad precisely because there was so much strife. The mirzas were always having trouble. The King Muzaffar Shah the Third was no longer in control. You know all this. This is why you took Gujarat under your protection.”

  Akbar nodded, seeming to remember that campaign. “But now Husain Mirza has come back out of the Deccan, and many of the nobles of Gujarat have joined him in rebellion. If word spreads that I can be defied so easily, who knows what will follow?”

  “Surely Gujarat must be retaken,” Bistami said uncertainly; perhaps, as last time, this was exactly what Akbar did not want to hear. What was expected of Bistami was not clear to him; he was an official of the court, a qadi, but his advice before had all been religious, or legal. Now, with a previous residence of his in revolt, he was apparently on the spot; not where one wanted to be when Akbar was angry.

  “It may already be too late,” Akbar said. “The coast is two months away.”

  “Must it be?” Bistami asked. “I have made the trip by myself in ten days. Perhaps if you took only your best hundreds, on female camels, you could surprise the rebels.”

  Akbar favoured him with his hawk look. He called for Raja Todor Mal, and soon it was arranged as Bistami had suggested. A cavalry of three thousand soldiers, led by Akbar, with Bistami ordered along, covered the distance between Agra and Ahmadabad in eleven dusty long days, and this cavalry, made strong and bold by the swift march, shattered a ragtag horde of many thousands of rebels, fifteen thousand by one general’s count, most of them killed in the battle.

  Bistami spent that day on camelback, following the main charges of the front, trying to stay within sight of Akbar, and when that failed, helping wounded men into the shade. Even without Akbar’s great siege guns, the noise of the battle was shocking — most of it created by the screaming of men and camels. Dust blanketing the hot air smelled of blood.

  Late in the afternoon, desperately thirsty, Bistami made his way down to the river. Scores of wounded and dying were already there, staining the river red. Even at the upstream edge of the crowd it was impossible to drink a mouthful that did not taste of blood.

  Then Raja Todor Mal and a gang of soldiers arrived among them, executing with swords the mirzas and Afghans who had led the rebellion. One of the mirzas caught sight of Bistami and cried out ‘Bistami, save me! Save me!”

  The next moment he was headless, his body pouring its blood onto the bankside from the open neck. Bistami turned away, Raja Todor Mal staring after him.

  Clearly Akbar heard of this later, for all during the leisurely march back to Fatepur Sikri, despite the triumphant nature of the procession, and Akbar’s evident high spirits, he did not call Bistami into his presence. This despite the fact that the lightning assault on the rebels had been Bistami’s idea. Or perhaps this also was part of it. Raja Todor Mal and his cronies could not be pleased by that.

  It looked bad, and nothing in the great victory festival on their return to Fatepur Sikri, only forty-three days after their departure, made Bistami feel any better. On the contrary, he felt more and more apprehensive, as the days passed and Akbar did not come to the tomb of Chishti.

  Instead, one morning, three guards appeared there. They had been assigned to guard Bistami at the tomb, also back at his own compound. They informed him that he was not allowed to go anywhere else but these two places. He was under house arrest.

  This was the usual prelude to the interrogation and execution of traitors. Bistami could see in his guards’ eyes that this time was no exception, and that they considered him a dead man. It was hard for him to believe that Akbar had turned on him; he struggled to understand it. Fear grew daily in him. The image of the mirza’s headless body, gushing blood, kept recurring to him, and each time it did the blood in his own body would pound through him as if testing the means of escape, eager for release in a bursting red fountain.

  He went to the Chishti tomb on one of these frightful mornings, and decided not to leave it. He sent orders for one of his retainers to bring him food every day at sundown, and after eating outside the gate of the tomb, he slept on a mat in the corner of the courtyard. He fasted through the days as if it were Ramadan, and alternated days reciting from the Quran and from Rumi’s “Mathnawi”, and other Persian sufi texts. Some part of him hoped and expected that one of the guards would speak Persian, so that the words of the Mowlana, Rumi the great poet and voice of the sufis, would be understood as they came pouring out of him.

  “Here are the miracle signs you want,” he would say in a loud voice, “that you cry through the night and get up at dawn, asking that in the absence of what you ask for, your day gets dark, your neck thin as a spindle, that what you give away is all you own, that you sacrifice belongings, sleep, health, your head, that you often sit down in a fire like aloes-wood, and often go out to meet a blade like a battered helmet. When acts of helplessness become habitual, those are the signs. You run back and forth listening for unusual events, peering into the faces of travellers. Why are you looking at me like a madman? I have lost a Friend. Please forgive me. Searching like that does not fail. There will come a rider who holds you close. You faint and gibber. The uninitiated say, he’s faking. How could they know? Water washes over a beached fish.”

  “Blessed is that intelligence into whose heart’s ear from heaven the sound of ‘come hither’ is coming. The defiled ear hears not that sound — only the deserving gets his desserts. Defile not your eye with human cheek and mole, for that emperor of eternal life is coming; and if it has become defiled, wash it with tears, for the cure comes from those tears. A caravan of sugar has arrived from Egypt; the sound of a footfall and bell is coming. Ha, be silent, for to complete the ode our speaking King is coming.”

  After many days of that, Bistami began to repeat the Quran sura by sura, returning often to the first sura, the Opening of the Book, the Fatiha, the Healer, which the guards would never fail to recognize:

  “Praise be to God, Lord of the worlds! The compassionate, the merciful! King on the day of reckoning! Thee only do we worship, and to Thee do we cry for help. Guide Thou us on the straight path, the path of those to whom Thou has been gracious; — and with whom Thou are not angry, and who go not ast
ray.”

  This great opening prayer, so appropriate to his situation, Bistami repeated hundreds of times per day. Sometimes he repeated only the prayer ‘Sufficient for us is God and excellent the Protector’; once he said it thirty-three thousand times in a row. Then he switched to ‘Allah is merciful, submit to Allah, Allah is merciful, submit to Allah’, which he repeated until his mouth was parched, his voice hoarse, and the muscles of his face cramped with exhaustion.

  All the while he swept the courtyard clear, and then all the rooms of the shrine, one by one, and he filled the lamps and trimmed the wicks, and swept some more, looking at the skies as they changed through the days, and he said the same things over and over, feeling the wind push through him, watching the leaves of the trees surrounding the shrine pulse, each in its own transparent light. Arabic is learning, but Persian is sugar. He tasted his food at sundown as he had never tasted food before. Nevertheless it became easy to fast, perhaps because it was winter and the days were a bit shorter. Fear still stabbed him frequently, causing his blood to surge in him at enormous pressure, and he prayed aloud in every waking moment, no doubt driving his guards mad with the droning of it.

  Eventually the whole world contracted to the tomb, and he began to forget the things that had happened before to him, or the things that presumably were still happening in the world outside the shrine grounds. He forgot them. His mind was becoming clarified, indeed everything in the world seemed to be becoming slightly transparent. He could see into leaves, and sometimes through them, as if they were made of glass; and it was the same with the white marble and alabaster of the tomb, which glowed as if alive in the dusks; and with his own flesh. “All save the face of God doth perish. To Him shall we return.” These were the words from the Quran embedded in the Mowlana’s beautiful poem of reincarnation,

  I died as mineral and became a plant,

  I died as plant and rose as animal,

  I died as animal and I was Man.

  Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?

  Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar

  With angels blessed; but even from angelhood

  I must pass on: “All save the face of God doth perish.”

  When I have sacrificed my angelic soul,

  I shall become what no mind has ever conceived,

  Oh, let me not exist! for non-existence

  Proclaims in organ tones: ‘To Him shall we return’.”

  He repeated this poem a thousand times, always whispering the last part, for fear the guards would report to Akbar that he was preparing himself for death.

  Days passed; weeks passed. He grew hungrier, and hypersensitive to all tastes and smells, then to the air and the light. He could feel the nights that stayed hot and steamy as if they were blankets swaddling him, and in the brief cool of dawn he walked around sweeping and praying, looking at the sky over the leafy trees growing lighter and lighter; and then one morning as dawn grew, everything began to turn into light. “O he, O he who is He, O he who is naught but He!” Over and over he cried these words out into the world of light, and even the words were shards of light bursting out of his mouth. The tomb became a thing of pure white light, glowing in the cool green light of the trees, the trees of green light, and the fountain poured its water of light up into the lit air, and the walls of the courtyard were bricks of light, and everything was light, pulsing lightly. He could see through the Earth, and back through time, over a Khyber Pass made of slabs of yellow light, back to the time of his birth, in the tenth day of Moharram, the day when the Imam Hosain, the only living grandson of Mohammed, had died defending the faith, and he saw that whether or not Akbar had him killed he would live on, for he had lived before many times, and was not going to be done when this life ended. “Why should I be afraid? When did I ever lose by dying?” He was a creature of light as everything else was, and had once been a village girl, another time a horseman on the steppes, another time the servant of the Twelfth Imam, so that he knew how and why the Imam had disappeared, and when he would return to save the world. Knowing that, there was no reason to fear anything. “Why should I be afraid? O he, O he who is He, sufficient is God and excellent the Protector, Allah the merciful, the beneficent!” Allah who had sent Mohammed on his isra, his journey into light, just as Bistami was being sent now, towards the ascension of miraj, when all would become a light utterly transparent and invisible.

  Understanding this, Bistami looked through the transparent walls and trees and earth to Akbar, across the city in his clear palace, robed in light like an angel, a man surely more than half angel already, an angel spirit that he had known in previous lives, and that he would know again in future lives, until they all came to one place and Allah rang down the universe.

  Except this Akbar of light turned his head, and looked through the lit space between them, and Bistami saw then that his eyes were black balls in his head, black as onyx; and he said to Bistami, We have never met before; I am not the one you seek; the one you seek is elsewhere.

  Bistami reeled, fell back in the corner made by the two walls.

  When he came to himself, still in a colourful glassine world, Akbar in the flesh stood there before him, sweeping the courtyard with Bistami’s broom.

  “Master,” Bistami said, and began to weep. “Mowlana.”

  Akbar stopped over him, stared down at him.

  Finally he put a hand to Bistami’s head. “You are a servant of God,” he said.

  “Yes, Mowlana.”

  “ ‘Now hath God been gracious to us’,” Akbar recited in Arabic.

  “ ‘For whoso feareth God and endureth, God verily will not suffer the reward of the righteous to perish.’ ”

  This was from Sura Twelve, the story of Joseph and his brothers. Bistami, encouraged, still seeing through the edges of things, including Akbar and his luminous hand and face, a creature of light pulsing through lives like days, recited verses from the end of the next sura, “Thunder”:

  “ ‘Those who lived before them made plots; but all plotting is controlled by God: He knoweth the works of every one.’ ”

  Akbar nodded, looking to Chishti’s tomb and thinking his own thoughts.

  “ ‘No blame be on you this day’,” he muttered, speaking the words Joseph spoke as he forgave his brothers.

  “ ‘Godwill forgive you, for He is the most merciful of those who show mercy.’ ”

  “Yes, mowlana. God gives us all things, God the merciful and compassionate, he who is He. O he who is He, O he who is He, O he who is He . . . “ With difficulty he stopped himself.

  “Yes.” Akbar looked back down at him again. “Now, whatever may have happened in Gujarat, I don’t wish to hear any more of it. I don’t believe you had anything to do with the rebellion. Stop weeping. But Abul Fazl and Shaikh Abdul Nabi do believe this, and they are among my chief advisers. In most matters I trust them. I am loyal to them, as they are to me. So I can ignore them in this, and instruct them to leave you alone, but even if I do that, your life here will not be as comfortable as it was before. You understand.”

  “Yes, master.”

  “So I am going to send you away

  “No, master!”

  “Be silent. I am going to send you on the haj.”

  Bistami’s mouth fell open. After all these days of endless talking, his jaw hung from his face like a broken gate. White light filled everything, and for a moment he swooned.

  Then colours returned, and he began to hear again: “ — you will ride to Surat and sail on my pilgrim ship, Ilahi, across the Arabian Sea to Jiddah. The waqf has generated a good donation to Mecca and Medina, and I have appointed Wazir as the mir haj, and the party will include my aunt, Bulbadan Begam, and my wife Salima. I would like to go myself, but Abul FazI insists that I am needed here.”

  Bistami nodded. “You are indispensable, master.”

  Akbar contemplated him. “Unlike you.”

  He removed his hand from Bistami’s head. “But the mir haj can always
use another cladi. And I wish to establish a permanent Timurid school in Mecca. You can help with that.”

  “But — and not come back?”

  “Not if you value this existence.”

  Bistami stared down at the ground, feeling a chill.

  “Come now,” the Emperor said. “For such a devout scholar as you, a life in Mecca should be pure joy.”

  “Yes, master. Of course.” But his voice choked on the words.

  Akbar laughed. “It’s better than beheading, you must admit! And who knows. Life is long. Perhaps you will come back one day.”

  They both knew it was not likely. Life was not long.

  “Whatever God wills,” Bistami murmured, looking around. This courtyard, this tomb, these trees, which he knew stone by stone, branch by branch, leaf by leaf — this life, which had filled a hundred years in the last month — it was over. All that he knew so well would pass from him, including this beloved awesome young man. Strange to think that each true life was only a few years long — that one passed through several in each bodily span. He said, “God is great. We will never meet again.”

  FIVE

  The Haj to Mecca

  From the port of Jiddah to Mecca, the pilgrims’ camels were continuous from horizon to horizon, looking as if they might continue unbroken all the way across Arabia, or the world. The rocky shallow valleys around Mecca were filled with encampments, and the mutton-greased smoke of cooking fires rose into the clear skies at sunset. Cool nights, warm days, never a cloud in the whitish blue sky, and thousands of pilgrims, enthusiastically making the final rounds of the haj, everyone in the city participating in the same ecstatic ritual, all dressed in white, accented by the green turbans in the crowd, worn by the sayyids, those who claimed direct descent from the Prophet: a big family, if the turbans were to be believed, all reciting verses from the Quran following the people in front of them, who followed those before them, and those before them, in a line that extended back nine centuries.