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.”