Jack was not, in general, a sigher of sighs, but now he sighed.
“Take inventory of your BATNA,” Surendranath suggested, eyeing Jack’s naked and lumpy form, “and meet me in an hour’s time at the Caravanserai.” And then he uttered words in the Marathi tongue, and the four Marathas (as Marathi-speakers were called) got their shoulders under the bamboo and hoisted the palanquin into the air. They spun the conveyance end-for-end in the middle of the vast street and trotted away.
Jack scratched a bug-bite, then another half an inch to the left, then forced himself to stop, before it got out of hand.
The clouded leopard emerged from the hospital, quiet as fog, and curled up in the middle of the street to blink at goings-on; her enormous protruding fangs shone like twin stars in the firmament of swirling dust.
Bearded vultures were raiding a butcher’s shop in the market. One of them pounded up into the air with all the grace of a porter lugging a side of beef up a staircase.
Jack trudged upwind, headed for the Triple Gate: a set of three arches at the end of the street. Behind him he heard a rustling commotion, approaching fast. By the time he could turn round to look, it had already overtaken him: a trio of bustards-long-legged black and white birds-disputing possession of some dripping morsel. They reminded Jack of the ostrich in Vienna. Tears came to his eyes, which astonished and annoyed him. He slapped himself in the face, swung wide around a huge waddling porcupine, and headed briskly for the Tin Darwaza, as the Triple Gate was called hereabouts.
THE TIN DARWAZA formed one end of the central square of “The House of Hell” (as Jahangir, the father of Shah Jahan, affectionately referred to Ahmadabad). This square-the Maidan Shah-ran for perhaps a quarter of a mile to the opposite end, which was walled off by a clutter of towers, balconies, pillars, arches, and toy fortifications: the Palace of the local King, whose name was Terror of the Idolaters. The middle of the square was mostly open so that rowzinders could practice their horsemanship and archery there, and parade for the amusement of Terror of the Idolaters and his wives. There were a few low undistinguished buildings where the kotwals held their tribunals and inflicted the bastinado on anyone who did not measure up to their standards of conduct. Jack avoided these.
Several Hindoo pagodas had once stood around the Maidan Shah, and they still did; but they were mosques now. Jack’s knowledge of local history was limited to what he’d picked up by talking to Dutch, French, and English traders. But he gathered that this Shah Jahan fellow had spawned a boy named Aurangzeb and despised him so thoroughly that he had made him King of Gujarat, which meant that he had had to come and reside in “the abode of sickness” (another one of Jahangir’s pet names for Ahmadabad) and continually do battle against the Marathas. Later Aurangzeb had returned the favor by forcibly overthrowing his father and tossing him into a prison cell in Agra. But in the meantime he’d had many years to kill in The Abode of Sickness and to hone his already keen dislike of all things Hindoo. So he had slaughtered a cow in the middle of the main Hindoo pagoda, defiling it forever, and then gone round with a sledgehammer and knocked the noses off all the idols for good measure. Now it was a mosque. Jack gazed into it as he walked by and saw the usual crowd of fakirs-perhaps two hundred of them-sitting on the marble pavement with their arms crossed behind their heads. Of these, some were mere novices. Other had been doing it for long enough that their joints had frozen that way. These had begging-bowls in front of them, never without a few rupees, and from time to time junior fakirs would bring them water or food.
Some fakirs were Hindoos. As their temples had been desecrated, these had no central place to congregate. Instead they were scattered around the Maidan Shah, under trees or in the lee of walls, performing various penances, some of which were more bizarre and some less bizarre than those of the Mohametan fakirs. The common objective of all fakirs was to get money out of people, and by that definition, Jack and Padraig were fakirs themselves.
After a few minutes’ search Jack found his partner seated between the two rows of trees that lined the Maidan Shah. Coincidentally, Padraig had chosen a spot along the south side of the square, beneath one of the jutting balconies of the Caravanserai. Or perhaps it was no coincidence. This was one of the more beautiful buildings in the city. It attracted the wealthy men who made Ahmadabad work, just as the Damplatz did in Amsterdam. Neither its beauty nor its wealth meant much to Jack and Padraig in their current estate. But when they loitered here they could watch caravans coming in from Lahore, Kabul, Kandahar, Agra, and places even farther distant: Chinamen who had brought their silks down from Kashgar over the wastes of Leh, and Armenians who had sallied far to the east from their ghetto in Isfahan, and Turkomans from Bokhara, looking like poorer and shorter versions of the mighty Turks who held sway over Algiers. The Caravanserai reminded them, in other words, that it was possible, at least in theory, to escape “The Thorn Bed” (as Jahangir had referred to Ahmadabad in his Memoirs).
Padraig was sitting crosslegged on a snatch of rug (or, to be precise, the coarse weavings that rugs came wrapped in). He had a captured mouse, a rock, and a bowl. When he saw an approaching pedestrian who looked like a Brahmin, he would pin the mouse down on the ground and then raise the rock as if he intended to smash it. Of course he never actually did smash the mouse, and neither did Jack, when Jack took his turn. If they smashed the mouse they would not get money from the Brahmin, and they would have to spend valuable time searching for a replacement mouse. But by assiduously threatening to smash the mouse all day long, they could collect a few paisas in ransom money.
“We’ve been presented-assuming I am reading the signs correctly-with an opportunity to get ourselves killed for money,” Jack announced.
Padraig looked up alertly.
A bloody ox femur fell out of the sky and smashed into the pavement, where it shattered. Two bearded vultures plunged down after it and began to squabble over the marrow.
“Here, or somewhere else?” Padraig inquired, watching the vultures coolly.
“Somewhere else.”
Padraig let the mouse run away.
THE CARAVANSERAI SPRAWLED along the southern side of the Maidan Shah, and had many balconies and lodges, all surrounded by delicately carved stone screens, but you got into it through an octagonal porch that was topped with an onion-dome. Four sides of the porch were open to the street and four were archways giving entry to the building itself, or to the yard in the middle, where queues of horses and camels were assembled or dispersed, and loaded or unloaded. It was in that yard that they found the palanquin of Surendranath. The Banyan himself was negotiating with a one-eyed Pathan for a couple of horses, and when he saw Jack’s and Padraig’s condition he decided to acquire some clothing for them, too. This turned out to be long tunics over loose breeches, and turbans to protect their heads.
“Now that we are out of the bug-feeding business we shall have to let our hair grow back,” Jack mused as they rode out of town along the Kathiawar Road, which is to say that they were going a little south of west.
“I could have gotten you European clothes with a little effort, but I did not want to spend any longer than was absolutely necessary in the Place of the Simoom,” hollered Surendranath, clutching the balusters of his palanquin as it was slugged by another wind-blast. Leaves of exotic trees, curled and spiked like the shells of sea-creatures, whipped past their heads and cartwheeled madly down the road. Jack and Padraig, on horses, were flanking Surendranath’s palanquin, and three of the Banyan’s aides were following behind on foot, leading a couple of asses laden with baggage.
“With our backs to the wind it is not so bad,” said Padraig; but only because he prided himself on making the best of bad situations. Indeed, the street to the Kathiawar Gate was lined with much that would have been scenic, if not for the dust in their eyes: vast gardens of wealthy Banyans and Moguls, mosques, pagodas, reservoirs, and wells.