I contend that wronged women do not die. They live on as witches, goddesses, spirits, echoes and stories. In the Quran, murdered girls speak in the hereafter too. The book of books says that on the day of judgement, a female infant will ask, “For which crime did you bury me alive?”
I was working on an index of thematically similar entries across codices when the order was given: Keep an account of the imperial hunt. I am no storyteller. Still, a royal command cannot be denied. If the same skills that brought me to sanctuary in the Great Moghul’s Kitabkhana, the largest house of books in the world, now bind me to the page to record the adventures of the hunt, so be it. To question the Great Moghul is to question why the sun rises in the east, why a lion hunts, why a daughter of Iblis cannot be trusted. I have packed into a leather satchel all the things I need: balms, oils, potions and other concoctions. Nibs like needles, paper-thin as a fly’s wings, powder that can be mixed with spit to make ink – implements to fashion miniature texts like this one.
I will set down what I can of the words and deeds of Amar Singh the warrior, Jingu the tracker and Qamaruz Zaman the artist as we travel through the greatest empire in the world, on the trail of the wondrous beasts it contains. Courier pigeons will carry these missives back to the one who sends them to us, the one I address, the one I hope to please. If he notices this lowly one at all in these pages, may he notice it as one notices the stirring of grain in a sack when a mouse passes.
Maya was the Great Moghul’s most beloved elephant. In times of war, she was tethered close to him, covered in matching metal armour, ready to execute the enemies he sentenced to death. She crushed their heads and removed their limbs with poise and refinement. In times of leisure, she moved with him, dressed in matching finery, from Delhi to Zikri to Nagra to Lahore, and all the minor stars in his dazzling necklace of cities too. She marched behind him in the imperial convoy as it wound through the plains and mountains, valleys and deserts, of the land of many rivers. The breastplates of the war elephants Maya marched between reflected the gems in her silk and velvet caparisons, her chains of thick gold. Maya’s ears were pierced with sapphire studs, and her iron anklets flashed emeralds. Yak tails brushed smooth hung from the gold filigree net draping her forehead. The net was wrought by the same goldsmiths who served the harem.
Maya’s diet was in line with her status. She ate roots and grasses gathered while dew formed on them and drank from freshly scoured barrels. The fruit offered to her was grown in rosewater. Any bull in the stable who did not please her was sent to a battlefront and not allowed to return; any that pleased her was allowed to please her. At the time of their union, Maya and her chosen mate were honoured by the presence of the Great Moghul on a lattice-covered platform in the wall of the breeding pen.
The Great Moghul was accompanied by a chosen begum clad in a gold filigree face covering and anklets matching Maya’s, with the night’s constellations hennaed onto her skin. Of such pleasure was Maya’s first calf born in Lahore. Shortly after the birth of her calf, Maya began to move away when the calf tried to nurse. She began rolling up her trunk at delicacies, pacing circles into the elephant ground by the Ravi. She grew restless on walks through Lahore’s gardens. The animal hakim and astrologer spent days poring over Maya’s chart and faeces. They advised a change of scenery as Scorpio moved into Mars.
But the weather was turning. The Great Moghul did not want to leave the warmth and security of his fort and harem or abandon the daily banquets in which alliances were made or renewed or the Thursday symposiums in which Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Jains, Jesuits and those wholly without a sense of the Creator debated metaphysics and exchanged opinions on more mundane matters, such as how and when to pray, or when it was acceptable to conceal one’s faith from other people. He ordered that Maya’s chains be unfastened, her enclosure opened, so she and the calf could wander at will. Mother and calf ambled through the courtyard where elephant fights took place, down the sloping ramps between Lahore Fort’s massive stone walls and out of its gates, past the brick-and-wood houses of the rich, through the thatched mud-brick shanties of the poor clustered around them like ticks, and into the countryside. They meandered through fields, villages, waterways and wilderness with only two mahouts for company. Messages were dispatched back to Lahore at regular intervals to bring the Great Moghul news of the elephant he cherished more than all the others. The winter winds blew harder, but the only concerning news of Maya was that she would not accept a caparison or let one be thrown over her calf. Then, some weeks after they left Lahore, a message came. The calf had been taken by a muggermuch on a bank of the Sutlej, and a madness had come upon Maya.
Excerpted with permission from Ferdowsnama, Shandana Minhas, Penguin India.
