The Peacock Throne

Chapter 1

The Talisman

It was a strange thing, surviving.

One moment, Esh­aal had been dead to the world. The next, she was simply . . . not.

She was grateful, of course, to not be dead. She had fully expected that the last thing she’d see in this life was the peeling paint of her bedchamber, now a sickroom. Indeed, when she had first realized that she had khwabida fever, she had been more put out about the temporary discomfort of her symptoms than the near-­certain death sentence. If suffering with a magical disease meant she had an outside chance of breaking free from the poor-­unlucky-­orphan side-glances she got from many of her relatives, she would take it. And dying from that magical disease—­

Well, Esh­aal had always loved a good tragedy.

Three weeks had passed since she’d woken up, though, and it seemed her body was beginning to recover. She had regained a little of the weight the fever had stolen from her, her kameezes no longer hanging limply over flattened curves, the glow in her wheatish skin restored. Her long brown-­black hair was not falling out as much when her cousins brushed it down her back for her, and her dark, wide-­set eyes were starting to glimmer with their usual sharpness, the return of which her aunts noted with some disappointment. But even this far removed from her fever, she couldn’t remember doing anything to break herself free of it.

Perhaps that was why she couldn’t speak of what she had seen in her dreams, why she feared they were still there, somewhere, waiting for her. Perhaps that was why her grip on the waking world still felt tenuous, why she sometimes caught herself thinking that this world was an illusion, too empty to sustain existence. Why she sometimes felt it flickering in her sight, as though she were staring too hard at it over the tip of a flame.

It would have been so much simpler, for everyone, if she had simply died. The way she was supposed to, twice over. So why hadn’t she? What was the point of surviving? What was she supposed to do with this life she had been given?

Now, seated somewhat precariously on the cushioned wooden swing of the haveli’s inner courtyard, with most of the Hamid Khan household staring obliquely in her direction, she finally had an answer.

For this.

Her father’s barsi.

“Fifteen years,” said a voice with a note of unmistakable authority, “since our Munawar was taken from us.” This was Taya Abba, Esh­aal’s eldest uncle and the head of the family. He sat on a simple woven armchair someone had dragged for him into the middle of the stormy blue-­and-gray tiled courtyard. The early afternoon sun shone on his bald spot, sweat and absolutely not a tear gleaming on his sunken cheek. “Fifteen years since he was forced to leave his wife’s dead body behind in Dhillika in order to save their daughter.”

When Esh­aal was a little girl, she hadn’t understood why no one talked about her parents. She had feared this meant they had been bad people who had done bad things, and that to speak of them was to bring shame on the rest of her family, and especially, perhaps, on her. So she learned to pretend, like her uncles and aunts and older cousins all seemed to, that she had never had any parents. She had emerged fully formed out of a lotus blossom. She had been deposited as a perfect infant on the roof by a laggar falcon carrying her in her beak. She washed up in front of the wrought iron gate of Hamid Khan Haveli during the monsoon, propelled by a beautiful green-­gold tail.

She knew now what had happened to them, of course, and why the Hamid Khans could never bring themselves to speak of them. They’d told her when she was four years old, her parents already two years in the ground. Through all her pretending, all the stories she told herself to imbue her life in the zenana with some measure of magic, she did not exactly have leave to forget.

“With his dying breaths,” Taya Abba went on, “Munna made me swear to raise his daughter as if she were my own.”

His gaze found Esh­aal on the swing hanging near the carved wooden double doors—­her rounded features already drawn, her once-­incisive gaze dulled and trained studiously downward. The momentum of her body made her sway gently over the floor, whose tiles blurred in her vision into a remarkably gloomy lake. If she dared stretch her leg out, the waves might grab her by the ankle and drag her into their depths.

She did not dare.

“It is by God’s grace,” her uncle continued, “that my promise is not yet broken.”

“Thanks be to God,” murmured the Hamid Khans.

Esh­aal bit down on her own tongue. God forbid your promise break if I die.

But the Hamid Khans needed Munawar’s daughter to commemorate his barsi. To embody the promises, spoken and unspoken, that they had abided by for fifteen years. They needed their talisman of death. They were never going to let her die, khwabida fever be damned. They would never allow her a tragedy of her own.

Stray strands of her hair had slipped out of her great white dupatta, her dress of mourning. She didn’t let herself brush them out of her eyes. She just swallowed down her doubts, her annoyance, her restlessness, her gnawing fear that she was the one who was hollow, not the world, that she really was nothing, just an empty husk to be filled up with her family’s self-satisfaction and drained when they no longer needed, or wanted, to remember why she had darkened their doorstep fifteen years ago, and said what she was expected to say.

“A thousand thanks be to God.”

Empty as she was, Esh­aal did not have it in her to be upset about all that had befallen her, survival included. That would be like railing against the sun for rising. Fate was not something lucky orphans, or the unlucky ones for that matter, could change just because they willed it in the quiet of the night.

So she no longer willed it.

She was only seventeen, and long before she had fallen ill, her nights of dreaming had already ended.

Taking Esh­aal’s thanks as a signal, Taya Abba nodded once and then pushed up from his chair, gesturing for one of his sons to take it back inside. The rest of the Hamid Khans rose as well and began to form straight rows across the courtyard. Esh­aal slid off the swing, her worn chappals slapping against the floor, and took her place in one of the last rows, with the rest of the girls of the household. As the afternoon prayers began, the Hamid Khans stood and bowed and kneeled as one. Esh­aal didn’t pray out loud, but in the final stage of the group’s devotions, she said in her head what she knew to say, the prayers for all those who pass from this world: Protect him from harm and forgive his sins. Ease the pain of those left behind.

But she had another invocation she sent heavenward. She’d been adding it for years, ever since she understood what she was supposed to be doing on this day, at this time, in this company. It had not yet been granted, but she had just recently been turned away from death’s door: Miracles were in the air. Perhaps this was the year her dua, too, came true.

You have kept me alive for all these years. Now let it mean something. At least to me, if nothing else.

With a final blessing from Taya Abba, the Hamid Khans completed their prayers, righting the potted plants and rearranging the furniture they had displaced. Esh­aal stayed cross-­legged on the ground, staring into the dry central fountain like the picture of piety. It was better to bake in the afternoon heat than gather in the zenana’s great room with her aunts and cousins and be subject to their scrutiny. She already was different from the Hamid Khans in so many ways: in temperament, in the precarity of her circumstances, even in her appearance, with her complexion a deeper tan and her features more rounded than the elegant angles of most of her relatives; she could not give them the satisfaction of looking her in the eye now and remembering that she was indeed nothing but her father’s yet-­reverberating echo. After all, a talisman’s value was in its continued existence, not necessarily in its shine.

She didn’t know what she was, or why she was alive, but she didn’t want that to be all she was. She could not exist to feed her family’s pity.

Then she noticed, in the western corner of the courtyard, a manservant from the mardana who had come to talk to Taya Abba. From her vantage point, she could see the look on the servant’s face, and increasingly on her uncle’s. Not the faraway melancholy of those remembering the dead. Something more immediate. When Tayi Ammi, her eldest aunt and Taya Abba’s wife, sidled toward them, all thoughts of avoiding the rest of the Hamid Khans fled Esh­aal’s mind. She clambered to her feet and darted through the emptying courtyard, loitering around the curve of the fountain so the wind carried their muttering her way.

“. . . chicken after all, so we can serve him something . . .” Tayi Ammi was saying, her voice surprisingly sour. “Thompson Sahib only eats meat . . .”

The magistrate is coming here?

“Do what you must. We cannot keep him waiting.” Taya Abba squared his shoulders, exhaled deeply, and headed into the men’s quarters. Esh­aal watched her aunt’s melancholy harden into resolve as she turned and marched back in the opposite direction, toward the gate guarding the zenana.

Esh­aal plopped down on the edge of the fountain, unfazed by the thump of her body’s impact against the hot sandstone. The magistrate is coming here.

Here was, of course, a very broad word. The magistrate, to whom the Berang government had invested the rule of the town of Lairath and its surrounding villages, would be received in the mardana, where Esh­aal and all the other girls and women were not, and could not be. The outside world did not intrude on the women’s quarters; whatever Esh­aal knew about it she had gleaned from her aunts’ gossip and her uncles’ and male cousins’ somewhat more hands-­on experience.