Himalayan Passage

By Jean Smith

As a sixteenth century Himalayan mountain girl, Tara knew a husband would be chosen for her. One day, Mughals riding sleek Arabian horses arrived seeking a woman prophesized to be one of the sultan's wives. Fear and excitement mingle in Tara's heart as she realizes she is the chosen one.

Tara is taken to live in sultan Ibrahim's desert fortress. Since assuming power at eighteen, Ibrahim had established a vast empire where the arts flourished and religious tolerance meant peace. There, Tara joins Ibrahim's wives, each representing a region and religion, and quickly grows to love the exotic people and their rituals.

Ibrahim is consumed by Tara's beauty and passion, and she quickly becomes his exclusive nightly companion. Tara's intelligence bonds her to Ibrahim's very first wife, Kiren. Together, Tara and Kiren serve Ibrahim, Tara as his lover and Kiren as his political advisor.

As jealousy simmers among Ibrahim's wives, a southern governor, Bhaji, builds power by encouraging Hindu nationalism against Ibrahim's empire. Working against both time and karma, Tara, Kiren, and Ibrahim must devise a strategy to confront the tide of unrest. The task seems insurmountable as culture, religion, and ethnic politics collide in this riveting story of love, faith, and karmic tragedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 17, 2008
• ISBN: 9780595607457

Jean Smith

I attended St Marys High School in Downpatrick that is where my interest for writing grew; I was thirteen when I entered a writing competition for a play I was lucky to win and my mum Maureen Mageean went with me to recording studio in England and it was screened on television in 1965, I worked in the catering trade which I loved and later on met my husband and we had a lovely son named Gary who married Michelle and they have given me three lovely grand children Rayan Shannon and Amy; I have continued writing through out the years and since retiring I now have the time to sit down and write.

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Copyright © 2008 by Jean Smith

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-0-595-48650-2 (pbk)

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The hands of the dead wives at the Amber Fort. Photo by Jean Smith

The Time of Himalayan Passage

Long ago, a young emperor transformed a continent into a vast empire where the arts flourished and religious tolerance was an instrument of peace. This distant place was the land now known as India, ruled by the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great during the second half of the sixteenth century. Akbar’s world is the tapestry into which Himalayan Passage is woven.

Himalayan Passage is a work of fiction. Although some of the events and characters are composites drawn from Indian and Nepali history over several centuries, none is—or is intended to be—historical representation.

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 1

Those are the hands of Ibrahim’s dead wives, murmured Sheela. Before holy men burned his wives, they made casts of their right hands to just where their bracelets rested. They mounted the hands here so women wouldn’t forget their duty. That was, umm, three years ago.

The sun-scorched wall shimmered as Tara stared at the hands. Eerily pale against the massive sandstone arch, they had looked from a distance like an abstract tile decoration. Only when she neared the entrance to the Amber Fort did she notice the spread fingers and realize that the pattern was hands. She gazed at the irregular, eye-level tier. It had one more hand than the others because the hands in that row were small, like hers. As she stood framed in the arch, Tara’s gray eyes searched the face of her companion.

"Sheela, why? " Tara asked.

Sheela’s sari rustled as she wiped the perspiration from her face and caught her breath after the hard climb. "When the report of Ibrahim’s defeat and death was brought to the Amber Fort, his wives and the messenger had to die. That is our way."

How did they die?

"Even though Ibrahim’s funeral pyre was not here so that the wives could do sati by being cremated on it, they had to be burned to death anyway—"

Burned to death? Tara interrupted.

"Yes, of course. Don’t they practice sati in your part of the mountains? Here a Hindu wife shows her devotion for her husband by being cremated with him. Sheela lowered her voice. Sati also ensures that no wife will be responsible for her husband’s death, since she would have to die too."

But Ibrahim wasn’t dead, said Tara thickly.

No one knew that for nine days. Ibrahim had retreated and gone with reinforcements to the northern empire. By the time we found out, it was too late. His wives had been dead for five days.

"Did all of his wives have to die?" Tara asked.

Fortunately, his three political wives and Kiren, the older wife who is his confidante, were at the Summer Palace, far away in the hills. The mistake was discovered before they too died.

"And I’ve been brought here to be a new wife, to replace one of those women who died needlessly. Ibrahim the Great, indeed. Tara spoke the ruler’s nickname with such vehemence that Sheela could see, in the harsh sunlight, the spittle from her mouth. Why wasn’t I told about the murdered wives? Did my father know about them?"

The question hung unanswered as Sheela gazed at this haughty young mountain woman, staring defiantly at the hands. She gave Tara a reproving look for her sarcasm, then shuffled back to wait with the rest of the escorts. They stood silently by the gilded ceremonial palanquin, the enclosed litter that Tara refused to be carried in. When Tara first saw the silk, the gold braid, the encrustation of precious stones, she strode off ahead of the group saying she wasn’t a kumari, a child-goddess to be lifted up and locked away. The six puzzled litter bearers had carried the palanquin empty the whole way from the Himalayas to Jodhpur.

Tara stood a moment longer, her fists clenched on her hips, and muttered, What a welcome! She turned and looked back down the steep flagstone walk she had just climbed. From across the desert plateau, the Amber Fort had looked like part of the reddish mountain that jutted abruptly 300 feet above the city of Jodhpur. As she walked through the alleys of shanties and markets at its base, the crenellated battlements had come into focus, until finally she could see the slits for the muskets and cannons Ibrahim had brought here to protect his fortress and his empire.

Climbing up to the Amber Fort, Tara had been surprised by the angled turns of the flagstone path, so much sharper than the switchbacks in her mountains. Anyone trying to invade the Amber Fort had to follow this steep, zigzag maze between high walls and would be constantly exposed in narrow spaces. No one had ever breached the fortress, even during the hundreds of years before Ibrahim had moved cannons to the battlements.

The path for several hundred feet traversed the steepest part of the mountain, below the main battlements and above the Jodhpur bazaar. From above, the earthen roofs of the crowded shanties looked like a dry riverbed whose clay has cracked in the unrelenting sun. On a hillock in the distance, a large tower made of mud bricks rose above the fl at roofs.

What’s that tower? Tara asked Sheela.

The minaret of the mosque. Ibrahim goes there every week to pray. It’s much more impressive from here than it is up close. It’s not much more than a courtyard surrounded by an arcade of palm trunks. There are not even any statues or paintings—it’s against their belief to depict their Prophet. But all the Muslim men go there on Fridays.

As Tara had climbed higher, she had seen pools where rainwater was gathered during the monsoon and, near the top, a settlement of perhaps sixty stuccoed houses that had been hidden from Jodhpur by the mountain and fortress.

Sheela, why are those houses blue?

Brahmins paint their houses light blue as a sign of their high caste—unlike the stone houses in your kingdom. Many of Ibrahim’s officials live here. But his closest advisers and his guards live inside the walls of the Amber Fort, in the City Palace Ibrahim built inside.

The palace towers, with their keyhole-shape arches, had come into view as Tara approached the main gate—the arch with the ghostly hands, the arch with huge, iron-studded doors gaping. Tara had to hold her shawl in place with one hand when she tried to look up beyond the massive walls to the three levels of arched windows above. On outside brackets, she saw hunched silhouettes so still she thought they were statues. Then one of the black vultures lurched off its perch and heavily flapped until it caught a warm-air current and began to circle slowly.

Tara was unexpectedly pierced by homesickness. She remembered her vultures, the Himalayan griffons who drifted so high above her village, seven-foot wings spread to ride the mountain winds. She thought of how she and her mother used to watch them with wonder, and what her mother had said about Tara’s name.

"I almost named you for them, Didi, because I want you to soar. But when the Tibetans came to build their monastery in our village, they told me about their devas, about Tara—the compassionate one—and I knew that I couldn’t wish more for you than that. I hope your name will be your life."

"But, Ama, no one else here is named Tara. I’ve never heard of anyone named Tara."

No. It’s a very special name. It’s the name that we’ll use—you and I—and if you ever need an ordinary name, we’ll give you one. Tara wondered if she would get that new name now.

The soft smile on Tara’s face abruptly shattered into a grimace as she remembered those other vultures, the ones who had given her precious brother, the boy-monk Pema, sky burial after he died of the bad-water illness. She shuddered and drew her veil around her in vain trying to dispel the palpable presence of death that had surrounded her since she first looked at the dead wives hands.

Tara turned away from the ghoulish reminders on the arch and took a few hesitant steps into the Amber Fort. As she passed out of the shadow of the gate, she was startled by the sudden peal of a flute behind her. She stumbled on the flagstones and almost fell.

Just inside the gate, two men were squatting before a pair of fraying round baskets. As the bearded man played his flute, two cobras rose sinuously from the baskets, swaying and arching, tongues darting, black beady eyes fixed on her. The second man, wearing tattered clothes and a dirty white turban wound the way a man from the south would coil it, glowered at her so malevolently that she shivered despite the heat.

Sheela saw that malice too and took Tara by the elbow. Come along, now. You must be parched from the desert heat after a lifetime in the mountains. We must get you some limewater and fruit and a cool bath. Then you must rest, for tomorrow you meet your husband.

Tara turned to the older woman and asked, in an uncharacteristically plaintive voice, Sheela, will you stay with me? Or will you go down to one of those blue houses after you deliver me to the Muslim?

"Please don’t call him that. He may be a Mughal from the north, but he has made this kingdom safe for all of us. Yes, I will stay with you as your companion and personal servant for as long as you’ll have me."

"Then you’d better plan to live to be a very old ama, Tara said, affectionately using the familiar word for mother."

Tara was relieved to learn that Sheela would be staying with her. During the twenty-seven-day journey to Jodhpur, she had become quite fond of the wise and good-natured woman who had been her companion and teacher, patiently answering her endless stream of questions. Despite Tara’s attempts to seem confident, everything in her world had changed so suddenly that she desperately needed a friend, even a new friend. She had always known that a husband would be chosen for her—all marriages were arranged—but she could never have imagined that she would become the wife of the sultan and would be taken so far from her mountain kingdom to live in a fortress in the desert. Tara did not know it at the time, but the bewildering transformation from headstrong mountain girl to royal consort began when Ibrahim’s emissaries were spotted cantering along the ridge trail near Durbar, her village, raising dust just as the Tibetan traders did. But these heavily armed Mughals rode sleek Arabian horses, not stocky, rough-coated mountain ponies with clanging bells. The strangers followed the trail into the high, boulder-strewn valley, circled the blue lake, and clattered into the village. They dismounted in the square, near the well, and began to water their horses, scattering the women bathing and washing clothes there. A huge, grizzled man named Akkan, the Mughals’ leader, looked across the square at the palace and asked in a heavily accented dialect who ruled this kingdom. He was taken to Maila, Tara’s father.

Maila always welcomed visitors—in his isolated kingdom, he hungered for news about other lands and rulers, especially one as powerful as the Sultan Ibrahim—so it was no surprise that he invited the Mughals for a meal the next day. As they lounged on cushions, making small talk, servants brought dishes of aromatic vegetables, rice, bananas, and a flat bread still warm from the stone in the fireplace where it was baked. The Mughals responded with surprise and delight when they were served little cubes of meat in a pungent sauce.

It’s wonderful to have meat again. In Jodhpur, there are a few bony cows trying to stay alive on desert scrub, but they are holy to the people there. Ibrahim insists that we follow local customs, so we rarely have a chance to eat meat. I’m surprised that you eat it here, Akkan commented.

Maila explained, We too hold cows sacred. But we also believe that the buffalo is different and has been given to us for nourishment. Even the mountain people who sacrifice buffaloes to the gods eat the meat. Our growing season is so short and our winters so harsh that we would starve if we didn’t eat the buffalo meat we cure. That’s what you’re eating now.

They talked politely for a while about Durbar, but Maila wanted to hear about the world beyond the mountains. Akkan obliged. "It’s a time of changes everywhere. In our grandfather’s grandfather’s time, sailing ships from distant kingdoms tried to reach us by sailing west. When they reached land, the mariners thought they had reached this empire, but they really had found a new world far, far to the east. Since they hadn’t fallen off the edge of the earth, now these sailing men are using their great ships to settle in that new world, but they also are sailing east to reach us and traveling along our coasts."

Why do they come to Ibrahim’s empire? What do they want? asked Maila.

They want to trade. They especially want fabrics, ivory, and spices.

Are they warlike? Have they tried to conquer people here?

Akkan paused before he answered, I don’t think they want to conduct war with weapons, but they have sent envoys to Ibrahim to inquire about establishing trading companies. Somehow, I think that their gold will be the saber that cuts into our empire’s heart. Ibrahim does not trust them.

Akkan broke off when servants brought in a steaming pot of tea. As it was poured into his earthen cup, he could see bits of clove and orange rind floating in it. As he lifted the cup, he could also smell the nutmeg and cinnamon. But when he tasted it, the complex sweetness of spices was penetrated by pepper and the saltiness of butter. His reverie was interrupted by another question from Maila.

Tell me about Ibrahim. Is all well in his empire?

The first years of his rule went smoothly, as I’m sure you know. He was still beardless when his father, Salim, died and Ibrahim had to take over conquered lands. But as young as he is, he’s wise. His land and tax reforms are popular, he permits freedom of religious worship, and until the Persian invaders came back the only problems were a few border disputes.

Akkan talked for a while longer about what had happened during the invasion, about the false report of Ibrahim’s death and the burning of his wives. But the longer Akkan discussed political issues, the more impatient he seemed to become. Unexpectedly he changed the subject: We have come here on a specific mission, related to the death of Ibrahim’s wives. The men in the room grew silent, and Akkan continued: "When Ibrahim was on his way to the Summer Palace, he passed through a small settlement where a Hindu holy man lives—a great seer, a great diviner. Ibrahim was still grief-stricken about the death of his wives. Sati is a Hindu practice, not his belief, and he was inconsolable that he had been the cause of their deaths. For all his courage as a warrior, he has a tender heart. He sought solace from this sadhu, who had wandered throughout the empire and the mountain kingdoms as a mendicant.

"By candlelight, the holy man performed a ritual and went into a trance. Visions came to him, and he saw that a gray-eyed woman would give Ibrahim the son that he so longed for. The sadhu foretold that we would find her high in the mountains, in a village on a glacial lake with snow peaks behind, a village with slate roofs and prayer flags and a stone palace with carved wooden window frames—a village where there is a girl with gray eyes. He described a test that only the girl in the prophecy can pass. Then the sadhu began to tremble and tear at his hair. He wouldn’t tell Ibrahim what else he had seen—only that Ibrahim would know great joy, as well as great sorrow of his own karmic making.

Because my regiment used to be stationed in the Himalayan foothills and I speak some of the mountain dialects, I have commanded the search team. We’ve been exploring the villages of the snow peaks for almost two years. We must find the gray-eyed woman and give her the test of the prophecy. Do you know who she is?

Akkan saw a darkness come over this slight, genial man who ruled a small kingdom in the Himalayas. With a grief so heavy he could hardly breathe, Maila answered, Yes, Akkan. I know who she is. She is my daughter, my only surviving child, my beloved Tara.

CHAPTER 2

Father, will the test hurt?

"No, Tara, not at all. Akkan said the sadhu had spent time in the mountains, and the test seems to have come from a Tibetan practice. When Tibetans locate a child they believe is a reincarnate lama—even the Dalai Lama—they show him five or six things like begging bowls, only one of which had belonged to the dead lama. They say a reincarnate, as young as even a year old, can pick out all the things that had belonged to the lama. Your test will be to identify things that belong to Ibrahim even though he is still alive."

But, Father, what if I fail?

You won’t fail.

But what if I fail on purpose, so that I can stay in Durbar?

"You will not fail. The words were spoken slowly, like a command, and Tara could see the flush spread on her father’s cheeks as he continued, Most women your age are already married and have at least one child, but every time we began to arrange an alliance, you turned into a mewling baby yourself—whining until you got your way. All you ever want to do is run free in the mountains, like a self-indulgent child. His voice, which had risen to almost a shout, dropped, and he said deliberately, bitterly, Well, Tara, you have no choice this time. You finally have to grow up and assume the responsibilities that all women must. You will pass the test, and you will marry Sultan Ibrahim, and you will be a dutiful wife."

Tara was stunned by her father’s outburst. A slim man with a gentle smile and eyes that seemed too large for his narrow face, Maila had been shrouded by grief since his son, Pema, had died. He had been noticeably tense and noncommunicative since the Mughals came, but nothing had prepared her for the fury underlying his words. He had told her nothing of his conversation with Akkan except that a sadhu had seen a new wife for Ibrahim in a vision and Akkan believed that Tara is the woman. But even as Maila had told Tara that she might become a sultana of a vast empire, there was no joy in his voice—just a sense of foreboding that made Tara wonder if he was hiding something from her. Now her uneasiness turned to dread, and for once she did not try to cajole him to get her way. But in her mind, a shadow of a question had been cast: Could I be reincarnated too? Tara’s mother helped her dress. Neither of them spoke, though the two women with gray eyes exchanged long and tender looks as they adjusted the dark-green sari Tara had been told to wear. Just as they were fastening the shawl, Maila stormed into the chamber.

What’s taking you so long? They’re waiting. Hurry up. His curtness was unusual, and he paced back and forth as the dark liner was drawn around Tara’s eyes. When she turned to face him, he softened and said with palpable sadness, "I haven’t seen your eyes made up like that since you were a tiny, tiny girl—our little kumari, all made up for the ceremony of the Living Goddess."

Tara wondered if the clothes and makeup she had been told to put on made her some kind of a kumari for the Mughals. As Tara and her father walked toward the West Hall, where Akkan and the emissaries were waiting, she thought about what her mother had once told her about kumaris. Ama had raised her voice dramatically, the way she did when she told Tara stories about evil spirits, and had told her little daughter: "Many kingdoms have a Living Goddess. She’s a very young girl, a virgin, wearing heavy eye makeup, who is carried from her palace to festivals in a gold chariot because her feet are not allowed to touch the ground. Kumaris have to watch grisly animal sacrifices without fl inching and must stay all night alone in a temple with the

Reviews for Himalayan Passage

[jasonpettus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)As regular readers know, this fall I plan on undertaking for the first time in my life a major study regarding the history and culture of India, with me slowly adding titles to my reading list whenever I have a convenient excuse to do so. So how cool, then, that one of the books I received during a recent huge shipment by print-on-demand outfit iUniverse (and seriously, they sent something like eight books all in one big box, so keep your eye out for reviews of them all this spring) would happen to be the historical novel Himalayan Passage, which just happens to take the real events from the Akbar reign of the subcontinent's Mughal Empire years (roughly AD 1400 to 1700, the same as the European Renaissance), then twists them a bit to form a rousing adventure tale and love story. Because make no mistake, this is no scholarly tome, nor does it aim to be; in fact, its author Jean Smith is not a history professor but rather a veteran new-age Buddhist, one who's been traveling repeatedly for years through the Himalayans herself, and who obviously was inspired to write this as a way to give flight to the romantic thoughts she herself has had while in the region. So better maybe to think of this instead as a companion piece to those scholarly books out there, say for example the one on the Taj Mahal I just reviewed here a few weeks ago, a book that transcribes the vivid dreams of color and dance and desert heat that one has when reading the textbooks themselves; and in that, then, this book is stunning in its ability to transport the reader to another time and place, even if it admittedly has the habit of veering into chick-lit territory at times too.In fact, maybe it would help to start with just the most basic history lesson about these times, just the absolute least amount of information you need to know in order to understand a novel like this (i.e. the same amount of information I know), starting with this fact: that until the British occupation of the subcontinent in the 1800s, what we now know as India, Pakistan and central Asia was not a small group of sovereign nations at all, but rather dozens and sometimes hundreds of constantly warring little kingdoms, empires, city-states and more (yes, just like Germany until the 1800s too). And that's why India is such a profoundly diverse place, despite everyone there now collectively known as "Indians" -- from the desert-dwelling Hindu nomads of the south, to the spartan, militaristic Muslims of the northwest, to the cold-weather "mystical hillbillies" of the northeast (next-door to such infamous Asian spiritual regions as Tibet and Nepal). For those who don't know, in fact, Ghengis Khan (or "Asia's Alexander the Great") comes from this rural region of central Asia himself, just north of the actual Himalayan mountain range, in his case eventually traveling east in order to take over China; it was some of his descendants who moved south and formed the Mughal Empire, which over the course of roughly 250 years ended up dominating at its height around 75 percent or so of what we now know as India and Pakistan.But of course, this meant subduing all those dozens of small kingdoms (or rajas as they're known there); and one of the ways the Mughal emperors did this was by taking on dozens of official wives, one princess from each of these little fiefdoms, thereby giving that particular petty little territorial leader a new imperial title and new imperial power, an annual imperial stipend, regular access to the emperor (who after all was now his in-law), the opportunity to still rule over his local people and keep living in his local castle, etc. And so that's what Smith's book is about, a fictional look at one of these regional princesses from a far-north mini-kingdom, who is eventually sent to Delhi to be a part of the royal harem of "Ibrahim" (Smith's fictional version of a thirty-something Akbar). And this is very smart of Smith to do, because it gives her all kinds of things to talk about within this slim 200-page book, and thus keep the story rolling along at a fast clip; it's not only a look at her original simple mountain home, up in the Himalayans themselves, but also a detailed look at the machinations inside the Mughal court, a grrl-power look at a rebellious late teen not happy at all about this forced arranged marriage, plus a surprisingly erotic look at how she and Ibrahim end up falling deeply in love anyway.It is what it is, and I'm not going to pretend it's anything else; I'm sure one of the reasons I myself was so charmed by it, for example, is precisely because I have a high interest in this subject right now, and am actively looking for excuses these days to be swept away by tales of silk saris and stone lattices, of midnight treks on panting Arabian horses through enemy territory, of epic family feuds worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy. (For those who don't know, the empire fell apart in the 1700s over a series of family civil wars regarding succession; that's what allowed the French Empire to conquer the region so easily in the late 1700s, and then the British Empire in the 1800s.) Because make no mistake, Himalayan Passage has all of that, deftly mixing the melodrama with the actual dry boring details of the real time period, becoming by the end like a grown-up version of one of those David Macaulay "edutainment" books. And that's why I say that a novel like this makes for a perfect companion piece to a textbook covering the same topic; because the book is constantly touching on the real details from this period, but not in the full way a scholarly volume does, and of course let's not forget with many of the details fictionalized and changed, as to present a more neatly-structured tale by the end. And again, I think this was smart of Smith to do, because it then lets her play hard and fast with the actual historical account, in order to sometimes spice up elements of the story that otherwise would've probably been quite dull. Take for one example the "Star Room" from Smith's novel, a lush bedroom and sorta temple to carnality, located in the rooftop of the highest tower of the emperor's entire fortress complex; I have a feeling that it's based on a similar "royal bedroom" from the actual Akbar reign, but that the real-life room wasn't the romantically perfect little thing as the fictional one on display here. (Jewels embedded in the ceiling! The Kama Sutra painted in a big circle around the bed! A 360-degree panoramic view of the entire kingdom! Sheesh, who could resist an emperor's libidinous advances under circumstances like those?!)I have to admit, for being a company that makes no real editorial decisions when it comes to which authors they publish, I've been pleasantly surprised and impressed by nearly every book iUniverse has sent my way over the last six months; and Himalayan Passage is no exception, which if I didn't mention it is also just as detailed a look at the major religions that compete for attention in that region as it is everything else. (In fact, this is mostly what Smith is known for, having already published eight nonfiction books in the past regarding the subject of Buddhism.) Although certainly there's a decent-sized crowd out there more apt to roll their eyes at such a novel, I myself was thoroughly entertained by it from nearly the first page to the last, and happily recommend it today to any fan of adventure tales, romance novels, or detailed looks at this fascinating period of history. More titles like these, please, iUniverse!Out of 10: 8.8