1 a vizier's daughter - Hazara.net

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A VIZIER’S DAUGHTER – A TALE OF THE HAZARA WAR
spent in unobserved, apparently unappreciated, obscurity, became now
a person of paramount importance. The world seemed to have died to
the Chief Secretary in her death, and he had no wish to live.
He entirely neglected his business, and never left his house for thirt y
days, except to pay a daily visit to his dead wife’s grave. Oh, if her
lifeless cla y could but have been sensible of all this, what joy would
not have been hers, what compensation for the loss of life – mere life,
indeed! But all unconsciously to himself, and quite unnoticed, there
was an unobserved hand that was smoothing over the sad event for him.
His ordinary creature comforts had indeed been attended to from the
very first, clumsily perhaps, according to his fancy, or, at least, not in
the accustomed way, but still attended to.
“Ho there! is there no one who will give me water?” he had cried one
night as he tossed on his bed in restlessness and fever.
There was a gentle movement outside, as of one who sought for shoes
upon the flags, and presently a woman’s voice said, “Agha, here is
water, are you ill?”
“I cannot sleep,” he said. “I am so hot, and all my bones are aching,
and I am, oh, so weary,” and after a pause, something like a sob, “How
I wish that I were dead.”
The girl said nothing, but knelt down beside him, gently pressed his
back and shoulders in the soothing way that Easterns understand so
well; then his arms and feet, and then his head. Gradually he tossed
less, and became more comfortable. The clock struck two. He was
asleep, and at sunrise he was still asleep, but she did not wake him for
his prayers. He must have rest, she thought.
But with the ingratitude of man, he never noticed her; never for one
moment dreamt that his earthly selfish petition had been heard, and
granted, though not in the exact form that he had expected. For,
behold, a lamb was caught in the thicket, ready to be sacrificed, and
willing, too. Gul Begum had found her master, and was willing – glad
to be his slave.
* Afghans and man y others among the less educated and therefore more
superstitious Mohamedans b elieve that if they go to the grave of some man
who during his life was noted for his piet y and charit y, and there relent
certain p ortions of the Koran “on his name,” that they will obtain some
immediate temporal blessing. The idea is, that to repeat these passages of
the Koran is an act of piet y, and that if this is done “in the name of” a dead
man, that the act is counted to him for righteousness, and so shortens his