He is an amiable fellow and he will talk for hours—of silks, of jewels (for in those luxuries he deals), or still more eloquently of Peshawar, where the blue peaks of the Hindu Kush let their lips caress the sky as though it were the cheek of some siren. But mention the barbarian with corn-colored hair, or the blue-eyed Punjabi, and he will suddenly become as uncommunicative as the tongueless fakir who sits before the Anna Chuttra and mutely pleads for alms.
For once, at a time not long past, a mysterious hand reached out of nowhere and touched him with two equally as mysterious fingers. The barbarian with corn-colored hair was one finger, the blue-eyed Punjabi the other. And as swiftly, as inexplicably, as it came, this hand withdrew—but not without leaving its mark upon the memory of Muhafiz Ali, merchant and loyal servant of the Raj.
For ten years before that day when he felt the first impelling wave of intrigue his shop was a haunt for tourists and wealthy residents; for ten years he divided his days between salaaming to customers, cooking his meals over a cow-dung fire in the rear, and staring across the roadway with visible contempt at his despised rival, Venekiah, the Brahmin. For all those years Muhafiz Ali had hated Venekiah as only a Mussulman can hate one who wears the trident of Vishnu painted on his forehead. But of late there was another sore that festered deep in his heart and hour by hour fed his rancor with poison. His one son had dared the horrors of an unknown sea (oh, a thousand times larger than Back Bay, Bombay, the only water Muhafiz Ali can offer by way of comparison) on a troop-ship, and in a strange country, where monstrous metal things howled destruction and death, the parts of his only-born were buried—by Christian hands and in a Christian grave!... While Venekiah's son, who never stirred from the bazaar when the sounds of India responding to the Sirkar's call rumbled from Kabul down to the Gulf of Manaar, lived and walked the streets to talk Swaraj and curse the Sirkar and everything bred of the Sirkar!
Muhafiz Ali came from the North, from Peshawar, and the sultry, throbbing heat of Central India dried up the life in his veins. He longed for the sight of his brother-hillmen swaggering through the Bokhara Bazaar, at Peshawar; for the smell of camels (perfume to a Peshawari) clinging to the chilly dusk. He hoped some day to have enough rupees to board one of those terrifying, though thoroughly convenient, iron demons that he frequently saw panting in the railway station and ride back to Peshawar, where he would dwell for the rest of his earthly days in a house with a garden and an azure-necked peacock that strutted and shrilled like an angry Rajput.
Meanwhile, to this end he sat daily in his shop, not shrieking at prospective customers with "Please buy my nicklass!" like that offspring of the sewer across the way, but waiting with the dignity befitting a son of the Prophet for those who came to buy. And many came. For the fame of his silks (bales from Bokhara frail as spun moonlight and the raw sheeny stuff from Samarkand) had spread through the Residency and haunted every Memsahib and Ladyship who once allowed herself to be enticed into his felt-floored treasure-room.
But his fame lay not only in silks. In formidable chests in the inner room were many necklaces and ornaments—stones precious and semi-precious, and even paste. He was a lapidary and had once served in the establishment of a great jeweller in Delhi. It required but a single glance for him to find the matrix in falsely beautiful gems, or to appraise any sort of stone from diamonds down to chalcedony. Even his Highness the Maharajah had heard of his skill in cutting and setting jewels, and on two occasions had given him commissions.
On this particular day when the mysterious hand was very close, and Destiny had placed a chalk-mark upon a certain young woman and an officer of the empire, his hatred for Venekiah swelled to such proportions that it included every one; it quivered against the walls of his being, hot as the Indian sun that throughout the noonday blazed above the sweltering bazaar. Nor did his rage cool when, toward sundown, lilac shadows lounged in the street and a hundred-hued swarm jostled by.
The cause of his anger was a Sulaimaneh ring, which he wore at all times. Now it is an established fact in the social orbit in which Muhafiz Ali revolved that these onyx stones will repel devils; therefore, to lose such a talisman is to invite misfortune. And Muhafiz Ali had lost his Sulaimaneh ring. Furthermore, he suspected that his enemy, Venekiah, had stolen it from his finger while he slept—although for a Brahmin to touch a Mussulman is to defile himself. Yet he felt that that heap of offal, to speak in the vernacular of the bazaars, would suffer contamination to see him at the mercy of devils.
So he sat and glared, and swore all manner of Moslem oaths under his beard, and stopped hating only long enough to look toward the kindling west beyond which Mecca lay, and prostrate himself on a rug for evening prayer.
As he lifted his eyes they encountered a Sahib with corn-colored hair and beard; a Sahib who stood not a yard away; who fanned himself with a pith-helmet, and looked upon the Mussulman's religious performances with a slightly cynical smile.