audience with the exiled king would have to be arranged without alerting the British. Through an intermediary, Harlan sent a secret message to Shujah’s vizier, or chief counsellor, outlining ‘a general proposition affecting the royal prospects of restoration’. The king snapped at the bait, and Harlan was summoned to a private interview in the garden of the royal residence.
At twilight on the appointed evening, a figure clad in Afghan turban and shalwar kamiz slipped quietly out of Wade’s house and headed in the direction of Shujah’s walled compound. ‘I assumed the disguise of a Cabulee,’ wrote Harlan, ‘although then unaccustomed to the role and unaddicted to the air of a native.’ The British had posted a pair of guards at the gates to Shujah’s residence, ostensibly for his protection but also to spy on visitors, including the numerous local ‘dancers’ attending the king and his court. The soldiers had been bribed in advance, and at a prearranged signal they melted away. ‘The Indian sentries were well trained in the amatory service of His Majesty,’ Harlan remarked wryly. ‘The magic influence of “open sesame” could not have been more effective upon bolts and bars. The portals were thrown open and I approached the small wicket gate that afforded secret egress in a retired part of the wall.’
On the other side of the gate stood Mullah Shakur, Shujah’s vizier, personal cleric and sometime military commander. ‘The priest was a short fat person,’ wrote Harlan. ‘The rotundity of his figure was adequately finished by the huge turban characteristic of his class, encased in voluminous outline by a profusion of long thick hair which fell upon his shoulders in heavy sable silvered curls.’ There was a reason for the vizier’s elaborate hairdo, for Shakur’s most obvious distinguishing feature was the absence of his ears. These had been cut off on the orders of the king many years earlier, as a punishment for cowardice on the battlefield, and Mullah Shakur had grown his flowing locks to conceal the mutilation.
Harlan would soon discover that Shujah had an unpleasant penchant for removing the ears, tongues, noses and even the testicles of those of his courtiers who had offended him; and despite his own disfigurement, Mullah Shakur was an enthusiast for this brutal form of chastisement. The result was an ‘earless assemblage of mutes and eunuchs in the ex-king’s service’, including one Khwajah Mika, the chief eunuch, an African Muslim in charge of the royal harem. The king had ordered Khwajah to be de-eared during a royal picnic, after the tent protecting the king’s wives from sight had been blown down by a gust of wind. ‘The executioner was of a tender conscience,’ Harlan wrote, and ‘merely deprived Khwajah Mika of the lower part of the organ’. Having already lost his manhood, the African appears to have been philosophical about the additional loss of his lobes, and unlike the mullah he ‘shaved the head and fearlessly displayed the mark of royal favour’.
Earless and suspicious, Mullah Shakur eyed the American visitor carefully. ‘Having assured himself by carefully scanning my features that I was the person he expected, for my dress entirely concealed the Christian outline, he replied to my salutation in a subdued tone and turning about without another word, led the way into the interior.’
It was the golden moment just before sunset in India known as the time of hawa khana, ‘breathing the air’, when the cooling earth exhales. What Harlan saw in the dusk light took his breath away: a vast and perfectly tended Oriental garden in full bloom: ‘His Majesty’s tastes and exiled fancies sought gratification in the floral beauties of his native soil, and the royal mind had ameliorated its misfortunes in the construction of a garden on the model of Oriental horticulture practised in the City of Cabul. This enclosure, which was three hundred yards square, included the fruit trees, the parterres of flowers, the terraced walks and the well irrigated soil incident to the place of his nativity, and thus the king caused to be transplanted a part, at least, of the dominion which he had lost.’ Like many expatriates, Shujah had surrounded himself with memories of home, but he had done so in spectacular style, reproducing the gardens of Kabul’s Bala Hisar fortress, from the harem buildings to the flowerbeds to the pavilions, where he would play chess in the evenings.
Motioning Harlan to follow, the vizier set off down a cool avenue of lime and orange trees. Many years later, Harlan recalled the delightful sensation of leaving the parched evening heat of India to enter the refreshing shade of a make-believe pleasure garden with blooming flowers, ornamental ponds and fountains, their cool spray shining in the moonlight.
As they neared a large terrace walled with richly embroidered cloth, the mullah touched Harlan’s shoulder, indicating that he should remain where he was, and slipped inside the enclosure. Household servants and slaves flitted between the trees, observing the newcomer in Afghan robes, who tried to calm his nerves by identifying the different varieties of fruit trees. Silently Mullah Shakur reappeared at Harlan’s elbow, drew him towards the terrace and lifted the flap. Inside, on an elevated banquette, sat Shujah al-Moolk, the exiled king of Afghanistan, enthroned in a vast armchair.
Harlan snapped off his best military salute. Shujah responded with a courteous nod, a few words of welcome and a sprinkling of light compliments. Harlan had been boning up on Afghan courtly etiquette, and struggled through the fantastically ornate language required when addressing royalty. ‘I replied in bad Hindoostani and worse Persian,’ he conceded, ‘for I was then but a neophyte in the acquisition of Oriental languages.’
Harlan studied the exiled monarch, a stout and imposing figure in middle age with a thick beard dyed the deepest black. His clothing was expensively simple, a plain white tunic of fine muslin over dark silk pantaloons, but his headgear was priceless: a large velvet cap, scalloped at the edges and adorned in the centre by a large diamond. Harlan was immediately struck by ‘the grace and dignity of His Highness’s demeanour’. Every movement, every word, was freighted with unquestionable authority. The heavy-lidded eyes radiated power and menace, but also sadness: ‘Years of disappointment had created in the countenance of the ex-King an appearance of melancholy and resignation.’ His commands were barked in monosyllables, and his servants, including Mullah Shakur, were plainly terrified of him, loitering in submissive attitudes like dogs waiting to be kicked.
Courtesies over, in a mixture of languages Harlan made the king an offer. He would travel secretly to Kabul, and link up with Shah Shujah’s allies to organise a rebellion. Meanwhile Shujah should begin raising troops for an assault against Dost Mohammed Khan, the prince who had usurped his crown. Once Harlan had managed to ‘ascertain and organise his partisans’ in Kabul, he proposed to return to Ludhiana and lead the king’s troops in a full-scale invasion. If all went according to plan this would coincide with a mass uprising in Kabul, and Shah Shujah al-Moolk, with Harlan at his side, would return in triumph to the throne of his ancestors. Harlan even offered to provide some of the troops. ‘I engaged to join the royal standard with a thousand retainers,’ he wrote, ‘holding myself responsible for the command of the army and the performance of all duties connected with the military details of an expedition into the kingdom of Kabul.’
If the king was surprised by this audacious proposition, he was far too clever to show it. His popularity in his homeland, he told Harlan, ‘far preponderated above the present leader in Kabul’, and he listed the powerful supporters who would flock to the royal banner. Indeed, he would have launched such an invasion already, but the British had declined to promise him a safe haven in case of failure, and he was concerned for the safety of the harem, which he could hardly take into battle. If the British government would look after his family, and promise that he could return to Ludhiana if the invasion failed, then he would immediately begin to prepare an expedition. Shujah had not yet recruited a single soldier to his cause, and already he was talking about defeat. This, as Harlan would soon learn, was typical of a man whose arrogance was matched only by his timidity.
And what, Shujah asked pointedly, did Harlan expect for himself, should this daring plan come to fruition? Harlan’s response was astonishing. In return for restoring Shujah’s crown, this young American adventurer without references, Persian or experience of military command, expected to govern the kingdom, in fact if not in name. If their joint enterprise was successful,
