The Mountain of Light

by Indu Sundaresan

  An ousted Shuja was of no importance to the British, they had let him be for the last eight years, and yet . . . here was this Elphinstone back in the Punjab.

  By an 1806 Treaty of Lahore, Ranjit Singh had agreed with the English East India Company that the lands north of the Sutlej River belonged to him, and those south of the river to the British in India. However, the Maharajah not only gave them free rein to travel through his Empire but also made sure that his bazaars and merchants provided them with the means to do so at low prices and with immaculate hospitality.

  Why? Azizuddin had asked him once, and the Maharajah had replied that it was always a good policy to keep enemies well fed, contented, and close to the heart.

  So, Elphinstone’s presence at Lahore was not a surprise. What was unusual was that he had sneaked into the city. And that he had been the man who met Shuja in Afghanistan.

  The Maharajah spoke first. “Napoleon Bonaparte has been defeated? And so, our tent-pegging firangis came here for a job?”

  Azizuddin bobbed his head. “At Waterloo. He will not escape again; they’ve taken him to some island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The British will not make the Elba mistake again.”

  “Who then?”

  “The Russians, your Majesty,” Azizuddin said slowly. “Rumor is that the Russian envoy in Kabul is very friendly with Shah Mahmud. Yes”—he nodded more furiously, sure now of himself—“the British fear a Russian invasion of India.”

  An almost full moon had risen over the cusp of the horizon, and sent its hoary light across the maidan. In the plummy dark, Azizuddin had not been able to see the Akali guards on the periphery of the field, although he had known they were there. Ranjit Singh had not been king of the Punjab Empire for so long, and with so much success, by wandering alone even in his own lands. Now, the silver glow glittered over the rings of the quoits, marking each Akali as an obvious target for anyone who would care to raise a musket in their direction—although few would and live to tell of it.

  The Maharajah put back his well-shaped head and laughed up at the moon. The sound reverberated around the maidan, echoed off the walls of the fort. “Our British friends are very nervous people. They worried about Bonaparte invading India, but to do so, he would have had to defeat me. Now they worry about the Russians? I’m still the Maharajah of the Punjab.”

  Azizuddin smiled. It was true. Ranjit Singh was only thirty-seven years old. Allah willing, he would live for many more years, and he, who had halted the rapacious East India Company south of the Sutlej, would not give up his empire for another foreign invader, whether he was French, or Russian, or anybody else.

  “Elphinstone, your Majesty,” he said.

  The Maharajah sobered, combing through the hair of his beard with long fingers. “Ah, yes, the problem of Elphinstone. Double the guard around the Shalimar Gardens. If the British want to steal Shuja from me and put him on the Afghan throne instead of Mahmud, they will have to ask me first. That’s why they want him, don’t they, Aziz?”

  “Yes, your Majesty.”

  “Double the guard now. Before first light.”

  Azizuddin bowed, his hand touching his forehead in a taslim. He turned to leave, and Ranjit Singh’s voice, lazy, casual, came to him. “Besides, Shuja still has to give me the Kohinoor. He’s not going anywhere until he does so.”

  • • •

  There was only one gateway, one entrance from the outside into the upper terrace of the Shalimar Gardens, set in the middle of the southern wall. The south entrance was also surrounded by the soldiers of the Maharajah. Though the guard was to protect every inch of the exterior walls of the Shalimar, after three years, the rotation had slackened.

  And so, every night around the first hour of the next day, the guard outside the Khwabagh, Wafa Begam’s sleeping quarters on the western side of the upper terrace, took a long hike through the scrub toward the fire that burned in the distance.

  An old woman, toothless and haggard, had set up her chai shop here for the soldiers—this far, because she wasn’t allowed to come any closer. Her “shop” consisted merely of two stones dragged together to hold a fire, a terra-cotta vessel atop, in which the water boiled, tea leaves she threw into the simmer, a brass pot of day-old milk, a mound of sugar tied into a knot at the end of her sari’s pallu. For one cup of chai, she charged the men one anna. When they had drunk their chai, she wiped the cups out with a dirty rag and set them to dry in the heated dark. If she had been closer to the river, she would have washed out the cups. All night long, she stirred the chai and doled out cups, and when morning came, she packed up her things and went home to sleep. She had a young and comely daughter, who took over the chai duty during the day in the bazaar on the outskirts of Lahore, but she would not send that child to the deserted land around the Shalimar Gardens, to be at the mercy of these foulmouthed soldiers. She came herself.

  The guard, a thin, swarthy man, came to squat by the woman and grunted. He held a shining anna piece in his grubby hand, but he was one of those who liked to toy with her, not paying for his cup of tea until he had drunk at least three. He sat facing her, with his back to the Shalimar. She ladled out the muddy liquid, put the cup on the ground, and prodded it toward him with her knuckles.

  He picked it up with both his hands and drank noisily. “It’s awful today, Maji.” He called her Mother, as did the other soldiers, because she was old, not out of respect.

  She shrugged. Awful today, awful yesterday, it was all the same to her. This was the only chai shop for miles, and in the middle of the night, they would take what they got. At least, the chai was hot.

  Her attention was caught by a movement on the Shalimar’s walls, near the upper terrace. The moon had risen, and the walls stood starkly black. Something snaked up into the lighter sky beyond the walls, once, twice, a third time, until a figure showed, its arm raised to catch the rope. Then, the figure disappeared for a while, as the old woman watched intently. It came back, hesitated for a moment, and then a man swung over the edge of the wall and began to let himself down with the rope.

  The old woman grinned, showing a gaping mouth; she had only two teeth left in her upper and lower jaws.

  The guard eyed her suspiciously. “What’s so funny? What did you put in the chai?”

  “Drink it,” she snapped. “And give me my money.”

  He leaned over and knocked her on the side of her head. As she lay in the dirt, arms around her breasts, crooning in pain, he helped himself to another cup of chai. He took a sip and spat it out. Then another, which he also spat out, as if to show her how easily he wasted the chai. The third he drank. The woman sat up, massaging her head, and watched as another man stood briefly in the light of the moon above the garden’s walls and then began climbing down. His kurta was a patch of white against the murky walls, moving surely and speedily.

  The guard deliberately drank his chai, and then he stood up, lodged his toe under the lip of the vessel on the fire, and upended it. The old woman sat there, rocking and moaning, her eyes flashing with hatred. A smile gathered around her mouth. She let him go, with the anna coin folded into the cloth of his turban, and saw him pick his way through the land, gaze downward, stepping carefully to avoid snakes and scorpions.

  By the time the guard had kicked at the chai urn, the second man had descended to the ground.

  • • •

  Shah Shuja jumped the last three yards, landing on the balls of his feet, the shock sending a jar of pain through his sore legs. He flitted closer to the wall. “Where is she?” he hissed into the gloom.

  Ibrahim Khan limped up, trailing a foot; he had crushed an ankle during his fall from the rope and eaten up the yelp that had come bursting from him. His face was wan in the moonlight, his hair shining in a cloud of curls. “It’s a bad night to escape, your Majesty. Too much light. Are these people to be trusted?”

  They turned to the two men standing against the wall, their clothing blurred and indistinct in the shadows, the cloths of
their turbans wrapped around the lower halves of their faces. One of them had pitched the rope to Shuja, and he had heard quiet grunts as he heaved upward. Since, neither of the men had spoken, or helped them descend.

  The letter tied around the rock that Wafa Begam had read and shown to her husband had come from Elphinstone. In it, he had offered to rescue them from the Shalimar Gardens, but it had to be tonight, in a few hours. Elphinstone had already spent too much time in Lahore, any longer and the Maharajah would begin to get inquisitive. Would his Majesty, Shah Shuja, trust that the British had his best interests at heart?

  For once, Wafa, more suspicious about almost anything than her husband, had not advised caution. “We must go tonight,” she said. Shuja, awakened from a dreamy sleep, the muscles of his arms, legs, and shoulders fiery raw from the wrestling, had shaken his head to clear the fog. All those years of plotting, scheming, wondering who would help them, how that help would appear . . . had come to this. An imperative in the middle of the night. Leave now. How? he had asked. But the letter only said in two hours, not how.

  They had woken Ibrahim, drawn him from his cot, doused his head in the waters of the central pool in the upper terrace, and whispered the news in his ear. Shuja and he had padded all around the upper and middle terraces in search of an escape route, or some indication that, suddenly, there was one. They did not descend into the lower terrace, where the Maharajah’s guards kept watch, and all their movements were stealthy, quiet, so that no noise filtered downward.

  Then that whistle had come again from beyond the walls, sweet and lucid, like the song of a bird. A violinist had accompanied Elphinstone’s embassy to Peshawar, and one spring evening, Shuja had invited this man’s music into his palace. The music had a strange yet beguiling sound for all of them—a violin concerto by a composer named Bach—and he had asked for it to be played often, and tried to get his own court musicians to imitate that sound.

  “Here,” Wafa had said, pulling them up the stairs to the top of the wall. They couldn’t see anything of the men below, but they heard them throwing the rope and saw it a moment later, twisting temptingly just beyond reach. Both Shuja and Ibrahim had held back, too exhausted to make real sense of what was happening, and it was Wafa who had leaned over the parapet and caught the rope. She who had yanked it to one of the pillars and wrapped it around. But she could not tie the knot and sat there, trembling, her face drenched with tears. “Come, my lord. Are we going to stay here forever? Do you want to lose the Kohinoor to Ranjit Singh?”

  At that word, Shuja ran to her, knotted the rope, and tugged at it to check that it was secure.

  “Where is the diamond?” he asked.

  In response, she bent to kiss his hand, used his fingers to wipe away her tears. “Go, Ibrahim and you must go first. Even if they catch us doing this, I will be safe; they will not dare touch me. Go!”

  As she pushed him away, Shuja resisted. Go without her? What was she saying?

  She sensed his hesitation. “I will follow right after. After I get the Kohinoor, that is. Go now!” And with that she fled out of the pavilion. He heard her running down the stone pathway alongside the long water channel, and then heard the soft, successive thuds of her feet as she descended the stairs to the middle terrace.

  Shuja had never given a thought to where his wife had hidden the diamond; better not to know until he actually wanted it. If he had considered it at all, if he had been asked where, he would have thought it was somewhere in her harem quarters. But, to conceal it in the middle terrace, with the gardeners working there, the guards roaming around every now and then, in so public a place . . . why, it was brilliant. Galvanized into action, he shoved Ibrahim over the edge of the wall and listened as he made his way down. Just for a moment, before he went over himself, he tarried again. Where was Wafa? Why was she taking so long? Then, he swung over, wrapped his hands around the rope, and slid down the wall, his toes grabbing onto footholds in the dark, the rope ending far too soon, leaving him swaying above nothing.

  “Where is she?” he whispered now, glancing up with a growing worry. He said to one of the two men, “Whistle that song again.”

  The man shook his head, didn’t seem inclined to speak at first, and then he said, in a hoarse voice, “Too dangerous, your Majesty.”

  Just then, Shah Shuja saw his wife dangle a leg over the parapet. She hung over the edge on her stomach for a sickening moment, and Shuja urged her in a whisper, “Grab on to the rope, Wafa.”

  She reached for the rope and let her weight down. It took her a long time to descend, almost five minutes; at times she hung in the moonlight, at times her body banged into the wall, but slowly she came down to the end of the rope and swung there in a circle. “What do I do now?” she asked, terrified.

  “Let go,” Shuja said firmly. Ibrahim and he linked their arms under Wafa, and when Shuja waved to the two men to help them, one shook his head. Wafa Begam undid her tight grasp around the rope and fell into the net formed by her husband and Ibrahim. She was shaking, teary-eyed, and trembling. But she still smiled. Her thin chiffon veil was pulled tight around her face and tied at her nape, enclosing her head in a pale blue.

  “Do you have it?” Shuja said in her ear, holding his wife tight by his side.

  She nodded.

  And then, one of the men said in a deep, cultured voice, “Perhaps then you will allow me to take it from you, your Majesty, and give it to my Maharajah.”

  • • •

  As dawn cleaved a line of lilac on the horizon, slitting open another day, a row of slaves toted loads of firewood upon their backs toward the Shalimar Gardens. The slaves were bent under the weight of the sticks, which were swaddled in cloth, strung with ropes around the tops of their heads like headbands.

  They flung each stack near the door at the southeastern corner of the middle terrace, by the side of a huge brick stove. The firewood was shoved into the stove’s black and yawning mouth, burning balls of newspapers were thrown in, each setting fire to one part until the whole roared to life.

  Water from the Hasli Canal, which fed the fountains and pools in the gardens, was diverted in a little stream to the top of the stove and into a permanently built brick-dome-covered stone cauldron. Pipes ran from this dome into the Shalimar, releasing clouds of steam into a series of closed pavilions on the southeastern corner of the middle terrace. This was the bathhouse, the hammam that Emperor Shah Jahan had built for the pleasure of both the ladies of his harem and himself. The only entrance into the hammam was from inside the gardens, in a series of three pointed archways that were tucked into the corner.

  Shah Shuja lay on the wet floor near the pool in the center of the hammam, stripped down to a small pair of shorts and nothing else. His face rested against the stone, his left arm hung into the pale and green waters of the pool. Wafa Begam sat astride his back, clad in very little herself, merely a small cloth covering her breasts and another piece of cloth fashioned into underwear.

  She dug the heels of her palms into Shuja’s back and ran them over the length of it, from his waist to his hairline. She made fists and pummeled the spent muscles. She kneaded his arms, pulled the strain out of every finger, bent to kiss his sweaty cheek, the hair on his beard scratching her face.

  Smudged light streamed around them in sharp bars from each of the skylights above. One lit the center of the pool, and the water glowed like a gathering of emeralds. Others cast their radiance around, lighting up the steam as it swirled through, taking on ghostly shapes at one moment, dispersing into flatness the next.

  Shuja and Wafa lay in the path of one such shaft of light, which glanced off her slender shoulders, dabbed at Shuja’s hair, turning it into glittering ebony, painted its way over his outflung arm, and dripped into the pool.

  He made a movement, and Wafa rose on her knees and allowed him to flip onto his back before settling down over him again. They gazed at each other for a long while, not speaking, not knowing, perhaps, what to say. They had tried to esc
ape in the middle of the previous night, had been captured and brought back into the Shalimar soon after—merely a few hours had passed before they ordered the hammam fires lit.

  “What now?” Shuja said, cupping his palm over his wife’s cheek.

  She leaned into his hand, her eyebrows meeting in distress. “Now,” she said slowly and clearly, “we wait and see what the Maharajah will do.”

  Shuja felt an ache blossom inside his chest, and he rubbed at it unconsciously. Seeing that, Wafa caressed him, taking his hand away, replacing it with her own. He kissed her hand, felt the warm skin on his lips, felt a well of tears rise behind his eyes. Even Wafa had lost hope.

  In these past five years, whether in the dungeons under the Hari Parbat Fort in Kashmir, or here in the golden cage of the Shalimar, it had always been Shuja who had been doubtful, or pessimistic. Wafa, with her laughter, her joy, her belief that everything would go her way or no way at all, had a spark of hope lighting her from within. Oh, she had cried before, in distress, or frustration, or hatred, but she had never swerved from their purpose—Shuja would be freed and one day he would return to Afghanistan to be king.

  Shah Shuja swiped at the tears that ran in thin lines around the edges of his face and hoped that his wife wouldn’t notice them. “Sweat in my eyes,” he said hoarsely.