The Mountain of Light

by Indu Sundaresan

  Mr. Taft was merely a clerk in the Company’s employ. But his job was to attach himself to the Governor-General’s office, to follow him around, to catalog and list every offering from a native king—and to send them all to fill the Company’s coffers.

  “True,” Emily said. “Nothing’s really ours here, except what we pay for. Mr. Taft is most scrupulous about that. But, George, think of the glory—if you managed to get the Kohinoor away from Runjeet and gave it to her Majesty. No one would ever forget that . . . or you.”

  He gave her a thin smile that vanished as quickly as it came. George had no illusions about himself or what he could do. He had thought for a very long while about this invasion of Afghanistan, hesitant to stir up too much trouble during his tenure as Governor-General, but McNaghten, his political secretary, was insistent . . . and it would be splendid to conquer Afghanistan, make it a vassal to British India . . . there could be no harm, surely? Nothing but success in this venture?

  While Emily talked, George put a fastidious finger on the triangular edge of the paper jutting out from the others on her desk. He saw her writing, and rubbed out the blot of ink on the end of the last word. “This is to General Avitabile?”

  She nodded.

  “That Italian who is in Runjeet’s employ? Why, Emily?”

  She turned away. “He’s been very kind. You know, after he came with Fakir Azizuddin to Calcutta, as part of Runjeet’s first embassy, well, at that time, he promised me shawls, some gowns, embroidered in the finest wool from Kashmir. They came yesterday, a year and a half after I’d met him in Calcutta. It was good of him to remember after so long. I want to thank him . . .”

  There was a whiteness around George’s nostrils, and his cheeks had drawn into his bones. He did not look at her either. “He’s been writing to you all the while.”

  “Not all the while, some of the time,” Emily said. She glanced at his finely wrought face—that sharp, hooked nose, that slender jaw, those arched eyebrows—and thought that her brother was, even at fifty-three, an attractive man. But he was a cold, dull creature, eminently suited for this position as Governor-General of India. George had the looks of a poet, maybe he was even as handsome as Lord Byron, who had wreaked havoc on the periphery of their lives, but he hadn’t the heart of one. How would she explain this to him, about General Avitabile, a man she had seen only a year and a half ago but who had . . . taken her fancy. Emily flushed, buried her face into the gloom of the tent. She was forty-one years old and had never yet met a man she had been attracted to, until she met the giant Monsieur Avitabile.

  “But you have no . . . understanding with this Avitabile. Do you?” George tapped his fingers on the desk and the letter. “You can’t write to him, or any man. Do you, Em?” This last came with a plea.

  She clicked her tongue. “Don’t be ridiculous, George. He did Fanny and me a favor, I responded with thanks. As for only being able to write to a man I am betrothed to . . . it’s such a wild and old-fashioned notion. I write to Melbourne, he writes to me, and you know there’s nothing there between us.”

  George kicked the leg of the desk lightly and felt his way out of the room. He paused for a bit. “You could have had Melbourne if you wanted. He’s Prime Minister of England. I don’t doubt that he offered me this post as Governor-General of India because of you, once it was his for the giving. Flirt, if you like, with General Avitabile. But you cannot leave me.” He turned. “You can’t be so silly, Em.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, shut it again, and listened to him fumble his way through the tented corridor that led to his own room, which he had dubbed “Foully Palace.”

  They had left Calcutta soon after Runjeet’s embassy, and had been on the road for a year and a half now, wandering up-country through British territories, visiting Company regiments at various cities and towns. It was the duty of every Governor-General of India to travel through his lands; else, shut away in the relative splendor of Government House in Calcutta, he wouldn’t know anything about the real India. Or so, at least, the Court of Directors of East India Company thought. And all the while, this—the encounter with the Maharajah of the Punjab—had been the main objective. Now, they were here on the banks of the Sutlej.

  This morning, Jimrud had toted into Emily’s tent an armful of yellow and pink roses, long-stemmed, freshly cut, dew upon the petals that fell in a shimmering glitter of silver drops when she arranged the blooms in the vases. There was a note of welcome from Avitabile. And General Avitabile was finally, finally on the other bank, a short two miles away.

  • • •

  The British encampment straggled along a short length of the Sutlej River, for the most part, tents flung haphazardly into the flat ground, wide and unused spaces in between. The privies lay behind the tents, landward, and the trip at night would have to be made with a lot of weaving and maneuvering around the horses, cattle, sheep, and goats that were penned wherever there was a place. So the intention to use the privies had to come well before the actual need for it. George Auckland’s tent lay somewhere in the middle; Emily’s and Fanny’s were connected to this by a series of chintz-covered corridors. Ten-foot-high red screens, in calico, adorned with geometric shapes, enclosed their sets of tents. To Emily, it was like being in a zenana of the Mughal kings who had ruled India (and still, technically ruled India, although the British were, surely, supreme now), with only a postage-stamp-size view of the unruffled waters of the river through a tear in the screens.

  Major Bryne, supervisor of the Governor-General’s household at Calcutta and in charge of their living arrangements during the long march in the Upper Provinces of India, had pored over the Ain-i-Akbari of Abul Fazl, written during the time of Emperor Akbar’s rule in the late 1500s. It was difficult going at first—Bryne’s Persian was assured, and of some twenty years standing, learned when he first came to India as a civil servant (as one of the required languages), but Abul Fazl had spoken the tongue on his father’s knee, had written his Ain in a dense scholarly manner, and some three hundred years earlier. Picking through the manuscript during the whole year before the Governor-General’s march, Bryne had nonetheless managed to jot down some important details. A few days before Emily, George, and Fanny left Calcutta, the Paish-khana, the advance camp, had set off on the journey itself, first on the flats, towed by steamer up the Ganges all the way to Kanpur, and from then on by foot, horseback, carriage, elephant back, camel back, in a slow progression over the last few months until they had arrived at the banks of the Sutlej.

  It was Bryne who, in his enthusiastic imitation of the Ain, had put Emily, Fanny, and George in the zenana enclosure, just as Akbar had in his day enclosed his women. It was Bryne who had laid out the camp in a faithful reproduction of the Emperor’s camp—there was a Diwan-i-am, a Hall of Public Audience; a Diwan-i-khas, a Hall of Private Audience; three hundred yards of plain dirt separating the Governor-General’s enclosures and offices from the accompanying regiments of the British army; a wax-cloth-covered tower, which housed the band, overlooking the zenana quarters; even an Akash-diya, “light in the sky,” a hundred-foot-high pole atop which sat an equally large paraffin lamp, lit all night through as an indication of the Governor-General’s presence at camp.

  Bryne made some changes, of course. The bazaar for the soldiers and the servants was, as per the Ain, on the four outside corners of the camp. But a few shops were installed inside at regular intervals. They sold hats, pins, petticoats, the odd book or novel from the belongings of a recently dead Company man, brooches, necklaces, yards of indifferent fabric, needles, thread, thimbles, and the like. Food came from the kitchen house at the rear, and this only for the three hundred or so inhabitants—the aides-de-camp; the various secretaries, political and civil; the military commanders; the medical men; the civil servants attached to the Governor-General’s office in the capacity of advisers or listeners; and all of their families.

  The Ain’s tent for worship had been replaced by, well, a tent for worshi
p presided over by the chaplain, Mr. Hurley, in which, every Sunday morning, he gave long, sonorous sermons unmindful of the heat, or the clanking punkah that merely moved the sluggish air around. The streets were laid out at right angles, in tight and sharp turns, not more than a few hundred yards long, and this became the promenade. Here, on somewhat cool evenings, the ladies came out to walk alongside their men, arm in arm, nodding their heads at friends and acquaintances they had seen every day for the last year and a half, showing off their oft-shown finery—vastly out of fashion in London by now.

  Across the Sutlej, there was no such haphazardness in Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s camp. Major Bryne’s counterpart, Mahabat Arif, was equally well versed in the Ain, perhaps better so, since like the author of the Ain, he had learned his Persian early on and well. More important, he was quartermaster of a moving camp under a nomadic ruler. For although the Maharajah’s empire stretched from Kashmir in the north to the Sutlej in the south and pushed against Afghanistan in the west, Ranjit Singh had had no capital city, no place to rest, for all of his ruling years—he lived in the camp, and delegated administration of the cities to his various generals.

  Ranjit Singh’s encampment reached out in orderly concentric rectangles—the Maharajah’s tent in the very middle, surrounded by the women of his zenana; these separated by screens from the offices of the court, a darbar hall, a meeting room, an eating room, and beyond them the army. The generals of the army lived among their men and had lushly decorated tents, much like that of their king.

  It was in one such tent, on the northeastern corner of the camp, about half a mile from the water’s edge, that lights still burned, even this late at night.

  General Paolo Avitabile drank, moved his hand down, and a silver platter held by a manservant found its way under the base of the goblet and it landed, deft as a kiss, with barely a sound.

  “So the Maharajah is finally to meet Lord Auckland tomorrow,” Avitabile said in Persian.

  By his side, the doctor, Martin Honigberger, nodded. “What did you think of this new Governor-General?”

  “Speak English, won’t you?” This came harshly from the man seated on their far right on the semicircular divan. Josiah Harlan, the American in the group.

  Avitabile turned to gaze at him. Harlan was always a little crass, a little too loud, his consonants grating, his vowels never quite achieving the sound of music. Though he too could speak Persian (and perfectly understood what had been said), he butchered the beauty of the language in his mouth well before it found its way to a listener’s ear. At court, everyone—Indian and not—cringed when Harlan spoke his chopped Persian or Hindustani, and Avitabile could see their minds processing the words before they could be, even remotely, understood.

  “Why?” Avitabile asked, his hand out for the wine, which swung down from the bearer’s arms on the platter before he had reached too far. The crushed grapes from Kabul sang on his tongue, sweet, tart, fruity, honeyed. He raised his wineglass toward Harlan in appreciation, for it was this man who had brought the cases of Kabul wines from Afghanistan a few months ago, and his efforts had filled the Maharajah’s cellars to choking.

  “The servants,” Harlan mumbled. “They understand too much.”

  At this, all the men in Avitabile’s tent roared with a gentle laughter.

  “It’s only the British who believe that the Indians do not understand English, Josiah,” General Ventura said. “No doubt their servants do, and make use of the fact to their advantage.”

  “Still . . .” Harlan muttered. His was the brightest eye in the room, among these most decorated foreign generals and ministers in Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s employ. Josiah Harlan had never let a fermented drink pass through his lips in all his years, whether here in Hindustan or at home in Philadelphia. His father had been a merchant trader; his brothers were in the same business, and the sea was in their blood. But of all of his siblings, it was Josiah who had sailed off American shores early on, to Calcutta and to a small port in China. Returning home had seemed like being in a bland, one-stroked canvas. Still, Josiah had fallen in love with a woman with fair hands that moved in a blur against her black Puritan gown; but she had later married someone else. “You’re too bloody pious, Josiah,” she’d said. “I couldn’t well have my hearth plagued with such grimness all my living days.” So Harlan had boarded another ship and come back to India, vowing never to set foot on American soil again. He was a thick-shouldered man, heavy on top, with a black beard that plunged to his belt. The hair on his head was equally thick, and at a passing glance, if he was dressed in his court robes, he could be taken for a Sikh, a native of the Punjab.

  There was a single ambition that simmered within Harlan. He wanted to be king. He hoped sometime, somehow, anyhow, to rule over some peoples. He did not care if they were black, white, green, or blue, he just wanted to be king. Perhaps even of Afghanistan? After all, the British were eyeing Dost Mohammad with disfavor, meant to invade his country and put a puppet king on the throne instead, so why not Josiah Harlan of Pennsylvania? They could call him . . .

  “. . . the Prince of Ghor,” Avitabile said.

  Again, there was that placid laughter from Honigberger and Ventura, who knew that Harlan had already loosely styled himself such, taking the name of the province of Ghor in Afghanistan, this after just a few visits to that country on behalf of Ranjit Singh, and after finding in Dost Mohammad a ruler who had no intention of being deposed.

  Harlan flushed and subsided onto the cushions of the divan. On the far side of the tent, the nautch girls still danced, the music from the sitars still played, and the singer’s voice, though hoarse from overuse through the long night, still trilled out the same songs.

  “Send them away, Avitabile,” Honigberger begged in his guttural voice, his eyelids drooping with fatigue. “The Maharajah makes us watch his nautch girls interminably, should we have to in your tent also? Besides, they’re tired.”

  Avitabile raised an eyebrow toward his jemadar, Babu. The man stood all the way near the flap of the tent, out of earshot surely, and Honigberger had spoken in English, but in a wailing, fretful, above all carrying voice, and Babu understood, bowed, clapped his hands softly, and ushered the orchestra and the dancing girls out.

  “Why does Auckland want to invade Afghanistan?” Honigberger asked when the tent was empty of everyone but the five men.

  “Auckland doesn’t,” Avitabile said, lighting a thin, brown cigarette, cupping his hands over the flame. His lean, brown face lit up briefly, gray eyes long-lashed, the skin smooth and clean-shaven with barely a wrinkle marring it. When he raised his head toward his companions, no laugh lines cut along the edges of his mouth. Avitabile had rarely laughed enough to create them. He flung the matchstick into the air, and it came to rest, smoke winding upward, upon the rich red Persian carpet. But Avitabile did not care. His warehouse in Peshawar contained many more such carpets, silver and gold platters, jugs, goblets, and pots. “McNaghten does,” he said now. “That political secretary. Auckland is too timid to venture into anything remotely resembling a war or conquest.”

  Ventura’s teeth flashed in a white gleam. Like Avitabile, Ventura was a soldier, a general in Ranjit Singh’s army, also, an Italian. In fact, it was Ventura who had drawn Avitabile this far out east, and the two men, of like temperament, like personality, could trace their friendship back all the way to the first day they had signed up as soldiers outside the tiny town of Agerola on the Amalfi coast, at the age of sixteen.

  “He is a bear, that McNaghten,” Ventura said. “He is the reason there is going to be a war with Afghanistan, and he is the reason Auckland is here, hat in hand, imploring our Maharajah for troops and money.”

  Honigberger wiped his bald head thoughtfully. He was the official surgeon in Ranjit Singh’s court, from the principality of Transylvania in Romania. His primary job was personal physician to the Maharajah. And, because Ranjit Singh could not imagine a man intelligent in one way not to have some acumen in anot
her, Honigberger was also put in charge of the Empire’s gunpowder factory and the stock of guns for the imperial army. He might have known how to treat the ailing horse that had disturbed Emily’s sleep for many nights now, if he had known of its existence or been asked for help—at one time, Honigberger had made a poultice to treat the ulcerated legs of the Maharajah’s favorite horse, Leili.

  Avitabile felt in the pocket of his short cotton coat for the pair of dice he kept there always, and flung them upon the carpet. They rolled smoothly on the pile and came to rest against the base of the lantern with a quiet click. The men bent to peer at the dice, ivory-clear, glowing like little nuggets of snow.

  “What did you throw this time, my friend?” Allard asked. Jean-François Allard had been the earliest—before Avitabile and Ventura—at the Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s court, and had blazed the trail for them, so to speak, landing first at the court of Persia, and then taking them with him to Lahore. Allard was French, born at Saint-Tropez, and like Avitabile had grown up with the blue of the sea in his heart.

  The Maharajah had been impressed by Allard’s credentials, by the decorations heaped on him by the Persian Shah, and Allard had been given the city of Lahore to govern. In Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s court, at times, the risks were high, but the rewards equally so.

  “Two fours,” Avitabile responded in the same language Allard had spoken in, French.

  “It is true?” Honigberger asked.

  “Always,” Harlan said with a small smile that lost itself in his midnight beard. “Avitabile has the . . . the best luck of any man I’ve known.” He had meant to say the devil’s own luck, but Harlan had never taken the devil’s name in jest or in seriousness.

  Paolo Avitabile lay back on the cushions of the divan and let his long legs hang over the edge. Stretched out like this, he was a giant of a man, as indeed he was standing also, an inch shy of seven feet. He had won the dice from a boy in the army, and won exactly that, the dice themselves, not the money from the game. He had won because he had cast the dice perfectly each time, calling out how the cubes would roll before he threw. On his way back, Paolo had bought a single rose from a street seller, crushed the petals in a small canteen of water, and immersed the sweaty dice into this. His tent mate had laughed. Making perfume, my Paoluccio? No, just my luck, Paolo had replied, rubbing off the offensive odor of that other boy.