The Mountain of Light

by Indu Sundaresan

  “It has, though, been a long time since it belonged to the Mughals.”

  Avitabile nodded, a gleam of appreciation in his glance. “True, you know your Indian history, mademoiselle. And, as long as my Maharajah is alive, it will remain an Indian diamond. After him”—he shrugged—“who knows.”

  Ever since they had come to India, Emily had been almost surfeited with the range and breadth of jewelry and precious stones she had seen—pearls of an impossible luster; diamonds glittering like a new-hewn moon; rubies to rival sunrises; emeralds that evoked the cool hush of a rained-upon forest. And crude as the setting was for the Kohinoor, with its rudimentary gold work and the two lesser diamonds, one on either side, it still took her breath away.

  “Is there really a curse upon it?” she asked.

  Avitabile took the armlet from her and laid it back upon the tray. “There is a legend, certainly,” he agreed, “that the Kohinoor must never be worn upon a ruler’s crown. The Mughal king Shah Jahan had it embedded into his Peacock Throne; my master has it in an armlet and wears it well away from his head. Other than that . . . I don’t know, mademoiselle. But diamonds of a fabulous worth have a way of bringing misfortune upon all those who possess them.”

  Emily turned away; the moment had passed. “Shall we eat, Monsieur Avitabile? St. Cloup has been immensely bothered about this meal; he intends to rival all the cooks in your kitchen at Peshawar.”

  “That,” Avitabile said comfortably, “is something I doubt he can do, mademoiselle. I have the best. It’s a simple truth. Someday, perhaps, you will eat at my home. That would truly be a pleasure.”

  Major Bryne had hung a chandelier in this sitting room, to one side, and the little, round table was set directly underneath it, the light from the chandelier casting its flickering flame around but not on the table. The tablecloth was white damask, the fabric lush in the muted light; a crystal vase stood in the middle filled with the white roses that Avitabile had sent in the morning. The china was from Government House, and came from an original set that served a hundred people. The plates were white with a pink and gold edging, the cutlery was pure silver, and the napkins were again damask. In the year and a half that George, Emily, and Fanny had progressed, in great state, through the Upper Provinces of India, this whole set had traveled with them, cushioned in hay, nestled in tin boxes made for this purpose, and toted on camel back.

  “You brought this along with you?” Avitabile asked, drawing out Emily’s chair and waiting for her to be seated.

  “We are like the Mughal kings, Monsieur Avitabile,” Emily replied, laughing. “We were told that if we left one stick of furniture in Government House, the white ants would reduce them to a crumble before we returned, and if we left one candlestick, it would be burgled. So, we brought it all along.”

  “And now your encampment is some twenty-five thousand people?”

  “Yes, it’s difficult to imagine.” Emily nodded toward the head bearer, lurking in the entry to the tent. He came in with a bottle of claret, wrapped in a white napkin, and deftly filled their glasses. She flung out her napkin and put it on her lap as she picked up her wineglass. “Thank you for showing me the Kohinoor,” she said.

  He smiled. “It is my master you must thank. The Maharajah is a generous man.”

  Their glasses touched lightly and they drank.

  Outside the tent they heard the slow, hacking cough of the ill horse. Once, twice, a third and tired time. The khitmatgar put two bowls of soup in front of them—shrimp balls in a clear, cinnamon-flavored broth. There was nothing but a little salt and pepper for the flavoring, but the shrimp was perfectly cooked, the broth flavored just right, and the soup sang on their tongues.

  “Tell me about Peshawar,” Emily said, putting down her soup spoon. Here, for the first time, she had an opportunity to really talk with General Avitabile, to watch his face as they did so, to consider him . . . for what? A husband? “But before that, are you married?”

  He waved his spoon in the air. “Many times, mademoiselle. They are all native women, you understand. The Maharajah made us all sign a contract with him when we joined his service—we had to learn an Indian language, which was not a problem for me, for I spoke Persian before. And we had to marry a Punjabi woman.” He rubbed his chin, his gaze intent upon her face. “I married several.”

  “Ah.” At least, he was honest. But an ache caught Emily between her ribs, and she rubbed her side, over the corset. What did it matter, really? This was life in India. A man could not be expected to be . . . celibate. And all of George’s ADCs had these native wives, women who were not to take the place of a real Englishwoman.

  “Tell me about Peshawar,” she said again, faintly, as the fish was brought in—lake trout in an almond jacket. All morning long, St. Cloup, the French cook they had brought along with them from England, had clattered around the camp, complaining that his oven would not heat properly. Coals had come from the northern side of the Sutlej to pile on top of the oven, and a man had been employed in keeping them smoking at just the right temperature, so that St. Cloup could finish this dish in time. When the bearer lifted the cover, the thin slivers of almonds were precisely browned all over; the mousse had seeped into the flaky skin of the trout; the mushroom sauce was burnished with a hint of sherry; and the whole lay upon a bed of pureed watercress, palely green.

  “Peshawar was . . . is a city of hooligans,” Avitabile said, lifting a slice of trout and setting it on Emily’s plate. He served himself and then pointed at his plate with a fork. “Not bad; not what I would have expected. I wonder if it tastes as good as it looks.” He slipped a piece into his mouth and chewed. “They ran riot over the people, killing as they wished, a law unto themselves. I changed all that for the Maharajah.”

  The light from the chandelier cast Avitabile’s face in a shadow, and all Emily could see was the burning fire in his eyes. “Your St. Cloup is indeed a marvel, Mademoiselle Emily.” When he had finished the fish on his plate, he continued, “There’s no lawlessness in Peshawar now, not anymore. I widened the streets, and men and women walk abroad in the middle of the night without fear.” A smile, wicked and enticing to Emily. “There’s no one left to fear.”

  “Will you go back to Italy, monsieur?”

  “Someday, yes. My Maharajah will not live forever . . . After him, there’s really no one left to rule. Perhaps you British will take over the Punjab Empire then.”

  “Perhaps,” Emily said.

  They ate the chicken Alabaster, doused in a cream sauce, in silence, and all the while Emily watched his hands move fluidly over the table. His cutlery did not clink on his plate, and he ate and drank with a quietness she had never seen in a man. St. Cloup gave them a mango fool for dessert, simple and elegant, with a smear of cream on top.

  “I see why your chef does this little dessert,” Avitabile said, “to tell me that he can get ripe mangoes in December.”

  “He has been nursing these in hay since the summer, picked green, ripened over the last six months.”

  When the food was cleared away and a glass of port lay before Avitabile, he sat back and folded his hands in his lap. “This has been a very pleasant interlude, Mademoiselle Emily.”

  “Yes,” Emily said slowly. “Yes.” It had been just that, an interlude. Nothing more.

  “I return to Peshawar tomorrow, mademoiselle,” he said, rising as he spoke. He pushed his chair back in to the table and came around the other side to hold Emily’s as she rose. “You see, only I can maintain order there. I might find a few more men to hang before breakfast. Such is my life.”

  “I see that,” she said, putting out her hand to him. He kissed it again, and she felt the warmth of his breath upon her skin. He raised a hand in farewell at the door to the tent, and when he had gone out, she doused the candles, leaving only the jeweled light from the chandelier near the ceiling.

  She stood there, alone, arms wrapped tightly around herself. She heard the horse stretch the sound of its lengthy c
ough. A shot blasted through the sound, and through the white canvas of the tent, Emily saw the horse collapse on the dirt, and die.

  The next day the Governor-General’s party broke camp and crossed over the Sutlej into Punjab territory, to begin the leisurely waltz of asking and being refused.

  Emily did not accompany them. She went back to Simla to await George and Fanny’s return, before they could all head back to Calcutta. There, in the rented cottage, she watched snow dust the mountains, completed her sketches, wrote long letters to Eleanor, Robert, and Mary. Late at night, when Jimrud and her maids were asleep, alone by the flickering fire in the hearth, she thought of home, of England.

  She did not think of Monsieur Avitabile.

  Love in Lahore

  September 1846

  Eight years later

  A gigantic harvest moon rose over the ramparts of Lahore Fort, tangerine-hued in the just-darkened night sky. It was a hot moon—a great big ball of fire, with no illusion of coolness—as heated as the day had been. Henry Lawrence had seen the mercury rise trembling in the thermometer until, late in the afternoon, it had hit a hundred and ten degrees. As a consequence, it had been a quiet day, for which Henry was grateful.

  He sat, legs splayed, on the floor of the northern end of Jahangir’s Quadrangle, against the base of the flat-roofed building that hugged the outer, riverfront rim of the courtyard. The wall behind his back was warm, and heat seeped in through the thin cotton of his trousers. Reaching into the inner pocket of his khaki shirt, he took out a packet of beedis—native cigarettes. His fingers caught in the lacings of his shirt’s collar and the packet fell to the ground, the beedis spilling in all directions. He picked one up, struck a match, cupped his fist around the flame although no breeze budged the thick night air, lit the squat end of the beedi. Inhaled. The tobacco was harsh, unfiltered, and the smoke scraped down his throat to his lungs.

  It had been many years since Henry had smoked the pallid, insipid cigarettes that came from England, not after his first taste of a beedi. That had happened in the middle of the jungles in the Northwest Provinces, where he had been sent as a revenue surveyor—difficult work that meant tramping through the wilderness of unmapped, uncharted territory, peopled with natives and villages who had never seen an Englishman before. Who could not understand that their land was now part of the British Empire. Or that land tax payments were due, every quarter, to a foreign lord, where once it had been at the whimsy of whichever raja or emperor had ruled over them—this king sitting far away in Delhi, or Agra, or Lahore.

  It had been tough, exacting work. There were no hotels to be had, no dak bungalows (since the survey took place far from the dak—postal—routes), no chicken curries with gleaming white rice, certainly no tinned sausages and ham. Henry and his group—which was composed of him, a horse which he rode when it was amenable, three donkeys to carry the load of his tent and his belongings, four servants, two to guard, two to look after his needs—had traversed the hilly, shrub-clad land for months. Once in a very rare while, they would stumble upon another British civil servant, also with his survey papers, his native servants, his tent, donkeys, and horses. That night they would each break out their cigarettes and their brandy, drink a tot before a crackling fire, talk the hours away, glad to hear the sound of English spoken as it should be. The campfires were kept burning all through the night, and Henry’s sleep would often be fractured by the frustrated roar of a tiger or the cry of a jackal.

  Henry’s cigarettes ran out in two months, and quaking with need, he watched his servant pull out a pouch of tobacco flakes, a notebook with dried tendu leaves carefully interspersed between its pages, and a square of jute cloth. First, the man worried the frayed edges of the jute cloth, until his stumpy fingers delicately picked out a string of thread. Then, he laid out a rectangular piece of tendu leaf, filled it with the tobacco, and furled it on a diagonal into a cylinder. He rolled this several times between the palms of his hands, with a delicate touch, not crushing the leaf. The jute thread went twice around the base of the beedi, and the man twisted the ends before stubbing in the bigger edge to keep the tobacco from falling out. It was simple, it was easy.

  Looking up at Henry’s eager face, his servant offered it to him. “Here, Sahib.”

  Henry took it gingerly, bent to have it lit, took a drag. “Is it safe?”

  The man shrugged, lifting emaciated shoulders. “I have smoked these, Larens Sahib, since I was twelve years old.” The semblance of a smile cracked across his wizened face. “Safer than being here, surely.”

  When he returned to what passed for civilization in India, Henry Lawrence could not put an English cigarette in his mouth; he had gone unfortunately native in the matter.

  The beedi in Henry’s hand burned down until the tip of glowing embers seared his fingers. He dropped it on the ground, moved his foot to stamp it out, and ran his hand through the abundant darkness of his hair. How many days had he been here in Lahore, as Resident? Some sixty-five, and it was, for an artillery soldier, a promotion beyond his best dreams. Such choice posts went only to the civil servants of the Indian Civil Service, and Henry Lawrence had come to India twenty-three years ago, at the age of sixteen, to join the Bengal Artillery in Dum Dum near Calcutta.

  All his postings since then had been in the Northwest Provinces of British India, outside the boundaries of the Punjab Empire, the last one—as Assistant Agent—at Firozpur, just south of the Sutlej River, which had been deemed by the Treaty of Amritsar in 1809 the southern bastion of the Empire, beyond which the British army redcoats would not travel.

  And yet, here they were at Lahore, Henry thought with a dry irony. Maharajah Ranjit had been dead for some seven years. The Punjab Empire had disintegrated into a veritable bloodbath. Three, maybe four of Ranjit’s descendants had since died by the sword of a brother, a cousin, a friend, and only one young boy was left to reign over the lands of the Punjab. He had been crowned king with the help of the British army, another irony. And that child’s name was Maharajah Dalip Singh.

  As the moon flooded the courtyard of Jahangir’s Quadrangle with its flaming glow, Henry gathered the beedis strewn over the floor. He took off his boots. His bare feet slapped against the stone of the pathway that led to a square pool in the center of the courtyard, with its marble platform.

  Once, not so long ago, this courtyard had been part of the most private quarters at Lahore Fort. Lord Auckland, author of that devastating war in Afghanistan, a past Governor-General, had come to Lahore Fort as a guest of Ranjit Singh. But he wouldn’t have been permitted into Jahangir’s Quadrangle, then part of the zenana—harem—space. Auckland would have been received in the courtyard just south, the Diwan-i-Am, the Hall of Public Audience, perhaps in the adjoining Shah Burj, which was still part of the zenana, but Maharajah Ranjit Singh had used it as his own, not allowed his women there.

  Henry rubbed his right side as he walked, dulling the pain there. Three days ago, while he was riding through the local bazaar outside the fort, a piece of brick had come flying out of nowhere and glanced off his shoulder. The soldiers accompanying him, and his private secretary, Herbert Edwardes, had scurried around, shouted, pounded into zenana apartments in the buildings overhanging the narrow street in search of the miscreant. They had found only gaggles of sloe-eyed, bold women, veils over their noses and mouths, ogling children, men belligerent at having been disturbed in their rest, or their chai, or their gossip.

  “I saw nothing,” they all variously said, when questioned in Punjabi, Urdu, Hindustani, and Persian. “But the Resident Sahib must take care, eh?”

  Another warning, a very mild one, that the British were not wanted.

  Although the child Dalip Singh had been proclaimed Maharajah of the Punjab, it was harshly evident that the British ruled instead.

  Henry breathed in the silvered air, filled with the aroma of night blooms of the rath-ki-rani. After twenty-three years in India, England was a distant dream, even, the few times he had gone
back, an unfamiliar country. Cold, damp, the skies knitted close with clouds, clinging moss on flagstones. He thought at times that if and when he died, it would be here in the Punjab, in this heated land with its churning passions, its strange tongues—not so unfamiliar anymore; he spoke all of them fluently—its luscious landscapes with open skies, rivers, streams, gullies, the abundantly fertile fields.

  Henry lit another beedi and squatted on the marble floor of the platform in the center of the pool. Maharajah Ranjit Singh had owned the fort at Lahore, as the conqueror of the city, but it had its origins and its embellishments from some two or three hundred years in the past. Jahangir’s Quadrangle was attributed to Emperor Jahangir of the Mughal Empire, who had ruled in the early 1600s. Immediately west was Shah Jahan’s Quadrangle, also part of the riverfront residences, and beyond another series of courtyards and rooms, including the Shah Burj, which Henry had not seen yet. When he had been appointed Resident at Lahore, he had stopped his men from evacuating the women of Ranjit Singh’s harem from the rest of the apartments. For his own use, he had kept Jahangir’s and Shah Jahan’s Quadrangles.

  The last Mughal king lay moldering in Delhi, for forty years Maharajah Ranjit Singh had occupied the fort at Lahore, and now, the Punjab Empire was also dead.

  When he thought of that—the death of the Punjab Empire—Henry smiled grimly into his fist, even as his mouth closed over the beedi. He knew this to be true; he was here in Lahore to make it happen. They might all talk of the British helping the Punjab rise and ride again as a northwestern power in India, with Dalip as Maharajah, or talk of the British army retreating when Dalip hit his majority. But it wouldn’t happen. Why would it? There was talk of Dalhousie being made Governor-General of India; and Lord Dalhousie would annex the Punjab, throw Dalip Singh into prison, and trample over everyone’s hearts until hatred and revenge bloomed. Henry and Dalhousie had an antagonistic relationship; there were childhood slights, and a vast, yawning gap of misunderstanding as adults between them. Somehow, John, Henry’s brother, was a jewel to Dalhousie; Henry, not so much of one. As long as one of the Lawrence brothers is liked, Henry thought, we’ll all do well in India.