The Mountain of Light

by Indu Sundaresan

  Henry stepped into the murk, and his breath stilled in his chest. Every wall was covered in minute chips of mirror, interspersed with blue, green, red, and yellow tiles. The mirrors rose to the ceiling, and Henry tilted his head to follow their line up, around, and back down again. There were five arches in the front entrance, four boarded up, the one in the center—the one they had entered from—provided with the door. The reflection of the sun on the marble floors of the courtyard kissed the mirrors on the wall, setting them on fire, so bright that it hurt his eyes. The mirror work began from hip height on every wall; below that were simple, marble dado panels, almost shabby in execution, but frames for the glory above.

  The four of them stood quietly, looking at the wedge of the rooms that was visible in the light from the doorway. Misr Makraj moved beyond the archway in the center, into the darkness of the second room, fumbled with latches, and threw open a set of windows. All at once, the light flooded through, and lit up the treasures of the Toshakhana. Henry heard one of the Howards stir, reach up to loosen his collar by running a finger around the inside of it. He thought of the stories of the Arabian Nights, of every myth he had ever heard about the East, and gave thanks for this opportunity to have stepped into one of them.

  There were silver and gold chairs, stacked haphazardly. Every surface contained cooking vessels, plates, spoons, serving ladles, serving dishes, and water pots—ghadhis—in solid gold, embedded with twinkling stones. Henry blinked. He lifted a ghadhi, clasping its mouth with his fingers; it almost slipped out of his hold—it was so heavy. Misr Makraj now moved around the furniture and the jewels, reaching his hand beyond them to the wall, where there were carved niches, their top arches mimicking the archways of the Toshakhana. An oil lamp sat in each niche, and Misr Makraj laboriously cleaned the wicks with a piece of cloth from the pocket of his kurta and lit a lucifer match, striking it on a slice of sandpaper. The sharp tang of sulfur speared through the still air.

  “Where would we sit?” Henry asked, when he had found his voice. It rustled through his throat.

  “Where . . .” Misr Makraj turned to him. “In the courtyard would be best, Henry Sahib. I will bring out each item, and if your men could set up their books and their pens and ink, they can then write out the lists.”

  “Outside then,” Henry said over his shoulder, and the clerks moved away, dragging their feet.

  He saw the old treasurer touch a dagger that lay atop a gold plate. Its hilt was solid gold, embedded with chips of precious stones in a rainbow of colors, and its scabbard was plain red leather with no ornamentation.

  “What is that?”

  “Oh.” Misr Makraj turned hurriedly. “I thought you had left the room, Sahib.” He glanced down at the dagger. “It belonged to the Maharajah; he had two made, exactly the same.” His voice faded.

  “Where’s the other one now?”

  “With me, Sahib. Maharajah Ranjit Singh gave it to me when I was a young man—it was a reward.” His eyes had filled. “In Peshawar . . . we were out in an encampment . . . but, that was very long ago.”

  Henry stepped up to the plate, picked up the dagger, and went over to the windows so that he could see it in the light. The hilt was solid in the palm of his hand, and when he tugged, the blade came out easily, shining sharp and curved at the tip. “Why did the Maharajah give it to you, Misr Makraj?”

  The old man blew his nose on a cotton handkerchief and tucked the handkerchief under the sleeve of his kurta. He took a deep breath. “Too many years have passed, Sahib, since that day. It was for . . . nothing at all. I was a farmer’s son; I met the Maharajah, he gave this”—he pointed at the dagger in Henry’s hands—“one like this.” He murmured to himself. “A long time ago.”

  “Let’s begin, Misr Makraj,” Henry said briskly. There was a story here behind the dagger—but then stories abounded in India, steeped as she was in a varied history that went back many thousands of years, and if Henry Lawrence stopped to hear each one of them, well, he would get no work done.

  For the next four hours, the treasures in the Toshakhana came out to the courtyard, and Henry and the clerks moved often, seeking shade under the wide marble eaves of the buildings, fleeing from one spot to another. There were some ten bags of gold finger rings—just that, crammed chaotically into the cloth, strewn with diamonds, rubies, topaz, emeralds, and stones Henry could not even name. He put “unknown” next to them on the list.

  Misr Makraj carted enormous bundles of cashmere shawls, with embroidery, with gems embedded into them, with gold and silver zari, and each had been carefully packed in a thin leather pouch with the leaves of the neem tree tucked between the folds to keep out insects and white ants. Henry had one fine coat, made of thin wool, with golden buttons (not really gold; he was not a Maharajah), which although kept in a sandalwood trunk made especially for his most precious items, already had four moth holes in it. The treasurer had wrought a miracle.

  He then brought out delicate, filmy rock-crystal wine cups, ninety-nine in all, the hundredth, he said, had been broken by Sher Singh, the Maharajah’s adopted son, who had briefly sat on the throne of the Punjab in the long melee after Ranjit Singh’s death.

  One dirty rag in the palm of Misr Makraj’s hand was unwrapped to reveal a pale yellow stone with a heart of fire, its facets cutting deeply into the middle, and every way the old man turned the stone in the light, it reflected it back a hundred times.

  Henry reached for it hastily. “The Kohinoor?”

  Misr Makraj shook his head, amused. “No, Sahib. Merely a pukraj. Valuable, no doubt, but not the Kohinoor. It did masquerade as the Kohinoor once though.”

  “Pook . . . raj,” Henry said slowly. “What is that . . . oh, a topaz?”

  “If you say so.” Misr Makraj bent his head. “There is a humorous story about it, if you wish to hear.”

  They had work to do, a lot of it, but Henry said suddenly, “I wish to hear every story, Misr Makraj, everything you have to tell me.”

  “In a moment, Henry Sahib.” The treasurer returned to the Toshakhana and returned in less than a minute, tucking a rag into the pocket of his kurta as he came down the stairs.

  They retreated to the far end of the courtyard, away from the Howard brothers, who had barely shown any interest upon hearing that the topaz had a history. One of them had brought out his calipers and had the stone tenderly clutched between the two arms. It glowed like a piece of the sun, held in the dull gray tentacles of the tool.

  “They have no soul, those two men,” Misr Makraj said. “To hold a jewel like that, and feel no emotion.” He smiled down at Henry, who was already sitting. “But they are good at writing and adding numbers, eh, Henry Sahib?”

  “That they are,” Henry said. He brought out his beedis and patted the stone beside him. “Please sit.”

  “If you say so, Sahib.” Misr Makraj would never have sat down in the presence of his Maharajah; in fact, he never had, for all the years of his service, no matter how long the audiences had lasted—two, three, six hours or more. He squatted beside Henry easily enough, although tiredly. He was an old man, and his heart had been damaged many times since the death of his king.

  They smoked a beedi each, another bit of etiquette breached, the smoke curling out from their fingers gray in the deep shadows, blue as it wandered into the sunlight and then dissipated.

  “The pukraj belonged to the king Shah Shuja,” Misr began.

  “This too?” Henry said involuntarily. He had promised himself to listen with patience. Every tale had its long beginnings, middles, and even more elongated endings, no matter what it was about. A magistrate, a judge, a postmaster, or now a resident, had to have an extensive ear in India, capable of being filled with protracted sagas. He also had to have a mind like a pernickety sieve—able to strain out the superfluous, and concentrate on the fundamental.

  “Yes.” Another smile, this one sly. “Shah Shuja had many jewels. My Maharajah wrestled all of them from him. This too, Henry Sahib, a
long with the Kohinoor. But you know, don’t you, that Shah Shuja was driven out of Afghanistan by his own people, and his own general in Kashmir—which was once part of Shuja’s lands—imprisoned him in a dungeon there. Shuja had sent his primary wife, Wafa Begam, to Lahore a long while ago, when all these civil rebellions began on his land. She begged my king for help, promised him Peshawar in return—although Peshawar was neither Shuja’s nor hers to give away. The Maharajah sent his troops to Kashmir, rescued Shuja, and returned him under guard to the arms of his wife, kept Kashmir for himself and made it part of the Punjab Empire.” A shrug. “Only Peshawar was part of the original bargain, but . . . if Shuja could not rule Afghanistan, there was no way he would have been able to rule Kashmir. He was a weakling.”

  Henry nodded. “We had him for a while, you know.”

  “I do, and what a disaster it was for you, Henry Sahib, although I think the disaster was not of Amir Shuja’s making but very much yours—the British, I mean.”

  Bold words from a mere retainer, Henry thought. How would Edwardes and John have reacted to this—which was after all nothing but a stark truth that could not bear to be ignored? The First Anglo-Afghan War, fought to put Shuja back on the throne of Afghanistan with the help of the British army—with only the British army to help; Shuja had no support from his own, scattered men—had been a gut-curdling catastrophe. Henry rubbed his forehead and wiped the sweat on his fingers onto his trousers, where it darkened into a patch. He threw the burned-down end of his beedi into the courtyard, and it came to rest upon the stone, smoking itself into oblivion.

  In the silence that stretched out between the two men—one who was on the path to being made a peer of England, the other who was nothing more than a servant without employ—Henry wondered where all the fury of his youth had gone. Whether the Indian sun had burned it all out into nothingness. He had always had a temper, much like John, and all through his school life he had jumped into scraps, feet-first, thinking later. Although invariably, he had realized later that he ought to have been more thoughtful. And Henry had never been afraid of giving an apology where he had thought he was wrong, where he had inadvertently done wrong. This, in the thirty-ninth year of his life, as he tarried in a courtyard in Lahore Fort, listening to a story, was what had matured him into the man he was today.

  Shah Shuja had been as much of a curse to the British as the Kohinoor he’d once possessed was said to have a curse upon it. But Shuja had been an excuse to invade Afghanistan—the folly of that first intention, and the doggedness in following through with it belonged to one man who had unfortunately been appointed Governor-General of India, George, Lord Auckland.

  “So Wafa Begam, Amir Shuja’s wife, had also promised the Kohinoor to my Maharajah,” Misr continued. “Or rather, he made it a condition for his help. After Shuja was in Lahore, and though under heavy guard, he had all the luxuries of a king—the food, the accommodations (the whole of the Shalimar Gardens was put at his disposal), the nautch girls, the picnic parties, the pleasures of his harem. My king sent him polite requests over the months to ask for the Kohinoor.”

  “Polite?” Henry asked ironically.

  “Always polite, Henry Sahib. Maharajah Ranjit Singh was a man of great patience, and a levelheaded man. He never put to death any person unreasonably. He was also vastly generous to Shuja; he waited years for the Kohinoor.”

  A bhisti came to the door of the courtyard, with his goatskin bag slung over one arm and a tower of earthenware cups. He filled the cups for Henry and the treasurer, and one of the Howards rose to bring the water in a tray that had been set just inside the door. No one else was allowed in.

  Henry drank the water thirstily, allowing it to flow down his chin and drench his shirt. In the heated courtyard, he felt a sense of blessed coolness. When he was done, he raised his cup to the man next to him.

  Misr Makraj nodded, accepting the compliment. “At first, Shuja said he did not have the Kohinoor, that he had lost it while fleeing Peshawar. Then he said he had misplaced it. For a few months, he said he had searched very hard among his belongings for it. Your man Elphinstone came to Lahore to help Shuja escape, but there was nothing in the Punjab that my Maharajah did not know.”

  “He didn’t escape?”

  “No, and then he sent a message to my master saying that he had miraculously found the diamond, praise be to Allah, and that he was ready to hand it over.”

  Henry laughed, throwing his head back. The two Howards tilted their heads inquiringly, peered at him, and then bent back down toward their work. “He sent the topaz.”

  “He sent the topaz back with Fakir Azizuddin, the foreign minister. We had none of us seen the Kohinoor before, and didn’t know if it was blue or white or yellow, but the court jewelers said that it wasn’t a diamond at all, but a pukraj. The Maharajah kept the topaz—”

  Henry grinned. “Of course he would.”

  Misr Makraj turned in surprise. “Of course; it was a silly trick to play on a great Maharajah. Shah Shuja should have sent him a fake stone, instead of a real one. So the Maharajah then cut off all his supplies again. He sent men to drain the ponds and fountains in Shalimar Bagh, and strip the trees of all fruit.”

  “How long did Shah Shuja last?”

  Misr Makraj held up fists and began unfolding fingers. “One . . . two . . . five . . . six . . . eight.”

  Henry raised his eyebrows. “Eight days?”

  “Eight hours, Henry Sahib.” He made a spitting sound with his mouth. “And this man was once Amir of Afghanistan. A mere eight hours, and when he asked for an emissary from the Maharajah’s court, Fakir Azizuddin went again. This time he came back with the Kohinoor. It was brought to my king in a box lined with red velvet, a little depression made in the cloth so that it could be shown against it. It was just the Kohinoor by itself, one stone, and a couple of strings tied to its base so that it could be worn as an armlet. For a few years, my king wore it thus.”

  Henry had heard, though not yet seen, that the Kohinoor was now in an arm ornament of three stones—the Kohinoor itself, flanked by two smaller diamonds, with gold links to complete the armlet. It was in his notes from the Governor-General’s office in Calcutta, and the last confirming entry had been in the hand of Lord Auckland.

  “And then?”

  “Then he had it put into a sarpech for his turban. It was set in gold and had a teardrop diamond depending from it. A very small stone, Henry Sahib, this other diamond was, only forty-five carats.” Here, Misr Makraj reached into his pocket and brought out the grimy piece of cloth for which he had gone into the Toshakhana. Henry watched as he opened the folds of the cloth. In his palm lay a flawless diamond, lightly faceted, about an inch and a half in length.

  Only forty-five carats, Misr Makraj said, incredibly. The Kohinoor was said to be some four times the weight of this little diamond, able to feed the world’s population for a whole day. This bauble would send many a man into a comfortable retirement and take care of a few more future generations.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Misr Makraj asked, dreamily. “It takes a lot of competence to facet a diamond into a teardrop, but the Maharajah’s jewelers always had skill.”

  Henry nodded. He felt for his watch in his vest. He had to leave soon. Tomorrow, perhaps next week, he would be back again to document all the effects of the Toshakhana and he had to be here—this was not work he would entrust to the sole discretion of the Howards, although he would to the man next to him, who gazed at the diamond with such adoration, it was impossible to think he would ever imagine stealing it. Or anything else in the treasury.

  “Shuja, as you know,” Misr Makraj continued, the stone glowing bright in his dark hand, “escaped eventually from Maharajah Ranjit Singh. He could not go back to Afghanistan, so he went instead to Ludhiana, well south of the Sutlej, into British territory.”

  “He was our guest, true.”

  Misr Makraj folded the cloth again and stood up. The corners of his mouth turned upward in
a dry smile. “As much your guest as he had been ours, Henry Sahib. And then a pawn in your Afghan war.”

  He walked away, his bare feet creeping over the dust. In the last four hours, he had become more and more bent, his shoulders falling, his back curved, the weight of what he was doing bearing down upon him. Misr Makraj set the teardrop diamond on the book of one of the clerks, who opened up the cloth eagerly and reached for his calipers.

  “What about the Kohinoor, Misr Makraj?” Henry called.

  The man put out his hands. “It was eventually set in an armlet with a gold chain, flanked by two smaller diamonds. This was early on, Henry Sahib; for the last twenty years of the Maharajah’s life, this is how he wore his Kohinoor.”

  “I mean,” Henry said deliberately, “where is the Kohinoor now?”

  Misr Makraj lifted his shoulders and turned to his right.

  “Where it should be,” said a voice from the entrance to the courtyard. “With his Majesty, Maharajah Dalip Singh.”

  Henry rose to his feet slowly. The woman who stood there was veiled, her ghagara and choli a crimson red, like a splash of blood against the sandstone. The thin chiffon covering her face was almost transparent, but so heavily embroidered that nothing showed, except her hands, fretting away the edge of the fabric. She stood erect, with a queenly bearing, her skirts full and lush. Even through the veil Henry could see that she was slim, with a tiny waist, and tall enough for her head to almost hit the entrance archways—he had had to duck through, but then Henry Lawrence was a tall man even among the British.

  He noticed Misr Makraj bowing, and the two Howards rising from their places.

  “How did you get in here?”

  She moved one hand out; it was an imperious gesture. “In my palaces, Henry Lawrence, you ask me how I go anywhere and why?”

  She had spoken Persian, and Henry had responded alike; the only difficulty she had was with his name. She called him Henny Larens.

  “It is not allowed, your . . . er . . . your,” Henry stuttered and stopped, cursing under his breath. Who was she? One of the numerous widows of Maharajah Ranjit Singh? Not the Maharani Jindan Kaur; her voice was seared in his brain; he had heard her talk many times. When Ranjit Singh had died, he had been cremated, and five of his wives had chosen to commit Sati along with him on his funeral pyre. But he had had a quiverful of others—twenty-three that Henry knew of and, in his meticulous fashion, had documented, demanding from them proof of date of birth, their ancestry, the dates of their marriages to the Maharajah, whether they had had any children from him. This, after having been confronted with an astounding number of royal “widows” when he had first come to Lahore. The British government and the East India Company intended to grant pensions to these women—from the coffers of the Punjab Toshakhana, of course, after taking what they considered right, just, and the spoils of the conqueror.