The Mountain of Light

by Indu Sundaresan

  “Not allowed.” She put as much mockery as she could into those two words. “You are not allowed to have the Kohinoor diamond.”

  Henry turned helplessly to Misr Makraj, who was watching him with a gleam in his eyes. “Who is she, Misr Makraj?”

  “A . . . princess, Henry Sahib,” he said quietly. “She is the sister of Maharajah Sher Singh.”

  Henry turned again to the woman in the archway and saw her back stiffen, and her chin come up under the veil. Princess? Queen? These titles had been idly bandied about by the twenty-three remaining wives, and the hundred and thirty concubines Ranjit Singh had left behind. She was really nobody, he thought. Sher Singh had been Ranjit Singh’s adopted son, and had been assassinated at the behest of Dalip Singh’s mother . . . or someone else; the histories, just a few years later, were so muddied with legend. And none of those alive who had witnessed the events spoke of them. Sher Singh’s antecedents were murky also; some said he was truly Ranjit Singh’s son, though born without the benefit of his parents being married; some said he was a cousin. And this girl was the sister of the man who had pretended to be the son of the Lion of the Punjab, a man who had sat on the throne for a few short days before someone had walked up to him in open court, pulled out a pistol, and shot him between the eyes.

  “I’m sorry—” Henry began.

  “Don’t be,” she said harshly. “If you want the Kohinoor back, ask for me, Roshni. If you want to be sorry for me, don’t be; I’m betrothed to Maharajah Dalip Singh.”

  “Tomorrow then,” Henry said quickly. “In Jahangir’s Quadrangle, at noon. Please come.”

  He saw her pondering his words, shaking her head at first, and then she said, “All right.” She turned to go, and said over her shoulder, “You are here for protection, are you not, Henry Lawrence?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And to be fair, you must believe that.”

  She looked at him for a long while. “Why then, in all the time that you have been in Lahore, have you not made an attempt to meet with your charge? Have you seen Maharajah Dalip Singh?”

  Henry felt blood warm his skin. He hadn’t. The biggest part of his duties as Resident was the care of the young Maharajah, but thus far he had met only the members of the Sikh Durbar—the men who were advisors to the Maharajah’s court—his mother and her lover, and the various other men who were in charge of arrangements at Lahore Fort. Henry had the city to deal with also, with all its myriad troubles—water, the lack of it; the hooligans who paraded abroad at night. And then, he had the administration of the whole of the Punjab Empire—what was left of it, ponderous enough for a man not born to rule. He had spent the last two months writing copious letters to every man of note he had served with during all his years with the artillery, inviting them to Lahore to serve under him, giving them governorships of Peshawar and Multan and other places smaller, all with the injunction that their hand must not be too heavy, their wisdom sage indeed, and the people under their guardianship happy.

  In all this—days and nights spent in all this—Henry had pushed away the care of the boy king toward his retainers. As long as he had heard reports that Dalip Singh was cheerful, riding his horse every day, learning from his Urdu and Persian masters, keeping his hawks and falcons—he had not bothered to contact him.

  The girl, the woman, mocked him, as though she knew his thoughts. “The Maharajah must be your first charge, must he not, Henry Lawrence? What else does the Resident of Lahore really have to do?”

  “I . . .” Henry began, and then stopped, abashed. She was right.

  She went out through the archways, and to Henry it seemed as though the light in the courtyard had dimmed. She had said that she was betrothed to Maharajah Dalip Singh, and she was twenty years old at least—there was none of that adolescent gawkiness in her walk, her talk. And Dalip Singh was eight years old.

  And Henry had finally recognized her as the girl he had seen last night in Jahangir’s Quadrangle.

  • • •

  The next morning, at four o’clock, before night had slackened its grip over the city of Lahore, the crackle of gunshots resounded off the ramparts.

  Henry, John, Edwardes, and the others scrambled from their cots, flung on trousers and shirts, grabbed guns, and sprinted toward the sound. They could see flashes of light beyond the walls, near the stables just outside the Diwan-i-am, the Hall of Public Audience.

  “What’s happening?” Edwardes yelled, his breathing harsh. He had been in the Bengal Artillery at Dum Dum with Henry; they had arrived in India together, bunked together, spent many a night drinking and exchanging stories. Whereas Henry’s figure was slim, almost gaunt after a bout of malaria in a Burma campaign, Edwardes had steadily been putting on bulk. He kept up with the Lawrence brothers, but just barely.

  They clattered down the steep set of stairs of the Hathi Pol, the Elephant Gate, and out into the night. To meet with chaos.

  Handheld lanterns swung their beams in wild arcs as men dashed around. Fifty or so camels strained in their harnesses, cows bellowed in pain, curses puckered the air, and a small contingent of British soldiers fired into the fabric of the sky.

  “Stop,” Henry roared. His eyes moved over the scene quickly—no one was dead, although a few cows had collapsed on the dirt, no one was actually shooting at someone else, and everyone was shouting. In a few moments, even this comparative peace would escalate into something worse. “John.” He whipped around to his brother. “Get to the back of this crowd, show yourself to the soldiers, and get them to stop shooting—they’re frightening the animals. Lake”—this to another lieutenant—“to the right, calm down the natives, find out why. Nicholson, put on your uniform jacket, man, how will they know who you are otherwise?”

  Henry pounded back up the stairs leading to the Hathi Pol, grabbed a torch from its holder, and held it aloft.

  John, preparing to follow his brother’s orders, stopped and turned back. “Put that down, Pat, for God’s sake. You’re a sitting target; some of these men have guns.”

  “Only the British soldiers have guns,” Henry shouted back. “And no one will shoot at me. Go now.”

  For ten minutes the racket continued; then slowly, the gunshots stopped, and the natives subsided, muttering under their breath. The only sounds heard for a while were the lowing of the cows, and the distressed snorting of the camels. Henry waited, his arm tiring as he held the light up.

  “Who’s in charge here?”

  “I am, sir.” A sergeant came up, his face blackened with gunpowder, his rifle’s spout wreathed in smoke. He stood below Henry, his eyes screwed up in a defiant glitter.

  “What happened?”

  A downward look and an explanation that came out in a mumble. The camel artillery had been on its way to Lahore Fort, to be housed in the stables there. They had chosen this hour of the morning so that there would be no interference from the natives, so that the road would be clear. The camels were hitched onto cannons and large guns, and they had a difficult enough time towing their burdens without the natives running across their paths. But a couple of cowherds had decided to let their herds of cows—some twenty of them—pass by just as the sergeant had shouted at them to stand back. The camels had reared, some of their harnesses had come loose; the camel drivers had bellowed at the cowherds, the cowherds had yelled back. And then the sergeant had drawn his sword and jumped in between the cows and slashed out indiscriminately. He hadn’t hit the cowherds—he was careful of that, he said to Henry—but a few of the cows were bleeding from their shoulders and their ears and faces.

  “I’m sorry,” Henry called out to the cowherds, who were quaking with rage, their kurtas drenched in sweat. “Go home now; you will be compensated for the cows. Tell your masters that I will come and visit them later to make amends.”

  The two men shook their heads. One of them spoke. “It is indecent to harm a cow; she is like a mother to us. This man”—he pointed at the sergeant—“has destroyed our mother.”

 
“John,” Henry said, “escort these men away, please, right now. Send them on to their pasture.”

  As the men left they looked back, muttered to each other, and one of them called out a word that Henry had come to dread, that had signaled trouble for him in the past, “Hartal.”

  And sure enough, when the cows’ blood had been wiped off and the dirt resettled in the yard outside the Hathi Pol so that no other native could make a pilgrimage here, the city of Lahore woke to a strike, a hartal. Shops were shut down even before they opened, schools were given the day off; women crept out to the communal wells in fear, returning with their pots of water held in front of their bellies, covered by their veils. Vegetables brought fresh from the countryside baked in the carts; no buyer dared to step outside while a gang of ruffians roamed the streets, beating up whomever they saw, smashing the windows of the houses, setting fires that spread through one neighborhood, and then another.

  All morning long, Henry listened with growing dismay to the news from the outside. He called for the wazir, Lal Singh, and ordered him to lift the strike.

  Lal Singh was a short, fair man, with a large mole on his chin, which he worried with his fingers as he talked. He had shifty eyes, never met Henry’s gaze, and bent his head from one direction to another in birdlike movements. “What can I do?” he said, touching his chin with a fat hand.

  Henry looked at him with distaste. It was rumored that Lal Singh’s father had been a shopkeeper in Lahore, and it was true that he was Maharani Jindan Kaur’s lover, and the two of them had engineered the whole coup that led to Dalip Singh’s being on the throne. It was also rumored that perhaps Lal Singh, and not Maharajah Ranjit Singh, was Dalip Singh’s father, that their affair was one of long standing. This last Henry did not pay heed to, or care about.

  “Go talk to the people, Lal Singh,” he said. “They will listen to you.”

  “Ah.” Lal Singh pretended to ponder this. His glittering gaze rested upon the top button on Henry’s shirt. “They do not listen to you, do they? What can I do? The people have a mind of their own and are demanding restitution for a wrong. You must instruct your soldiers not to touch any Indian cows, Resident Henry; it is against my religion.”

  “They know this.” And it was true. Henry, John, Edwardes—all of them—had continually dinned this message of tolerance into the uneducated foot soldiers of the armies of the Queen and the East India Company. Especially here, in Lahore, where they were on such a tentative footing with the natives—not rulers yet, not vassals of their Maharajah either.

  Then Henry pleaded with Lal Singh, something he had never done so far. But the wazir refused to leave the safety of the fort and step into the raging fire outside. The people would come to a resolution themselves, he said, over and over again. He could not interfere.

  So, at noon, Henry, John, and Edwardes set out on horseback with five soldiers as a guard and went down the deserted, ghostly streets to the houses of the two Hindu men who owned the herds. As they passed through the barren bazaars, many eyes viewed them through shutters and just-ajar windows. Doors opened softly in their wake, and from each house, a man stepped out and joined the growing throng following them. Their horses’ hooves rattled on the deserted cobblestones of the streets, along with the muted flip-flop of the men’s feet behind. By the time they had reached their destination, the crowd had grown to some seven hundred men.

  John nudged his horse closer to Henry’s and said, “We should turn back; this is not safe. Better to come with a larger escort.”

  “No,” Henry said, just as quietly. “We come in peace.”

  “Henry—”

  “John,” Henry said, his face rigid, “do as I say.”

  They arrived outside the house of one of the herd owners. It was really a mansion, Henry realized, large, whitewashed, set well back from the road and hidden behind the foliage of a grove of fruit trees—guavas, tamarinds, jamuns. They dismounted, left their horses outside the gates, reins flung on the dirt, and put the soldiers on guard.

  On the front verandah, seated in balloon cane chairs, were two corpulent men in pristine white dhotis and kurtas. They nodded at the three Englishmen and, not rising from their places, indicated to the servants that more chairs be brought out. The five men sat in an uneasy circle as chai was served, along with a plate of purple coconut burfis. They ate and drank in silence—even in turbulent times such as these, niceties had to be observed—and at the end, Henry gulped down his chai, to wash away the sticky sugar of the sweets in his mouth.

  He set his cup down and waved off a persistent fly buzzing about his ear. “The British government will compensate you for the loss of your cows. We are truly sorry about the incident.”

  One of the two men—and they were friends, and owners of the herds, this Henry understood even though no introductions had been made—sank deeper into his chair. A fine sheen of sweat glittered on his forehead and on the folds of his chin. He gazed at his hands, linked over a comfortable stomach, and said, in a low, muffled voice, “This is a travesty, Henry Sahib.”

  Henry was distracted for a moment by a harsh curse that came floating over the gardens to them from the vicinity of the gates. “I agree,” he said. “The soldier responsible is an unpad—illiterate—and he does not understand the value you have for your cows. He will be reprimanded, and demoted immediately.”

  “That is good,” the man replied. “But is it enough?”

  “Enough for now. We will all talk to our men later today, and teach them to be more careful.”

  The two men glanced at each other, their eyes tiny in the many folds of flesh on their cheeks, and seemed to come to an agreement.

  “Thank you,” said the man who had spoken so far.

  The house, the gardens, the sheer repose of the two herd owners meant that they were also rich, and men of some influence in the city. Henry said, “Will you call off the hartal? Everyone suffers.”

  The man agreed. “Everyone does. Good-bye.”

  The three Englishmen rose but did not shake hands. Just as they had pushed their chairs back, a loud clatter came from the gates. Curses were flung into the heated air, the horses began neighing in distress, and the men fled out of the gardens toward the sounds. Another altercation had begun, this time between Henry’s five soldiers and the mob outside. The soldiers had been stripped of their rifles, and these were passed on from hand to hand until they disappeared into the mass of bodies. Bricks, stones, and sticks were lobbed upward just as Henry, Edwardes, and John launched themselves into the mob.

  They fought as best they could, pushing, jostling, trampled upon by hundreds of feet. A few men that Henry grabbed out to hold slipped away from his grasp, their bodies slick with sweat. He saw a brick crash down upon Edwardes’s head, and the secretary disappeared into the crowd. Henry shoved his way to him and pulled him back up onto his feet. Of John there was no sight. He had vanished also. Someone yanked at Henry’s arm, and he felt an immense pain as it pulled out of his shoulder socket. His eyes blurred, his mouth went dry, and in a few seconds he would have fallen into unconsciousness.

  But just at that moment, a calm voice said, “Bas.”

  Just that, just one word, at almost a whisper. Bas. Enough.

  The throng melted away, leaving the road littered with the debris of its weapons—pieces of broken earthenware, stones, chipped bricks, sticks. Henry and his men gathered together, their faces bloodied, their uniforms soiled and torn, and stood looking at the fat herd owner who leaned upon the gate to his mansion, and who had broken up the fight.

  “Go home now, Henry Sahib,” he said, weary from the long walk from his verandah to the road. The gold rings on his plump hand flashed in the sunlight. “You will be safe. Go back to the fort now.” With that, he turned and waddled away.

  Henry cradled his sore arm, his horse picking its way back through the bazaar streets. Edwardes lay forward on his horse, half-unconscious, his face buried against the horse’s mane. Only John seemed to have escape
d much damage—his clothes were torn also, his collar soaked with blood from a cut above his ear, but he, the civil servant Lawrence brother, had enjoyed his foray into a minor battle with the gusto of a soldier.

  Back at the fort, Dr. Kingsley, the surgeon attached to the Resident’s staff, popped Henry’s arm back into its socket, put a few stitches in Edwardes’s face, wiped the blood from above John’s ear, and attended to the soldiers.

  Henry went to speak to his men.

  The horde of native men had cursed and called them names, bitter names in Hindustani, Persian, and Punjabi, Henry’s soldiers said to him. And you must know, sir, that English were never as expressive a language as these native ones.

  Did they throw the first stone? Henry asked.

  No, but they opened their filthy mouths so wide and Gus ’ere felt constrained to smack one of them on ’is bloody head . . . and that started it all. Sir.

  Henry grimaced, promptly demoted the five soldiers, and set them to work cleaning out the latrines. He then sent a message to the cantonment of Firozpur, where the largest British presence was stationed in the form of five regiments, and where Henry had once been Assistant Agent. Firozpur was forty-seven miles from Lahore, south of the Sutlej River, and very much in British territory even well before the death of Maharajah Ranjit Singh.