The Mountain of Light

by Indu Sundaresan

  The night sky lit up around them again in a burst of fireworks. It was impossible to talk with all that noise, the screams from a delighted city, the fainter sounds of gunshots in the distance. Earlier in the month, Henry and his contingent had seriously debated on whether they ought to allow Diwali to be observed—whether there wouldn’t be an opportunity for rebellion under cover of all the sound and smog created by the gunpowder. But it would have been impolitic to stop the city from celebrating a tradition that went back thousands of years, and putting a stop to it would have probably created its own form of rebellion. So they had said nothing, even participated in paying for the fireworks set off from the ramparts of the fort, and looking up at the sky and hearing those gunshots, Henry hoped very much that it was just some miscreants shooting into the air, and not at someone else. He would find out in the morning.

  “I think,” Henry said, when he could speak, and rolls of acrid smoke drifted over the courtyard and draped themselves in folds around them, “Honoria would like that very much.”

  She rose then, and Henry rose with her. “Let me see you out,” he said.

  A tilt of her head, and that mocking voice. “I know my way around the fort very well, Henny Larens.”

  He watched her walk away through the haze. He would have only memories of her that he could hold in a part of his heart—nothing more. Even had he not been engaged to marry Honoria, nothing could have come out of this. Perhaps a hundred years ago in India, it would have been reasonable, acceptable, for an Englishman to have a native wife . . . and to know that he could never return to England with her. The ADCs at the Governor-General’s office were notorious for their Indian “wives” even now, until the English missus came along.

  She stopped, swung around, and came running up the pathway again, wrestling with her arm all the while. When she had reached him, she held out her hand and said, “I almost forgot.”

  In her palm was a gold armlet, a diamond on either side of the main diamond, which was as big as a robin’s egg, oval, ablaze with radiance.

  “It’s yours,” she said.

  He took the Kohinoor and slipped it into the pocket of his trousers but kept a hold of her hand. “Thank you,” he said, “for everything.” And then, he said, “Why?”

  “You’re a good man. At least, I think so.”

  She bent her head for a brief moment, carried his hand to her cheek and held it there. Henry felt the heat of her skin and the flutter of a pulse. Then, she turned, picked up the skirts of her ghagara, and went out into the night.

  • • •

  Honoria came to Lahore two days later, having traveled by the dak roads from Calcutta through the Upper Provinces. Major Battersea, who had made all the arrangements, had written to the Postmaster General outlining her route—where she would stop each night, where she would eat her meals, how many guards she needed along the way, how many torchbearers to light the way at night, how the horses would be paid for. He had tried to get her to stay on at Calcutta until Henry was free to come to her, but she wouldn’t listen. So, alone in a country that was new to her, she got into the dak palki, essentially a palanquin on wheels drawn by horses, and lumbered over thirteen hundred miles to the man she was to marry.

  Henry rode to the outskirts of Lahore to meet her. She descended from the palki in a faded blue gown, the lace at her collar and the edges of her sleeves fraying, her face brown under a straw hat. Her skin was pitted with prickly heat. She was thinner than he remembered, older also—but then so was he.

  He held her hands, and felt an overwhelming rush of emotion for this woman who had braved seas, squalls, heat, and a dangerous journey to find her way to him.

  “You’ll still marry me, Honoria?”

  “That is why I’m here, darling Henry,” she said, her eyes shining with love.

  He sent her to the zenana at the fort. The next day the vicar rode in from Firozpur. And in Jahangir’s Quadrangle, with his brother John on one side, the Maharajah of the Punjab on the other, he waited for her to walk up to him in a pale green gown, a spray of tiny white jasmines in her hair, and took her for his wife.

  Once, many years later, after their children had been born, he asked her how that first day at Lahore had been.

  “The girl in the zenana was very kind,” she said. “If you hadn’t loved me, Henry, I think you could have been in love with her.”

  An Alexandria Moon

  April, 1850

  Four years later

  The whole third page of the Bombay Herald, almost all of it actually, was taken up with the advertisement by Dossabhoy Merwanjee and Co., addresses at 6, Parsee Bazaar Street, in Bombay. They were “American” importers, purveyors of all things American, from the basest—kerosene oil, navy stores, ropes, canvas, lumber—to the finest—tobacco, bar soaps, Waltham watches, and Dr. Townsend’s famed and celebrated sarsaparilla, a tonic for the purification of the blood and for curing dullness or lassitude.

  Having had his weekly paper all laid out—and to accommodate this relatively late-breaking story—Mr. Wingate, the publisher, cut out a small corner at the bottom right of the full-page advertisement and inserted the story there. It looked odd enough that people noticed it, and consequently the advertisement. And Mr. Dossabhoy, bathed, his beard spruce, fresh and cool in his white vest at the entrance to his store, was gratified to see large crowds who cleaned out his stock of the sarsaparilla.

  The story, by “our local correspondent,” read simply, Under other circumstances, the visit of a Governor-General would be nothing less than royal, but not if we are to believe that Lord Dalhousie slipped into Bombay two days ago, under cover of dark, without notice to Lord Falkland, who as Governor of this city, has sorely missed an opportunity to parade the other Lord around with a plenitude of pomp.

  Why, one wonders, all this secrecy? Would it have something to do with the annexation of the lands of the Maharajah Ranjit Singh? Or with the jewels of his famed Toshakhana? Or with one specific stone—large as a woman’s clenched fist, the ransom of a king . . . on its way, perhaps, to a Queen?

  Mr. Wingate had once been sued for libel and slander by a man who had offended him, and about whom, previously, he had not been flattering in his Bombay Herald. But this story, with its innuendos and delighted whisperings, had to have some truth in it. The Government of India and the East India Company could hardly call him out in public without revealing at least some of those truths.

  Two nights ago, driving back in his horse-drawn carriage, Wingate had passed the Treasury part of Fort George, and who should be coming out of it but Lord Dalhousie—with a smile on his face! Now, everyone knew that the dour Governor-General never found occasion for mirth. A smile would spoil that handsome façade of which he was possessed; even perhaps, ruffle that coolly blond hair so carefully brushed across his noble forehead.

  So, sitting in his carriage, wrapped in a cigar-smoke fug, his mind pleasantly blurred by an evening of port, brandy, sherry, Madeira, and a splendid dinner, Mr. Wingate was sure that this man was none other than Dalhousie. He had been last reported in the Punjab, in Lahore; for him to appear in Bombay could only mean that he had brought here something from the Punjab. Something so secret, so valuable, it had to be deposited into the Treasury building. Why else would he be here? Dalhousie surely had a furtive air about him.

  The next morning, behind his cluttered and paper-strewn desk, Mr. Wingate was reading the ship lists that his Herald published every six months. His blunt, nicotine-yellow finger rubbed its way down the columns. Ah, here it was. On the first of April 1850, on regular schedule, the P & O paddle steamer the SS Indus was to depart from Bombay to Suez. From Suez to Alexandria, via Cairo, would be a three- or four-day journey at the most, and by the twenty-second or so, one of the P & O steamers that plied the Mediterranean route—Alexandria to Southampton or Portsmouth—would pick up Indian passengers and take them to England by the end of the month.

  The list of warships at the Government Docks in Bombay was
not so readily available to the public, but Mr. Wingate nonetheless received a copy of it at the beginning of each month. The frigate HMS Megaera, commissioned as a troopship, was due to arrive in two days, and . . . the HMS Medea was already at dock. This last, as Mr. Wingate read, was a second-class sloop, a warship, troops and cannons and other fine things, he assumed.

  He glanced up at the tear-off calendar he had got as a gift from Dossabhoy Merwanjee & Co. when buying—of all things non-American—a couple of Persian carpets from them. There had been very little discount on the carpets, even though Mr. Wingate had given Dossabhoy a quarter rate cut on a full-page advertisement in the Herald for a whole three months. Mr. Wingate groaned. Twelve weekly page spaces to that well-fed and slick Dossabhoy, all for two Persian carpets and a cheap paper calendar with no colored paintings on it. However, the Persian carpets had kept his wife from complaining, and she happily massaged the plush pile with her toe while chatting desultorily with visitors during her “at homes.” And the calendar now told him that it was the twenty-fifth of March, some six days before the Indus’s departure.

  He sent his chai boy to smoke English cigarettes at the Government Docks and distribute them liberally in exchange for information. The HMS Megaera would be leaving tomorrow night, and she was headed to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal. Curious, Mr. Wingate said. Why there? The jail is there, Sahib, the boy said. A penal colony in the Andamans, thought Mr. Wingate. He was quite certain the Bay of Bengal and the islands were not in the direction of England, but to make doubly sure, he pulled out his Victoria Regina Atlas and traced over Madras and then out into the Indian Ocean. There they were, scattered in a tattered line in the middle of the waters, far, far away from England.

  And the Medea? he asked the chai boy. It goes to England, Sahib, very soon, even the deckhands did not seem to know when. The man commanding the ship, Captain Lockyer, has orders to take onboard two men from some . . . government office, and to follow their orders. The captain is not very happy about leaving the fate of his ship in the hands of two nonnaval men.

  Mr. Wingate gazed with adoration at the sweaty, scrawny face of his chai boy. He was an unprepossessing lad, long of nose, big of mouth, knobby about the knees that showed under his khaki uniform shorts. His hair was always thick with oil, and he reeked of the coconut. But he had performed a veritable miracle.

  Would he, Mr. Wingate inquired delicately, happen to know the names of the two, um, nonnaval men? Co-lo-nel Mac Gragor and a Cap-i-tane Ramsay, the boys at the dock said that this second man had the same name as the Governor-General.

  Colonel McGregor and Captain Ramsay, Mr. Wingate decided. He went for his Burke’s Peerage, and again, his finger laboriously moved over the pages until he came to the current Earl of Dalhousie, who had a given name (among many) of Ramsay, and who was the head of the clan of Ramsay, and whose father was a Sir William Ramsay. Why, thought Mr. Wingate with sheer delight—Dalhousie’s family was littered with Ramsays! So this captain was surely, as the chai boy said, a kinsman.

  He searched assiduously through the military lists and found a few McGregors, a few MacGregors, but none of them seemed important enough—subalterns, or lieutenants, one a captain. It made no sense. Who was this McGregor?

  Mr. Wingate thought about this for a long while. The punkah in his room flapped forward and backward, braiding the warm air into thick cords around him, setting some of the papers on his desk aflutter. The chai boy breathed through his mouth, wiped his running nose on the back of his hand, and then smeared that on his shorts. But surely, the HMS Medea would be carrying Dalhousie’s precious cargo, whatever it was that he had deposited from Lahore into the Bombay Treasury, and these two men were in charge of it. The newspaperman chewed on the end of his pencil and hawked out the wood fragments into a dustbin conveniently placed within spitting distance.

  The chai boy snorted and took in a deep, noisy breath that gargled the phlegm in his chest.

  Mr. Wingate dug in his waistcoat pocket for an anna coin, glanced at it briefly, and then took out a rupee coin—a whole sixteen annas—and flipped it to the boy. The lad’s smile, when he had caught the coin and weighed its value in his palm (he was too polite to actually look at it) was wide, showed all of his teeth and a good deal of the inside of his mouth.

  “You’re a marvel,” Mr. Wingate said. “You really are.”

  “Thank you, Sahib.” The boy bowed and backed out of the door, salaaming furiously.

  What should he do with this information? Mr. Wingate wondered. No other paper in town knew of Dalhousie’s visit—or they would have been buzzing with the news—there had been no talk in the Bombay Club, or the Navy or Army Club. No mention in the theater last night during the intermission; a lot of inconsequential chatter, which he always kept his ear open to, but something as big as this would have been bandied about for months—with every person in the city trying to get onto the party lists at Government House, the morning rides lists, the tiffin lists, or trying to invite Dalhousie’s wife to open a club here, a swimming bath there, a charity ball or an orphanage.

  Now, if only the item in the Treasury was going to travel by the commercial P & O steamer, Mr. Wingate would have considered buying a ticket to England, or sending someone else on his behalf . . . for what he did not know yet. But it was surely being taken aboard the British Navy’s HMS Medea, impossible to board with a captain already livid at the rattling of his authority.

  What should he do with this information? Mr. Wingate pored over the copy for the next edition of his Herald, shouted at a few editors about the headlines on a couple of the pages. At the end of the day, he took his hat off the hook behind the door and went home to his wife and his children in the comfortably luxurious neighborhood of Colabah, with its lush palm trees, its bright bougainvilleas, its chunam-washed bungalows and neat tile roofs.

  After dinner, Mary and he went for a drive in the nearby park. Mr. Wingate normally enjoyed the daily parade of nations in Bombay—the only city in the world where this could be possible. The Chinese man in his satin jacket with thin braided hair wrapped around his head; the Hindu with his fat wife and equally fat kids, their hair oil-slicked; the Portuguese with their olive complexions, short, curly hair, and white cotton shirts, looking more Indian than the Indians; the Roman Catholic priests, pale and ascetic in their flapping gray cassocks; the stiff military Englishman, quite from another country than the casual civil service Englishman, so dissimilar that they might speak different languages; the Muslims, the Bengalis, the Gujaratis, the Jains, the Buddhists, all in their distinctive outfits; and the Parsi, quiet, composed, his beard trimmed with a precise hand . . . the Parsi! Mr. Wingate turned his head around as the Parsi’s carriage passed, and in it, resplendent in his white vest, was none other than Dossabhoy Merwanjee.

  “You’re preoccupied today, Harry,” his wife said. “You hardly noticed that nice Mr. Dossabhoy’s bow; he’s the one who sold us the carpets, you know. And I’ve got my eye on one of those American toy pistols for little Harry’s birthday. Will you be nice to him next time, please?”

  “A lot on my mind, Mer,” Mr. Wingate mumbled. “I was thinking about poor Lucius, struck with cholera in those dreadful barracks at Calcutta.”

  Mrs. Wingate shuddered; it was a delicate movement of her massive shoulders.

  “He died, you know, my brother’s only son. Horace had specifically asked me to look after him, and I thought, since I am the publisher of the fine Bombay Herald, a letter of introduction from me to the Governor-General would get Lucius a post in the Council at least. What I had in mind for him was that military secretary title. How fine he would have been in his uniform then, eh, Mary?”

  Mrs. Wingate nodded without enthusiasm. Lucius had been a spotty-faced boy of seventeen, who had somehow wrangled his way as an infantryman into the Forty-third regiment of the East India Company, and he had been happy enough there until her husband had decided that a boy with his charm and intelligence needed to be
in Calcutta, not languishing under a burning Indian sun on march to some outpost. Or rather, his brother Horace had written to Harry Wingate to tell him he ought to think so and, to help him think so, had brought up a long-held debt. So Wingate had written to Lord Dalhousie, and the Governor-General had thrown that letter into the garbage, and sent its deliverer, Lucius, to the jailhouse of the nearest regiment until he could be sent back to his own—as he was AWOL from it. The Persian carpets, the ivory-inlaid tea table, the fine china tea set that Harry Wingate had also sent along—he, Wingate, was sure had gone to fatten the personal treasury of the Governor-General.

  Lucius had died within a week, having caught cholera—and literally not having been able to run from it—in the jail.

  This Captain Ramsay who was to travel to England at Lord Dalhousie’s behest was the military secretary—the very post Mr. Wingate had coveted for his nephew had gone to Dalhousie’s nephew.

  The next morning, before the Bombay Herald went to press, Mr. Wingate cheated Mr. Dossabhoy by carving out the bottom right-hand side of his advertisement, and took his revenge upon Lord Dalhousie by printing notice of his presence in Bombay—when, why, et cetera. He had finally decided to release this information because he couldn’t see how it could be of any use to him at all since he couldn’t get onto the HMS Medea—that ship was under a tight and rigorous guard.

  Three hours after the paper came out there was an accident in the steam room of the HMS Medea; a fire began, and half the machinery was burned before the fire could be brought under control. That put the Medea out of commission. There were then no ships leaving the Bombay docks—civil or military—other than the SS Indus, a P & O steamer, winding its leisurely way up the Red Sea to Suez, where passengers would then go across the desert, and by the Nile to Alexandria, from there across the Mediterranean on another steamer, the SS Oriental, almost perfectly synchronized with the Bombay–Suez route, so that there would be no delay in arriving in England.