The Mountain of Light

by Indu Sundaresan

  “You will grow,” Winterhalter growls.

  “And if I don’t, this is what people will remember most of your portrait,” I say.

  “It’s splendid,” the Queen says. “You have captured the Maharajah’s beautiful eyes, Mr. Winterhalter.”

  “What will the background be?” I ask, curious. Others come up to mill around her Majesty and listen, interested. Lady Login is here also; she usually is. We have not talked much at the hotel after that day. There isn’t much to say. I haven’t forgotten, but I’ve forgiven her. What I cannot forget are the Lahore days when they took on my guardianship, their generosity in befriending a near-orphaned boy.

  “Humph,” Winterhalter says. “That I have not thought of. Maybe some minarets and domes. You know, Maharajah”—he curves the palms of his hands into appropriate shapes—“something like Lahore.”

  I protest. “You’ve never been there.”

  “Ah,” he says, “but I have seen Schoefft’s painting; the one you have in your possession. It gives me ideas, and this”—he taps the canvas with his brush—“will be much better than that one. Now, pose, please. Not like that, toward the mirror. Just your face, not your body.”

  In the reflection I watch as the Queen draws Lady Login to the side and they talk. About me? By now her Majesty must know that I don’t want to marry Victoria Gouramma; perhaps she’s heard about my interest in Cecilia also. She says nothing to me, about one or the other. If she’s disappointed—I know that she also had wished for the marriage with Gouramma—her manner has not changed. She’s the same. As kind as before.

  The Queen summons a gentleman-in-waiting to her side; he bows, listens to what she has to say, and runs fleetly out of the room.

  A half hour passes before I hear a rustle and clomping footsteps outside the room. The guards of the Tower of London come in, sleek and colorful in their livery. They hold out a tray to her Majesty. She beckons Prince Albert to her side and, turning, opens a casket and takes something out—what it is I cannot see from the other end of the room. They whisper together, and then, suddenly, the Queen comes running across the expanse of carpet, taps me on my arm, and before I can say anything, grabs my hand, puts something into my palm, and closes my fingers around it.

  “Maharajah, here is the Kohinoor come from Amsterdam. What do you think of it?”

  I unclench my fingers and gaze down, stupefied for a moment. And then I step off the podium and to the window, where the light is better. It snowed the day before, and the grounds of the palace are swathed in the gentle embrace of a winter’s cold. The sun shows only a faint face in the gray-streaked sky, but the softly reflected daylight is luminous. The stone in my hand draws the light inward, from the outside, and glows within its dazzling heart.

  It is set again as my father had it—as an armlet with a smaller diamond on either side. But it is not the diamond I remember. The Kohinoor lies weightless upon my hand, its heft cut away in an effort to give it more brilliance, a rose cut, I have heard Prince Albert call it. Surely the job has been bungled? Where is the Mountain of Light? The diamond cutters have taken away too much—this is not a mountain anymore, but a hill, a hillock, a mere bump in the horizon.

  My head is bent over the stone in my hand. I place it on my heart. It isn’t the Kohinoor diamond anymore, and it’s the last time I will hold this stone. It doesn’t belong to me.

  The Queen and Prince Albert are together. She bites her lower lip; her dark eyes shine with compassion. Lady Login twists the fabric of her gown into little spirals between white-knuckled fingers. The Tower guards remain at attention, their expressions impassive, waiting for me to make a move. What do they all think I will do?

  I go to the Queen, clasp her hand as she had mine a few moments ago, and place the Kohinoor in it. “It gives me immense pleasure to give to my sovereign the greatest treasure from the Toshakhana of Lahore. Will you accept this gift from a grateful subject?”

  She touches me lightly on the shoulder. “You are truly one of the gems of my court, Maharajah.”

  “Will you wear it, your Majesty?” I ask. “I would like to see it on you.”

  The Queen slides it around her bare arm, and it blazes there on her skin through the rest of that morning, set off perfectly by her white gown.

  • • •

  Paris, 1893: Night comes to the rue de la Trémoille. The gas lamps on the street are lit and throw crowns of gold in tight little circles down its length. One of the streetlights is just outside the window, and Sophia reads the last few pages with the diary turned toward this.

  Her father’s face lies in a deep shadow. His fingers are interlaced on his stomach, a sparkle of diamonds and rubies in the rings.

  “Did you see Cecilia Bowles again?”

  “No.” His voice comes in a tired rumble. “Never again. I don’t know who she married, if she married, if she cared at all for me.”

  “And so you married Mama.”

  She hears him sigh. “Bamba, yes, we gave you her name as your first. Sophia, so that you wouldn’t feel out of place if you grew up and stayed in England. Jindan, for your grandmother.”

  “Did you love Mama?”

  He waits a long time before answering. He wants to be honest. “No,” he says finally. “I barely knew her when I married her. She was the daughter of a German merchant and his Egyptian mistress.” He laughs. “She was appropriate for me, you see. Bamba had been brought up in a missionary society in Cairo; she taught at the local orphanage. I asked the missionaries to find me a wife who was Christian . . . and who wasn’t British. We married at the British embassy in Cairo. I took my vows in English; she took hers in Arabic. For a long time, she couldn’t speak English.”

  Now, it’s Sophia’s turn to be quiet. In the space of one day, a bit of a night, she has learned more about her father than she has known in the twenty-four years she has lived. Things haven’t changed very much yet. Victor, her oldest brother, wants to marry an English girl he met at Cambridge. Her father’s an earl. The Prince of Wales is pushing for the match; the Queen says nothing, and so nothing’s happened yet.

  She rises, scrapes a match against the side of a matchbox, turns on the gas, lights the sconces on the walls. The flames flicker, the gas hisses, the room comes into focus.

  Her father has been crying. Tears soak into his mustache and his beard, his eyes are red. Sophia bends, puts her arms around him. He rests his head against her cheek. His hair is long, tied into a ponytail at his nape. He has long since become a Sikh again.

  “I’m taking the night train, Papa. By tomorrow evening, I’ll be back in London, if the crossing is good.”

  He wipes his face. “Sit, child. No, not there, all the way across the table, here, by my side. Let me look at you.”

  She pulls up her chair, and they sit, knee to knee. He gazes at her face for a long while. There’s a shade of pain, somewhere behind her dark eyes.

  “Who is he?”

  She doesn’t flinch, but a glow of pink covers her skin. “David Waters Sutherland. He’s a physician . . . in Lahore. I met him on his last home leave.”

  “He’s coming back again?”

  She nods. “To see me. I think, Papa, that no one will care about David and me.” She smiles; it lights up her face. “He isn’t the son of an earl. He’s nobody. Just someone I want to marry, that’s all.”

  “And will you live in Lahore then, Sophia?”

  “Yes.”

  “They never let me go back to Lahore. I left when I was ten years old. You will find it changed.”

  “I haven’t been there before, Papa.”

  The clock in the cathedral on the next street chimes out the hour. Ten o’clock. A theater down the street empties after a play. Women come out in silks and satins, vendors roast hot chestnuts over fires, men smoke cigarettes and cast the butts on the cobblestones. A fight begins, and men push and shove against each other. There’s blood on white shirtfronts, sweat on brows; bowlers roll on the ground.

 
Sophia gets up and pins her hat on her head. “My train’s at eleven, Papa.” She kisses him on both cheeks and on his forehead. “I’ll come back in a week. Good night.”

  “Good-bye,” he says. But she’s gone. He can hear the sharp click of her heels on the wooden stairs, the creak of the door as she opens it, the concierge greeting her. He watches her walk quickly through the crowd, slim, upright, her hat slanted over the right half of her face. She raises her hand at the street corner, just before she disappears.

  He brushes his teeth in the cold water from the bucket, turns down the lamps, and climbs into bed. There’s an ache in his heart. The diary has churned up memories that have lain buried under years of distrust, dwindling hope. He has asked, in years gone by, for the Punjab Empire to be returned to him. The response was to cast doubt upon his origins, his fitness to be called the Maharajah of the Punjab. Was Ranjit Singh, Lion of the Punjab, really his father?

  He has asked for the Kohinoor—the response was, still is, demonstrated only in the fact that he does not have it.

  He massages his chest with a big hand. The street quiets down.

  • • •

  Paris, 1893: The next morning, Aimée heaves her pail and mop up the stairs to Dalip Singh’s rooms. The door is unlocked; it opens at her touch.

  “Allo?” she says. “Tout ça va?”

  She enters, sees the still figure on the bed. She bends over him, puts her hand in front of his nose. And then she runs out of the room, and down the stairs, surprisingly fast for an old woman.

  The violin player puts down his instrument when he sees her. She grabs his arm and drags him toward the building, filling his ear all the while. He clatters up the stairs, doesn’t go beyond the doorway. He hesitates there. Makes the sign of a cross.

  TELEGRAM: From the Embassy at Paris: 10:30 A.M. Received at Balmoral Castle, Scotland: 10:34 A.M.

  To Her Imperial Majesty. H.H. the Maharajah died suddenly in Paris today. Please advise about funeral arrangements.

  Lord Dufferin. Her Majesty’s Ambassador to France

  Afterword

  So, what’s fact and what’s fiction? If you’ve read my other work, you’ll know that this is where I address how all of my research and readings are woven into the text.

  Shah Shuja did send his harem, along with Wafa Begam, to the court of Maharajah Ranjit Singh in the Punjab, when his brother Shah Mahmud, after having conquered Kabul, was knocking at the door in Peshawar.

  The events in “Fragment of Light” take place in 1817. And, for the most part, they’re accurate. For the purposes of the story, however, I’ve condensed the time line considerably on both ends. Kashmir and Peshawar belonged to Afghanistan when Shuja fled to the Punjab. Ranjit Singh did agree to help Shuja regain both cities, and ended up annexing them to his own Empire—the actual retaking of Kashmir (whose governor had rebelled against Afghan rule and established himself semi-independent) occurred in 1819; Peshawar fell in 1818, and was not completely annexed until 1834.

  Maharajah Ranjit Singh was not quite as patient as I portray him in “Fragment of Light” in waiting for the promised Kohinoor. He took the diamond from Shuja in 1813, after storming the fort at Kashmir to free the imprisoned Shuja at his wife, Wafa Begam’s behest. After many requests, Shuja sent the Maharajah a pukraj—the topaz—hoping to fool him into thinking it was the Kohinoor. And Ranjit did then order no food or drink to be allowed into the mansion where Shah Shuja was being kept prisoner, starving him until he gave up the Kohinoor.

  Emily and Fanny Eden left India with their hearts untouched, if the evidence of their published collections of letters is to be believed. In one such book, Up the Country, published in 1867, Emily mentions in the introduction that “many passages . . . written solely for the amusement of my own family, have of course been omitted.” And indeed, the letters, the speaking voices of the Eden sisters, are lacking in many things—the truly personal; and even names of the main players from the East India Company at the court of Maharajah Ranjit Singh. (For these latter—the Major Bs, the Mr. Ts, the Mr. Ys—I dug into other readings from that time period.)

  Paolo Avitabile, and his other foreign soldier friends, existed in the form they find in this book, for the most part. Avitabile did strike up a friendship with George, Lord Auckland, and his sisters. He didn’t leave the Punjab Empire and India until 1843, four years after Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s death. By February 1844, he was in Naples, and then Marseille and Paris, feted in each place. When he visited London, Lord Auckland took Avitabile around as his own special guest, and introduced him to Lord Palmerston, who was later Prime Minister of England. As a mark of favor, Avitabile—Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s governor of Peshawar, the son of a peasant proprietor in Agerola—was invited to a dinner at the Duke of Wellington’s residence.

  I considered that it would have been Emily, the more dominant sister, and not Fanny, who would have had a stronger connection with Paolo Avitabile at Maharajah Ranjit Singh’s court—and their unusual “love” story formed the framework for Lord Auckland’s visit to the Sutlej in “Roses for Emily.” So, from a historical perspective, this story is possible. Would it have been probable? I was curious about what would happen if I took a very proper, intelligent, well-off Victorian lady and gave her affections for a man she would not have looked at—or met—in the normal course of her life. Avitabile, for all of his known refinement and self-taught education, was the son of a peasant, and a mercenary soldier—not at all from Emily’s class.

  According to a genealogical chart prepared for Maharajah Ranjit Singh around 1886, he had thirty-seven acknowledged wives. There is no detailed and reliable source on either the names of or the number of his sons. I chose to focus on the men who became rulers of Lahore after Ranjit Singh’s death—Kharak Singh, the second king of Lahore; Sher Singh, the fourth king of Lahore; and, of course, Dalip Singh, who was the fifth king of Lahore, a title he enjoyed for the rest of his life, even though the Punjab was part of the British Empire.

  Roshni (in “Love in Lahore”), the young woman related to Sher Singh, existed—although her name has been lost to history. And she was betrothed to Dalip Singh, even though she was much older than he. This much is true, so also the fact that Dalip Singh eventually decided not to marry Roshni.

  Henry and Honoria Lawrence were married before Henry came to Lahore as Resident and met the young Maharajah Dalip Singh. To the eight-year-old king, Henry was a protector, a father figure, a man for whom Dalip formed a strong and abiding affection.

  The incident with the cows and the camel artillery in “Love in Lahore” occurred during Henry’s tenure at Lahore and is described as the “Cow Row” in his biography, authored by Herbert Edwardes, his private secretary in the Punjab. Henry Lawrence left Lahore in 1856 and gave way to Lord and Lady Login, who then became Dalip Singh’s guardians. Lawrence died a year later, defending Lucknow in the Sepoy Rebellion, and is buried there.

  As for “An Alexandria Moon”? The Kohinoor diamond left Indian shores on the sixth of April 1850. It traveled not on the SS Indus but on the HMS Medea, a Royal Navy steam sloop. Even the captain of the Medea did not know that he was carrying such precious cargo—he had only been given orders to take Lieutenant Colonel Mackeson and Captain Ramsay to England. On their way there, the sole sparkle of excitement came when the ship approached Mauritius and sent notice of cholera onboard, with two sailors dead. Port authorities refused to allow food and water onboard the Medea, and threatened to blow her up if she attempted to berth. But the HMS Medea went on safely to England and, on the twenty-ninth of June 1850, docked at Portsmouth.

  I borrowed the story of Multan Raj’s death, however, from a similar incident that happened to Henry Lawrence’s brother. John Lawrence interviewed a man suspected of murder who sat smoking all through their conversation. When he rose, in deference, so as not to be seated in front of the Sahib, there was blood on the upper part of his dhoti—he had stabbed himself, and then calmly continued talking.

  I
n England, under the guardianship of Lord and Lady Login, Maharajah Dalip Singh fell in love with one of Lady Login’s relatives. This scene in “Diary of a Maharajah” and Lady Login’s refusal are detailed in a letter from Lady Login to Queen Victoria. The Queen had also given guardianship of the Princess Victoria Gouramma to Lady Login, considering that “these two young people are pointed out for each other. The only two Christians of high rank of their own countries, both having the advantage of early European influences, there seems to be many points of sympathy between them.” Dalip Singh, however, did not find himself sympathetic to the Princess Gouramma and, in saying so to Lady Login, also professed his love for her other ward—an unnamed Englishwoman who was staying with them.

  In all the years that the young Maharajah Dalip Singh had spent—in India and in England—under the guardianship of the various British officials who looked after him during the long process of the annexation of the Punjab, he had become most attached to Lord and Lady Login (although he always professed a deep fondness for Henry Lawrence also). Lady Login, in the same letter to the Queen, then candidly put down Dalip’s thoughts on her refusal: “But if we, whom he trusted and regarded as parents, could not accept him into the family; if we, who had taken him from his own country and people, and cut him off . . . from all prospect of mixing with his own race, should refuse to regard him as one of ourselves, to whom could he look?”

  Despite this plea from Dalip, Lady Login was adamant—the Maharajah might be their adopted “son,” but he could not marry an Englishwoman connected with them. It just would not do. She hoped that “he will see his true position more clearly, and meet with someone more suitable in every respect . . . as we in no wise covet such a destiny for our charge.”

  It was the first intimation to Maharajah Dalip Singh that, although he was royal, he was still a subject of the Queen of England, and though he had the precedence of a European king in every English drawing room, he was still not good enough for a young British woman of little fortune and no pretensions to nobility.