But, once again, who could say?
What I could say, though, was what I told a Japanese graduate student on a spring day in Kathmandu at the Unity Restaurant in 1996, after he handed me a photograph of an unusual star-shaped tile of faience mosaic, inset between the roots of an ancient tree. He said that it supposedly memorialized an Englishman.
“Do you know Namobuddha?” he asked.
I said that I did, without saying why.
Without saying I had been very cold there, but also very warm.
What I said was:
I remember it well.
Even after twenty years.
What I said was:
I know this poem.
From somewhere.
Without remembering Herat.
Without remembering the poet Jami’s epitaph in Rosi Bagh.
When your face is hidden from me,
Like the moon hidden on a dark night,
I shed stars of tears and yet my night remains dark
In spite of all those shining stars.
“Like a head without a trunk,” said the spurious archaeologist who was probably a spy, after he translated the incomplete stanza of the poem on the mosaic tile of the derelict royal tomb.
Without knowing then that Nigel’s friend Sa’adat was a prince of the blood royal, credited by the Afghan Royal Genealogy with “no issue,” a conspicuous exception to the rule for Sadozai nobles who lived into manhood.
Without recognizing then that the words in English on the star-shaped tile of the chautara at Namobuddha completed the truncated stanza in Persian on the star-shaped tile fifteen hundred miles distant at Rosi Bagh, and could only serve as a private memorial to the lives shared for twenty-eight years by two men, a Muslim and a Christian, a prince and a clerk, an Afghan and an Englishman.
Not the only Englishman who was different from the rest. Not the only Englishman for whom the empire made a bed and beckoned him to lie in it. But a rare one nonetheless, who permitted his liking for a native to become so much more than just attraction that there was no turning back, no going home, no darkening the love-lit nighttime sky until death did them part.
The revelation finally came later, back in America after my encounter with the Japanese student. One day, as I was looking for something else, I unearthed a school exercise book that had served as my daybook when I lived in Kathmandu. It also contained my journal from Afghanistan, which quoted the lines from Jami as translated by Boris’ friend beneath the spreading dusty leaves of a pistachio tree, once upon another time.
What I remembered in the moment that I read them was the seeress, saying that I already knew the place.
Saying:
“Exact same, sahib with other man.”
Saying:
“These men, very much friends.”
Saying, finally, in answer to a question I never asked:
“You are not his reincarnation.”
How could I be? I thought. If I was Nigel’s reincarnation, I surely would have known it when I found it, the place I thought I could not find.
But that was then.
Now I think that she was speaking of another man, the man with him when he died.
Now that I know who he was.
Now that I know that Sa’adat was what happened to Nigel.
Now that I know that everything she told me turned out to be true.
It wasn’t personal, I told her.
Not personal at all.
She knew better.
It would have saved me time and trouble if I realized it then. But in this world we can only walk one step at a time.
A Note on Sources and Further Reading
* * *
The most difficult part of researching this book was knowing when to stop. Victorians abroad in India were prodigious letter writers and journal keepers. Much of their output survives in the stacks of university and public libraries and, increasingly, in digitized form, freely available online. It amounts to an embarrassment of riches for anyone interested in sahibs and memsahibs and how they went about the business of ruling a sizable portion of the world’s population for two hundred years. One attempts to fix undivided attention on a governor’s prosecution of a war in Afghanistan, only to encounter the beguiling distraction that his wife deserted him to live in a Bedouin harem.
Nor was the historical quicksand confined to the British. The plots of William Shakespeare—and the librettos of Giuseppe Verdi—seem pedestrian compared with the documented histories of the royal dynasties that rose and fell in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Nepal and Afghanistan. Behind every beheading and blinding and servant girl made queen lurks a story demanding to be told. That it was tough enough telling Nigel’s was a lesson I learned through trial, tribulation, and many months of unforced error.
In addition to the period correspondence and archival research described in the narrative, I relied on the sources that follow in re-creating Nigel’s world.
The Company
Confronted by the sweep and scope of the affairs of the “Company of Traders” chartered by Elizabeth I, it is only natural to yearn for a historical masterwork on the order of Edward Gibbon. Such a book, alas, remains to be written. John Keay’s The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company (London: HarperCollins, 1991), though light on details about the social side of life for Company employees, goes further than most popular histories toward filling the vacuum. A briefer and equally readable introduction is Brian Gardner’s The East India Company (London: Marlboro, 1971). Most of my principal sources date back to the Company’s heyday:
Anonymous, Facts and Reflections by a Subaltern of the Indian Army (London: James Madden, 1849).
John Beames, Memoirs of a Bengal Civilian (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961).
Francis John Bellew, Memoirs of a Griffin; Or, a Cadet’s First Year in India (London: William Allen & Co., 1880).
Kathleen Blechynden, Calcutta: Past and Present (London: W. Thacker & Co., 1905).
Francis Hamilton (formerly Buchanan), An Account of the Districts of Bihar and Patna in 1811–1812 (Bankipore, India: Bihar Research Society, 1936).
Rev. John Cormac, Account of the Abolition of Female Infanticide in Guzerat, with Considerations of the Question of Promoting the Gospel in India (London: Black, Parry, & Co., 1815).
William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (New York: Penguin, 2004).
Frederick Danvers, Monier Williams, Steuart Bayley, Percy Wigram, and Brand Sapte, Memorials of Old Haileybury College (Westminster, UK: Archibald Constable & Co., 1894).
Sara Graham Mulhall, Opium: The Demon Flower (New York: Montrose, 1928).
Fanny Parkes, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque (London: Pelham Richardson, 1850).
John Pinkerton, ed., A General Collection of Voyages and Travels: Hindostan (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1811).
Narendra Krishna Sinha and Nisith Ranjan Ray, A History of India (Hyderabad, India: Orient Longman, 1973).
Joachim Stocqueler, The Hand-Book of British India: A Guide to the Stranger, the Traveller, the Resident, and All Who May Have Business with or Appertaining to India (London: William Allen & Co., 1854).
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and Valentine Ball, Travels in India (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Horace Wilson, The History of British India (London: Madden & Malcolm, 1846).
The Empire
The memoirs and correspondence of British India’s supreme rulers make for heavy going. Steeped in cultural arrogance and overt racism that is profoundly distasteful to modern sensibilities—or so it would have seemed, in America anyway, prior to November 8, 2016—they nonetheless provide insights into decision-making and contemporary politics available nowhere else. Here and there, too, emerge striking vignettes of the imperial progress, as when Governor General Charles Hardinge whispers to the Sikh foreign secretary to remind him that, by the terms of the Treaty of La
hore, the Koh-i-noor diamond is to be delivered to Queen Victoria, and must be submitted for his inspection:
Another pause, and more whispers. At last, a small tin box enveloped in a shabby cloth was brought in, containing the diamond which is now worn by the Empress of India on state occasions. Many have since seen it; to us it appeared to be wanting in that brilliancy which is the charm of lesser stones.
James Andrew Broun-Ramsay, Marquis of Dalhousie, Private Letters (London: Blackwood, 1911).
George Nathaniel Curzon, British Government in India: The Story of the Viceroys and Government Houses (London: Cassell & Co., 1925).
Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985).
Charles Hardinge, Rulers of India: Viscount Hardinge (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1891).
Lena Campbell Login, Sir John Login and Duleep Singh (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1890).
Robert Pearce, Memoirs and Correspondence of the Most Noble Richard Marquess Wellesley (London: Richard Bentley, 1846).
Frederick Sleigh Roberts, Forty-one Years in India: From Subaltern to Commander-in-Chief (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1897).
Ernest Sackville Turner, Gallant Gentlemen: A Portrait of the British Officer, 1600–1956 (London: Michael Joseph, 1956).
The Lawrences and Henry’s Young Men
In the aftermath of John Nicholson’s heroic death during the Siege of Delhi, John Lawrence remarked that his name would not be forgotten, “as long as an Englishman survives in India.” Surely enough, everyone from Rudyard Kipling to authors of adventure stories for boys worked to ensure the immortality of “Nikal Seyn.” But Lawrence might have said the same about himself and his brother Henry, as well as several of the larger-than-life officers who served under them. Charles Allen’s Soldier Sahibs: The Men Who Made the North-West Frontier (London: John Murray, 2000) began as an attempt by a Nicholson family descendant to sort out the truth from the hagiography, then expanded into a riveting account of the exploits and personalities of his forebear’s colleagues and mentors. There is no better introduction to the time, the place, and the players. Other—mostly period—sources include:
Maud Diver, Honoria Lawrence: A Fragment of Indian History (London: John Murray, 1936).
Herbert Edwardes, A Year on the Punjab Frontier, in 1848–49 (London: Richard Bentley, 1851).
Herbert Edwardes and Emma Sydney Edwardes, Memorials of the Life and Letters of Major General Sir Herbert B. Edwardes (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1886).
Herbert Edwardes and Herman Merivale, Life of Sir Henry Lawrence (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1872).
Frederick P. Gibbon, The Lawrences of the Punjab (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1908).
John William Kaye, Lives of Indian Officers: Illustrative of the Civil and Military Services of India (London: A. Strahan & Co., 1867).
Harold Lee, Brothers in the Raj: The Lives of John and Henry Lawrence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Peter Lumsden and George Elsmie, Lumsden of the Guides (London: John Murray, 1900).
Reginald Bosworth Smith, Life of Lord Lawrence (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1883).
Lionel Trotter, The Life of John Nicholson: Soldier and Administrator (London: John Murray, 1898).
Afghanistan
A great many books about Afghanistan have been published since the Soviet invasion in 1979. None approach Louis Dupree’s magisterial Afghanistan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983) as a definitive survey of the country’s history and culture. Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between (London: Picador, 2004), a Scotsman’s personal narrative of his walk across Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban in 2002, provides a memorable portrait of Ghor, the mountainous province where Sa’adat ul-Mulk and his elder brother plotted revenge on the traitorous vizier who imprisoned and murdered their father, Kamran Shah.
Henry Bellew, Afghanistan and the Afghans (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1879).
———. The Races of Afghanistan (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1880).
Human Terrain Team AF-6, “Pashtun Sexuality” (Washington: U.S. Department of Defense, 2009).
Seth G. Jones, Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan (Santa Monica, CA: RAND National Defense Research Institute, 2008).
John William Kaye, History of the War in Afghanistan (London: William Allen & Co., 1878).
George Rawlinson, A Memoir of Major-General Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1898).
G. P. Tate, The Kingdom of Afghanistan: A Historical Sketch (Bombay: Times of India, 1911).
Nepal
Francis Hamilton (formerly Buchanan) wrote the essential work in English. One of the first Europeans to venture beyond the dread Terai jungle, he spent fourteen months in the vicinity of Kathmandu in 1802–1803. His Account of the Kingdom of Nepal, and of the Territories Annexed to This Dominion by the House of Gorkha (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1819) provides a detailed overview of Nepalese geography, natural history, and ethnography, coupled with recent history gleaned from informants who personally experienced the momentous rise to power of Prithvi Narayan Shah. Other principal sources:
Michael Peissel, Tiger for Breakfast (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1966).
Pramode Shamshere Rana, Rana Intrigues (Kathmandu: Pramode Shamshere Rana, 1995).
Mahesh Chandra Regmi, A Study in Nepali Economic History, 1768–1846 (Kathmandu: Man̄juśrī Publishing House, 1971).
Tulasī Rāma Vaidya, Triratna Mānandhara, and Shankar Lal Joshi, Social History of Nepal (Kathmandu: Anmol Publications, 1993).
The Mutiny
In the interest of historical accuracy—as well as fidelity to eyewitness accounts—I have avoided the current fashion of referring to the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58 as the “Indian Rebellion” or “India’s First War of Independence.” The uprising began as a series of mutinies by native soldiers serving in the Bengal Army, who were joined by former soldiers as prime movers in hostilities that were largely confined to the Gangetic Plain. Most of the sources listed above for “The Lawrences and Henry’s Young Men” include accounts of the Mutiny relevant to the lives—and deaths—of those individuals. The following sources depict the Mutiny from the viewpoints of less illustrious survivors.
Anonymous, The Story of the Indian Mutiny (1857–58) (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo & Co., 1885).
Edward Vibart, The Sepoy Mutiny as Seen by a Subaltern, from Delhi to Lucknow (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1898).
Acknowledgments
* * *
To the many Nepalis, Indians, Pakistanis, and Afghans who showed such kindness and hospitality to me during my travels over the years, I owe a debt impossible to repay in words. To protect the privacy of certain inviduals mentioned in the text, I have changed their names and identifying characteristics.
My special thanks go to Kathy Robbins, who has represented me since 1982. No author could hope for wiser counsel or stauncher advocacy. I also want to thank everyone else at the Robbins Office.
Andrea Schulz acquired Empire Made and saw the manuscript through two drafts before leaving Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. My dismay at her departure proved short-lived once Nicole Angeloro took up the reins. Working with editors of their acumen and judgment was the best part of making this book.
This project owes its genesis to a book proposal completed on assignment for Nicholas Christopher’s seminar on travel writing in the MFA program at Columbia University. It was Nic who encouraged me to run with the idea in the real world, and I am grateful for both his belief in my writing and the inspiration of his own artistry in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.
About the Author
* * *
Kief Hillsbery is the author of the critically acclaimed War Boy and What We Do Is Secret, which was selected as a finalist for the 2006 Lambda Literary Award in fiction. He has contributed feature articles and columns on outdoor sports to Rolling Stone, Outside, and other magazines. He completed his MFA at Columbia U
niversity and lives in New York City.
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