The Mountain of Light

by Indu Sundaresan

  “I could not wish for anything more, your Majesty.” But there is that small memory of my conversation with Mir Kheema; I nudge it away.

  She chatters as the others wait in the corners of the room. She does not say this in so many words, but I think she has been against the annexation, and would have preferred a more minor British hand in the Punjab, akin to that after the First Anglo-Sikh War, when Henry Lawrence was sent as Resident. I don’t tell her that the terms of that earlier treaty gave Lawrence more or less full ruling rights over the Punjab, even with the nominal guidance of my Sikh Council. And that I have been, for a long while now, a king only in name, not in deed, not in fact. But this she must have known.

  She is so different from Lord Dalhousie. He had come to the Punjab as a conqueror, with very little of the respect that one king grants another, even a vanquished one. But then—and now I realize the fact—Dalhousie is merely a Governor-General; his real sovereign is before me.

  A while later, the Queen beckons to a girl, introduces her to me. “This is my goddaughter, Maharajah. Her name is also Victoria and she is the Princess of Coorg. You will have much in common with each other and must be friends.”

  It is the Miss Victoria of my first dinner party! She’s quietly sophisticated, at ease—because Lady Hartford, her guardian, is not here.

  “How lucky you are to have them,” she says, nodding toward Lord and Lady Login. “I hate mine, that woman Hartford.”

  “When did you come to England?”

  “A few years ago. My father brought me; he’s left now and this is to be my home.”

  This Victoria Gouramma had been baptized at St. James’s Cathedral—a tamasha, Lord Dalhousie had called it while writing to Lord Login about my own, quieter baptism. The Raja of Coorg had traveled to England with his daughter, left her there to marry an English nobleman, and duped the Queen into taking an interest in the girl. Grumble. Grumble. Grumble. The native kings were being made too much of at Home—if only they could see them in India as they truly were, they would not be thought worthy of all the attention.

  We have something in common then, Victoria and I, a loathing for Lord Dalhousie. She is, suddenly, more interesting than she had been at the dinner party.

  I tumble into bed late that night, so exhausted that I sleep as soon as I lie down. Mir Kheema takes off my clothes, puts away the jewels, rubs my face with a damp cloth.

  I did not see the Kohinoor diamond. It has been sent to Amsterdam to be recut and reset. My father never touched the stone after he acquired it from Shah Shuja; he did, though, reset it twice, but he had always thought its cut and its appearance were flawless.

  • • •

  July 4, 1854: Once I have been received by the Queen, invitations flood in for dinners, picnics, and at homes! The whole of London wants to meet me. But they don’t know where I fit in society. Am I an Eastern potentate? A European royal? What am I?

  Tonight is the dinner at Sir Charles Inglis’s home. Where I am invited, I meet Victoria Gouramma also. Lady Login says nothing, merely flings her in my way. Perhaps the Queen herself wants this—two Christians, two Indians; we could be a perfect couple.

  There has always, even when we were in India, been talk of an eligible wife for me. All kings, even deposed ones, have to marry—there’s no real choice in the matter. But I did say no to a girl I had been betrothed to since I was two or three years old. Her name is Roshni, and she’s twelve years older than I am. She is Sher Singh’s sister, and he was the adopted son of my father. I liked her very much, as a sister, as a companion, but not as a wife. Nobody protested when I refused to marry Roshni—not Lord or Lady Login, not Lord Dalhousie, who likes to object at every opportunity. It’s what he does best. But with Sher Singh, the fourth king of Lahore dead, and me, the fifth king of Lahore, on the throne, Roshni has no powerful connections left in the Punjab. She has become unimportant.

  When the talk of Victoria Gouramma gets to India, Dalhousie writes again to Lord Login, and he shows the letter to me. Here’s what Dalhousie says: If I am to be fastidious enough not to marry Roshni, the girl I was betrothed to, I would do well to see if Gouramma was to my whole liking before I married her, since I have taken the faith myself and can no longer get “Ranees in duplicate.”

  Bah. Bah. Bah. This man is the Governor-General of India?

  Sir Charles Inglis comes by in the afternoon and is closeted with Papa Login. When he leaves, I see him in the corridor. He bows, scrabbles at his collar, and almost runs out of the house.

  Lord Login calls to me from the drawing room door. “Maharajah, a word with you, please.”

  “What’s the matter with Sir Charles? Has he canceled tonight’s dinner? Is there a problem?”

  “The dinner’s still on,” Lord Login says. When we sit, he begins laughing. “You are the problem, Duleep. Sir Charles doesn’t know what to do with you.”

  Sir Charles has invited the ton of London, those who are in residence, one of whom is the Primate, Archbishop Longley. Under any other circumstances, the Primate has precedence at a party such as this; he’s the seniormost man in rank. But, after her Majesty acknowledged me at Buckingham Palace . . . where do I stand? Surely, the Archbishop ought to lead the way into the dining room . . . and surely I should, as a Maharajah? How to resolve this?

  “And how did he?” I ask. “The dinner’s only a few hours off; he had better have a plan by now and make sure he does not offend either of us.”

  “He suggested”—and here Lord Login collapses into his chair again, roaring—“that you both go in together, arm in arm, each of you stepping foot into the dining room at precisely the same moment so it would not be said either of you went in first.”

  Oh, the English and their rules in society. The man highest in rank always takes in the woman highest in rank, and so on, down the line. And the woman highest in rank usually has quite a few years tucked under her belt, and a mapful of wrinkles on her face.

  “I’m tired of taking in old ladies,” I say. “And the Primate is an old lady, Papa.”

  Lord Login had convinced the distraught Sir Charles that I would be perfectly content to enter the dining room after the Archbishop. I have no problem with this—let him take the oldest lady in; this time I might just get a younger one on my arm. But when we arrive at the party, it throngs with old ladies, so though I go in second, I still have to take one in. All the younger, prettier ones waltz in with younger, handsome men of little or no rank. I’m not sure it’s that advantageous to be a Maharajah.

  The Logins and I come back in different carriages, and I enter the drawing room first. A girl is sitting there, a shabby carpetbag at her feet, her skin pale.

  “My dear,” I say. “What is the matter? And who are you?”

  She rises to give me her hand; it’s tiny, fits in my palm like a flower. Her head is bowed, and a tear trembles down her smooth cheek to her chin. I wipe it off. “Please, tell me what it is. What can I do?”

  She looks up then, her lower lip quivering, a glitter of tears making clumps of her eyelashes. Of course, the Miss . . . Bowles from the first dinner party.

  “Where are your parents, Miss Bowles?”

  She begins to cry again; I take out my handkerchief and hand it to her. “Please . . .” I say again. What should I do? How does one handle a crying woman who doesn’t throw things around, doesn’t shout? I’ve seen only my mother in tears before, and she had splendid fits—it was more a matter of ducking than of consoling.

  “My parents are dead.”

  The poor child! Why, we saw Lord and Lady Bowles just a month or so ago, and now they’re dead. I sit by her, clasp her cold hands. “I’m sorry to hear that. What can I do? Please, let me do something, anything.”

  And this is how the Logins find us, on the sofa. Lady Login comes rushing in, gathers the girl in her arms, and pushes me away.

  “She says her parents are dead,” I say, “Isn’t that awful, Mama Login?”

  Lady Login tucks the girl’
s head under her chin. “But they’ve been dead for months.” When the girl heaves with another sob, she pats her on the back. “I’m sorry, my dear, but what is the Maharajah talking about?”

  “How could that have been months ago?” I ask. “They were here for dinner the other night.”

  It turns out that Lord and Lady Bowles are her guardians. Her parents actually did die some time ago in a boating accident, and she went to live with her uncle and aunt. Yesterday, Lord Bowles was posted to Paris as the military attaché, and his wife and he left almost immediately. They tried getting in touch with Mama and Papa Login (we find the letter under the table in the front hall) and sent Cecilia (that’s her name!) to Mivart’s with her bag.

  “Where will she stay, Lena?” Lord Login asks. He’s walking back and forth on the carpet, a frown creasing his forehead. “We don’t have a place ourselves.”

  As they talk, Cecilia Bowles sinks back into the cushions, her purple traveling habit blending with the fabric of the sofa. All I see is a white face, anxious eyes that move from Mama’s to Papa’s face and then back, hands knotted around my now-damp handkerchief. She’s an orphan, just as I am.

  “She can stay here, with us,” I say suddenly.

  They turn to me.

  “But the Company pays our bills here,” Lord Login says slowly. “It would not be right . . . I’m sorry, my dear”—this last to Cecilia—“you know how it is, how it will look.”

  “Nonsense,” I say. “What the Company pays for our accommodation is nothing less than what they ought to, what is due to me as the Maharajah of the Punjab. You know this, Lord Login; they aren’t giving us charity.”

  He shakes his head, rubbing his fingers against his chin.

  “I will pay for Miss Bowles’s rooms at Mivart’s,” I say.

  “No, Duleep. You’re right, she can stay here, but I will pay her bill. If it wouldn’t be right for me to take the money from the East India Company, it’s even less likely that I will take it from you.”

  We argue for a while. Lord Login is being paid for his guardianship of me, and the money for it comes, in a roundabout fashion, from me, or rather from the monies demarcated for me by the East India Company. They grabbed the Punjab and the treasures of the Toshakhana; they give back in a salary and my expenses in London.

  He will not listen, though. He’s a conscientious man. And so, he takes on the burden of his wife’s niece, and pays for her stay at Mivart’s.

  Back in my rooms, I pull out The Court and Camp of Runjeet Sing again, sit with a lamp by the window, listen to the dying sounds of the street. In India, I had been so eager to learn English, to be English, but here, with England all around me, there’s a craving to know my Indian self . . . albeit from an Englishman.

  My father was illiterate—not uneducated—literally not able to put two words in writing. He was brought up to be a warrior, to live by the sword, die by it, kill with it. What use would a book be? Better yet to learn to look a person in the eye, take his measure, notice tics and uncertainties, smell fear running in cold veins under his skin.

  In Osborne’s telling, he comes across as a mountain of a man, fierce, proud, garrulous to make up for his lack of book learning, inquisitive, curious, with an astounding memory. Osborne talks of my father’s generosity, of the heaps of presents given to every member of Lord Auckland’s embassy, of the fact that they never had to pay for any morsel of food for the month they spent at my father’s court.

  When I close the book late into the night, I wonder what he would have thought of me, his infant son, grown into manhood in a place so distant that I have crossed the black waters to get here, giving up my caste as I did. There is an ache in my chest. Osborne talks of my father as a devout Sikh, though eminently tolerant of other religions and meticulous in attending other places of worship, both Hindu and Muslim. What would he have thought of me, a Christian? I lie down, but sleep does not come for a very long while.

  At the very least, I am Ranjit Singh’s son, and he, who had established the mammoth Sikh Empire, was the Lion of the Punjab.

  • • •

  Paris, 1893: Sophia leans out of the window suddenly and shouts, “Viens.”

  The violin player’s head jerks up. He shuts his case, locks it, and runs across the street, his hobnailed boots ringing on the stones. When he’s directly below, she throws a sou down to him. The coin spins through the air, and his hand swipes to catch it.

  “Merci, mademoiselle.”

  “Now how did he know,” she says over her shoulder, “that I’m not married?”

  “He knows who you are,” the Maharajah of the Punjab says.

  She spins another sou out. This one tumbles to the street, and the man scrambles after it, before one of the ragpickers can steal it. “Bien merci.”

  Sophia hangs her reticule over her arm and goes downstairs. He watches her from his place, as she haggles with the fish seller, who slaps a fillet of mackerel in a slice of newspaper and takes the money from her. Then she goes into the bakery, comes out with two more baguettes. She stops by the fried-potato woman, with her heavy vat of oil, her blunt knife, her potato peelings stuffed carefully in a bag to be fed to the pigs later. When she returns, she is redolent of the aromas of dinner. The newspaper cone with the pommes-frites is dark with oil; she peels away the paper and lays the golden spears of potatoes on a plate and covers it to keep it warm.

  She douses the mackerel with pepper, salt, a pinch of turmeric, and some chilli powder, heats a pan on the stove, and sets it, sizzling, in the butter.

  They sit down to dinner in the long twilight of spring. The strip of sky above them is crimson, a few thunderclouds are edged with gilt. The mackerel is perfectly cooked, flakes to the fork, melts in his mouth. The butter is already rancid, but he does not mind.

  “I tried to give Lord Login an annuity from my personal income, put something aside in my will,” he says, chewing. “Lady Login and he looked after me for nine years; he must have neglected his other duties. But the Company refused. No native of India could give a present or a gratuity to an officer of the Company.” His smile is wry. “It was forbidden, by the rules of service, by an Act of Parliament.”

  “Do you think of the others, Papa?” she asks. “Dalhousie . . . Lawrence . . .”

  “They’re both dead.”

  “I can see why you hated the Marquess of Dalhousie. But Henry Lawrence.”

  He takes a sip of the wine. There’s a wine seller in the street also, and every morning he fills the mouth of the street with his wine casks, causes a traffic jam, much yelling and cursing. His French has become rigorously fluent with these curses, some he’s never heard before. At fifty-five, he’s learning a new language, not the courtly French of his youth.

  “Henry I loved,” he says, putting down his fork and looking out of the window. And then he’s back in Lahore, eight years old, still sucking his thumb. He can feel the pull of Henry’s fingers as he tugs his hand out of his mouth. No, Maharajah, only babies do this. It was a difficult habit to break; but he did it because he wanted so much to please this giant, thin man, with his gentle voice, his sudden smiles. “Even though he . . . he sent my mother away to the fortress of Sheikhpura. I can understand that she had become very demanding, dangerous even. But I didn’t see her for many years after that . . . my own mother. I suppose”—his voice is dreamy, still in his childhood—“they all did their duty in building the Empire. I only wish, at times, that they could have done things differently.” His eyes turn to his daughter, bright, with the hint of a smile. “You have her name, you know.”

  She nods. “Bamba Sophia Jindan.”

  They don’t talk of her first name. Or they do, in another way, when she asks, “Did you like this Princess Victoria Gouramma?”

  “She was a silly child. I can’t blame her. She was left in England so young, with no one to call her own, moved to different guardians, given no boundaries; no one cared really.”

  There’s a curious quality to the
light in the room, as though it’s split into parts—pure and pale blue here, blotches of dark from the coming night there, but the pages of the diary are still visible. The ink is faded, but the writing is clear.

  • • •

  July 24, 1854: I take the Princess Gouramma boating on the river. We cannot be alone, so Cecilia accompanies us. They form a picture on the other end of the rowboat, laughing when I mishandle the oars, giggling when I crash into the greenery on the bank and emerge with scratches on my face. When we finally disembark, they walk arm in arm in front of me. I like the view—their figures are trim, the mass of their hair bows down their necks.

  There’s a frost and fire in Victoria Gouramma, almost as though she doesn’t know how to control her moods. Cecilia, on the other hand, is always cheerful, ready with a smile. When we are in the drawing room, Victoria frets, sits at the piano, bangs out a few songs, paces restlessly around the room. Cecilia sits on the sofa for hours, head bent over her embroidery. Her white fingers flit across the silk, patient, until a pattern forms.

  Once, I ask Victoria what she reads.

  “Why, this,” she says, holding out a copy of Thornton’s Old Testament. I’ve noticed that the book goes with her everywhere.

  “What else? Have you read Byron? Walter Scott?”

  “Who?” she says, wrinkling her nose. “Did they write sermons?”

  What sort of education has she had that she can read only religious texts? It’s a narrow mind that cannot appreciate Lord Byron’s poetry (to say nothing of his personal life and his arduous love affairs, exciting to know of, if not to emulate) or Scott’s romantic novels?

  “I’ve read Kenilworth,” Cecilia says suddenly, raising shining eyes to mine. “I mean, I wasn’t supposed to, it was banned by Lady Bowles, but that made me want to find a copy.”

  She’s read Walter Scott! “How did you get one then?”

  “I bribed the maid, Hannah, to buy me a copy. I had to lie to Lady Bowles for a whole month after that when Hannah went out walking with her young man at night. Oh!” She clamps her hand over her mouth. She’s certainly said more than she ought to.