The Mountain of Light (43 page)

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

S
o, 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.

In 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.

The Maharajah's wide-eyed innocence had taken a beating; over the rest of his life it would be shattered until, knowing he would not be given back his kingdom of Punjab, he was reduced to demanding the return of the Kohinoor.

Maharajah Dalip Singh died, alone actually, in a shabby hotel in Paris in 1893. Bamba Sophia Jindan, his daughter, married David Sutherland and lived in Lahore with him. She is buried in Lahore.

The diamond is said to have held a curse. Legend had it that the Kohinoor could be safely possessed only by a woman, that no man who had it would long hold his kingdom, and that it could never be worn in the official crown of a monarch (hence, perhaps, the reason it was worn in an armlet or set in a throne). In India, Persia, and Afghanistan, during the diamond's tumultuous and bloody history, only men owned the Kohinoor.

After Queen Victoria, no male ruler of England has worn the Kohinoor on his person. Today, it is displayed along with the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London . . . in the Queen Mother's crown.

The only man to have successfully warded off the curse of the diamond was Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the Lion of the Punjab, monarch of the largest and most powerful independent kingdom in India in the mid-1800s. In his lifetime, he did not lose his lands, his Empire, or the Kohinoor. But he was, effectively, the first and last ruler of the Punjab. After his death, the Empire crumbled; some ten years later, the Punjab was annexed to the British Empire.

In 1858, India lost her sovereignty and became a British colony, and the Kohinoor shimmered on the arm of her Queen, Victoria. Perhaps, after all, there
was
a curse on the Kohinoor.

Indu Sundaresan

June 2012