The Mountain of Light (26 page)

Henry Lawrence sat back in his chair and stared at the boy, a pang in his heart. Wars he understood, the making of them, the conquest of a people, the division of the spoils after.
And there had been a war—the Anglo-Sikh War—that had brought him here to Lahore. But the terms of the treaty were so . . . nebulous. The British government had promised Punjab that once their young Maharajah reached his majority, at sixteen years of age, they would retire from the land. Somehow, this insistence upon cataloging the Toshakhana didn't seem the right step in that direction; it implied only the path to full annexation. But this Henry could not say to the Maharajah; he wondered if the boy even understood this much.

Dalip Singh had a child's round face, curved cheeks, bright eyes, a rosebud mouth that was ever ready to smile. His hair, long no doubt, since the Sikhs did not cut their hair, would be braided and tucked under his turban. Tiny wisps curled out on his nape. The collar of his sherwani lay tight against his neck, and its sleeves closed about his chubby wrists. He had a little stomach that strained against his pearl and silver
zari
-embroidered cummerbund.

“What are you studying now, your Majesty?” Henry asked.

Dalip made a clicking sound with his mouth. “Captain Henry, you are here as a representative of your wonderful Queen, and I
am
the Maharajah of the Punjab.” Henry grinned at this insistence, and Dalip said sharply, “It's true!”

“True enough, your Majesty, but repeating it will not make it truer.”

“What I mean to say is that I'm not here to talk about my education. Tell me instead about your Afghan War. You lost, didn't you?”

There was no cunning in that ingenuous gaze. Henry did not wonder that this child was asking him a question about the war, because he was no ordinary eight-year-old; he was the Maharajah of the Punjab, and as such, he would have been schooled in the politics of his frontiers.

Dalip put a hand on Henry's arm, stopping his narrative even as he began. “Your Lord Auckland was Governor-
General then? He was the one who gave the orders for the war?”

Henry nodded. “It was his . . . fault, his responsibility.”

“And why did you jump into it then?”

Henry pondered this for a long while. “No reason at all; at least, in retrospect it seems so, but Lord Auckland must have found something else that was compelling.”

“I'm thirsty,” Dalip said, his mouth screwed up into a pout.

Henry rose from his chair. “I'll find someone.”

Just then, a servant came in with a gold tray and two golden goblets with a sweet, cool watermelon sherbet. Henry did not ask where the man had come from, or if he had been close enough to overhear the conversation. Dalip would not have been left alone, for all of his imperious posturing—there was no privacy for kings, but then again, nothing the king said would ever be repeated in public or in private.

When the attendant had retreated, Dalip got down from the desk and came to lean against Henry's chair, behind him, close enough so Henry could feel the Maharajah's warm breath on his ear. And so, Henry began his tale.

Long after Shah Shuja had been driven away from Afghanistan, Dost Mohammad had ascended the throne at Kabul. Russia had then sent an embassy to Dost Mohammad. The British, to counteract this Russian influence, had also sent their embassy, but it had seemed as though the Amir's ear had bent more toward the Russian at court than toward the Englishman.

There was still the whole of the Punjab Empire between Afghanistan and British India—for Russia to invade India, they would have to go through Persia, Afghanistan, and Punjab. But Lord Auckland had feared such an eventuality—the thing to do then was to depose Dost Mohammad and put on the throne a puppet king, who would protect British India from invasion.

And then the Persians had begun knocking on the western borders of Afghanistan, and Dost Mohammad had actually turned to the English for assistance. This, Lord Auckland had ignored, and gone on with his plans to invade Afghanistan. He had come to Maharajah Ranjit Singh for help—troops, provisions, guns, and passage through the lands of the Punjab to Peshawar (in Punjab territory) and through the Khyber Pass from there to Kabul . . . and victory.

Ranjit Singh had feted the Governor-General and his sisters, piled them with gifts, looked after the entire British encampment for a whole two months, and agreed only to the last—they would be given safe passage through his lands to Peshawar, but no guns, no provisions, no troops. The Maharajah had been too canny to indulge in a pointless war, and Shah Shuja, whom the British intended to put on the throne instead of Dost Mohammad, could never hold it—there was a reason why he had been driven out of the country in the first place.

Sorry, Ranjit Singh had said, but he'd said it so nicely, with so much generosity, even paying their way all the way to Peshawar, it was difficult to be quarrelsome with the old, one-eyed king.

“So you won Kabul then, and put Shah Shuja on the throne?” The little voice at Henry's shoulder was filled with contempt.

“Yes,” Henry said. “But the rumblings of a rebellion began soon after—the people of Afghanistan hated Shuja, and adored Dost Mohammad. And, they disliked seeing British regiments more or less permanently stationed in Kabul. Although we were supposed to stay only until Shuja had attained some stability in his land.”

“Just as you have promised here, Captain Henry?”

“Yes,” Henry said again, discomfort filling him.

The Afghans had rebelled. Spectacularly. Key British officials had been cut down in the streets one after another; Shuja had been killed also. Dost Mohammad had been put back on
the throne by the rebels. The message was clear—the British were no longer welcome in Afghanistan, they had to leave and they had to leave
now
. So in December of 1841, sixteen thousand British soldiers, their wives, children, and camp followers were driven out east toward the snow-clotted Khyber Pass, which would lead them to Peshawar, and shelter in the Punjab. The Afghanis had promised them safe passage . . . and did not keep their word. They'd massacred everyone, indiscriminately, until, a day before Christmas, only
one
man had staggered into Jalalabad, the British outpost on the Afghan side of the Khyber Pass.

His name was Dr. Brydon and though he'd spoken of the horrors of the slaughter, he had also given some hope to Henry—his brother George had been taken prisoner, not killed. Of the sixteen thousand, apart from Dr. Brydon, another four or five men had been taken prisoner.

The young Maharajah had been wandering about the pavilion, picking up Henry's inkpot, rifling through his papers, leaning against his desk to watch him, or simply skipping. He was a child; keeping quiet was not something he had learned yet. But at this point in the story he asked Henry, “Your brother George was taken prisoner? Did you go in to rescue him?”

Henry smiled grimly. “It was a while before anyone could take action; the news of the carnage shattered all of us. And Lord Auckland was a few months from the end of his term as Governor-General; he did not want to make the decision to invade Afghanistan again, not after all this had happened.”

“But you did,” Dalip Singh said.

“We did. The new Governor-General supported the plan, thanks be to God, and the British armies succeeded in retaking Kabul and freeing the prisoners.”

“Who's on the throne of Afghanistan now, Captain Henry?” This came in a mocking tone.

So the child had known all of this before, Henry thought. He looked at him with admiration.

“Dost Mohammad,” Henry said. “There was no one left, no one powerful enough to be accepted by the Afghanis, to be our ally, and to rule over the people. Dost Mohammad,” he said again, laughter shaking his thin frame, “whom we set out to depose in the first instance.”

“I'm bored,” Dalip Singh said suddenly, and Henry waited for a juggler to appear from behind the pillars of the pavilion.

When that didn't happen, he put out a hand to the boy. “Enough of a history lesson, your Majesty. But I hope you learned that if you persist, everything will give way before you. Come, let's play cricket.”

“What's that?” Dalip asked, running out to the edge of the pavilion.

“You don't know? You're in for a treat.”

•  •  •

A few days later, the Maharajah sent his men into Henry's courtyard when he was away and had a slim, rectangular strip of grass carved out from the lawns. The men hammered at the dirt until it was glass-smooth and shiny. The cricket pitch thus came into being, and every afternoon as his strength increased, Henry taught the boy to bowl, to bat, to watch the trajectory of the ball as it left the bowler's hand and came pounding down the pitch toward him. If the ball went over the edge of the fort, toward the Ravi River, short though that distance was, it was a six—worth six runs. The four was hitting the face of a pavilion on any side of the courtyard. Dalip ordered uniforms sewn overnight, in white silk, embedded with diamond buttons, with even his turban white. When he came every day in his pristine clothes, Henry expressed surprise at how clean they were—hadn't Dalip leapt for the ball and fallen on the wet grass just yesterday?

The answer came equally surprised and exaggeratedly
wide-eyed from the boy. This was a new uniform. He wore new cricket whites
every
day. What else did Henry expect from him? After all, he
was
the Maharajah of the Punjab.

A regular cricket team came into being, with John, Edwardes, Nicholson, and the Maharajah's attendants as fielders. Henry had a new cricket set brought in from the Army & Navy stores in Calcutta, and he had to convince Dalip Singh not to embellish the handles of the bat, or the wickets, with precious stones.

Henry oversaw Dalip's studies also, making him bring his tutors to the pavilion and correcting his spelling, grammar, and his handwriting in Urdu, Punjabi, Hindustani, and Persian. He taught him a smattering of English and every morning, much to his amusement, was greeted with “Good morning, I trust you had a restful night. It looks like it's going to be a fine day, isn't it, old chap?”

Dalip didn't mention his mother, Maharani Jindan Kaur, at all. Ever since Ranjit Singh's death she had fought, ferociously, to put her son on the throne, but she had forgotten to be the child's mother. She didn't put him to bed at night, wake him in the morning with a kiss, bind his minor scratches. In the fort, she stayed in her harem apartments; Dalip in his own quarters. Since Henry had come to Lahore, the Maharani had been a niggling burr in his side. He heard complaints from her daily—orders of precedence, the number of guards around her apartments, the food from the kitchens, the use of her jewelry, the need to dip into the Toshakhana . . . they were endless. Eventually, he found her embroiled in a plot to poison him and the other British soldiers in the fort. That evening, he sent her away to the fortress at Sheikhpura, northwest of Lahore. He waited with a pounding heart for Dalip to say something to him about it. But the Maharajah said nothing.

For a moment, Henry felt a blasting ache in his chest. What had the fates done to this boy? His mother could not
scheme, plot, avenge, and be his mother at the same time. And Dalip, who had lost his father before he even came to know him, was put in the care of strangers.

Another letter came from Lettice one day, when Henry was hunched over papers at his desk and Dalip was sitting on the ground, leaning against Henry's legs, laying out a cricket team on the floor with clay figures that one of his servants had made for him. The letter began, as the previous one had, with “My dearest Henry and Honoria,” because his sister assumed that Honoria would be with Henry by now, and that they would be married—she didn't know about the delay at Aden. Henry read on, flipping page after page, his bewilderment growing, until he turned the last page and saw that it was signed by an Adele. Adele who? He searched through his head among all their friends, acquaintances, cousins, near and distant, and could find no one of that name who was intimate enough with him—and Honoria—to actually write to him. Then, he started laughing, and retied the letter.

Dalip looked up, curious. “Tell me,” he said, “what does our sister say, Henry?”

“
Our
sister,” Henry said, chuckling, “did not write this letter. In fact, it isn't even to me, but to another Henry Lawrence in the Bengal army. He's also a captain, it would seem, and . . . he also seems to have married a woman named Honoria.”

A frown creased Dalip's forehead. “But you are not married, Henry.”

“No, but I will be soon.”

Dalip clapped his hands. “How wonderful, who is she, this Honoria? When does she come to marry you? Will it be here, in Lahore? I will throw you splendid parties to celebrate.”

Henry put a hand on his charge's shoulder as he attempted to rise and rush off to make wedding arrangements. “No, stay, Dalip. My . . . Honoria is on her way; she left Calcutta
a few months ago. When she gets here, I think we both will want a quiet ceremony. You can come, though, and stand up beside me if you want.”

“I can? John will not mind?”

“I don't think so.”

For a while, Dalip rearranged his cricket pieces on the floor as Henry wrote a note to the other Henry Lawrence, explaining his mistake and apologizing for having opened his letter. This done, he looked down at the Maharajah, who had his cheeks puffed out, his brow furrowed, as his little hands moved the pieces around with an under-the-breath running commentary. Here comes the bowler, here the batter swings, the ball flies into the wicket keeper's gloves with a thwack, they all turn to the umpire.
“Howz that?”
No, the umpire shakes his head, his eyes stony, not to be swayed by any amount of pleading . . . and so on.