The Mountain of Light (30 page)

Three thousand pounds of flour, bread, hops, and malt. Oxtails, sides of beef, pork, mutton, calves' heads, and enormous blocks of ice clad in jute heaved over the steep gangplank to keep the meat fresh. Two hundred head of livestock—hens, geese, ducks, sheep, pigs—which were
kept in a pen belowdecks, brought up to the bow in the middle of the night, slaughtered there, bled over the edge of the ship's bulwark. The decks were then washed down and disinfected before the first shard of dawn streaked over the horizon, so although the passengers of the
Indus
would sit down to freshly made sausages at breakfast in the stateroom, they wouldn't realize that the meat had lived and breathed, and eventually died, just a few feet away on the very deck they would promenade on after the meal.

There were bottles of champagne, claret, Madeira, port and sherry, brandy, rum, whiskey, and pale ale, soda water and lemonade for the ladies. Bags of tea, coffee, sugar, curry powder, made their way up the gangplank. And then came the jams, jellies, marmalade, macaroni, olive oil, catsup, vinegar, salted tripe, vermicelli, eggs, butter, and bacon.

The kitchens—there were two of them on the
Indus,
one for the passengers and one for the crew—were below the foredeck, and each had its set of cooks and provisions. P & O policy strictly forbade the crew cooks from dipping into the passengers' rations.

When the last of the goods had been stowed aboard—and this was the second night of the loading—the old man finally turned the wick of his lantern on high, waited for flame to flare, picked up his stick, and held the lantern, swinging, over the face of his nephew, whom he had never before seen. His breath caught in his chest—this was his brother's face, the one he would have had if the watchman had stayed on in the Punjab to see his younger brother grow up into manhood. How much he had missed because of his stupid fight with this boy's grandfather.

“I must go back now, Chachaji,” his nephew said. “My master will wake soon; he cannot quite manage without me.”

The watchman set the lantern down and reached out to touch his nephew's shoulder. How firm and strong he felt, how successful he had already been in his life—children he
had brought up and given the family lands to, daughters he had married to good people and good families, a wife . . . “Where is your wife?” he asked.

“She died, Chachaji,” the other replied. “Four years ago.” He turned to look at the
Indus,
lying a little lower in the waters of the bay, the waves lapping against her bow in a rhythmic motion, setting her rocking slightly. “So I decided to take this job. My father thought I should.”

“You have been a good son,” the old man said ruminatively. His brother had always had an ease of control over many things—people, his family—but then his brother had had a great responsibility in the court of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, and he had held that job for years, trusted and comfortable in the imperial presence. Bringing up his children to listen to him well into their adulthoods would also have been easy for him.

“Then you leave on this boat?” the watchman asked, nudging his chin outward.

“With my master, yes.”

“You cannot come back,
beta,
” the uncle said. “Can you? After you have crossed the black waters, after you've lost caste doing so. Who will you be? What can you be?”

The younger man bowed his head. When he spoke, though, there was no bitterness in his voice. “I have been asked to go along with my master to England, there to serve him as I have here. He will not return, I think; he has other plans. And so I cannot also; I could not afford to pay my way back. But”—his mouth hardened and his eyes glittered—“it will not be so bad after all. I have work to do, Chachaji. Much work.”

He rose, bent down again to touch his uncle's feet, and moved that hand to his forehead and eyes, then walked away into the gloom of the dockyard. The night watchman listened to his footsteps fading away and knew that he would not see his nephew again. They could, either of them, die before that meeting would happen.

•  •  •

While the city of Bombay slept, lamplighters roamed about, flames held aloft, their quick eyes seeking out a smoking or doused streetlamp. The street sweepers and cleaners came by, pulling their carts, and the whish-whoosh of their brushes, and sluice of water from their buckets, set the roads gleaming by dawn. Police constables walked their beats, striking the ground with their thick
lathis
. Here and there, a night watchman called out the hour in a song-filled voice.

A brisk breeze settled in from the sea, whisking around the buildings and towers, bringing cool relief to the poor, the homeless, shrouded in cotton sheets on the pavements under the star-thronged sky.

At Watson's Hotel in the Esplanade, a five-minute walk from the docks at Apollo Bandar, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Mackeson lay on his bed in the very center of the room. It was on the fourth floor, the topmost, and at one corner, so the room had windows, or rather a series of half-glass doors, perforating two walls. A wrought-iron balcony wrapped around the outside of each floor of the hotel, common to all the rooms, wide enough only for a man to step outside for a smoke.

Mackeson had his hands crossed on his chest, in the pose of a dead saint put to rest, but his thoughts were anything but calm. For sleep would not come, coveted though it was. He shifted his head. Although the curtains had been drawn over each door, light from the streetlamps still seeped in around the sides. And for a long time now, he had been able to distinguish the chair, the desk, the paintings on the walls, even the whorls and swirls of the carpet's design, and the gleam of the mosaic floor. Overhead, a broad, sheetlike
punkah
moved from side to side, and a rope attached to it ran along the ceiling to the entrance door, and through a hole in the wall
above the transom window. A boy sat outside, tugging at the rope and making the
punkah
move. He usually had it tied to his toe, and merely had to waggle his foot to keep the fan in motion once started.

He had fallen asleep though, Mackeson thought; the
punkah
had stopped many times, and started again when the boy awoke and remembered his duty.

The room was stifling hot. Mr. Granger, the manager, upon showing Colonel Mackeson the room, had suggested keeping the verandah doors open during the night. It was quite safe, he had said, and they had security guards patrolling the street outside. But the noises of a city fading into the night's rest had grated upon Mackeson's ears—he had spent all of his time in India in small, outlying villages and distant regimental camps. The constant sound of carriages, the harsh laughter of the coolies, the inconsequential chatter of so many people, forever and on and on, had churned inside him, given him no peace at all since he had come to Bombay this morning.

Even the hushed luxury of Watson's was painful. In the smoking room, there was the crackle of the newspapers, the smog of cigarettes, the unnerving sensation that the cut of his trousers was at least four years out of date and that the crease was not sharp enough no matter how hard Multan Raj had tried his hand at an iron. In the dining room, he had been bewildered by the array of forks and knives and spoons—which was for what? He had forgotten, so long in the army, so unused to a grand dinner party; the utensils for the fish, the fowl, the side of beef all seemed the same to him. He was conscious of having lifted the wrong one when the waiter—a native boy—had coughed by his side and gently removed all others to the side of his plate so that he could identify the correct fork.

And the women were so . . . splendid. Some were clad in real blue gowns—the up-country women Mackeson knew had long given up that color because it yellowed and aged
quickly under the Indian sun—their hands were smooth and clean, unwrinkled; their hair was set by expert hands, presumably by their native
ayahs,
who were more skillful than the ones who served the Englishwoman anywhere else in India.

Colonel Mackeson had never married; that is, he had not married an Englishwoman. He did, though, have a
zenana
of native women—three of them—with whom he had lived for twenty-five years, and who had borne him twelve children. He knew all of their names, had named them himself, and taught them English and some mathematics. They lived in a house he had built on the banks of the Hooghly near Calcutta. There were some officers in the army who knew of his wives and children, but most did not, because he did not travel with them and had never introduced them to his fellow officers' wives.

There had not been enough money for an English wife at first, and then, when the promotions came in, never an opportunity to meet one. Mackeson had been forced to spend his first home leave—ten years after he had come to India—in bed with a fever through which one of his wives had nursed him, or he would have died. When the next home leave came around, another ten years later, one of his children was sick with the cholera, and the boy had subsequently died, leaving a yawning hole in Mackeson's heart. This boy he had taught to hunt, to fish, to sit on a chair, to drink tea from a cup's rim and not slurp it from the saucer. Most of the men under his command, for a very long time, had been natives. Over the years the balance had changed, as the East India Company recruited more and more men from the British Isles, promising them wealth from an Indian tour (which had to last at least a few decades before it could be realized) and faster promotions than in the King's army. This had been what had lured Mackeson also.

He watched as other, younger men, with connections on the Governor-General's Council, or the Court of Directors of the East India Company, or at court, leapt over him to higher
ranks. But Colonel Mackeson was patient and unworried. Finally, he was asked to be a political agent in Peshawar while the Maharajah Ranjit Singh still ruled over the Punjab Empire. That led to other civil postings, and the final one—the one that had brought him to Watson's Hotel in Bombay, sleepless and wide-eyed—was as political liaison of the Governor-General's office during the Second Sikh War.

Lord Dalhousie had come to India as Governor-General over two years ago. It wasn't he who had recommended Mackeson for the post—he had hardly known any of the old India hands when he landed—but he soon came to rely upon the man, his dedication, his unhurried answers, his thoughtfulness, his proven bravery. Of Mackeson's harem in Calcutta, Dalhousie neither knew nor cared. And it had been two years since Mackeson had seen these women of his family.

Now this. He eventually rose from his bed, his arms stiff, his shoulders frozen, his neck muscles tense. The Punjab Empire had finally been dissolved, and there was no more pretense at the British government “holding” the throne for the young Maharajah Dalip Singh until he reached his majority. The Second Sikh War had put an end to that entire charade, and Dalip Singh had signed an official treaty giving up his lands, his right to rule over them, the jewels in his Toshakhana and the Kohinoor diamond. He had also been taken away from Lahore at Lord Dalhousie's behest, for fear that the twelve-year-old Maharajah's very presence would be an incitement to riot, to claim back the throne of the Punjab.

Colonel Mackeson walked up to the verandah doors, brushed aside the curtains, and looked out into the street. Over the tops of the buildings, in the distance, he could see the dark blue waters of the harbor, and the intermittent twinkle of lights from the boats and ships clustered there. He put his hand on the door's latch and opened it enough so that the breeze wafted in, mildly scented with frangipani flowers, and the pure breath of the sea.

As political liaison for Lord Dalhousie, he had also carried the terms of the treaty to the child king, not sure that he should have been doing this. Surely it was better that Henry Lawrence, who had been Resident at Lahore before, and knew the Maharajah well, should have performed this task?

If there was one thing Colonel Mackeson would fault Lord Dalhousie for, it had been this. The child had been brought into a room full of strangers and told that depriving him of his lands was the right thing for him, that he would be looked after, could keep some of his jewels, and would have an income for life. What more could he want?

“But,” Dalip Singh had said, in the high voice of a child, “where's Henry?”

Dr. John Login had been left—when Henry Lawrence was taken away from Dalip Singh and Lahore—as the guardian for the fort, the treasury, and the child. This too Mackeson approved of; he had also thought Henry Lawrence too empathetic with the native people of the Punjab to remain there any longer . . . but Lawrence should have been there to hold the boy's hand when he signed the treaty, to explain to him what was happening, to assure him that he still had a friend.

And then Lord Dalhousie had taken charge of the Kohinoor diamond and come up with the idea that it should be presented to the Queen, that it rightfully belonged to the woman who was sovereign of British lands in Britain and abroad.

Mackeson pulled the gold tasseled rope that hung beside his bed and waited for Multan Raj to knock softly and enter, when he said,
“Aao.”

“You cannot sleep, Sahib?” he asked after he had touched his forehead in a salaam.

“No,” Mackeson said with a grin.
“Tum bhi nahi so rahi ho?”
You aren't sleeping either? He didn't notice the small smile that creased the man's swarthy face, for Mackeson had
learned all his Hindustani among the women of his
zenana,
and hadn't learned the grammar well enough to realize that he spoke only in the feminine, as the women did. “A brandy, please. No water, just ice.”

“I will bring the ice, Mackeson Sahib.” Multan Raj went out and shut the door. In the sudden darkness that came flooding back, and before his eyes became accustomed to the pale light filtering from the street outside, Mackeson remembered his conversation with Lord Dalhousie in the old Shah Burj, the tower in Lahore Fort. He had come upon the Governor-General holding the Kohinoor diamond, in its bracelet, and turning it this way and that in the sunlight until it looked like his hand was on fire. Mackeson had hesitated at the doorway.