Free The Mountain of Light by Indu Sundaresan

scrub, a journey he had already made twice today, Aziz had doubted the wisdom of haste. But when Ranjit Singh gave an order, it was obeyed. As simple as that. And then, to see the two men in Elphinstone’s employ whistling a snatch of a violin concerto, the blows on their heads, bundling them out of the way before Ibrahim Khan came snaking down the rope . . . waiting for Wafa Begam to also descend . . . Azizuddin had thought himself brilliant in allowing it to happen so that he could corner them and snatch the Kohinoor and end all these years of futile waiting.
    But then Wafa had walked away with the diamond, and Azizuddin knew that it was she who was brilliant. He was just a fool who had thought only to the edge of the pit, not beyond it, and so had fallen in.
    The wily Wafa would have hidden the Kohinoor again by now. They had searched the gardens many times in the past few years, and it had never been discovered. He knew howmuch his king wanted the diamond. And Azizuddin wanted to be the man who brought it to him. He had thought for a while longer, and then walked around the perimeter of the Shalimar Gardens, looking up at the walls as the light rose, giving a new set of orders to the guards.
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    â€œI’m hungry,” Wafa Begam said. All of their worries seemed to have leached away with the steam; the tiredness had left their bodies, and they both lay back on the edge of the pool, their feet in the water, looking up at the skylights.
    Shuja ordered the steam to be stopped, and the hiss died down into a quiet nothingness. The light from the sun seemed to burn away the mist and created dark shadows in the shade, a golden transparency where it touched.
    Perhaps things were not so bad after all, Shuja thought, his fingers entwined with his wife’s. He had one more thing left to give Ranjit Singh if he became too demanding. He didn’t know anymore if Elphinstone was truly in Lahore, if his offer to help was genuine, if the night’s adventures had been an elaborate ruse.
    â€œLet’s go have breakfast,” he said, rising from the floor and helping Wafa up.
    They went out into the middle terrace, paused for a moment at the pool. The fountains were silent now, and water lay without a ripple, placid, the tinted stones underneath the surface throwing rainbows of glittering color upon the face of the water.
    When they ascended to the upper terrace, all was quiet. No smoke from the kitchen fires, no aroma of cooked chicken and lamb, no fragrance of freshly baked naans . Every morning, through the south entrance of the upper terrace, Maharajah Ranjit Singh sent in a mass of supplies—clucking hens driven in a cluster, fresh vegetables, spices in covered jars,butter and ghee in urns. But today, the gates had been firmly shut. The Maharajah of the Punjab intended to starve them until Shah Shuja gave him the Kohinoor diamond.
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    For the next two days, Shuja, Ibrahim, and Wafa ate the ripening guavas in the trees, and then the unripe ones, their stomachs protesting. When the guavas were gone, they washed the green mangoes, cut them into slices, sprinkled on salt and chilli powder, ate them until their tongues became sour.
    Desperate, Shuja sent the Maharajah his last jewel, a stone as big as his fist, hued in pale yellow, and said that it was the Kohinoor. A long eight hours passed on that third day as they waited. Ranjit Singh had never seen the Kohinoor; he did not know what it looked like, or how big it actually was, or anything about it at all.
    A letter came from the king to Shah Shuja in which he thanked him for the pukraj, the wonderful topaz, he had sent him, but it wasn’t the Kohinoor, was it?
    On the fourth day, a slew of gardeners came into the Shalimar and cut down every tree. They drained the pools, shut off the water source from the Hasli Canal, and the stones in the central pool of the middle terrace