Free The Mountain of Light by Indu Sundaresan Page A

lay twinkling reproachfully at them in the harsh sun.
    A few hours later, Wafa Begam picked her way over the stones in the pool, went to the fountain spout that was the third one from the northwest corner, toward the wrestling platform, bent down, and picked up the armlet hidden there.
    She was weak, rabidly hungry, shaking from a want of water and food. Shuja took the armlet himself to Fakir Azizuddin, who waited at the northernmost end of the middle terrace, his face turned away from Wafa Begam. Shuja’s steps were halting, dragged on the ground.
    Azizuddin examined the armlet and the enormous stone in the center, which caught fire in the light from the sun and shed its lovely glow over his dark face.
    â€œThank you, your Majesty,” he said.
    Within the hour, servants had brought in covered dishes wrapped in red satin cloth and laid them out on a carpet in the Aiwan pavilion. Shuja, Wafa, and Ibrahim ate everything in sight, drank cups of wine, and fell onto the carpets sated and full.
    The next day, they found all the entrances to the Shalimar thrown wide open, no guards around, the heated air from the plains rolling in. Freedom, Shah Shuja thought, as he watched the Englishman, Mountstuart Elphinstone, ride his horse into the lower terrace and bow his head. More horses were brought in; they jumped into the saddles and rode away south toward the Sutlej River. When they had crossed the river and entered the lands of British India, they were guided to a splendid haveli in Ludhiana.

Roses for Emily
    December 1838
    Twenty years later
    W hat is her name?”
    A doubtful silence tarried behind her, until she almost turned—unused to not being answered immediately—and then thought better of it.
    Fakir Azizuddin said, “Imli.”
    Her voice was resonant with laughter. “She’s named for the tamarind?”
    â€œNo,” he said, “surely not, your Majesty. It’s just that . . . these English names . . . they are so difficult. So short, sometimes so meaningless. I’ve only seen it written down, and my English, you know, is of such newness. Perhaps Em-ee-lee.”
    Maharani Jindan Kaur pondered on that, tapping her slender foot upon the ground. She, and the fakir, stood on the northern bank of the Sutlej River, on the very boundary of the lands ruled by Maharajah Ranjit Singh. Behind her, and him, spread the royal encampment, some hundred thousand souls, tents laid out in a refined grid, dirt pathways hammered and smoothed in the dust, bazaar streets that soldspices, oranges, ghee, and copper vessels. In front of her was the mighty Sutlej itself, which found its source thousands of miles away to the east and north, in the Himalayan mountains and the kingdom of Tibet. Here, in the Punjab, the same river that had earlier thundered through rock and mud, carving out sheer gorges, plummeting in deep waterfalls, had spent its force and lay in a wide, tranquil band of water. So serene was the Sutlej on her way to joining the Indus River and emptying out into the Arabian Sea, that the land grew lush and green in parallel stripes around the waters, buffaloes nibbled in the grass and waded in the river to rest upon sudden sandbanks, their black heads bowed under the weight of their curved horns.
    â€œIt’s a funny name,” Jindan said. “But then all these English names are incomprehensible to me.”
    Fakir Azizuddin was half-turned from his Queen, almost facing into his own king’s camp, but not quite, because he couldn’t look obviously upon the woman, and couldn’t present his back to her. So, he shifted in little semicircles, swinging his body this way and that. He allowed his gaze only to fall upon the skirts of her ghagara, noted the smooth heel that lifted one edge of it, the sole painted orange with henna. She was young, this wife of his Maharajah, perhaps not even eighteen years old yet. And Ranjit Singh, this year, was fifty-eight years