Lucknow waits in the clobbering temperatures for the monsoons to arrive. In the front hall of the palace, Amah’s cousin, old Kasim, and another cousin, Fatima, who also guards the royal storerooms, take out pressed handkerchiefs and mop their brows. His Majesty’s wives hide away in their bougainvillea-covered rooms. In a pavilion deep in the gardens, palace advisors talk in low voices, their bare feet caressing the cool marble floors. In the city, some of the English have left for better weather up in the hills; their procession of elephants, oxen carts, and hundreds of servants weighed down with luggage, creeps along under the hot sun. The rumour in Lucknow is that this year most Company men will not join their wives but will stay in the city, despite the heat, to continue with the so-called improvements. Vendors watch the Company men in their blue tailcoats come and go from the new offices established in the King’s buildings. The vendors’ eyes are not unkind; they are trusting souls, souls that trust change. But, Amah thinks, there are things they don’t understand.
She leaves the palace in the evening light to meet Gulbadan who’s already been notified about the need to find messengers. Gulbadan is an older, plump woman with black-and-grey hair pulled tightly away from the delicate pearl clusters that cover her ears. She manages the wealthy kotha, a set of apartments belonging to the King’s courtesans—some of his favoured poets, singers, and classical dancers who live above the main market street, Chowk, situated west of Qaisarbagh Palace, on the other side of Residency Hill. Begam Sahiba completed some of her training privately with Gulbadan before her marriage to His Majesty. After marriage, she replaced her courtesan friends with tigers, black swans, her son Birjis, and Amah.
Amah climbs the stairs to the kotha and finds Gulbadan in her little pavilion at the top. Her back to Amah, she sifts through papers in a wall of drawers. She wears a green, silk kurta with a short-sleeved, tight blouse underneath, and wide pyjamas tied at the waist. A light duppata is draped over her head. As Amah waits for Gulbadan to turn around, she daydreams about being invited to recline in the open-air courtyard against one of the pillows, as if she were a royal patron waiting for an evening of poetry and music, while Sai, Gulbadan’s nephew, serves her puffed puris, chicken in creamy gravies, and almond milk when she asks.
“Tasleem,” Amah finally says, bowing slightly, and touching her forehead in respect.
“Tasleem. I’ll talk to you about the messengers in a moment,” Gulbadan says, not turning around. “Go and do something else for a little while.”
Amah leaves to find Gulbadan’s nephew, Sai. In the courtyard, a group of Indian nobles are seated for dinner and a performance of ragas. They’ve brought ruby bracelets for the courtesans and laid them out on a low wall for marvelling. Serving boys offer the guests fried kebabs with mint and pepper chutneys. Sai, a small, young man, places mosquito coils around the courtyard and supplies salve for bites. He supplies the guests with cool water to relieve their hot mouths. The men thirst for the possibility to touch a courtesan’s black hair, want to have their dry tongues quenched by smooth skin, men who return for these soirees like homing pigeons. Sai offers cool water to the courtesans, young women with green eyes, gold-flecked brown eyes, and bright, black eyes, women who own homes and shops and goats, who tutor young boys in manners, and who write poems that come from their fresh mouths—poems that hang in the warm air above the marigolds and blue pillows embroidered with silver fish that match the silver stars, poems that wink in the air like the diamonds on the courtesans’ delicate noses, that shimmer like the silver spangles on the women’s chiffon pyjamas. Delicate syllables rest in the air, then disappear—courtesan song written on the breeze.
At the well by the kitchen, Sai refills the water pitchers and greets Amah. “Adab,” he says, his head bowed slightly. He cups his hand over his heart and pats his chest twice.
“Tasleem,” Amah replies.
Over the years, she’s seen her friend Sai decorate the kotha for Ramadan, Diwali, Jain saint days, the Jewish New Year. They played together as children, like siblings, throwing mangoes at each other while being chastised by Gulbadan. “Milk sweet?” he asks, holding out a dish. “Sister, look. The colour of dark honey. Like you.”
“Too kind, my friend, but no.” Sai loves milk sweets so much that, watching him, Amah can taste the ones he eats.
The strains of a band practicing a waltz can be heard from Residency Hill. Sai twirls barefoot around the well, humming and sucking the sweet, mimicking the stiff-legged English couples performing their drills. Finally, he sits down beside her, still sucking on the sweet.
“That music makes my head sore,” Amah says.
“Those new telegraph wires make my eyes sore,” Sai says.
“Shall we cut them?” she asks.
He glances at her in surprise.
She hesitates, realizing she means the words. “Shall we cut them?”
“Is that some sort of foreign joke, Amah?”
“I’m serious. Their telegraph wires bring them news, and we receive empty envelopes. I think we should cut them.”
“We would land in jail. The royal family has some leeway— you might have some leeway even—but I would land in jail. Most likely a new English jail.”
“There must be a way to slow the Company down.”
“It’s better to proceed through the right channels. You know that.”
Amah keeps thinking.
“I would never do it, you know that, too,” he says. “However,” he adds, nodding in the direction of Amah’s rifle, “perhaps you would.” Sai gets up and stretches. “Sister, I’m not going to agree with you about something that will get you hurt. Leave the idea alone.” He picks up the water pitchers and stands there, waiting for her.
She lets the thought go for now and gets up to follow him.
In the courtyard, notes from a sitar curl through the air like questions. The gathering of captivated men listen, eat habshi halwa, and reflect. Gulbadan walks across the courtyard toward Amah, pausing to speak to two men in capes, seated behind the others. They are not Lakhnavis, and Amah cannot read their long faces. “Who are they?” she asks when Gulbadan reaches her.
“Rasheed and Akbar. From Calcutta. They work together, know villagers who they can stay with for a rupee. They know how to travel carefully, resting with villagers, making sure they stay alert. They can bring your correspondence from Calcutta through Cawnpore to here.”
“How do we know we can trust them?”
“I think they are trustworthy.”
“But Gulbadan, how do we know for certain? Have they done this work before? We need to be sure.”
“Begam Sahiba will know that if I think they are trustworthy, then they are trustworthy,” Gulbadan says, her voice rising, her face setting. “They are good men. Where is the letter for His Majesty’s advisors? Stop wasting time.”
Amah hands it to her and bows her head. “Thank you,” she says.
***
Lucknow stands still the next afternoon, the first afternoon of monsoon rain. Amah waits with her cousins, old Kasim and Fatima, at the doors of the front hall, looking out into the street where the water flows clearly from the drains, drenching the thirsty flower beds. The rain dampens their skin. A scrubbed warmth fills the air. “I wonder what the cold feels like in London,” Amah says. “Our Queen Mother must be watching the cold rain. And in Calcutta, what do those people see? I wonder if the rain in Calcutta chokes the streets as it never does here.”
Her mother’s angry absence washes over her. She suddenly wants to lie down and leaves the front hall, hurrying through Qaisarbagh’s gardens, rain trickling behind her ears, the wet azaleas brushing her arms. She means to go to her room, but she finds herself at her mother’s door and goes in.
In the corner of the room, Amah picks up her mother’s prayer mat to check her mother’s box of precious stones. Amah has already taken some to sell, to pay the royal cooks who wait, like she does, for their salaries to arrive.
Amah hears footsteps and, when she turns around, Aunt Laila stands in the doorway holding glass prayer beads. “You couldn’t even bring her warm milk,” she says to Amah, lifting her voice above the rain hammering on the roof.
“Auntie, my mother took the early coach to Calcutta. If she’d stayed I would have brought her warm milk in time.”
“Since when do you do things for your mother? It’s shameful that she had to travel alone. And now your mother’s room is as empty and silent as your heart is of prayers.”
Amah studies her aunt’s face. Like Amah’s mother, she has high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes. Aunt Laila’s son, Amah’s cousin Hasan, a royal jockey now out of work, shares these delicate features. Except for Amah’s cropped hair and her father’s height, they all look related. Their differences lie in a deeper place.
She doesn’t tell Aunt Laila that the silence in the room seems tranquil after her mother’s clucking sounds of disapproval that her aunt, it appears, has taken up. Instead, Amah excuses herself, and leaves.
She walks in the canopied street by Qaisarbagh Palace, under the dripping trees and some unseen birds who, to use her grandmother’s old phrase, make a clatter like pastry pans. In the distance, newspaper buyers huddle around Mohammed’s stall. She stays away, thinking about her mother, how she would wait for Amah’s brother to come away from his court meetings to eat, how she would give the palace cooks orders for her son’s daily dishes. Her mother often told her about her brother, and also about her Lakhnavi father. She spoke in an insistent, chastising voice, as if that would help Amah not to forget them. Amah does not remember them well.
She stops to contemplate the mosquitoes gathered above a puddle on the road. Lucknow is an ancient city, she thinks. Struggles have come and gone. Surely, this one with her mother can come and go, too. They will all come home, and there will be no more choosing. When Amah looks down, there are mosquitoes clinging to her ankles.