Palace boys come back with the news. Sent out to see what has happened to Rasheed and Akbar, they discover that the messengers did not reach the ruler of Nepal. Begam Sahiba’s letter was intercepted—like a Queen Mother’s letter was intercepted, like a young soldier boy’s letter was intercepted. Their beloved messengers do not return.
After this, Amah does not want to get out of bed at dawn but the sounds of loud shouting force her to dress. Outside the front of the palace and across the new moat, a rushing stream of men pass her in the street. Some of them are loading their guns as they walk, still groggy with sleep. Kasim is with them.
“They’re coming,” he says.
She goes immediately to Begam Sahiba’s meeting room where her friend is talking quickly with Jai Lal and Qaisarbagh’s old ministers. Amah bows her head. “Tasleem,” she starts.
Begam Sahiba interrupts her. “Be on guard on the roof with the others.”
In the garden, Amah ignores Shahzadi who wants to be fed. She walks through the gardens, past the spiral staircase, to the back wall of Qaisarbagh Palace, and climbs the ladder hidden by bougainvillea to join other guards surrounded by tall trees on the roof. She crouches down, her soft shoes curling over the plastered mud, and watches the streets below filled with men and women going to their positions at the great walls on the south side of the city.
Kitchen runners bring water and chapatis up to the roof and down to the defence. On the roof, they wait, listening to the muffled sounds in the distance. They spend the day standing around. They sleep on the roof and Amah stares at the stars most of the night. At dawn, they hear someone climbing the ladder from inside Qaisarbagh. In the grey light, Malamud’s head, then his shoulders appear. He climbs right up, dumps his rifle, takes off his boots, and stretches out on the rooftop beside them, panting.
“Where is the attack?” someone asks him in the shadowy light.
Malamud is out of breath. “Namaste. Is there water?”
“Tasleem. Here, friend. Water,” Amah says, and gives him a full pitcher. “I am so glad to see you.” She whistles for a runner who comes with chapatis and more water. “We will listen when you are ready,” she says.
Malamud sits up and holds the pitcher above his lips, pouring the water into his mouth. “Cold. Good,” he says. Then he eats, his black eyes glassy, listening to the sounds of men shouting in the distance. “It’s all done.” He nods at Amah. “I marked your mother’s grave. I had to delay coming back for a long time. I could not move fast after all. No one will trust you in the roads. Coming back, I didn’t have anyone I could stay with. It all took so long.” Malamud lies down. He lights a cigarette.
The smell is strange, acrid. Calcutta.
“I must go and find Jai Lal,” he says.
“Rest first. Wait until there’s better light.”
“I talked to several men in the streets. There are Englishmen coming up behind the southeast wall, just as Begam Sahiba predicted, they say. And they’re over in Dilkusha Park, eating carrots. No Nepalis yet. I heard about that agreement, too.” He sits up and takes two bracelets off his wrist. “I almost forgot. Laila gave them to me to give to you.”
Her mother’s gold bracelets clink together in Malamud’s hand. She takes them, feels their thickness with her fingers.
Malamud looks out in the direction of the river and smokes. “Do you know in Calcutta they say that the newspapers in London, and New York, too, are full of protests about what is happening here? Lots of people against the Company. But it doesn’t matter. Queen Victoria sent fourteen thousand men in boats from England to come to Lucknow. Fourteen thousand crossing the ocean to come here!”
“Rest a little, Malamud.”
He lies down and closes his eyes. After a while, he says, “Do you ever wish to cross the ocean, Amah? Do you ever wish to see your country again?”
She puts on the bracelets, turning them around and around on her wrist. “We made our place here a long time ago,” she says.
“His Majesty’s residence—at Matiya Burj. Do you know, Amah?” Malamud says, finishing his cigarette. “His Majesty has made his place there, even if he is under house arrest. Matiya Burj has become a miniature Lucknow—with dancers and poets and artists flocking to live there.” He stops. “I have something more to tell you,” he says. “More terrible news. They had the news in Calcutta. The Queen Mother has died.”
Amah stands up. She needs to find old Lal. By the time she finds the Queen Mother’s white-haired advisor in the gardens, the news has already reached him. He is staring into the mermaid fountain in the growing light, one leg up, his foot curled over the rim, throwing tangerines into the water. Amah talks to their reflections. “She was on her way home,” she says, repeating what Malamud has told her. “They were in Paris. On their way home,” she says. “She would have done everything you told her to do, Lal. She would have taken all of your tonics.”
Lal’s eyes remain fixed on the wavy water. Amah continues to gaze at the water, too, imagining holy men swimming, and soldiers washing their feet free from dirt. She imagines the weary Queen Mother standing in the fountain, gathering the billowing folds of her wet pyjamas as she watches a tiger lap the water, and a group of little English boys in sailor-suits splash, soaking the pages of her Persian poems so that the book falls apart, disintegrating the verses.
She doesn’t tell Lal that the Queen Mother died on the same day that one of Queen Victoria’s daughters was married. Her death found no place in the newspapers. “How hard she tried to reverse things,” Amah says to him instead. “She died of a broken heart, Lal. No medicine can fix that.”
Malamud leaves to join Jai Lal. Amah stays with the others on the rooftop, listening to the noise of fighting in the distance. They think they hear shots from the direction of the Gomti, as well as from the southeast, but no one is coming to tell them. The sky is a vast, hot indigo, and they keep to the shadows. Malamud comes back in the afternoon holding a flask of water. “They are firing at us from across the river,” he says, drinking the water quickly. He makes a face and spits it over the rooftop. He takes off his boots and sits on the roof, his eyes shut. They squat beside him.
“Tell us,” Amah says.
Someone hands Malamud a beedi. Finally, he opens his eyes and smokes, and they don’t interrupt him. “We are fighting them off, but thousands of our men have been killed. And the English are north of us. They came around the south side and set up a bridge of casks over the Gomti further down, and they’ve crossed to the north side, to the Faizabad Road. Soon they could be directly across the Gomti, looking at Qaisarbagh Palace. There are no barricades there,” Malamud says with awe in his voice. “Why in the name of Allah are there no barricades along the river?” He lies down, stays quiet while they watch his face, his eyes squeezed shut. “They have good fire power,” he finally says, and opens his eyes. “And more imagination with tactics. They are better at war than we are.”
“Yes,” Amah says. “They are much, much better at war.”
The second night on the roof they hear gun shots, and shouting. It is at a distance, and again it’s hard to make out what is going on. Malamud leaves, promising to return with news. No one feels like talking under the black boughs of trees under the stars. But there are murmured prayers. Someone in the darkness is anxiously brushing mosquitoes away from them all, urging no one to kill them. Amah is exhausted but none of them can sleep without some sort of news. All night there are gunshots. She prays for one small piece of good news. One tiny speck of firefly light.
Malamud appears late morning, scrambling onto the roof, his face grimy. “The south wall is broken. Last night, they punched holes in the garden walls so that they could get further into Lucknow through the gardens where we couldn’t see them coming.
“At dawn, we chased them through the gardens and fought them in the streets. A bullet hit a rain pipe beside me so loudly it feels like it shattered my ear drum. It still hurts,” he says, rubbing his ear. “There was so much red dust in the air this morning that all of us were coughing, everyone. Still, we had to shoot and cough and cough and shoot. Your time idling on this roof is coming to an end. They are getting close.”
On that roof, hearts sink. Amah is not sure when she starts yelling, but it is after a flock of gun shots rises in the air close to them. It is after she sees the men running below them. At first she pities them as villagers who are in too deep, who are running away. “The villagers are probably all dead,” Malamud says beside her, as if he has read her thoughts. She realizes that it is a straggling stream of men from the Awadh Force who slip and pour like glistening honey down the canopied street. Someone in the street calls out that the Iron Bridge is red with English coats. The road along the river is soon overcome by Redcoats who pass the empty fish stalls. Along the canopied road, crowds of Englishmen pass Mohammed’s abandoned newspaper stall. They skirt the high garden walls covered in yellow flowers, and glance at the bare tables set up by elderly Somalian neighbours who usually make paan. Everywhere there are thousands of Redcoats. Amah pictures the Redcoats crossing Qaisarbagh’s new moat, crawling around the tamarind tree growing out of the palace wall by the front doors.
She yells into the air, to His Majesty’s silk-winged pigeons flying toward the sun, and she is shooting in the direction of the unseen gardens where unseen Englishmen punched holes through walls and got closer, unseen. She is yelling and shooting, and Malamud tells her to shut up as he takes a sniper’s position on the roof. She is not sure what prompts her to get down right then, but she walks all the way back to the ladder and she slides and falls to Qaisarbagh’s gardens. It is hard to walk in the grass after being on the roof, and she falls again and gets up and walks woodenly across the lawns. She is yelling, and white-haired Lal is there holding her hand, asking her to stop, but she keeps going. She sees Begam Sahiba with Jai Lal and the palace’s old advisors in her meeting room. Amah stands at attention outside the room, and it calms her. Lal is beside her, searching her eyes, and tears are in his old ones. She takes out her mother’s yellow handkerchief, and she wipes his face. She runs back and climbs the ladder to the roof. She looks at the streets and watches green birds fly through the red dust and out over the Gomti. Slowly, she puts down her rifle. She strains to hear a pigeon breathe Yahu, or perhaps even the song from a sitar, or cooks’ knives chopping ginger, anything beyond the loud voices of Englishmen, but those noisy voices bounce high into the hot air, off the city’s brass domes, swirling into the pink clouds, not one note of music.