Chapter XX: Minor Conflicts: September and October (3)

‘This is perfectly untrue. I went with Mr Saunders, the civil
commissioner, and his wife, to see the unfortunate and guilty wretch.
We mounted a flight of stone steps, at the bottom and top of which was
a European sentry. A small low door opened into a room, half of which
was partitioned off with a grass-matting called chitac, behind which
was a woman cooking some atrocious compound, if I might judge from the
smell. In the other half was a native bedstead—that is, a frame of
bamboo on four legs, with grass-rope strung across it; on this was
lying and smoking a hookah an old man with a long white beard; no
other article of furniture whatever was in the room, and I am almost
ashamed to say that a feeling of pity mingled with my disgust at
seeing a man recently lord of an imperial city, almost unparalleled
for riches and magnificence, confined in a low, close, dirty room,
which the lowest slave of his household would scarcely have occupied,
in the very palace where he had reigned supreme, with power of life
and death, untrammelled by any law, within the precincts of a royal
residence as large as a considerable-sized town; streets, galleries,
towers, mosques, forts, and gardens, a private and a public hall of
justice, and innumerable courts, passages, and staircases. Its
magnificence can only be equalled by the atrocities which have been
committed there. But to go back to the degraded king. The boy, Jumma
Bukht, repeated my name after Mr Saunders. The old man raised his head
and looked at me, then muttered something I could not hear, and at the
moment the boy, who had been called from the opposite door, came and
told me that his mother, the begum, wished to see me. Mrs Saunders
then took possession of me, and we went on into a smaller, darker,
dirtier room than the first, in which were some eight or ten women
crowding round a common “charpoy” or couch, on which was a dark, fat,
shrewd, but sensual-looking woman, to whom my attention was
particularly drawn. She took hold of my hand—I shuddered a little—and
told me that my husband was a great warrior; but that if the king’s
life and her son’s had not been promised them by the government, the
king was preparing a great army which would have annihilated us. The
other women stood round in silence till her speech was finished, and
then crowded round, asking how many children I had, and if they were
all boys; examined my dress, and seemed particularly amused by my
bonnet and parasol. They were, with one exception, coarse, low-caste
women, as devoid of ornament as of beauty. Zeenat Mahal asked me—a
great honour, I found, which I did not appreciate—to sit down on her
bed; but I declined, as it looked so dirty. Mr Saunders was much
amused at my refusal, and told me it would have been more than my life
was worth six months before to have done so; and I have no doubt of
it.’

Lucknow, from the Observatory.
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