Rebel Queen (33 page)

I patted Sher’s flank. The constant sound of gunfire made him skittish. He pawed at the ground, eager to be gone. Kashi, Mandar, and Priyala fell into formation behind the rani. Then Jhalkari appeared. As soon as I saw her, I understood what she meant to do.

“Jhalkari, you have a husband!” I cried. “What are you doing?”

She was dressed in a blue angarkha, with pearls around her neck and a ruby ring in her nose. Only someone who truly knew Lakshmibai would be able to say it wasn’t her. She was going to create a distraction at another gate and pretend to be the rani. But as soon as they discovered the ruse, the British would have her executed.

I started weeping. Jhalkari wrapped her arms around me, and I cried into her chest. “Why are you doing this?”

“So the rani can fight again at Kalpi. Can you think of another way?”

But in my heart, I couldn’t. I separated myself from Jhalkari and had to look away.

Arjun mounted his horse and I mounted Sher. Then we rode toward Bhandir Gate. My heart ached. At the gate soldiers stopped us. “We’re the troops from Orchha,” General Singh said. He used a Bundelkhandi accent.

An Englishman looked directly at the rani, and saw only an exhausted soldier. “Move on then!”

We rode out of Jhansi as quickly as we could.

When I looked back, the entire city was on fire.

We hadn’t ridden for long when word that we were being pursued made it to the front of our procession. We stopped on the side of a farmer’s field. “We must split up,” Arjun persuaded the rani. “Our group is too slow. You ride ahead; take only my guards and the Durgavasi. You’ll make it to Kalpi faster.”

“The soldiers know she is in military clothes. We must change,” I said. “We could pass as peasants.”

We could hear the sound of distant gunfire; Arjun looked skeptical.

“In Homer’s
The Odyssey
, Odysseus returned home after an absence of twenty years and wasn’t sure whom he could trust. So he successfully disguised himself as a beggar,” I insisted.

The rani ordered Mandar and Priyala to buy clothes from the farmer who owned the field. When they returned, the rani and I headed to a small hut to change. We removed our clothes in silence, and when we emerged, the queen looked for all the world like a peasant. Before we remounted and rode on, she took my hand.

“Thank you.” She didn’t say what for, but I squeezed her hand and hoped she knew how much she meant to me. “Let’s ride.”

At a fork in the road, Arjun and I headed to Barwa Sagar. To the north, the rani and her group rode hard toward Kalpi.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I
t was eight hours before we reached Barwa Sagar. We stopped only to rest the horses and give them water. Most of the villages we passed were peaceful; they had offered no resistance. Their women were taken to British whorehouses, their crops would be taken as a form of taxation.

As dawn quickened, casting a rosy glow across the village, no one came out to see us as we rode through. There were no boys tending to buffalo in the fields; all windows remained shuttered. Did they think we were part of the British army?

When we reached my family’s house, the plants in the courtyard had withered and there was no smoke coming from the kitchen. “Pita-ji?” I called, and nobody answered. We dismounted and entered the house; it was dark. We checked the rooms, and memories came rushing back to me: my sister curling up next to me on my charpai. The wooden chest where I had kept my favorite things, like the wooden block my father had carved into a bear for me. But nobody had been inside for some time.

“Maybe they fled,” Arjun said.

But that was impossible. Fled where? With whom?

I hurried back through the courtyard, and while the other guards waited, Arjun followed me to Shivaji’s house. There were voices. I could hear them, as low and faint as a slow trickle of water, coming from inside.

“Shivaji!” I pounded on the door. “Shivaji!”

Ishan answered. “My father isn’t here.”

Then his brothers appeared.

“Sita,” the eldest said. I remembered meeting him once with his father. His name was Deepan. “You should come into the kitchen.” Deepan led us inside and asked, “What do you know?”

“My father sent a letter saying that Anu was taken.” My voice was shaking. “He told us to bring money and help. We have both.”

“With the rani’s blessing,” Arjun added.

“That was in February,” Deepan said. He lowered his gaze to his lap. “Sita . . .”

“Just say it!” I cried.

“Your father is dead. The local Kutwal arrived and said he had orders to find the most beautiful women in Barwa Sagar. Someone had told him about Anu, and when they saw her, they arrested her at once. They had guns. It happened so fast. When she was gone, your father asked Shivaji to help him.”

I felt as if someone had robbed me of my breath.

“Their plan was to buy her back, Sita, but when they reached the
chakla
the British wouldn’t hear why they had come. So your father and Shivaji returned with more men. They shot them both,” Deepan said. “Your father died immediately. My father lingered for three days.”

Father. My father was dead. Shivaji was gone.

“We can take you to the
chakla
, Sita, but they won’t release her.”

“What about Avani?” I whispered. “And Dadi-ji?”

“Your father’s wife committed sati,” Deepan explained. “No one could stop her.”

I covered my mouth with my hands. Avani had not been able to envision a life in which she had been made a widow twice. Was she afraid that no one would take care of her? Had she asked someone to write to me and gotten no response?

“Your grandmother fell ill and died within the month.”

Regret, as hot and searing as fire, burned through my body. When I had first arrived at Jhansi, Jhalkari had warned me not to send my letters through Gopal. But I had wanted to save money. My act of thrift had cost me everything.

If someone had told me that my acceptance in the Durga Dal would come at the cost of my family, I can say with certainty I would never have continued. Whatever my fate might have been, I would not have risked my father’s life, or the lives of Anu or Avani, to save myself from the Temple of Annapurna.

“We are bringing my sister back,” I said.

But Deepan glanced behind him. “Sita, she has been gone for four months.”

I knew what he meant. Ishan didn’t want her anymore. “Is it true?” I turned to him. I wanted to hear it from his lips. “Are you casting her off?”

He looked away.

“Say it!” I screamed.

He began to cry.

Arjun took my arm. “Sita, let’s find her. Lead us to the
chakla
,” he said. “How many soldiers are there?”

The second brother guessed, “Maybe fifty. The British posted them in any village large enough to cause trouble.”

“And how many women do fifty men need?” I wanted to know.

Deepan flinched. I’m sure my bluntness offended him. The women in his house didn’t stand in the company of men, wearing pistols on their hips and quivers of arrows on their backs. They were quiet and demure. Two months ago, my sister had been one of these women.

“Ten,” he said quietly. “They took ten girls.”

“I can’t just save Anu,” I said to Arjun.

He nodded. “I know.”

Deepan led the way while the rest of us rode. The sun was up, but the village was silent. It was harvest time. The fields should have been teeming with people harvesting barley, wheat, peas, and mustard. But unlike the burned fields surrounding Jhansi, these fields had been abandoned.

“When we reach the
chakla
,” Arjun told his guards, “no one fires. If British soldiers are killed, the entire village will pay. I will buy the women out of servitude. Then we’ll return them to their homes.”

“And if their families don’t want them?” one of the guards asked.

“Then we will use what the rani so generously gave to us to buy them a home where they can live together.”

T
he
chakla
turned out to be a small house built next to the Temple of Durga.

“Stay here,” Arjun said to me when we arrived. “We’re supposed to be men from this village. If they recognize you as a woman, they’re going to wonder where we have come from.”

I remained with the others while Arjun dismounted and walked with Deepan to the wooden door. An officer answered and they were taken inside. A hundred terrible scenarios passed through my
mind. What if the British killed them? What if they refused to let Anu go?

But in the end, gold was more tempting than flesh.

Deepan came out first. He was followed by nine girls, and finally Arjun. It took me a long moment to recognize her. She was thinner, with dark hollows under her eyes. But it was the roundness of her belly that made my breath catch in my throat. I dismounted as swiftly as I could and ran toward her. I didn’t care that there were officers watching us from the windows.

“Anu!” I said. “Anu, it’s Sita!”

“I know who you are.”

It wasn’t her voice. It was the voice of someone distant and hard.

Arjun said, “Go with Deepan and take her to your house. I’ll meet you there once we’ve delivered the rest of these women to their homes.”

“No. I’m not going back there,” Anu said, and I could hear the torment of the past four months in her voice. Then she shrieked, “I want Ishan!”

I glanced at Deepan. She was pregnant with another man’s child. A
British
child. Not even the most understanding husband would take back a wife in such condition.

“Take me back!” she screamed. “Take me back to my home!”

She was like someone possessed. But none of the other women appeared surprised. I looked at Deepan, since it was his decision.

“Yes. Let’s go to our house right now,” he said.

I put her in front of me on the horse, but she sat as far forward as she could. She didn’t want to feel my touch. When we reached Shivaji’s home, the knot in my stomach had grown so tight that I’m sure I could have pressed my hand there and felt it.

I helped her down, and Deepan slowly opened the door. The
other women rushed forward, but as soon as they saw my sister, they drew back. One of them covered her face with her hands and began to weep. But it was Ishan’s reaction that broke her.

“That isn’t my wife.”

“Sita, you should take her,” Deepan began, but my sister pushed her way inside the house. “Ishan,” she begged.

“You aren’t my wife.”

“Ishan!” She clung to his legs, forcing him to push her away. “Ishan!” She sounded like a wounded animal.

I stepped forward to take Anu in my arms but she resisted. “You’re not my sister! You’re not my family. This is my family!”

The other women were crying. The men had tears in their eyes.

“Ishan!” my sister shrieked. “Please! Just look at me.”

But his face was averted. “Go away!” he cried.

Then the fight went out of her. She went limp in my arms, repeating his name over and over like a mantra. I carried her back to our empty house, and she threatened to kill both the child and herself. I told her about Gopal and the letters. But it wasn’t enough.

“You chose the rani over me,” she screamed, her entire body trembling, and I feared for the child she was carrying. “And then the British wanted me because I was pretty! It was for all those silks and juti you sent me!” Then a familiar sound appeared in her voice. “You didn’t save me,” she hissed. I realized it was Grandmother I was hearing. “You should have left me there to die with my bastard,” she said. “Leave me.”

I did as she wanted and wandered outside to our peepal tree. Feelings of guilt and sorrow crashed over me in waves. Father had been killed by a British soldier; possibly the son of someone who had fought alongside him in Burma. I tried to imagine Avani’s despair when she heard that my father had been killed, and how
the flames had felt searing her body as she climbed onto Father’s funeral pyre, and then the only thing I could focus on was my rage.

I went back into the house, and Arjun could see my fury. He was sitting with several guards around our kitchen. “Shall we go outside?” he asked.

“I just came from outside.”

“Then let’s sit in your father’s workshop.”

I didn’t want to go. But I followed Arjun there and the woodsy scent of teak immediately made me cry. Arjun took me in his arms and shut the door. We sat together on the jute mats and he held me while I wept. When I’d drained myself of every possible tear, he tenderly wiped my face with his hand.

“What they’ve done to my family—”

“It’s finished, Sita. It’s over,” he said. “The walls have crumbled and you’re asking why instead of trying to rebuild. Your sister is in the next room. She’s what’s left, and that’s no small thing. She’s carrying a child.”

“Yes. A British—”

“Baby,” he said before I could finish. “An innocent child. That’s the future.”

I
won’t pretend that his speech changed the way I felt about the British, but it comforted me over the next few weeks. And it clarified in my mind what I needed to do now. We could not rejoin the rani; I had to heal my sister. So we stayed in Barwa Sagar, and when I was too overwhelmed by sorrow to get out of bed or get dressed, Arjun would encourage me to go on.

On a warm evening in May, after we’d been in Barwa Sagar for more than six weeks, Arjun took me into the courtyard and said quietly, “One of the guards met someone in the marketplace who
has news of Jhansi. His name is Balaji and he was a silk merchant in Jhansi.”

“Can I meet him?”

Arjun returned with a well-dressed man in his fifties. He had white hair and a mustache, and I imagined he’d been very handsome in his youth. We stood outside in the courtyard, near the old peepal tree, and waited for him to say something. As a child, I had thought all trees grew this big. I put my hand on its solid trunk. Finally the man from Jhansi said, “I have heard that the British pursued the rani to Banda. She killed two British soldiers and shot a lieutenant. One of her soldiers was killed. But the rest of her party reached Kalpi.”

“And the city of Jhansi?”

“Burned.”

“And the people?” Arjun asked.

“Killed.”

“But there were thousands of people!” I protested. Five thousand by the rani’s count.

“Yes. The British lost one hundred men.”

These are the actions demons take. Humans didn’t do this to one another. But Balaji’s gaze was unwavering, and I knew it was true. The British had taken five thousand lives in retaliation for an action a dozen men had perpetrated. I thought of the woman who had been desperate for us to take her child, the round face of the baby she’d been carrying, his dimpled cheeks and large, bright eyes. I buried my head in my hands.