White Mughals (65 page)

Despite this, John was able to report that both ‘the old lady’ and her husband were in fine fettle:

Staying around the corner from the Hyderabadis in John Palmer’s lavish Loll Bazaar mansion (notorious, incidentally, for its mosquitoes, which compelled lady supper-guests to cover their legs with thick stockings during dinner),
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Fyze and the General came over regularly to see Khair, though Russell reported to his brother Charles that Fyze was upset with him for forgetting to bring ‘a parcel of soosunee [coloured embroidery] and other things from her son in Hyderabad. I recollect William telling me he intended giving me a present of that sort; but I cannot find it anywhere, and am strongly inclined to think that he neglected to send it to me. Ask him and let me know what he says.’
³⁰

Another frequent caller at the house was William Kirkpatrick’s beautiful daughter Isabella Buller, in whose home James had died the previous year. Isabella was now heavily pregnant with her first child, and she and the Begum struck up a firm friendship from the moment they first met: ‘Since the Begum arrived in Calcutta, Mrs Buller has been extremely civil in calling on her, and paying her every Attention in her power,’ wrote Russell in June. ‘[Khair] is therefore desirous to evince her sense of this kindness, by gratifying Mrs Buller’s wishes to get some handsome native dresses, and as she left five very rich suits with her grandmother at Hyderabad, she thinks it is better to get them forwarded to Calcutta, than to incur the expense of making them up here.’
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Reverting to his role as the Begum’s self-appointed private secretary, Russell went on to give his brother more specific instructions about the consignment:

Many other similar commissions on behalf of Khair un-Nissa soon followed. A week later, for example, after Isabella Buller gave birth to a little girl, Henry was writing to Hyderabad asking Charles to send ‘two lots of choorees [bangles], one for Mrs Buller, and the other to accompany whatever
dupatta
the Begum is making up for dear little Rose [Isabella’s baby daughter]’.
³³

One thing that comes across very clearly in these letters is the strength of the bonds linking all these women: between Fyze, Isabella Buller and Khair, but also, more intensely and remarkably still, between Khair, her mother and her grandmother. The two Calcutta Begums are constantly writing to Durdanah Begum in Hyderabad, and a whole succession of small domestic requests (and even, apparently, on one occasion, a large helping of
halwa
carrot pudding
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) go backwards and forwards between Hyderabad and Calcutta, up and down the east coast via the two Russell brothers. The false rumour that Khair has died brings on a further succession of frantic letters. ‘I mentioned to the Begum the anxiety which had been caused to her family by the reports that have been prevalent about her illness,’ writes Henry in June,

Russell and Khair ‘after consulting together’ therefore hatched a small family conspiracy to fake a letter from Sharaf un-Nissa to her mother, something which Russell reported to Charles was easily achieved as ‘the old lady always gets her letters written through me, and I had not much difficulty in accomplishing what we wished’.
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He goes on: ‘Send the enclosed letter to the old lady immediately … You may also safely assure her that neither her daughter nor her granddaughter were ever in better health in their lives. The season has been uncommonly favourable and mild... ’
³⁵

It is increasingly apparent throughout these letters that it is Khair who seems to be the dominant force among the women. It is she, not her mother, who is writing the letters;
^hu
and it is she who is always ordering the various items from Hyderabad. There is absolutely no question of Khair un-Nissa being some sort of powerless ex-concubine: this is a beautiful, charismatic Mughal noblewoman behaving according to her rank, with a pair of senior British officials running around to do her bidding. In her widowhood, she clearly still retained her magnetism and her effortless ability to get her way with all those who were drawn into her orbit. Henry Russell, who treated her both protectively and with the greatest of respect, seemed no more able or willing to resist her requests than her mother, grandmother or late husband had been before him. At times, indeed, Khair seems to treat Russell as if he is some sort of junior milliner’s assistant, dictating to him long precise details of her requests which he uncomplainingly passes on to his younger brother at the Residency:

Pages full of further details follow, laying down exactly the measurements, patterns, colour and trimmings that the hapless Charles was supposed to find, and where he should go with Jugumma to get them.

In all ages, in all families, younger brothers are rarely treated with much deference by their elder siblings. Few however can have been so comprehensively patronised as Charles Russell, who was now Assistant Secretary at the Hyderabad Residency and so a diplomat of some standing and seniority in his own right,
^hv
but who nevertheless at this stage seems to have spent a great deal of his professional time running errands for the two Begums between the Residency, Durdanah Begum’s
deorhi
in Irani Gulli, and the various textile bazaars of the old city of Hyderabad, as well as trotting out to fetch any other personal items that Khair un-Nissa had forgotten to pack before leaving home, such as her
paan
set: ‘What is become of the chicknee, suparu and cardamoms [I ordered] for the Begum?’ demands Henry at one point. ‘I will thank you to send the enclosed letter to the Old Begum,’ begins another. ‘It contains a desire that she will give you a small box of medicine which her daughter is in the habit of taking, and which she cannot procure in Calcutta. It will be of very small dimensions, and I therefore beg you will forward it to me by dawke... ’
³⁷

Intriguingly, amid all these letters between the women, there is never a single mention of Bâqar Ali Khan, nor of Khair’s brothers or uncles; and there is certainly no mention of Khair ever writing to them. The strongest bonds, quite clearly, were those within the
zenana
—although it could also be of course that Bâqar and the men of the family had broken off relations with their unusually strong-minded and somewhat ungovernable womenfolk.
^hw

But increasingly—and perhaps inevitably—there is another bond in the air: that between Russell and Khair. Khair had spent eighteen months in mourning. She had lost her children—there is no indication that William Kirkpatrick encouraged them to write to her, though she presumably had news of them via William’s daughter Isabella Buller—and she had lost her husband. After the scandal of her affair with James, and the disgrace that Mir Alam had suffered in its wake, she was now very vulnerable to the Mir’s vengeance and was completely unprotected. Moreover she was only twenty, still regarded as a great beauty, and there is no stipulation in Islam against the remarriage of widows.
^hx
Indeed, Muslim tradition encourages it, and suggests that the late husband’s brother is usually the ideal second husband.

James’s two brothers were now in England and so unavailable; but his closest friend and Assistant was at hand, and seems to have needed little persuasion to have become more intimate with the ‘poor Begum’.

From the start, even before he arrived in Calcutta, Henry Russell had always been extremely solicitous to Khair un-Nissa.

In his letters to Charles on his way to Calcutta, Henry worries that as Ure and the other executors are taking so large a percentage of Kirkpatrick’s will as commission, the Begum is unlikely to get her full legacy. He therefore decides to claim his commission and give it straight to Khair, ‘both in order to remunerate her for the loss of the provisional bequest, and as the most fair and creditable mode of disposing of that money which nothing but Ure’s shabbiness and rapacity would have induced me to have requested from the estate’.
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Henry also takes it upon himself to get the new
diwan
^hz
in Hyderabad, Rajah Chandu Lal, to pay up the money owed to the Begum from her
jagirs
(estates), while he personally advances her the legacy from James’s will from his own funds ‘in order to prevent the Begum suffering any financial embarrassment’.
³⁸

The news that Khair had unveiled for Russell is the first hint that the two were becoming intimate. By July they were clearly discussing more personal matters. In the middle of the month, a letter arrived for Henry from Hyderabad telling him that his Hyderabadi concubine, by whom he had a son, had again become pregnant. There seemed to be no suggestion that the father was anyone but him,
^‡
yet he still wrote a slightly chilling reply to Charles, saying that ‘your account of my girl’s conduct gives me much pain, and I am exceedingly dissatisfied to hear she is with child’. He adds: ‘On me she has not many claims, but the Begum has interceded very warmly for her; and at her particular request, I have consented to restore to the girl her full monthly allowance of 30 rupees she originally received from me. I will therefore thank you to pay her that sum in future, and to tell her that I expect her gratitude to the Begum, as well as to me, will induce her to behave better than she has done lately.’
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He does not say it here, but the Begum—missing her own children as badly as she clearly did—had in fact offered to bring the child up herself;
^ia
something that was in both Mughal and Georgian society more normally the response of a long-suffering wife to a husband’s infidelities than that of a distant friend or acquaintance. But if Charles Russell, on reading these letters, was growing suspicious of his brother’s relationships with the Begum, he does not appear to have voiced it. So it was only in November, as winter was beginning to set in across north India, that Henry brought the matter to a head. He began by telling Charles that he had changed his mind and had now decided to come back to his job beside Charles at the Residency: ‘You will be astonished to learn that I have determined to return to Hyderabad,’ he wrote.