White Mughals (62 page)

And that was that. Calcutta was inured to death: as one Company man commented, ‘We have known instances of dining with a gentleman [at midday] and being invited to his burial before suppertime.’ Nowhere else would a death have caused less stir. As the saying went, two monsoons was the average life-span of a European in Bengal; one year, out of a total European population of 1200, over a third died between August and the end of December. Every year at the end of the monsoon in October, the survivors used to hold thanksgiving banquets to celebrate their deliverance. In her diary for 1826 a newly arrived Company wife wrote: ‘Here people die one day and are buried the next. Their furniture is sold the third. They are forgotten the fourth...’
⁷⁹

In James’s case there was no furniture, but there was, bizarrely enough, the ‘Electrifying Machine’ which he had ordered to amuse the nobles of the Hyderabad durbar two years previously. It had somehow got lost in the post, and disappeared off to the China coast. The week of James’s death, it suddenly reappeared on the quayside at the port of Calcutta. On 28 October, before a single obituary had appeared, the
Calcutta Gazette
contained a large advertisement:

It was eighteen days before the news of James’s death reached Hyderabad. According to Henry Russell’s official despatch, it was announced to the durbar to ‘universal gloom’. There is no record of Khair un-Nissa’s reaction to losing her husband, but it can easily be imagined. She was, after all, still only nineteen, and James’s death meant that in all likelihood she would never again see her son and daughter. They would now be kept from her, and turned into little English children. This was the loss of everything she had ever worked for, or dreamed of. There was no future, and in such circumstances there could be no comfort.

Her last love letter from her husband—at least the last to have survived—was in effect James’s will. Here he makes it clear that Khair had no need of his money: ‘The excellent and respectable Mother of my two natural children, who is named Kheir oon Nissah Begum, being amply provided for by Jaghiers and other possessions, both hereditary and acquired, independent of her personal property and jewels, which cannot amount to less than half a lakh of rupees, I have not thought it necessary to provide particularly for her.’ But, James implies, this might be misinterpreted, possibly by Khair, possibly by their children, and possibly by his relations. So he added an unequivocal declaration of his love for her: ‘By way of proof however of my unbounded love and affection towards her, and as a last token of my Esteem and Remembrance, I hereby will and ordain the sum of ten thousand Hyderabad rupees to be paid to her out of my funds immediately after my demise.’

A further ten thousand rupees was apportioned to Khair un-Nissa should there be any residue left to the estate after the children’s legacies had been paid. But Khair did not need such proof of her husband’s love for her. Over and over again, James had risked everything for her. Most relationships in life can survive—or not—without being put to any really crucial, fundamental test. It was James’s fate for his love to be tested not once, but four times. Four entirely separate inquiries had been carried out into his affair with Khair. At each stage he could easily have washed his hands of his teenage lover. Each time he chose to remain true to her.

That, not the words of any will, was the evidence she could cling to.

And there, abruptly and tragically, the story seemed to end.

In the various short accounts of the romance that have been written over the last two hundred years, there have been a number of solutions proposed as to what might have happened to Khair un-Nissa. Some say she faded away and died of grief. Another version has it that she tried to follow her children to England, but was drowned off the coast of Sri Lanka. Another has her moving to Calcutta or Madras. None of this speculation seemed to be based on any hard documentary evidence.

Four years into the research for this book, I was still none the wiser as to what happened to Khair. After James’s death, there was not one single reference to her in the hundreds of boxes that make up the Kirkpatrick Papers in the India Office Library in London. This seemed surprising, as William Kirkpatrick’s papers are fairly extensive for the years following 1805; but despite spending weeks hunting down and checking through every scrap of paper in his files, there was still not one hint as to Khair’s fate. There was no clue either in James’s overblown and oddly inappropriate epitaph, erected by the orders of the grieving Handsome Colonel on the south wall of St John’s church in Calcutta (where it still remains
^hi
). The Kennaway and Palmer Papers are equally silent, as are the various Hyderabadi chronicles and histories which discuss the affair. Even Abdul Lateef Shushtari does not utter a word as to what happened to his young cousin. After James’s death, Khair un-Nissa just seemed to disappear, to vanish from history.

But there turned out to be one source I had forgotten to check. In the summer of 2001, I drove up to Oxford to the Bodleian Library, to have a quick look at the Russell Papers. This voluminous set of manuscripts was deposited by Henry Russell’s grandson, Sir Arthur Russell, after the sale of the family’s mansion in the dog days of Spam and rationing following the Second World War.

At first Russell’s papers were a slight disappointment. Although there was no shortage of huge volumes, all beautifully bound in blue leather, here too there was an inexplicable gap in the vital period between June 1805 and January 1806, filled only by a single letter from November. It was from Sir Henry Russell (senior) in Calcutta to his son Charles Russell in Hyderabad, and referred in passing to Kirkpatrick’s death as ‘the melancholy event that has lately happened’. But here again there was no mention whatsoever of the Begum.
⁸¹

Then I found a passage about a trip Henry Russell made to Calcutta in April 1806, in connection with his duties as an executor of James’s will. Russell was a in a bad mood: ‘I have been annoyed with boils ever since I came here,’ he wrote to his brother Charles, and, vain as ever,
added: ‘[I] have therefore gone but little out.’ But on the opposite page was a passage that read plainly enough: ‘They left Cuttack with the poor Begum and the Moonshy a few days after me, and will probably arrive here about the 25th.’

It was like coming up for air. After four years of searching, here at last was a lead. The Begum was alive, and heading for Calcutta in the company of Munshi Aziz Ullah. But what was she up to? I read on as fast as Russell’s faded and often illegible copperplate would allow.

The shadows which seemed to obscure the documentation as James left Madras in September 1805, plunging the story into darkness at the most vital moment, dispersed as quickly as they had gathered. The detail was never so clear as it had been in the period before James’s death, with multiple sources from all sorts of different angles, and there remained a lot of unanswered questions. But after a month in the Bodleian, the outlines of an extraordinary story were quite clear. Moreover, Khair un-Nissa herself came into sharper focus than she ever had done in James’s discreet letters.

The year which followed James’s death still remained a complete blank. But from the autumn of 1806, Khair un-Nissa re-emerged into the centre of the spotlit stage. Having never left Hyderabad before, she was in the process of making what must have been for her an epic pilgrimage: a one-thousand-mile journey to the other end of India, at the most inclement time of year, to mourn at her husband’s grave. This seemed an unambiguous mark of her fidelity and devotion to James, and a final proof, if proof were needed, that her involvement with him was not just a political ruse dreamt up by her mother and Aristu Jah to entrap the Resident. She loved him, after all.

As the letters unfolded, it was clear that Khair was not alone on her expedition. Apart from the Munshi, Sharaf un-Nissa was coming too, though her mother, Durdanah Begum, now presumably in her seventies or even eighties, had opted to stay behind in the family
deorhi
in the old city. By good fortune, Russell was also in Calcutta at the time, and recorded everything in his letters. He travelled separately, and on separate business, but planned to meet the two Begums in Calcutta: two women beside whom he had lived, and whose notes and messages he had carried, but whose faces he had never yet seen.

There was another plan afoot too: Fyze and General Palmer were going to be in Calcutta to meet the two Begums, as was James’s niece Isabella Buller, to whom Khair had sent presents of opal jewellery, but whom she had never met. It sounded as if this expedition was like some sort of rebirth for Khair, an escape from the empty cage of the Residency
mahal
, with all its memories, and perhaps a part of a necessary exorcism.

There was certainly little indication at this stage, with Russell’s jaunty letters recording their progress, that the saddest and most tragic part of the whole story was still to come.

 

 

When William Hunter sailed into Calcutta for the first time to take up a job as a Junior Clerk in the Company at the very beginning of the nineteenth century, he wrote home: ‘Imagine everything that is glorious in nature combined with everything that is beautiful in architecture and you can faintly picture to yourself what Calcutta is.’ And this wasn’t just because (as one cruel commentator has suggested) he was in love—and had arrived fresh from Peckham.
¹

In 1806 Calcutta was at the height of its golden age. Known as the City of Palaces or the St Petersburg of the East, the British bridgehead in Bengal was unquestionably the richest, largest and most elegant colonial city in India. Here a Nabob like Philip Francis could boast in the 1770s that he was ‘master of the finest house in Bengal, with a hundred servants, a country house, spacious gardens, horses and carriages’. Francis’s ‘wine book’, which survives in the India Office Library, gives an indication of the style in which such men lived: in one typical month, chosen at random, Francis, his family and his guests drank seventy-five bottles of Madeira, ninety-nine bottles of claret, seventy-four bottles of porter, sixteen bottles of rum, three bottles of brandy and one bottle of cherry brandy—some 268 bottles in all, though part of the reason for such consumption was the noxious state of the Calcutta drinking water, and the widespread belief that it should always be ‘purified’ by the addition of alcohol—and especially by a little tot of brandy.
²