The Age of Kali: Travels and Encounters in India. William Dalrymple
bushes sprouted from the fort’s roof. In previous generations the chamber at the top of the naqqar khana would have been full of musicians announcing the arrival of the Rajah with kettle drums and shenai. It was empty now, of course, but there was certainly no shortage of servants to fill it. As we drove in to the qila’s courtyard a crowd of between twenty and thirty retainers was massed to greet the Rajah, all frantically bowing and salaaming; as Suleiman got out of the car the foremost ones dived to touch his feet.
I followed him in to the qila and up through the dark halls and narrow staircases of the fort; the troop of servants followed behind me. Dust lay thick underfoot, as if the qila was some lost castle in a forest in a child’s fairy tale. We passed through a splintered door in to an old ballroom, empty, echoing and spacious. Once its floor had been sprung, but now many of the planks were missing, and others were littered with pieces of plaster fallen from the ceiling. A torn family portrait of some bejewelled Rajah hung half in, half out of its frame. It looked as if no one had entered the room for at least a decade.
Suleiman threw back a door and led the way in to what had once been the library. Cobwebs hung like sheets from the walls; the chintz was literally peeling off the armchairs. Books were everywhere, great piles of 1920s hardbacks, but you had to wipe them with a handkerchief to read their spines and to uncover lines of classics – The Annals of Tacitus, The Works of Aristotle – nestling next to such long-forgotten titles as The Competition Wallah and The Races of the North-West Provinces of India.
‘This library was my ancestors’ window on the world,’ said Suleiman. ‘But, like everything, it’s fast decaying, as you can see.’
I looked around. There were no carpets on the floors, which, uncovered, had become stained and dirty. Above there were holes in the ceiling, with the wooden beams showing through the broken plaster like bones sticking out of wounded flesh. Suleiman was at the window now, pressing the shutters to try to open them; pushing too hard, he nearly succeeded in dislodging the whole window frame. Eventually the shutter gave way and hung open, precariously attached to the frame by its one remaining hinge.
A servant padded in and Suleiman ordered some cold drinks, asking when lunch would be ready. The servant looked flustered. It became apparent that the message had not reached them from Lucknow that we would be expecting lunch; probably the telephone lines were not working that day.
‘It wasn’t always like this,’ said Suleiman, slumping down in one of the moth-eaten armchairs underneath a single naked lightbulb. ‘When the 1965 Indo–Pakistani war broke out, the qila was seized by the government as enemy property. My father had finally made the decision to take Pakistani citizenship in 1957, and although he had never really lived there, it was enough. Everything was locked up and the gates were sealed. My mother – who had never taken Pakistani citizenship – lived on the verandah for three or four months before the government agreed to allow her to have a room to sleep in. Even then it was two years before she was allowed access to a bathroom. She endured it all with great dignity. Until her death she carried on as if nothing had happened.’
At this point the bearer reappeared and announced that no cold drinks were available. Suleiman frowned and dismissed him, asking him to bring some water and to hurry up with the lunch.
‘What was I saying?’ he asked, distracted by the domestic chaos.
‘About the sealing of the palace.’
‘Ah, yes. The Indian Armed Constabulary lived here for two years. It wasn’t just neglect: the place was looted. There were two major thefts of silver – they said ten tons in all …’
‘Ten tons? Of silver?’
‘That’s what they say,’ replied Suleiman dreamily. He looked at his watch. It was nearly three o’clock and his absent lunch was clearly on his mind. ‘Ten tons … though it’s probably exaggerated. Certainly everything valuable was taken: even the chairs were stripped of their silver backing.’
‘Were the guards in league with the robbers?’
‘The case is still going on. It’s directed against some poor character who got caught: no doubt one of the minnows who had no one to protect him.’
Suleiman walked over to the window and shouted some instructions in Urdu down to the servants in the courtyard below.
‘I’ve asked them to bring some bottled water. I can’t drink the water here. My stomach – you’ve no idea the hell I’ve been through with it, the pain. I have to keep taking these terrible antibiotics. I’ve been to specialists, but they can’t do anything.’
Shortly afterwards the bearer reappeared. There was no bottled water, he said. And no, Rajah Sahib, the khana was not yet ready. He shuffled out backwards, mumbling apologies.
‘What are these servants doing?’ said Suleiman. ‘They can’t treat us like this.’
He began to pace backwards and forwards through the ruination of his palace, stepping over the chunks of plaster on the floor.
‘I get terrible bouts of gloom whenever I come here,’ he said. ‘It makes me feel so tired – exhausted internally.’
He paused, trying to find the right words: ‘There is … so much that is about to collapse: it’s like trying to keep a dike from bursting. Partly it’s because I don’t live here enough … But it preys on my mind wherever I am. I feel overwhelmed at even the thought of this place.’
He paused again, raising his hands in a gesture of helplessness: ‘I simply can’t see any light at the end of any of the various tunnels. Each year I feel that it is less and less worth struggling for. Sometimes the urge just to escape becomes insupportable – just to leave it all behind, to take a donkey and some books and disappear.
‘Come,’ he said, suddenly taking my arm. ‘I can’t breathe. There’s no air in this room …’
The Rajah led me up flight after flight of dark, narrow staircases until we reached the flat roof at the top of the fort. From beyond the moat, out over the plains, smoke was rising from the early-evening cooking fires, forming a flat layer at the level of the treetops. To me it was a beautiful, peaceful Indian winter evening of the sort I had grown to love, but Suleiman seemed to see in it a vision of impending disaster. He was still tense and agitated, and the view did nothing to calm him down.
‘You see,’ he explained, ‘it’s not just the qila that depresses me. It’s what is happening to the people. There was so much that could have been done after Independence, when they abolished the holdings of the zamindars who were strangling the countryside. But all that happened was the rise of these criminal politicians: they filled the vacuum and they are the role models today. Worse still, theirs are the values – if you can call them values – to which people look up: corruption, deception, duplicity, and crude, crass materialism. These are seen to be the avenues to success.
‘The world that I knew has been completely corrupted and destroyed. I go in to fits of depression when I see the filth and dirt of modern Lucknow and remember the flowers and trees of my youth. Even out here the rot has set in. Look at that monstrosity!’
Suleiman pointed to a thick spire of smoke rising from a sugar factory some distance away across the fields.
‘Soft powder falls on the village all day from the pollution from that factory. It was erected illegally and in no other country would such a pollutant be tolerated. I spoke to the manager and he assured me action was imminent, but of course nothing ever happens.’
‘Perhaps if you went back in to politics you could have it closed down?’ I suggested.
‘Never again,’ said Suleiman. ‘After two terms in the Legislative Assembly I came on record saying I would leave the Congress Party if it continued to patronise criminals. The new breed of Indian politician has no ideas and no principles. In most cases they are just common criminals, in it for what they can plunder. Before he died I went and saw Rajiv and told him what was happening. He was interested but he didn’t