Soon, when one of our rulers needed military aid, they didn’t turn to other maharajas like themselves; instead they asked the British East India Company. And the more favors they asked, the more powerful the Company grew. Then, in 1824, a group of maharajas in northern India decided they’d had enough. They had been watching the Burmese take over their neighbors’ kingdoms year after year, and they knew that, just like with that cunning camel, it would only end once the Burmese were seated on their thrones as well. I can’t tell you why these same maharajas didn’t see that this story might apply to the British, too. You would think the safest thing would have been to turn to each other for help. But none of those powerful men wanted to be indebted to another maharaja. So instead, they indebted themselves to an outsider. They enlisted the help of the British East India Company, which was more than happy to wage war on Burma for their own, mostly economic, reasons.
Father fought in this war. Because of his caste, he was made a commanding officer and the Company paid him one hundred rupees a month for his post. I was only a few months old when he left for Burma, and there was every reason to believe that a glorious future lay ahead of Nihal Bhosale. He sent my sixteen-year-old mother letters from the front telling her that even though British customs were difficult to understand, fighting alongside these foreigners had its advantages. He was learning to speak English, and another officer had introduced him to a writer—a brilliant, unequaled writer—by the name of William Shakespeare.
“According to the colonel, if I wish to understand the British, I must first understand this Shakespeare.” Father took this advice to heart. He read everything Shakespeare wrote, from Othello to The Merchant of Venice, and when the war took his hearing two years later, it was Shakespeare who kept him company in his hospital bed.
Many years after this, I asked Father which of Shakespeare’s plays had comforted him the most while he was coming to terms with a world in which he’d never know the sound of his child’s voice or hear his wife sing ragas to Lord Shiva again. By that time, I had become a soldier myself in the rani’s Durga Dal—an elite group of the queen’s most trusted female guards. And by then, I, too, had read all of Shakespeare’s works.
Father thought for a moment, then told me what I had already guessed. “Henry V. Because there has never been a clearer, more persuasive argument for why we go to war.”
But war wasn’t what concerned me on that evening Father explained purdah to me. I was too young to understand about politics. All I knew was that I couldn’t play outside like the boys who drank juice from hairy coconut husks and staged mock battles with broken shoots of bamboo. I looked up at Father, with his bald head gleaming like a polished bowl in the sun, and wrote:
“Will I always be in purdah, even when I’m grown?”
“If you wish to be a respectable woman with a husband and children—as I hope you shall be—then, yes.”
But just as a crow will build its nest in a tree, only to have the sparrow come and tear it apart, the life Father had planned for me was ripped away by a little bird.
Chapter Two
1843
My sibling’s birth came at the height of the summer’s monsoon. Hot rain lashed our village, pooling in the fields and flooding the streets so that even the farmers’ children—long used to these conditions—were breaking off taro leaves and using them for umbrellas. I watched as the boys folded the giant leaves around their heads, and I thought of how fun it must be to use a leaf like a living shield. All of Barwa Sagar was under siege, and as I looked out the window, I imagined that each raindrop was a tiny soldier marching from the sky to our fields.
“What are you doing?” Grandmother said when she saw me at the window.
I was supposed to be in the kitchen, watching the fire.
“The water is still heating up, Dadi-ji. I was just—”
She slapped my face. “Don’t you know what’s happening in there?”
“Yes. Maa-ji is giving birth.” I bit my lip to keep it from trembling. Ji is a term of respect, and we add it to the name of any person who is older.
“Let me tell you something about childbirth, beti, which you may not learn from the books my son reads with you.”
Grandmother could never grasp why Father would waste his time teaching a daughter. Some things have changed for the better under British rule: for example, they have forbidden the killing of infant girls. At that time, however, the practice was common, which tells you how girls like me were valued. Even today, on the birth of a son there will be music, and dancing, and sweets will be distributed among the poor. But on the birth of a daughter, silence as thick and heavy as a blanket will descend on the house, since there is no reason to speak, let alone celebrate. After all, who wants to honor the birth of a child you will have to feed, and clothe, and educate, only to watch all that money and hard work disappear once she is married off?
Now, this isn’t to say that daughters are never loved. But for a father, the birth of a daughter means saving money from the moment she takes her first breath, since she will need a dowry within nine or ten years’ time. For a mother, the birth of a daughter means growing to love a little girl you are likely never to see again once her husband takes her away to his village.