White Eclipse

By Giri Hegde

White Eclipse tells the fictionalized history of the forced and fateful interactions between the British of the East India Company and the people of India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The sun didn't set on the British Empire, but it didn't rise for millions of people around the world.

It's a novel of conflicted and complex individuals, both men and women, Indian and British. The British Commissioner Shaw's corrupt politics was complicated by his wife's love for India and the Indians, and her sense of justice and equality. Conspiring with the Company officials, the powerful and the rich Indians oppressed and exploited the poor and betrayed their own country.

Teenage girls were regularly kidnapped and committed to the British army brothels where a ghastly, crude, and humiliating medical examination of girls held naked in suspended wire cages was done every month. Even in this dreadful place, intense love blossomed between a British army Captain and a teenage widow, although he finally betrays her.

This may be the first novel to recreate the story of the first Wahhabi movement against the British India. The British considered the Wahhabis terrorists, perhaps the first group so characterized in world history. A Muslim teenager who had supported the Wahabis fighting the British in the present-day Afghanistan was captured and sentenced to death for sedition but commuted to life in an Andaman prison. Another love story blossoms in this unlikely place.  

The novel is also a story of heart-warming kindness from an English girl, an 8-year-old Emily who smuggled food from her kitchen to her beloved Indian friends who were imprisoned in their own home for nonpayment of a debt. The little girl confronted the Commissioner and got her Indian friends released from their home imprisonment. Eventually, Emily marries the Indian couple's son.

Deadly famines, occurring with dreadful frequency, were a feature of the East India Company rule of India. Indian and Irish famines of the 19th century echo each other in the novel. Even during famines, the British had exported large quantities of food grains from India to England.

In an earlier famine, Helen had organized a relief program to feed the hungry. But in a subsequent famine, both her husband and the Governor-General stopped her in her tracks. She then became a horrified witness to the harrowing effects of her husband's Malthusian approach to managing the famines. Millions of Indians died on the streets. Helen left her husband and returned to England. His wife's departure forced the Commissioner to face not only his own ruthlessness but also his vulnerabilities that he never thought he had. The Governor declared that Shaw had gone insane and confined him to a small bungalow in Darjeeling.

The British slave trade on the Indian subcontinent echoes the African slave trade by the Europeans and the Americans. As under several colonial empires, Indian farmers were captured and sent to Caribbean islands where they worked as slaves on British sugarcane plantations.

Hearing the heartbreaking news that her husband had been confined as an insane, Helen returned to India and took her husband home.

In 1857, the Indian soldiers of the British Army rebelled against the Company rule. The soldiers killed many British men, women, and children. The company took brutal revenge against the Indian people, especially against the Indian soldiers of its own army. They tied solders into the mouths of cannons and blew them away in public places. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Giri Hegde
• Release date: Oct 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215729038

Book preview

White Eclipse

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A Novel

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Giri Hegde

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.

— Novalis (Georg von Hardenberg, 1772-1801; German philosopher.)

What is fiction in particular is truth in general.

—Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker, 1820-1887; Dutch novelist.)

AUTHOR’S NOTE

One of the most incredible and perhaps the least understood aspects of British colonialism is that an opium and spice trading company landed in India as merchants in 1608, colonized the country in subsequent decades, exploited its resources, and diminished its industries and agriculture. When the Indians in the British army rebelled in 1857, the Company brutally suppressed the rebellion and blew the disobedient Indian solders by tying them to the mouths of cannons. Because of the East India Company’s bungled handling of that rebellion, Queen Victoria bought India in 1858. She put the purchase price on India’s national debt. The British government ruled India until 1947 when Mohandas Gandhi’s national freedom movement drove the British out of the country.

Most of the history and historical fiction on the British colonial India glorify the pompous British Raj which began in 1858. India was glorified as the jewel in the crown, but the glory was all for Britain. Much less is known about the East India Company’s brutal and de facto rule of India. This novel is about the life of the Company men and women in India and the people they subjugated. The novel tells the story of how a trading Company that smuggled opium to China become a colonial ruler. Without much help from many unscrupulous and self-defeating Indian rulers, big and small, the Company could not have grown its British roots in India. 

This novel is an imagined past, based on historical facts. There are no historically real people in the novel, except for incidental mention of a few individuals. But the existence of such individuals and the kinds of actions described in the novel are historically valid and currently relevant. New kinds of technological, cultural, and economic colonialism and injustice and inequality that stem from them continue to the present day. 

I didn’t construct events in a chronological order in which the events similar to those described in the novel have occurred. The order of events follows an internal story structure, not a historical past. I also didn’t confine myself to a single place. Events that could have happened anywhere, mostly in one country, but not entirely limited to it, are imagined and rearranged regardless of time and place.

A reading of Will Durant’s The Case for India (1930), a book Sujay Shastry brought to my attention, suggested this novel to me. As I wrote it, I often thought of Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg’s (better known as Novalis, 1772-1801) statement that novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.

I am grateful to Durant and many other political, social, and economic historians including Charles Allen, Christopher John Baker, Kenneth Ballhatchet, Stephen Bown, C. T. Buckland, Neil Charlesworth, Eyre Chatterton, E. M. Collingham, William Dalrymple, Romesh Dutt, Kalikinkar Datta, Michael Edwardes, Indira Ghose, Suresh Chandra Ghosh, Christopher Hibbert, Hari Krishen Kaul, James Mill, Maria Misra, Madhusree Mukerjee, Pramod Nayar, Edward Farley Oaten, Peter Robb, Percival Spear, Shashi Tharoor, R. V. Vernede, Gouri Viswanathan, Elizabeth Whitcombe, and several others. Kalapani, a book by Mohammad Jafar Thanesari, a Wahhabi prisoner in the Andaman Islands, helped re-imagine the life and times of prisoners in that jail. Historical documents, pictures, and articles made available online by the British Library in London have been valuable. Scholarly articles in academic journals have been useful in recreating life under the EIC rule of India. I learned much that helped me imagine the events from reading personal memoirs or travelogues, including those by Emily Eden, Eliza Fay, Margaret Macmillan, Fanny Parkes, Harriet Tytler, and others who had lived in India during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Part 1

We Have Bought You All 

Everything that happened everywhere and at all times happened in Viratpur. The time was a blend of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and of all those before and after. The cheerful spring was fading into the dreadful summer.

Hoping to have an amazingly typical day on that mundane and marvelous morning, women threw open the front door and stepped out with a broom in one hand and a pot of water in the other. They swept the ground, sprinkled water on it, and quietened the dust that would otherwise swirl in the air. But when they turned around to enter the house, they saw a yellow sheet of paper nailed to the front door. 

None read it. But all hurried into the house to awaken their husbands to a dawn out of the ordinary. 

Get up! There’s something on the door, the female voices shrieked out of the Viratpur homes. 

Crabby men yawned and looked at their wives, each with a familiar broom and a pot, outlandish fear in their stretched-out eyes and mouths open wide enough for a molar tooth extraction. The men felt that it wasn’t going to be a spectacularly customary day. 

Children stirred. Rubbing their eyes, they followed their parents to the front of the house. Children and wives flanking them, all men in Viratpur read the message aloud, all at the same time. 

Next Sunday at 10 in the morning, the head of every household in town shall come to the field in front of the Kali temple. Wives may accompany their husbands, but not children. Zamindars, farmers, merchants, coolies, servants, and people of all crafts and trades shall be there. Those who skip the meeting will pay a fine of 100 Rupees. The new government officers will have some extremely important information for all.

The singular day hastened the sun, who lit up the town a bit sooner. The morning’s warmth turned into heat. 

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The next morning, Mohan Patil, a zamindar owning several hundred acres of land, went to the temple grounds with his wife Indira. Hundreds of people were talking to each other with raised voices and wild hand gestures. An ancient temple stood as a witness in the background. On the green carpet of grass mowed short by the grazing cows, a table and three chairs sat on a high podium. A large banyan tree’s shuddering leaves, shaped like sickly swollen hearts, went on to paint and wipe it clean, only to paint again, endless patterns of greyish gloom on the white tablecloth. A dozen servants stood behind the podium, looking like pieces of dry wood stuck in the mud. 

The crowd began to swell. Some people thought that Mohan, being a lawyer as well, may know what it’s all about. Tell me why we’re all asked to gather here, Mohan’s friend Shankar Joshi asked. 

I’m not sure, Mohan said. 

What about this new government? Another friend Murugan asked. Mohan shook his head.

Just when Mohan’s pocket watch showed 10, a cloud of reddish-brown dust rose from the road that snaked between the two green peaks and settled overhead. Soon, people saw a few horses galloping toward them. Mounted police officers, sons of the brown soil, galloped and surrounded the podium. Three reddish white riders dismounted their horses.  Two servants wearing red turbans twisted their bodies into masses of humility and walked slightly ahead of the three men and showed their chairs on the podium. Three servants stood behind the chairs like pillars wrapped in brown skin.

From estate owning zamindars to the skinners of dead animals and everyone in between looked at the three officers and at each other. The officers looked strange. Only their burned-red face could be seen. The rest of the body was covered. They wore long white socks, tight salwar-like cotton tubes up to the knee, white shirts, vests with numerous buttons that hugged their chests, and long overcoats. Each had a piece of cloth wrapped around his neck. The thing on their heads resembled a samosa frying pan. 

"Is this some kind of maya?" Shankar Joshi pointed to the sky.

Who are these people? Murugan shook his head, addressed to no one in particular. 

They’re the faces of the new government, I think, Indira said. 

The three men sitting on the podium talked to each other, cupping one side of their mouths with their palms. In a minute, one of them, sitting at the far-right end of the table, stood up, and moved to the front of the podium. A man about forty, wearing a dhoti and a white shirt hurried from the front of the crowd, climbed up, and stood next to the officer. 

Good morning. We’re very pleased that you’re all here. Thank you for coming. My name is Thomas Jones, he said. The man in the dhoti translated.

Jones paused and surveyed the quizzical faces in the crowd. People also took a good look at Jones. 

Why, he’s just a boy. May not be twenty yet, Mohan said, sizing up the thin and tall lad, his stick-like face, large ears, and oddly reddish hair. 

I’m the Chief Assistant to your new Commissioner, Jones said.

When the word Commissioner rode the thick and hot airwaves, the man sitting in the middle chair stood up and waved so briefly that most people missed it. His reddish and generous moustache was tightly knit under his nose. The Commissioner had a face that was too big for his body.

He’s Mr. William Shaw, Jones said. The Commissioner waved again and sat down. His lips didn’t move.  

Mr. Shaw is your revenue collector. He’s your judge. He’s also the chief of police, Jones said. 

That triple-headed Commissioner couldn’t be more than thirty, Mohan said. People surrounding him smiled and nodded. 

I can ride my bullock cart on one of his sideburns, a farmer said. 

His jaw could easily crush a coconut, a street coconut vendor said.

Attention, please! I wish to come to the main point of this meeting, Jones said and paused to survey the crowd. Mohan, Indira, and some of their friends moved to the front of the crowd. 

All of you, your properties, including your homes and farms, and all the surrounding lands have been sold and bought. We’re the new owners. We’re your new government.

The translator’s words flooded the ears. But still, What? What did he say? stormed through the crowd.    

Mohan raised his hand. 

Jones looked at Mohan, and said, There will be time for questions. For now, let me finish what I’ve to say.  

The officers of the new government need homes to live-in. Starting tomorrow, we’ll survey your homes and take those that are suitable for us. Our Governor in Nizampur just signed a new law authorizing us to take over the much-needed homes and properties, Jones said.

"Suar!" Some people shouted. 

"Harami!" Others shouted. 

The translator’s lips didn’t part. 

Pig and bastard, shouted in Hindi, was just annoying noise for Jones. Quiet, please! He admonished the crowd. 

Jones continued: I know what you want to know. You will be building your own new homes in the outskirts of the town or in the nearby jungles.

"Live in the jungles? They think we’re junglees," Shankar Joshi said.

Jones paused and looked at the faces in the crowd. Glad to have given the best part of the news without provoking anybody to come after him, Jones wiped sweat from the back of his neck, and took a few easy steps on the stage.

Jones continued: We’ve abolished all native ownership of homes and land. We may acquire homes we need. Land must be leased from us. Zamindars and farmers will pay a rent. It’s not a tax. Think of it as an annual tribute. Mr. Liam Walker is your Deputy Commissioner, DC we say. He has a few words for you. Jones said.

Looking a little older, heavier, and taller than the Commissioner, Mr. Walker freed himself from his chair with a slight struggle, waved to the crowd—a long wave people noticed—and walked to the front of the podium. He had a broad smile on his face where nothing was too big or too small or too fearsome or too friendly.

Good morning, Mr. Walker began. Besides the land rent, we shall collect additional revenue from you to administer your country. To keep the law and order, you understand. We’ll soon determine how much you all pay. Waving his right hand to the crowd and twisting the two ends of his moustache with his left, Mr. Walker returned to his seat.

Jones moved forward, and said, You may now ask your questions. 

Mohan raised hand. Jones nodded. 

How much did you pay to buy us? Mohan asked.

"Well. . . and really . . . actually, buying you is just a way of talking about what happened." 

What did happen? Asked Indira.

"Your emperor in Delhi gave us the authority to collect all taxes and land revenue from you. We’ve his furman, as you say. We really didn’t pay anything to anyone."

What do you do with the money you collect from us? Asked Shankar Joshi.

The Commissioner suddenly stood up, said, We may spend it as we see fit, and sat down. 

Even if you’re our new government, you can’t own our properties. Mohan said. 

Simple. Governments have always behaved like they owned the ruled. Companies have behaved like they owned their customers. We’re both a Company and the Government. Therefore, . . . Jones looked straight at the far end of the crowd, as though to make sure none there missed it, being a company and a ruler, we may take anything we need. Need to run the government, I mean. Jones stretched-out his syllables. 

But we never wanted to be sold or bought, Indira said.

It’s not something you choose. Jones replied. A dog barked at a distance, a crow cawed three times, and the leaves of the banyan tree made trembling music.

Jones was in a hurry to conclude the meeting. Your new and happy life begins tomorrow. Please stay in your homes in the coming days. Officials will be visiting you. Thank you again, and a good day to you all.

The servants rushed back to the trees and brought the horses out. The three officers mounted them and rode off, kicking the dust that created a partial eclipse.

We Need Huts, Too 

The day after telling people that they may lose their homes to the government, although it was only a trading Company from a foreign island, Commissioner Shaw had the deputy and assistant commissioners along with the Chief Police Inspector Manoj Jha lined-up in his front garden. Standing on the verandah of his home, a palace grabbed from a minor raja, he asked each assistant commissioner to head a team of home inspection, defined as confiscation in the East India Company Dictionary of English Language, first edition. Shaw asked the assistant commissioners to make a list of mansions and decent homes suitable for the Bilati officers and families. 

Survey the homes and make a list of contents in each home. The owners shall leave behind everything and move on. 

Yes, sir! said the D.C, the Deputy Commissioner Liam Walker, in charge of all the Assistant Commissioners.  

Mr. Jha, I’ve a special order for you. You need to clear the huts in the hills surrounding the town. Shaw pointed his fingers at Manoj.

Huts, sir? Manoj asked.

Yes, huts. We plan to build bungalows for our officers in the green hills. They can live there in peace. You better start your work tomorrow.   

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The next day, a dozen home confiscation teams, each headed by an Assistant Commissioner, began to assail decent and estate-sized homes with their unassailable right of entry. A native clerk took an inventory of the contents of each home. A surveyor measured the dimensions of each house. The houses would be allotted to Bilati officers depending on their rank.

The Chief Inspector Manoj knew that he could swiftly move to clear the huts. Because the huts had people and little else, they wouldn’t take the kind of time and effort needed to empty a rich family’s estate, like those of zamindars and merchants. With the rich, Manoj had to be careful, even when the law was on his side, and of course, it was always on his side. But meting out justice to the poor was a matter of only a few untroubling minutes. He put together an effective plan with no cost to the Company. 

The Chief Inspector needed a demolition crew. Demolition in this case was only a generic professional term in Manoj’s checklist of routine activities. The job was the easiest of all. A few incompetent and untrained men could competently complete it in a single night.

Roundup three beggars and bring them here, Manoj ordered his constables Biswas and Ansari. 

In twenty minutes that included a soothing tea break, the skilled constables captured three men begging on the streets of the white town called the Cantonment and stood them in front of Manoj. 

The beggars couldn’t imagine anything other than a few blows landing on them. They stood there smiling, hoping the inspector would hold them at least through the next mealtime.  

You know it’s illegal to beg on the streets of Cantonment? Manoj asked.

Smiling, all three nodded in affable agreement. 

You can do one of two things. Make your bodies available to us for nonstop lathi action for six hours a day for three days. If this isn’t your kind of thing, you may volunteer for a government job. 

The smile on the beggars’ faces widened. 

On your second choice, you get food and water. You will be government officers for two or three days, but remember, no pay comes with your title. Manoj described the conditions. 

The begging business was running under loss. Due to the spreading famine, the work was physically unsustainable. The beggars smelled the fragrance of basmati rice and felt the warmth of wheat rotis at their fingertips. The honorable title of government officers enriched Manoj’s offer. The beggars signed on to the volunteer demolition crew.

What are we to do? A beggar threw all of his unavailable energy into his throat and asked.

You’ll know soon. You will do it just for the thrill of it. You may learn something new that you can use at another time and place. Manoj said.

To prevent their likely overnight demise, Manoj fed the demolition crew a good meal, extorted from a nearby eating house with the threat of a mild lathi action. Along with the temporary officers, the permanent also got their stomachs filled up. To avert an escape attempt the beggars’ energized bodies could now support, Manoj threw them into a cell and locked them up. In the luxurious comfort of a thin straw mat of hundred holes to sleep on, peace of mind the iron bars assured, not missing the street dogs that barked into their ears and the rats that munched on their toes, their stomachs humming a song of contentment for once in seven months, the crew slept like they had entered a divine state of yogic coma. 

At three in the morning, constables woke the beggars up, not with their well-practiced lathi blows to the head, but with the unaccustomed civilian manner of shaking them with their bare hands. Intact bodies were needed for the job ahead. The beggars opened their eyes and saw a plate full of pooris, potato-stuffed parotas, kochuris, chur bhaja, poha, and dum aloo in front of them, coerced courtesy of the same eating house. They were challenged to eat their two-month ration of food in two minutes, and that too, at an odd hour. But they met the challenge with aplomb.

To give them an individual identity, Ansari put flower garlands of different colors on the beggars’ necks. One beggar officer was now Yellow, the second was Red, and the third was White. Manoj set out with two dozen constables and the well-rested, well-fed, and colorfully identified demolition crew. When each of them sat behind a constable on his horse, the Yellow, Red, and White glowed in darkness.   

Long time ago, the upper caste and class had banished the poor and the low-caste families from the city streets. Ironically, the banished had built their huts in the town’s outskirts, amidst green and peaceful surroundings, on the slopes of smaller and bigger hills. 

The Chief selected a high central hill crammed with huts as ground zero for his action. Smaller hills full of huts surrounded the central field of action. Manoj knew that there was a single key to simultaneous and multiple hut clearance. Fear knit the poor people’s lives everywhere, and the fear spread among the hut dwellers faster than a Bay of Bengal typhoon. The trick was to create the right conditions to terrorize them.

When the Chief tellingly twisted his moustache with his left hand, several peace officers kicked the straw covered stick frame front doors of huts. They rushed in and rushed out, dragging bewildered men, women, and children out of their beds, hitting and kicking them. The verbal volcano of pain erupted from the throats and echoed in the hills like monsoon thunders. Within a few seconds, countless families in the hills expelled themselves from their huts and ran in every direction under the hopelessly starless sky.

Manoj was pleased that his dedicated constables saved much time and energy. They didn’t have to swing their lathis that often. Inevitably, though, it was necessary to whack the faces of a few children and old people who didn’t get the message or didn’t get it quickly enough, and thus sat and stared at the raised lathis, like a baby stares at a cobra poised to strike.

Manoj’s team moved on to another ground zero on the other side of the hill and repeated the proven tactic. Soon, the officers of the law found themselves in an unbelievable position of not having to spend much muscular effort at all in hitting or kicking people. An officer with admirable restraint pulled an old woman out of her rag of a bed and delivered only a couple of slaps on her shriveled bony cheeks, mild enough to save his hand from getting hurt. Another officer with the same kind of good temperament and judgment, kicked a woman’s shrunken womb with only a moderate force. Still, the ungrateful woman screamed loudly enough to empty a dozen surrounding huts. The officers had learned from previous experience that in setting fire under poor people’s feet, the howls of women and children did a much better job than those of men.

Regrettably, as Manoj later would write in a report to the Commissioner, there were some minor mishaps. Manoj told the unworried constables not to worry because some things always went a little wrong in such huge and complex operations. An old man ran into a tree, cracked his head, and died. Two children, a brother and sister, holding hands and running downhill, slipped and tumbled down the bluff to their deaths. One constable dragged a woman and kicked her stomach a bit harder than he expected. 

Force of habit, sir! He later gave a psycho-scientific explanation to Manoj. I knew she was young when I was dragging her, sir! Her hands felt so smooth and soft. She was a bit heavier, too. So, my leg must have done its usual thing, sir! 

But the kicked woman fell to the ground. To hoist her up on her own two feet so she may run for her life, the officer put his hands under her arms. He couldn’t help an accidental slid of his hands toward her chest. Feels good, much better than other flat chests, he thought. When he finally lifted her off the ground, the woman slipped out of his hands, collapsed on her back, and began to moan.

"Want a bigger reason to moan louder, you saali kutti?" The constable shouted, raising his ferociously equipped left foot. 

The woman began to pant, and suddenly let out a scream that shook the trees. By this time, the Beggar Officer White, who was checking the action here and there in the hills because of his technical interest in the affairs of the government, stumbled along with a torch in his hand. He stopped in front of the woman on the ground whose saree was pulled all the way up to her waist. Her thighs were parted, and the top of a baby’s head was peeking from her inside. He gave the torch to the constable to hold and pressed his ear down on the left side of the woman’s chest. He placed his fingers on the sides of her neck and stared into darkness. He held his hand against her nose. 

Dead. Officer White issued a death certificate.

Take the torch, my duty is calling, the constable said.

Reaching for the torch, Officer White said, My duty is also calling. 

He stuck the torch in the soft soil and saw the constable merge with darkness. He squatted in-between the woman’s spread-out thighs, grabbed the baby’s head, and gently pulled it out. 

A boy! he shouted at the trees that were black India ink blobs under a dark blue sky. He put his fingers into the baby’s mouth and cleared it. When the boy began to cry, he held him to his chest and danced under the trees. 

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When all the families were ousted from the huts, Manoj looked around for the three volunteer officers to press them into duty. But Officer White was missing. Muttering beggars are beggars, Manoj prepared the remaining two dutiful for their action. He gave Officer Yellow an oil torch to be held in one hand and a wide-mouthed pot filled with kerosene oil in the other. With a red piece of cloth, he tied a wide quiver around Officer Red’s waist and filled it with dry bamboo sticks. Equipped thus by none other than the famed and feared Chief Inspector himself, the two beggars felt like they were now proper government officers. With the new government-issued equipment, they looked better than they did with their banged-up begging bowls. 

With one look at their equipment, they understood their government duty. Officer Red pulled one of the sticks from the quiver, dipped it in kerosene, touched it to the torch, and threw the burning stick into the hut, or on top of the thatched roof of hay, depending on his on-the-spot professional judgment. Job completed, they were in front of another hut in a few seconds. In a few minutes, the red fire and the grey smoke had enveloped the green hills. By the time he rose above the hills, the sun couldn’t dispel the untimely darkness that had spread over Viratpur. 

Manoj was in a hurry to flee the scene before too many people stirred up and poked around to check out the smokey sky. His team members gathered around him. That’s when they saw Officer White dance-walking toward them with a naked baby in his arms. Manoj’s eyes were about to burn White into grey ash. But he cooled off when he saw the tiny hands on White’s chest and little feet resting on his right ribs. 

Where did you find that baby? Manoj asked Officer White.

I delivered it from a dead mother. 

You delivered a baby?

White smiled and touched the baby’s cheeks. 

We all do that sir! When our female colleagues get pregnant, we deliver babies in the back streets, Officer Red said.

What are you going to do with it?

We’ll raise him. It’s a boy. White said.

On the streets?

Unless you want to take him home. Said White, believing the Chief wouldn’t.

Let me see, Manoj said and took the baby from White. 

The boy opened his eyes. Manoj looked at his black eyes, the quivering little pink lips, and the two small fists that waved at him. 

I’ll take him home. Manoj said.

Shubha’s Baby

Manoj returned from the hills, satisfied with the hut clearance and eager to please his wife Shubha. The glow on Manoj’s face outshone the rising sun that morning. He dismounted the horse, took the sleeping boy from White’s hands, and asked White to wait outside. He entered the house with the baby in his arms.  

In the front room, he wrapped the baby with a wool shawl and sneaked into the kitchen. Shubha was sitting on the floor, rolling rotis for breakfast. 

Shubha, I’ve something for you! Manoj said. His voice was so hushed that Shubha thought it’s his usual catch of the night. 

Put it in the trunk, I’ve flour on my hands, she said, without looking at the bundle in his arms. Nightly booties and bribes filled the trunks in an underground room.

No, I can’t put this in the trunk. Wash your hands! Hurry up!

Shubha lifted her eyes. What do you have in that bundle? A bar of gold? She asked and went to the bathroom, washed her hands, and came back.

Take it. Don’t drop, Manoj handed the baby. The boy woke up and began to cry. Shubha unwrapped the bundle.

Rocking the baby in her arms, Shubha asked, Whose baby is this?

Yours. Ours.

Ours? A happily confused Shubha asked and touched the baby’s lips with her little finger. He quieted. 

Where did you find him?

In the hills. The mother died. Don’t know the father.

I need to feed him. Hold him for a minute. She gave the boy back to Manoj and said, Be careful!

"Waare wa! The baby is already yours!" Manoj smiled.

Shubha boiled some milk in a pot, poured it into a silver cup and cooled it. She took the baby from her husband and sat on a mat. Shubha dipped her little finger in the milk and inserted it into the baby’s mouth. The baby’s mouth opened a little bit. 

Manoj came out and asked White, no longer an officer, to come inside the house. Both sat in the room. Shubha didn’t look at the stranger in her home.

Looking at the way Shubha was feeding the baby, White said, "Bhabhi, we can try another way to feed him. Need a clean piece of cloth."

Shubha lifted her eyes from the baby and looked at him. A first-class beggar. She looked at her husband, with a question mark between her eyebrows.

He delivered the baby from a dead mother in the hills where we worked last night. 

She gave the baby back to Manoj and went inside to find a piece of cloth. 

As soon as Manoj picked up the baby, it began to cry. White said, Let me, and took the baby. The baby quieted. 

Manoj just realized that he didn’t know White’s real