The House of Ranmaur

Too Loud for Footscray

In Melbourne my voice has been asked to leave four flats.

The first was in Clayton, in my student year, a brick block with carpet that smelled of other people's dinners. I sang there exactly once, on a Sunday afternoon in July, with the heater ticking and my window shut against the wind, and before I reached the end of the first verse a Malaysian engineering student from the floor above was knocking on my door to ask whether somebody was hurt. The second was in Brunswick, above a shop that sold secondhand records, where the owner said he liked my voice very much and would like it even more somewhere else. The third and fourth were in Footscray, where I live now, and where I have learned to do my singing in the car.

I want to be clear about this. I do not sing badly. I sing the way my family sings, which is to say that I open my throat as if the person I am singing to is standing on the far bank of a river in flood. An Alha singer is not built for rooms. He is built for a fort courtyard in the rain, with three hundred people sitting on wet durries and a pair of kettle drums going like hooves, and he has to reach the boy at the back who has climbed onto the wall to see. In a Footscray flat with plasterboard walls, that voice goes through the neighbour's kitchen and out the other side and lands somewhere near the railway line.

So on weeknights, when the studio finishes, I drive down to the river. There is a car park off the path under the bluestone wall where the Maribyrnong bends, with the cranes of the docks lit up orange to the south and the West Gate standing over everything like a long gray sentence. I park facing the water. I wind the windows up. I warm up the way my grandfather taught me, on a long open vowel that starts in the chest and climbs, and then I sing one passage, never more than one, of the war of Mahoba, Alha and Udal and their fifty-two battles, while the windscreen fogs and the ducks on the river go about their business.

Then I drive home and eat noodles standing up.

* * *

My name is Lakhan. My family have been the singers of the House of Ranmaur for as long as a House of Ranmaur has existed to be sung, which is to say since a little before 1700, and for the last six generations we have written our songs down in one book. I am the youngest singer of that family. I am twenty-nine. Until the second week of June this year, I was also, in my own estimation, the last.

I came to Melbourne in 2019 on a student visa to study audio production, and stayed. I work at a studio in Brunswick that records podcasts, voiceovers, advertisements for mattress sales and the occasional string quartet. I am good at it. I can hear a refrigerator two rooms away. I can tell you, from a recording, whether the person speaking had their back to a window. I can take the hiss out of a cassette made in 1984 without taking out the sound of the person who made it, which is harder than it sounds and which I learned on my grandfather's tapes. My boss, Fergus, says I have the best ears he has ever hired and the worst taste in lunch.

What I had not done, in seven years, was sing in front of anyone.

* * *

On Sundays I go to Craigieburn.

There is a primary school there with a gym that a community group rents from nine until eleven, and in that gym, under the basketball hoops, my oldest friend teaches gatka to about thirty children and eleven adults. I am one of the eleven. I am also, as Gurtej likes to point out to the children, the only one who has been coming for five years and still steps on his own stick.

Gatka is a martial art from Punjab. It is fought with a stick and a small round shield, the soti and the farri, and before it is anything else it is footwork. The feet move in a pattern called the paintra, a sort of crossing, circling step that keeps your weight low and your body turning, so that you are never standing where the other person last saw you. Gurtej's grandfather learned it as a boy in a village off the road from Ludhiana to Raikot and kept it up through thirty-four years in the army, and Gurtej learned it from him on the parade ground at Jalandhar and later, in the summers, on the old polo ground below my family's town, with the fort looking down.

That is how I know Gurtej. His mother is a daughter of the House of Ranmaur. His grandfather on his father's side was a Sikh officer who was posted to Jhansi in the 1960s and became the closest friend of the man who is now the Raja of Ranmaur, and when the friendship had gone on long enough, the two families did the obvious thing in the next generation and married their children to each other. Gurtej is the result. He spent every summer of his childhood in Ranmaur, staying in his nani's house below the fort and sneaking down the hill to our lane, where my grandfather fed him bafauri and taught him the first verse of the Mandogarh battle, which Gurtej sang in an accent so Punjabi that my grandmother had to go into the kitchen to laugh.

We are the same age, to the month. He came to Melbourne first, to study engineering at Monash, and when I said I wanted to learn sound he sent me the brochure and a photograph of a studio with egg-box foam on the walls and the message: *Come. The coffee is terrible and the sky is enormous.* He was right about the sky.

On the second Sunday of June, a few minutes after ten, we were doing pairs. My partner was a twelve-year-old girl called Japji who moves like a cat and has no pity. She had just tapped me twice on the shoulder and once, unnecessarily, on the ear, when Gurtej's phone started buzzing on the bench by the wall and did not stop.

He looked at it between rounds. Then he walked over to me with it in his hand, still holding his stick, and his face had gone careful in a way I had not seen since we were sixteen and his grandfather was in hospital in Chandigarh.

"It's from the house," he said. "Mehr's put it on the family page. Your Dadda fell on the fort steps on Tuesday."

* * *

I should explain Mehr, and the family page.

Mehr is Gurtej's younger sister. She is twenty-six and runs the office of the House of Ranmaur, which sounds grander than it is. The office is two rooms above the east gate of the fort, in the old drum-house where the war drums used to be beaten at dawn and dusk, and it contains three desks, a dehumidifier that sounds like a small aircraft, a steel almirah full of papers, a great many cardboard boxes, and Mehr. From those two rooms she keeps the house's records, its correspondence and its accounts, its papers going back to 1691, its photographs, and what she calls, without irony, the network.

The network is a private page the house keeps for its family and for the families of its old villages. Nobody outside can see it. On it there is a family tree of the House of Ranmaur that goes back eleven generations, with a second line running beside it, not inside it, that is ours: the singers. There is a map of the forty-one villages of the old state, with small pins in it, one for every family abroad who has marked the village their people came from. When Mehr started it three years ago there were nineteen pins. Now there are something over three hundred, from Edison, New Jersey, and Leicester and Dubai and Auckland and Doha and, as of two winters ago, one in Footscray. I put that one in myself, late at night, after a long day, and felt foolish and then did not.

Mostly the page is quiet. People post a wedding photograph. Somebody's grandmother in Leicester records the name of a well that has been filled in. Every so often Mehr posts a notice about the fort.

The notice she had posted on Tuesday was brief, because Mehr is brief. *Hiralal Dadda, the house's senior singer, slipped on the eleventh step of the east gate on Tuesday morning while bringing up the season's drum skins. He has a cracked wrist and his heart is tired. He is at home. He has asked for quiet, and for his grandson.*

I read it twice standing in the school gym with my stick under my arm, while Japji, sensing that the lesson had paused, started on her own paintra round the hoops.

He has asked for his grandson.

* * *

I had spoken to Dadda on the phone every second Saturday for seven years. He did not like video. He said the face on the screen was always looking somewhere a little to the left of you, and he did not trust a face that would not meet his eyes. So we spoke by voice, and I listened to him the way I listen to everything, with half my mind on the sound. I knew how his breath had changed over those years. I knew the slight rasp at the top of his register that had appeared in 2023 and had not gone away. I knew that he had started, last winter, to pause before the long notes of an ordinary sentence the way a singer pauses before a high passage, to gather himself. I had noticed all of that and filed it, as I file the hum of a fridge, as something to deal with later.

He had never once, in seven years, asked me to come home.

He asked me other things. Whether the water in Melbourne tasted of anything. Whether the Australians had a ballad tradition, and if so whether their singers stood or sat. Whether I was singing. To that last one I always said yes, and it was true in the sense that I sang in a parked car facing a river, and he always said "Good," in the tone of a man who knows exactly where you are singing and has decided not to mention it.

That Sunday night, in the flat, I opened the family page on my laptop and found that Mehr had sent me something privately underneath the notice. It was a recording, eleven seconds long, with a line of text below it in her neat Hindi: *He asked me to send this. He said you would know what it meant.*

I put my headphones on. I always do. It is a habit of the job.

The recording was made in his room, I could tell. I know that room by its sound: the low ceiling of whitewashed stone, the wooden shutters, the bare floor with a single durrie that soaks up nothing. There was a ceiling fan running on its second speed with the slightly loose blade that knocks once on every turn. There was a crow outside, and further off, the bell of a bicycle on the lane. Then my grandfather cleared his throat and sang a single line.

It was the first line of the song of Diwan Sujan Singh. Our song. The one that opens every rainy season at Ranmaur, and has done since 1858, the rains in which a man from my family brought a sword home from Gwalior. The first line is not a war line. It is a line about a road, and a horse, and the road going north.

He sang it in a voice I did not recognize. It was thin. It was true in pitch, and every syllable was in its place, but it stopped short of the top of the phrase, at the exact point where the voice is supposed to break out and fill the courtyard. It stopped there and fell, like a man who has started up a stair and found the next step missing.

Then there was a pause, with the fan knocking. Then he said, in Bundeli, quietly, not to the phone but to someone else in the room, "That's enough. He'll hear it."

I heard it.

* * *

I want to say that I sat up all night deciding. I did not. I sat at the kitchen bench with the recording playing on a loop through my headphones and a plate of cold noodles going stiff beside the laptop, and at a quarter past three I bought a ticket.

Melbourne to Delhi, through Singapore, the following Friday. Then the morning train from Delhi to Jhansi. Then the road.

At four I wrote to Fergus to tell him I needed leave, possibly a lot of it, and that I would explain. At four thirty I wrote to my landlord. At five I lay down on top of the bed in my clothes and listened to the first buses on Barkly Street and the early trains on the line beyond the back fence, a rising whine and a long grinding fall, which is the sound I think of now when I think of Melbourne. It is not a song. It is a city coughing itself awake.

On Monday I told Gurtej. He was not surprised.

"Mehr says it's the rains," he said. "He's frightened about the rains. The season opens in three weeks and there's nobody to open it."

"There's Papa."

He gave me a look. We both knew what my father had said about singing in 1987, and what he had done instead, and that he had not sung a note in public since, though he still played the nagariya when he thought nobody was listening.

"There's Bua," I said, more quietly.

"Your Bua knows every word of every song in the book," Gurtej said, "and she's never sung one of them in front of a man who wasn't family. You know that. She's not going to start on the fort steps at sixty-three because her father's wrist is cracked." He put his hand on my shoulder, the way he does at the end of a gatka round, to show that the bout is over and nobody is angry. "It's you, yaar. It's been you since you were nine. He just never said it, because he wanted you to come and not be sent for."

* * *

I packed one suitcase and one carry-on. Into the carry-on went my laptop, two pairs of good headphones, a field recorder, four microphones in a foam case, spare batteries, and a roll of gaffer tape, because there is no place on earth where gaffer tape is not useful. Into the suitcase went the rest. I left out my winter jacket, then put it back, then took it out again. It was nine degrees in Footscray and forty-one in Jhansi.

On the Thursday evening I drove to the river one last time and parked facing the water. The cranes were lit. The West Gate was a long chain of lights. There was rain on the windscreen, the fine Melbourne kind that does not so much fall as hang about.

I did not warm up. I sang the first line of the song of Diwan Sujan Singh, straight in, cold, the way my grandfather had sung it into Mehr's phone.

My voice went up the stair and did not stop. It went out through the shut glass and across the black water and broke on the bluestone on the far side, and a man walking a dog on the path stopped and turned around and looked at my car, and I sat there gripping the wheel with my ears ringing, and found that I was laughing, and that I was not entirely sure why.

Then I drove home, and finished packing, and in the morning I left.

The Morning Train to Jhansi

The morning express from Delhi leaves Nizamuddin a little after eight and reaches Jhansi in four and a half hours, which is how long it used to take my grandfather to walk from Ranmaur to Orchha and back with a sack of drum skins on his shoulder. I spent most of it with my forehead against the window, the way I did at ten, watching the country go from the flat green of the Yamuna plain to the scrub and stone of the south.

You can hear the change before you see it. North of Agra the train runs smooth and low, a long steady hum with a soft knock at each joint of the rail. After Gwalior the line starts to cross small rivers and cuttings, and the sound breaks up: a hollow drum-roll over the bridges, a sudden closeness as the walls of a cutting come up on both sides and the hum bounces back off rock, then open air again and the wind tearing at the window seals. By Datia I was not looking at my phone any more. On the left, far off across the fields, the old palace at Datia stood up out of the town like a great square stone box seven storeys high, built four hundred years ago for a king who, people say, never spent a night in it. Then more scrub, and boulders the size of houses lying about in the fields as if somebody had been playing with them and gone in for lunch, and herds of goats picking along the embankment, and then the train began to slow.

The station sign has changed since I left. It used to say Jhansi. Now, on the long yellow boards above the platforms, it gives the name of the queen first, in Hindi and in English: Virangana Lakshmibai Jhansi. The brave woman, Lakshmibai, of Jhansi. A woman in the seat across from me, going on to Bhopal, read it out to her grandson as we pulled in, and he asked who that was, and she said, "Arre, you don't know? The queen who fought." Then she told him the rest the way every child in this part of India learns it at school, from a poem written seventy-odd years after the queen died, about a woman who fought as hard as any man. The boy nodded as if this answered everything, and went back to his game.

I kept quiet. But I had my hand on the strap of my carry-on, with the recorder in it, and I found I was gripping it.

* * *

My parents were on platform one, under the clock, in the heat.

My father, Baldev, is sixty-two. He owns two buses that run between Jhansi and Tikamgarh, and he dresses as a man who owns two buses ought to, in a short-sleeved safari suit the color of milky coffee with a pen in the breast pocket. He has been a bus conductor and a bus driver and a mechanic, and he has a voice that can call a stop over the noise of a diesel engine and fifty passengers, which is to say he has the family voice and has used it, for thirty-nine years, for anything except singing. He shook my hand first. Then he took the suitcase. Then he put it down and hugged me, briefly, hard, smelling of diesel and the clove he chews, and picked the suitcase up again before anyone could comment.

My mother, Sushila, had brought a steel tiffin of puris and potatoes in case I had not eaten on the train, which I had, and a bottle of water from home because she does not trust station water, which is fair. She had been following my journey on the family page, where Mehr had posted that I was coming, and she took my face between her palms and turned it to the light, checking it for damage in transit. Then she said, "You're thin. Your Dadda's waiting. He's been sitting up since four."

"How is he?"

My parents looked at each other.

"He's angry," my father said. "Which is good. When he stops being angry, then you can worry."

* * *

We drove out in one of the buses, because the car was at the mechanic's and my father saw no reason to hire a taxi when he owned a forty-two-seater. The driver was a young man called Pintu who has worked for my father for six years and who drove with one hand and the horn. I sat behind him with my mother. My father stood in the doorway with his hand on the rail, in the conductor's place, out of habit.

Jhansi went past in a blur of heat and sound: the cantonment roads lined with old neem trees and whitewashed boundary stones, the bazaar near the Sadar, a procession of school buses, a man selling sugarcane juice from a cart with bells on the crushing wheel. And then, above the roofs, the fort.

It sits on a hump of bare granite called the Bangra hill, and its walls are built out of the same rock, so that from a distance you cannot quite tell where the hill stops and the fort begins. The stone is gray with a pink tinge in the morning, and by noon it has gone pale and hard in the glare. The walls run along the top in long straight lines broken by round bastions, and over the main gate there is a flag. I had seen it a hundred times. I had gone up there on school trips and stood at the place on the west wall where, the guides say, the queen made her horse jump. I had heard the guides tell it in Hindi and in English and once, memorably, in a Japanese that consisted mostly of the word "brave." I had never thought about it as anything to do with me.

This time I turned round in my seat to keep the walls in sight until the road bent and the houses closed over them.

"Your Dadda used to say there are two forts in Jhansi," my father said from the doorway, without turning round. "The one on the hill, and the one in the songs. He said the one in the songs is bigger."

It was the most he had said to me about singing in about fifteen years. I waited for more. Pintu hit the horn at a buffalo, and my father said nothing else.

* * *

South-east of Jhansi the road to Orchha runs straight for a while through fields, then squeezes through the tourist shops and parked autorickshaws of Orchha town, under the great walls of the palaces on their island, and comes down to the Betwa, and everything changes.

The Betwa at Orchha is a river that has had to argue with granite all the way, and you can see the argument. The bed is not mud or sand but rock, smooth humped gray rock in long ridges and pools, and in June, before the rains, the water runs low between them in green channels, with boys diving off the rocks and women washing clothes on the flat places and beating them with a sound like slow applause. Downstream, on the town's own bank, along the water, stand the chhatris.

There are fourteen or fifteen of them, depending on who is counting and what they count, and they are the memorials of the kings of Orchha: tall domed stone pavilions with spires like the tops of temples, built along the river so that their reflections stand upside down in the pools. In the afternoon light they turn the warm brown of a loaf left a minute too long in the oven. And on every spire, on every ledge and cornice, sit vultures. Small white ones with bare yellow faces and untidy shawls of feathers, and big brown ones, heavier, with pale ruffs at the neck, hunched like men in overcoats. They nest there. They have nested there longer than anyone can remember. When you stand on the bridge, which is low and narrow and has no railings to speak of, you can hear them: a dry creaking and clattering, like a roomful of old chairs.

Pintu slowed on the bridge, without being asked. He knew what my father would want. My father looked at the chhatris, and at the birds, and said, "Still there," to nobody in particular, and Pintu drove on.

Then the bridge was behind us and we were on the road south, and the country I grew up in began.

* * *

I am going to try to describe it properly, because I have been describing it badly to Australians for seven years.

It is not flat and it is not hilly. It is a long tableland of red-brown earth broken every few miles by ridges of bare granite, low and broken and humped, like the backs of animals asleep under a blanket. On the ridges, between the boulders, grow thorn trees and a scrubby tree called khair with a bark like burnt bread. In the fields there are old mahua trees, wide and dark and rounded, standing alone where the farmers have left them for a hundred years because in March and April they drop their pale fleshy flowers, which smell of honey and something fermented, and whole villages go out at dawn with baskets to gather them. In June the mahua season is long over and the flowers are dried and stored in sacks in every house. The fields are stubble and dust. The village ponds, which the old kings dug and walled with stone, have shrunk to a dark puddle in the middle of a plate of cracked mud. Women stand at the hand pumps in bright saris with their pots, and the pump handles squeal, and the sound carries for half a mile in the dry air.

And everywhere, everywhere, there is stone. Stone walls round the fields, stacked without mortar. Stone troughs. Stone steps going down to stone tanks. Little stone shrines no higher than your knee at the edge of a field, with a smear of orange on them. Old stone forts and gateways and bits of wall on half the ridges, so many that nobody bothers to know whose they were.

We followed the Jamni south. It is a small river that comes up from the south and runs north to meet the Betwa near Orchha, and in June it is a string of pools in a rocky bed, with egrets standing in them on one leg, white and patient. The road ran beside it on the west bank for an hour, through villages I knew by name and by the sound of the speed breakers. And then my mother touched my arm, though she did not need to, and I looked up.

* * *

Ranmaur is built on a ridge, and the fort is built on the ridge's spine.

It is not a big fort. It is not Jhansi or Orchha or Datia. But it is long, and it follows the line of the rock, so that its wall rises and falls with the ridge for nearly a mile, with fourteen bastions, eight of them still whole. The stone is the same pink-gray granite as the ridge, and in the late afternoon the whole length of it goes rose and then amber, and the shadows of the bastions lie across the slope below like the teeth of a comb. At the north end, on the highest knuckle of rock, is the old palace, with its upper rooms and its small domed pavilions on the roof. At the south end, where the ridge falls away toward the river, there is a stepwell, cut down into the rock, and below that, on a terrace by the water, the chhatris of the Rajas of Ranmaur, five of them, small and plain beside the ones at Orchha, with no vultures. And in the middle, facing the town, is the east gate, with its tall arched doorway and the drum-house above it, and the eleven steps going up to it from the street.

The town lies along the foot of the ridge, on the slope above the river. Flat-roofed houses of stone and plaster, painted pale blue and pink and mint and the yellow of turmeric, with steel water tanks on top and laundry on the parapets. A bazaar street. A bus stand, which is my father's office, more or less. A government school, a bank, two mobile phone shops, and a sweet shop that has been frying jalebis in the same spot since my grandfather was a boy.

And just below the east gate, on a little stony hump of its own between the town and the fort, is the lane where my family lives. It is called Nagara Toriya, the drum hillock, because the kettle drums of the fort were kept there when they were not being beaten, and the families who beat them and sang to them lived around them. There are nine houses in the lane. Ours is the one at the top, nearest the gate, with the blue door.

* * *

My grandfather was sitting up on his cot in the front room, with his back against the wall and his right wrist in a white plaster cast that someone had already decorated, in red ballpoint, with a small drawing of a horse.

He is eighty-eight. In his prime he was a large man, deep-chested from a lifetime of singing, and he is still broad but the flesh has gone loose on him, and his hair, which he keeps cut short, has gone the white of cotton wool. His face is long and brown and creased like a paper bag that has been folded many times. His eyes are very bright. When I came in through the blue door with my bag, he did not smile. He looked at me from my shoes to my hair and back.

"You've got fat on noodles," he said.

"Dadda, I'm thinner than I was."

"Then it's the wrong kind of thin." He held out his good hand. I took it, and bent and touched his feet, and he put the hand on my head and kept it there, heavy, until I straightened up.

The room had not changed. Whitewashed stone walls, a low ceiling, the fan with its loose blade knocking once a turn. A steel almirah. A wooden shelf with a radio on it older than my father. A calendar from a fertiliser company. Two dholaks and a pair of nagariya drums, the small clay kettle drums with goatskin heads, stacked in the corner under a cloth. And above, in the rafters, wrapped in red cotton gone brown with age and tied with three strings, a long curved shape that I had been told, at the age of five, never to touch.

My aunt, Phoolwati, came in from the kitchen with a glass of water and a plate of something fried, put both in my hands, kissed the top of my head, and went back out without a word, because she had something on the stove. My mother went after her. My father sat on the step of the doorway with his back to us, looking out at the lane, as he always has.

"Mehr sent you the recording," my grandfather said.

"Yes."

"You heard it."

"Yes, Dadda."

He nodded. He looked up at the rafters, at the long red bundle. Then he looked back at me, and there was nothing soft in his face at all.

"The rains are late this year," he said. "They'll come a week on Monday, the radio says. The season opens on the first Thursday after. In the baradari, in the fort, the way it has since before my father was born." He lifted his plastered wrist an inch, then put it down. "I can't hold the sword. I can't reach the top of the line. You heard that too."

"Dadda."

"So you'll open it," he said. "You'll sing Sujan. You have ten days."

Out on the step, my father did not turn round. But I saw his shoulders go still.

In the kitchen, my aunt had stopped stirring.

The Book in the Wooden Box

The book lives in a wooden box under my grandfather's cot, and on my first morning home he made me take it out before I had drunk my tea.

The box is teak, gone almost black, with brass corners and a hasp with no lock on it. Inside, wrapped in a piece of yellow cotton, is the book. It is about the size of a large atlas and as thick as my hand is wide, bound in boards covered with red cloth that has faded to the pink of a cooked prawn along the spine, where a hundred and sixty-seven years of hands have held it. The pages are thick, cream-colored, slightly furry to the touch, and when you turn them they make a sound like a dry leaf being folded, not the snap of modern paper. They were made at Kalpi, on the Yamuna, where the paper-makers' families have worked by hand for longer than anyone has records, and they were bought there in May 1858 by a man of my family who had no business buying paper, since he was at the time riding with an army that was about to lose a battle.

His name was Jagdev. He was twenty-six. He is the reason the book exists, and the reason the long red bundle in the rafters exists, and I will come to him properly. For now it is enough to say that he carried a bundle of Kalpi paper in his saddlebag from Kalpi to Gwalior and back to Ranmaur, through a defeat and a death and the whole of the rainy season, and that in the winter of 1859 he sat down in this house and began to write.

On the first page, in his hand, it says: *Ranmaur ki Alha. The Alha of Ranmaur. As sung by the singers of Nagara Toriya, written down so that it will not go where the men have gone.*

* * *

I should say what the Alha is, for anyone who has not stood in the rain to hear it.

Eight hundred years ago, more or less, there was a kingdom in Bundelkhand ruled from Mahoba by the Chandel kings, the same kings who built the temples at Khajuraho. Its last great king was Parmal, and his generals were two brothers, Alha and Udal, of the Banaphar clan. They were famous for their loyalty, which was absolute, and their courage, which was absurd, and the songs say they fought fifty-two battles for Mahoba, against the kings of half of northern India, including at the end Prithviraj Chauhan of Delhi, who came south with a great army and broke the Chandel kingdom. A poet at Parmal's court named Jagnik is said to have made the first songs of their wars. Nobody has his words now. What we have instead is what the singers made of them over eight centuries, passed from mouth to mouth across the whole north of India, changing with every valley, and collected only in the nineteenth century by Englishmen with notebooks who were astonished to find that men who could not read could sing for nine nights without repeating themselves.

We call the whole of it Alha-Khand, and we call the singers alhait, and we call the meter it is sung in the Alha chhand. Each line is thirty-one beats long, if you count beats the way the old poets did, sixteen and then fifteen with a little break in the middle where you breathe. It runs like a horse at a canter, and the drums run with it, and the singer runs on top of the drums.

It is sung in the rains. Everyone in Bundelkhand will tell you that, and everyone will give you a different reason. Some say it is because in the old days nobody went to war in the monsoon, when the rivers were up and the roads were mud, so the warriors sat at home and the singers sang them the wars instead. Some say it is because the farmers, after the sowing, have nothing to do but wait. My grandfather says it is because the Alha is loud and the rain is loud and they were made for each other, and that a man who sings Alha under a clear sky is wasting his voice on the crows.

And somewhere along the way, long before Jagdev, the singers of the houses of Bundelkhand began doing what we do: taking the meter and the manner of the Alha and making songs in it about their own patrons. Not about Alha and Udal, but about the Raja who built the tank, the Diwan who fell at such and such a ford, the queen who held the fort while her husband was away. Our family has done that for the House of Ranmaur since before 1700. Jagdev wrote down the old ones that he knew, and then the one he had made himself, and then he made a rule, and wrote the rule on the second page.

*Each generation of this house adds one song. No more. No less. It must be true, and it must be sung in the fort before it is written here.*

* * *

There are six songs in the book.

The first is the founding of Ranmaur, from the 1690s, when a younger son of a Bundela house called Ranjit Dev rode up onto the ridge with forty horsemen and a grant of eleven villages and found an old ruined wall on the rock and a spring below it. The name of the state is in that song. A maur, in Bundelkhand, is the tall crown of palm leaf and tinsel that a bridegroom wears to his wedding. Ranmaur is the war-crown, the crown you wear to battle as if you were going to your own wedding. The old Bundelas had a saying that a man should ride to a fight the way he rides to his bride, dressed in his best and not looking back. Ranjit Dev, the song says, came up the ridge in his wedding crown. Whether he did or not, nobody knows, and the song does not care.

The second is the stepwell, from the 1720s, the Hansa baori at the south end of the ridge, which a queen of the house called Hansa Kunwar had cut down into the rock after three years without rain. It is a song about stonemasons, mostly, and about how many baskets of rubble were carried up how many steps. My grandfather says it is the dullest song in the book and the one he would least like to lose.

The third is Sujan.

The fourth is the famine of 1896 and 1897, when the rains failed across the whole of central India, and Raja Gajraj Singh opened the fort's granaries and set the men of forty villages to deepening the tanks for wages paid in grain. It was made by Jagdev's son, who was also named Lakhan, like me. Our family recycles names.

The fifth is the merger, from 1948, when Raja Ranvijay Singh signed the papers that joined Ranmaur with the other small states of Bundelkhand and Baghelkhand in the new province of Vindhya Pradesh, and the flag came down from the north bastion and a different flag went up. That one was made by Dhaniram, my grandfather's father, who by every account wept through the whole of the first performance and refused to explain why.

The sixth is my grandfather's. It is called the song of the Punjabi wedding, and it is about Gurtej's parents, and it is the only song in the book in which the drummer is required, at one point, to stop playing the nagariya and start playing a dhol.

After the sixth song the pages are blank. There are about forty of them. The blank pages are the same Kalpi paper, cut from the same bundle. Jagdev bought enough for every generation he could imagine, and then a few more, and then, he wrote on the inside of the back cover, a few more again, *because the house will go on longer than I can count.*

My page is the seventh.

I knew that. I had known it since I was nine, when my grandfather first opened the book in front of me and showed me where the blank pages started and said, "Yours is there, when it comes." I had known it at nineteen when I told him I was going to Australia, and at twenty-five when I told him I was staying. I had not, in all that time, added a word.

* * *

He made me stand.

"You've been singing sitting down," he said. "In a car. I can hear it in your belly. It's gone soft."

"How can you hear that from the phone?"

"I can hear it now. You said 'Dadda' like a man in a chair." He pointed with his good hand at the middle of the floor. "There. Feet like you're about to be pushed."

The stance of an Alha singer is not a concert stance. It is a fighting stance. Feet apart, one a little forward, knees soft, weight low, the way Gurtej makes us stand before a gatka round. The chest is open. The head is up. One hand goes out in front, at the height of the heart, open, as if you are holding a sword or reaching for someone's shoulder, and the other is free for gesture. In the old days, and still among the serious singers, you hold an actual sword or a stick. You move. You step forward on the charge and back on the retreat. You turn to one side of the courtyard and then the other, because the courtyard is the army and you are its captain.

I stood like that, in the middle of the room, with the fan knocking overhead, in a T-shirt from a Melbourne brewery, and felt every one of my twenty-nine years and seven Australian winters.

"Breathe," he said.

I breathed.

"Not like that. Like you're pulling up water from the baori. From the bottom. Hand over hand."

I breathed again, lower.

"Now give me Sa. Long. Hold it till I say."

I gave him the note and held it. I held it while he looked out the door at the lane, and while a goat went past, and while my mother came to the kitchen door and looked at us and went away again. My diaphragm started to shake. He said nothing. I held it. Finally, just as I was about to break, he lifted one finger an inch off his knee, and I let it go and nearly fell over.

"Hm," he said. "There's something left. Not much. We'll work with it."

* * *

We worked through the morning. He taught the way he had always taught, which is to say mostly by refusing things. He would not let me sing words until I had done the vowels. He would not let me do the vowels at full voice until I had done them at half. He would not let me sing more than one line of Sujan until I could sing the first line in a way he called "awake," which was apparently different from what I had done in the car, and which I did not achieve until nearly noon, when the heat in the room had become like a hand on the back of my neck and my T-shirt was dark down the middle.

My aunt brought us water at intervals, and once a plate of chopped mango with salt and red chilli. She did not stay. But each time she came in, I saw her lips move. She was mouthing the words before I got to them. Every one. Every time.

Phoolwati is my father's younger sister. She is sixty-three, a widow for twenty years, small and quick, with her sari tucked up at the waist and a voice, when she speaks, that is lower than you would expect and very clear. She came back to this house after her husband died and has run its kitchen ever since. She knows the whole book by heart. She learned it at her father's knee, along with my father, in the years when my grandfather still believed one of his own children would sing in the fort. My father refused. My aunt was never asked.

The women of Nagara Toriya have always known the songs. That is how the songs survived, in the bad years, when the men were away or ill or dead. But in this family, by a custom no one can remember being decided, the women sing them only in the house, or at the baori, or among themselves at weddings, never in the fort and never in front of the house. My grandfather has never questioned it. Nor, until that morning, had I.

I watched her mouth the second line as she went out with the empty plate, and I missed my own entry, and my grandfather said, "Again. From the top. And look at me, not at the kitchen."

* * *

In the late afternoon Mehr came down from the fort.

She is small like her mother and has her father's height in the face, if that makes sense, a long serious face with straight black brows, and she wears her hair in a single plait down her back and a cotton kurta with the sleeves rolled up and a canvas bag over her shoulder that is always full of something. She touched my grandfather's feet, and nodded to me as if I had been away a fortnight, and sat down cross-legged on the durrie with a tablet in her lap.

"Dadda," she said, "I've come about the recording."

My grandfather sighed through his nose.

I learned then what had been going on. For two years, since the office began its work, Mehr had been asking him to let her record him: all six songs, the whole book, in his own voice, while he had it. She wanted it for the house's own archive, where it would be kept with the date and place and the name of who was singing, and for the singers' line on the family tree, and for the families abroad on the network who had heard of the Alha of Ranmaur from their grandparents and had never once heard it sung. She had asked politely. She had asked through her grandfather the Raja. She had asked through my father. My grandfather had said no every time, and the reason he gave was always the same: *Next season. When the voice is right.*

Now the voice was not going to be right again, and they both knew it.

"I've got a list," Mehr said. She turned the tablet round so he could see it. "Every word in the book that's old Bundeli. Words nobody in town uses any more. The names of the parts of a saddle. The word for the third watch of the night. The old word for the grey of a horse with a dark muzzle. Two hundred and twelve so far. I want you to say each one and tell me what it means, and I'll keep your voice with it. That's all. No singing, if you don't want."

He looked at the list for a while. Then he looked at me.

"He'll sing," he said. "In the fort. On the Thursday. You can record that."

"And the words?"

"The words, yes. Every one." He held up a finger. "Three things. One. The recordings stay in the house. Nobody outside hears them without the singers' family saying so. Two. Nothing of Sujan goes in until the season has opened. It has never been sung before the rains in a hundred and sixty-eight years, and it won't be sung into a tablet in June." He held up a third finger, then seemed to forget what it was for, and looked up at the rafters. "Three. If he gets it wrong, you keep that too. With his name. Let them hear what it costs."

Mehr wrote all three down, on the tablet, in a note under the list, with the date. Then she looked at me.

"Ten days," she said.

"I know."

"Gurtej says you sing in a car."

"Gurtej talks too much."

She smiled for the first time, a quick small smile, like her brother's. "Come up to the office tomorrow," she said. "You should see what we've done. And Nanaji wants to meet you. He says the last time he saw you, you were eleven and you were sick on the polo ground."

I had been. It had been very hot, and there had been too many jalebis.

When she had gone, my grandfather lay back against the wall and closed his eyes, and for a moment he looked every one of his eighty-eight years. Then he opened them again and said, "Sa. Long. Hold it till I say," and I stood up.

The Office Above the Gate

There are eleven steps from our lane to the east gate of the fort, and I climbed them the next morning at seven, before the heat, counting them the way every child in Nagara Toriya counts them. They are granite slabs, each one as long as a man and worn into a shallow dish in the middle by three hundred years of feet. The eleventh is the one my grandfather slipped on. It has a crack across one corner and a dark stain where water collects, and someone had put a brick on the stain, as a warning, which is the kind of warning that only works if you already know why the brick is there.

I stepped over it. I stood in the gateway.

The east gate is not grand. It is an arch about twice the height of a man on a horse, with heavy teak doors studded with iron spikes at the height of an elephant's forehead, because in the old days that was how you broke a gate, and the spikes were how you stopped it. The doors have stood open since before anyone alive was born. Pigeons live in the arch. Their sound, when you stand under it, is a soft continual burbling, like water running somewhere you cannot see, and it is the first sound I remember: being carried through here on my grandfather's shoulder, in the dark, to a sitting in the rain, and looking up at the pigeons shifting and muttering in the lamplight.

Above the arch is the drum-house. A long room built over the gate, with five small arched windows on the town side and five on the fort side, where the drummers sat. In the days of the Rajas, a pair of great kettle drums was beaten there at dawn, at noon and at dusk, and on festival days, and when the Raja rode out or came home. The drums were so big, the old people said, that a boy could sit inside one. They were beaten by men from our lane. When the Raja died, they were beaten slowly, with the skins slackened, and the sound went out over the town like something limping.

The great drums are gone now. One rotted, and one went to a museum in Bhopal in the 1960s and has never come back. The room where they sat is Mehr's office.

* * *

You go up by a stair inside the thickness of the wall, steep and narrow and dark, and come out into a room full of light. Mehr has put white cotton screens in the town-side windows to stop the glare, and left the fort-side windows open, so that the morning comes in over the inner courtyard and the old palace. The walls are whitewashed. The floor is the original stone, swept. Along one wall are three desks made from old doors, with computers and a scanner and a printer and a lamp with a magnifier. Along the other wall are the steel almirahs and the boxes and a long table with a sheet of glass on it, where papers are laid out to be photographed. In the corner, the dehumidifier roars.

"Sorry," Mehr said. "It has to. The monsoon gets into the paper."

She had been there since six. There was a steel tumbler of tea on her desk going cold, and a young man I did not know sitting at the second desk, feeding a stack of brittle brown papers one at a time onto the glass and photographing them with a camera on a stand. He looked up and nodded. His name, Mehr said, was Manohar, he was from Pipraun, which is one of the old villages, and he had a degree in history from Jhansi and the patience of a heron.

"Let me show you what we do," she said. "Then Nanaji."

* * *

I want to set it down as she showed it to me, because I had imagined something else. I had imagined an archive, which it is: the house's papers from 1691, grants and letters and ledgers and the court records of a tiny state, all of it being photographed page by page and put where the family and, with leave, the villages could see it. I had imagined the family page and its map, which I knew. What I had not imagined was how much of the work was simply watching.

On the biggest screen Mehr has a plan of the fort and the ridge, drawn properly, with every bastion numbered and every building named. Scattered over it are small colored dots. Each dot is a place she watches.

Bastion nine, on the north wall, has a crack in it, a long diagonal crack from the parapet down to the rock, that opened in the earthquake of 1927 and has been moving, very slowly, ever since. Across it, at three points, someone has cemented small strips of glass, each the length of a finger. If the crack moves, the glass breaks. Once a month a photograph is taken of each strip from the same place, and the photograph goes onto the plan, under the dot, with the date. Two of the strips were whole. The third had cracked in March, a hairline, and Mehr had sent the photograph to an engineer in Bhopal, and he had come and looked, and had said it could wait until after the rains but not much longer.

The Hansa baori, the stepwell at the south end, has its own dot. Every month the water level is measured against a stone on the fourth landing, where someone in the 1890s carved a row of notches, and the number goes onto the plan. In June it was low, below the seventh notch. There was also a photograph of a fig tree, a young peepal, growing out of a joint in the wall on the third landing, its roots already wedging into the stone. *Remove before rains*, the note said, and then, in another hand, *Done 4 June. Roots treated.*

The chhatris on the river terrace have three dots. The river comes up in the monsoon and eats at the terrace from below, and the third chhatri, the one for Raja Gajraj Singh of the famine song, has a plinth that the water has undercut. Its dot was orange.

"Who takes the pictures?" I said.

"Bhagirath Kaka. He's the chowkidar. He's been looking after the fort for thirty-one years." Mehr scrolled. "Every first of the month he walks the whole circuit with his phone. There are white paint marks on the ground at each place, a small dot on a stone. He stands on the dot and takes the picture. Same place, same direction, every month. You can lay them one over the other and see if anything's changed." She showed me: bastion nine in January, February, March, April, May, June. The wall flickered faintly as she went through them, the light changing, the shadows moving, a crow on the parapet appearing and disappearing. The crack did not move, except in March, when the glass broke. "He doesn't like the phone. But he likes being right. When the engineer came, Bhagirath Kaka showed him the March picture before I could, and told him the date."

* * *

Then she showed me the family tree.

I had seen it on my laptop in Footscray, but not like this, on a big screen with the morning light falling across it. The House of Ranmaur, eleven generations, from Ranjit Dev in the 1690s down to Gurtej and Mehr and their cousins in Pune. Each name had a small photograph, or a painted portrait, or a blank square. Under each, there were dates, and places, and the beginnings of a life story that grew whenever anyone in the family added to it: a memory, a letter, a scanned document. Raja Gajraj Singh had nineteen entries, most of them from Manohar's work on the famine ledgers. Mehr's own mother had added a paragraph about her grandmother's cooking.

And beside it, not inside it but running parallel, linked at the places where the two families touched, was a second tree. It started with a blank square in the 1690s labeled *the singer who came with Ranjit Dev, name unknown*, and went down through Jagdev and my namesake and Dhaniram to my grandfather, and my father, and my aunt, and me.

There were lines drawn across between the two trees. Not marriages; there had never been a marriage between the two families. They were what Mehr called *bonds*: places where a member of one family had done something that changed the other. A thin line ran from Diwan Sujan Singh across to Jagdev, with the date 1858. Another ran from Raja Gajraj Singh to my great-great-grandfather, 1897. A third from Gurtej's parents to my grandfather, 1996.

My square had a photograph in it that I had never seen. It was me at about ten, on the eleven steps, in a school uniform with my hair standing up, singing something with my mouth wide open and both arms out. I had no idea who had taken it.

"Bua sent it," Mehr said. "Last year. She added three things. That one, and a photograph of your father playing the nagariya at a wedding in 1985, and a note about your great-grandfather Dhaniram." She clicked it open. My aunt's handwriting, photographed: *Dhaniram Dadda wept through the merger song because the flag that came down from the north bastion was the same flag that Diwan Sujan's riders carried to Jhansi. He told my mother this when he was old. He told nobody else.*

I read it twice.

"Did you know that?" I said.

"No. Nobody did. Your Bua only wrote it down because I asked her for one thing about every singer, and she said she would give me the thing nobody else knew." Mehr looked at me. "She has a great many of those."

* * *

The Raja was in the stables.

The stables of the fort are in the lower courtyard, on the north side, a long arcade of stone stalls built in the 1880s for forty horses. Now it holds three. They are Marwari mares, the breed of Rajasthan, with ears that curve inward until the tips almost touch, like a pair of hands about to clap. Two are bay. The third is gray, a pale dappled gray going white with age, with a dark muzzle, as if she has been drinking ink.

"Bijuri," the Raja said, when he saw me looking. "Every gray mare in this house has been called Bijuri since 1858. Lightning. This one's fourteen. Her great-great-grandmother came from Kesarmer, in Rajasthan, in 1981. My father bought her from the old Maharaja's brother, who knew more about horses than any man alive and told me so twice in one afternoon."

Raja Bhupendra Singh is eighty-two. He is tall and thin and stooped a little, with a narrow face and a white mustache trained out to the sides in the old Bundela way, and he was wearing a cotton kurta and a pair of riding breeches gone soft with age and a pair of leather sandals. He walks with a stick of polished bamboo with a silver top, which he does not lean on so much as point with. He had been running a hand down Bijuri's foreleg when I came in. He did not stop.

"You were sick on the polo ground," he said.

"I was eleven, Raja-sahab."

"It was very hot. And there were too many jalebis. Gurtej ate twice as many and was not sick at all. He said it was because Punjabis have stronger stomachs. You told him it was because Bundelis have better taste." He straightened up, and looked at me properly for the first time, a long assessing look, and I saw where Mehr had got her straight brows. "Your grandfather says you'll open the season."

"Yes."

"With Sujan."

"Yes, Raja-sahab."

He nodded. He took a handful of something from his pocket, dried chickpeas, and held it out to Bijuri, who took it with her lips, delicately, as if it were a coin.

"You know that I've never heard it," he said.

I did not know what to say.

"My father never heard it. His father never heard it. Nobody in my line has heard that song all the way through since it was made." He brushed the chickpea dust off his hand. "It's a custom. The house comes to the opening sitting. We sit on the dais in the baradari. Your family sings the welcome, and the song of the founding, and then, before the third song, the Raja stands up and leaves, and the family goes with him. Then your family sings Sujan, to the town, without us. Every year. My grandfather told me it was out of respect for the dead. That the house should not sit and be praised for a death it caused." He paused. "I believed that for sixty years."

"And now?"

"Now Mehr has been reading the papers." He looked out through the arch of the stable to the courtyard, where Bhagirath, a lean old man in a white dhoti and a green cap, was sweeping the stone with a broom made of twigs, in long slow strokes that made a sound like breathing. "There's a book. You'll know it. *Ranmaur Darpan*, the Mirror of Ranmaur. A history of the house, written by a court scholar in 1932 for my grandfather. It's very handsome. Red leather, gold edges. Every Raja, every battle, every grant of land. And it says that Raja Mahipat Singh, who ruled in 1857, was an only son."

"He had a brother," I said. "Sujan. Diwan Sujan Singh. He rode to Jhansi."

"In your book, yes." The Raja looked at me. "In mine, he does not exist. There is not one paper in the office with his name on it. Not one. Mehr has looked. Manohar has looked. A man who was the brother of a Raja, who had lands and horses and a wife, and there is no grant, no letter, no ledger, nothing." He tapped the stick, once, on the stone. "Either your family made him up, which I don't believe, or mine made him disappear. And if mine made him disappear, then I have been walking out of that sitting for sixty years for a reason nobody ever told me."

Bijuri pushed her ink-dark nose against his shoulder, looking for more chickpeas.

"Sing it well," he said. "I may stay this year. I haven't decided."

* * *

I went back down the eleven steps at noon, in the full white glare, stepping over the brick on the eleventh, and found my grandfather asleep on his cot with his plastered wrist on his chest and the radio murmuring the weather. A depression over the Bay of Bengal. The monsoon advancing into eastern Madhya Pradesh. Heavy rain likely in the Bundelkhand region from the start of next week.

I sat down on the floor beside his cot, and took the book out of its box, and opened it to the third song, and read it from the beginning, all of it, in Jagdev's broken-topped hand, very slowly, moving my lips like my aunt.

Two Lightnings

The rains came on Monday afternoon, and I heard them before anyone else in the lane, because I had the window open and my ears are what they are.

First there was the wind. It came from the east across the river, a long low roar that started far off, like traffic on a highway, and grew, and then it was on us, slamming shutters up and down the lane and lifting the dust off the street in a brown wall that rolled up the eleven steps and through the gate and over the fort. The light went yellow, then copper, then a strange dim green. The pigeons in the gate arch went silent all at once. Somewhere a steel bucket went bouncing down the lane, ringing like a bell. My mother ran out to pull the washing off the roof, shouting. And under it all, beneath the wind, a sound I had not heard in seven years and had not known I missed: a faint continuous hiss, very far away, like a radio between stations, that was rain falling on the other side of the river on a thousand acres of dry earth, coming closer.

Then the first drops hit the lane, fat and slow and far apart, each one making a dark coin in the dust and a small flat smack. Then they were not far apart. Then the hiss arrived, and the whole world turned to noise.

I stood in the doorway and let it soak me. The smell came up off the ground, that smell of wet earth after drought that has a name in every language in India and a scientific name in English that I can never remember, and I breathed it in until my head swam. Behind me, from his cot, my grandfather was laughing.

"Now," he said. "Now we can start Sujan."

* * *

I will tell the song as the song tells it, and where history disagrees, I will say so. My grandfather says that is the only honest way to sing it: to know where the song has made a man bigger than he was, and to sing him that big anyway, because that is what the song is for, but never to forget where the edges are.

It begins with a road and a horse going north, the line I had heard in my headphones in Footscray. Then it goes back, and starts again, at the beginning, in the winter of 1857.

That year, the whole of the north of India was on fire. You will know the outline. In May the sepoys at Meerut rose against the East India Company, and within weeks the rising had spread to Delhi and Kanpur and Lucknow and a hundred smaller places, soldiers and princes and farmers together, for a hundred different reasons that had been piling up for fifty years. In Jhansi, in June, the Company's sepoys mutinied too, and the British in the town were killed. What part the Rani played in that, historians have argued about ever since. What is not argued is what came next. Jhansi had been taken from her by the Company three years before, when her husband the Raja died and the British refused to recognize the son they had adopted. Now the Company had gone, and she took up the government of her husband's state, and began to prepare it for war, because she knew the British would come back.

She was perhaps twenty-nine. The books give different years for her birth. She had been married at about fourteen to a Raja much older than herself, and had lost her own baby son, and had a little adopted boy of about nine, Damodar Rao. She rode like a cavalryman. She fenced. She had been brought up among men's games in the household of the Peshwa's exiled court at Bithoor, near Kanpur, and she had carried on with them in the palace at Jhansi, to the scandal of some and the delight of others.

She spent the winter of 1857 fighting her neighbors. That is the part people forget. Orchha, to the south, sent an army against Jhansi that autumn, to take back old lands, and the Rani beat it off. Datia, too, had claims. Bundelkhand was not a single thing that rose together. It was a patchwork of small states with long memories, and every one of them had to choose, that winter, between the Company that was coming back and the queen in the fort on the Bangra hill.

Ranmaur was one of the smallest. It owed old loyalties to Orchha. It sat under the eye of the Company's political officer for Bundelkhand at Nowgong, three days' ride to the east. And in February 1858 a rider came to the east gate, up the eleven steps, with a letter.

* * *

The song gives him a dun horse with a dark stripe down its back and a turban gone gray with dust. It does not give him a name. He came, it says, at the hour when the lamps are lit, and the great drums in the drum-house were sounding the evening watch, and he climbed the steps on foot, leading his horse, because the steps are too steep to ride.

The letter was from the Rani. It was in Hindi, in a clerk's hand, and it had her seal on it. The song does not quote it. The song says only that she asked for what she was asking of every chief in Bundelkhand who might listen: men, horses, grain, powder, for the defense of her son's state against the army that was coming up from the south, by way of Saugor. And that she asked it in her own words at the end, under the clerk's, in a line the song calls *the line in the queen's hand*, which said something to the effect that a house that remembered how it had got its own land would understand what it meant to have it taken.

Raja Mahipat Singh called his council in the hall of audience. He was a careful man of about forty. He had ruled for seventeen years and had kept Ranmaur whole through droughts and debts and the Company's endless demands, and he had done it by never being the first to do anything. The song is not unkind to him. It gives him a long speech, sixteen lines, in which he lays out the arithmetic: Ranmaur had perhaps two hundred horse and five hundred foot; the Company had won at Delhi and was coming; Orchha was watching; the Company's man at Nowgong was watching; if Ranmaur sent a single man to Jhansi and the Rani lost, there would be no Ranmaur. And at the end of the speech he said no.

Then the song turns to his brother.

* * *

Diwan Sujan Singh was twenty-nine, the same age as the Rani, near enough, and the same age I am now. The song says that he was the best horseman in the state and the worst at accounts, which I believe, because nobody would invent that second part. He kept the stables. He had married at twenty a woman from a house near Chanderi named Ratan Kunwar, who the song says was taller than he was and laughed louder, and they had no children yet. He was, the song says, a man who sharpened his own sword. In a house with a hundred servants, that was a statement.

He stood up in the hall, after his brother said no, and said nothing at all. That is how the song does it. Mahipat speaks for sixteen lines and Sujan stands up in silence and walks out, and the next line is the stables, at midnight, and twelve men saddling horses in the dark with rags tied round the bits so they would not ring.

He took the gray mare. Bijuri. Lightning. The song spends four lines on her: her dark muzzle, her small ears, the way she would not let any man but Sujan put a foot in the stirrup, the way she ran with her head low like a hunting dog. She was the fastest horse in Ranmaur. She was also, the song does not quite say, the Raja's own.

And he took a singer.

* * *

Here is the part that is ours.

Jagdev was the son of the man who beat the great drum in the drum-house. He was twenty-six, unmarried, and had been singing in the fort since he was twelve. He was not a soldier, though like every man in Nagara Toriya he could use a stick and had been taught the sword. When the twelve were saddling in the dark, he came down from the drum-house, where he had been on the night watch, and stood in the door of the stables, and asked Sujan where he was going.

The song does not give Sujan's answer. It gives Jagdev's next line, which every child in our lane knows, because it is the reason our family exists in the form it does. Jagdev said that a singer who sings what he has not seen is only a parrot with a loud voice, and that if the Diwan was going to do something worth a song, he had better take the singer.

Sujan laughed, the song says, and gave him a horse.

They went out by the south gate, the small one by the stepwell, not the east, so as not to pass under the drum-house. They went north in the dark along the Jamni, through the villages, and by first light they were in Orchha's country, where they would have been stopped and probably killed. So they lay up all day in a ravine full of thorn and went on at night. On the second night they crossed the Betwa at a ford downstream of Orchha, below the chhatris, with the river low and the rocks pale in the starlight and the vultures, the song says, watching from the spires. On the third morning they saw the walls of Jhansi on the Bangra hill.

* * *

"Slower," my grandfather said. "You're galloping."

"The song's galloping, Dadda."

"The horses are galloping. The song is walking beside them, looking at everything. If you gallop too, nobody sees anything." He lay back. "Again. The ford."

I did the ford again. Outside the rain had settled into a steady roar on the tin awning over the door, a sound like frying oil, and the lane had become a brown stream with a scum of yellow neem flowers turning on it. My father had come in from the bus stand early because the road to Tikamgarh was flooded at the second bridge, and was sitting on his step, watching the water, not watching me. My aunt was in the kitchen making something with besan and green chillies that made the whole house smell of smoke and heat.

When I got to the vultures, my grandfather lifted one finger.

"Better."

* * *

What Sujan and his twelve did in Jhansi, the song tells in a passage I find hard to sing, because it is so close to the history books and yet nothing like them.

The books tell it from above. Sir Hugh Rose's army arrived before Jhansi in the third week of March 1858 and surrounded the city. His guns opened on the walls on the twenty-fifth. For eight days and nights they fired, and the Rani's guns fired back, from the fort and the city walls, and the books say the defenders fought harder than the British had expected anywhere. They mention her gunners. They mention a gunner called Ghulam Ghaus Khan, whose name every child in Jhansi knows. They mention that the women of the city carried ammunition and food to the walls under fire, and that the Rani was seen on the ramparts, directing. They mention that on the last day of March and the first of April a relief army under Tatya Tope, come from Kalpi to break the siege, was beaten on the banks of the Betwa, and that the dry jungle along the river caught fire in the fighting and the smoke hung over Jhansi for a day. They mention the assault on the third of April, the ladders, the breach, the street fighting, the burning.

The song tells it from the stable yard. Sujan's twelve were cavalry and had nothing to do on the walls. They stood by their horses in a courtyard below the fort for eight days, under the noise, feeding them, walking them, keeping them calm. That is most of the passage: horses. The song describes the sound of the guns, which Jagdev says was like the great drum beaten by a madman, and how Bijuri stood through it without moving, with her ears flat and her eyes on Sujan. It describes the great gun on the fort wall, the one the people of Jhansi called Kadak Bijli, the crashing lightning, and how Jagdev, hearing its name for the first time, turned to Sujan and said that there were two lightnings in Jhansi that spring, and only one of them was made of iron. The song describes the women coming down to the yard with chapatis and water, and a woman of the Rani's household, tall, in a man's turban, who stopped to look at Bijuri and ran her hand down the gray neck, and said something to Sujan that the song does not give, and went back up toward the walls. It does not say who she was. My grandfather says that every singer in Bundelkhand would like it to have been one of the famous women of the Rani's guard, and that is exactly why we must never say so.

Two of the twelve died in Jhansi, in the street fighting on the fourth of April. The song gives their names, and their villages. Kalyan of Khajuri. Ramdin of Pipraun. Manohar, who photographs the papers in Mehr's office, is from Pipraun. I asked him later if he had known. He had not. That night he added both names to the village's page in the archive, with the date, and a line to say where they came from: the song.

And on the night of the fourth of April, when the city was burning and the fort was about to fall, the Rani rode out of Jhansi with her son and a small escort, through the British lines, and rode all night and all the next day toward Kalpi on the Yamuna, about a hundred miles away, where Tatya Tope had gone. That ride is in every book.

What the books do not have, and the song does, is eleven tired horsemen from a state too small to put on a map, who saw her go from the stable yard, and saddled, and followed.

* * *

I sang it through that evening, from the first line to the ford, and from the ford to the stable yard, and from the yard to the night ride. It took nineteen minutes. It was the furthest I had ever got. When I finished, my voice was rough and my shirt was wet through and the rain had stopped, and there was a frog in the lane outside going like a cheap alarm clock.

My grandfather let the frog have the lane to itself. Then he said, "The woman in the turban. You rushed her."

"I didn't want to make too much of her."

"Then you made too little. She's in the song for a reason. Jagdev saw her. He didn't know who she was, and he put her in anyway, because she touched the horse." He closed his eyes. "Somebody touches the horse and goes back up to the walls. That's the whole war. Sing it like that."

From the step, without turning round, my father said, "He's right."

And then, as if he had not said it, he stood up and went out into the wet lane to see about the bus.

The Baradari in the Rain

On the morning of the first sitting my father tuned the drums.

I did not see him start. I woke at five to a sound I could not place, a slow, patient tapping, each tap followed by a long falling note like a question being withdrawn, and lay on my mat in the back room listening to it for some minutes before I understood. Then I got up and went to the door of the front room and stood there in the half dark.

He was sitting on the floor with his back to me, in a vest and a lungi, with a small charcoal brazier in front of him and the pair of nagariya drums beside it. The nagariya are small kettle drums, two of them, one larger and deeper, one smaller and higher, with bodies of fired clay and heads of goatskin laced down with leather thongs. In the dry months the skins go slack. In the rains, they go slacker. So before every sitting, someone has to hold each drum over a little heat, turning it slowly, until the skin tightens, and tap it, and listen, and turn it again, and tap, until it rings right. It is the drummer's job. In our family it was my great-grandfather's job, and then my grandfather's, and then for a few years in the 1980s it was my father's, before he stopped.

He was holding the big drum over the coals and turning it with both hands, like a man warming a child, and every few turns he lifted it away and tapped the skin with one finger and listened, his head tipped to one side. He did not know I was there. Or he did, and had decided not to.

I went back to my mat and lay down and listened until he had got both drums ringing a fourth apart, the big one deep and round as a well, the small one tight and bright. Then the tapping stopped, and I heard him put them down very carefully on the cloth, and get up, and go out into the lane, and I heard the clink of his steel tumbler at the tea stall on the corner and his voice saying something to the tea-seller about the road to Tikamgarh.

He had not played in the fort in thirty-nine years. Nobody had asked him to play that night. My grandfather's drummer for the last decade had been a cousin from the next lane, a cheerful man called Raju who drives an autorickshaw and plays like a man in a hurry. Raju was expected. Raju's drums were his own.

* * *

The office had put the sitting on the family page a week before. Mehr does this for everything the house holds: a notice, a date and place, a small photograph, and a note of who is welcome. For the first sitting of the season the note said *All of Ranmaur*, which is what it has said, in one form or another, since there was a Ranmaur. Under it, in the thread, the families abroad had been leaving messages. A man in Edison, New Jersey, whose grandmother was from Khajuri, said his family would gather on the Saturday to hear the recording together, and asked whether the singer could say Khajuri's name loudly when he came to it, because his grandmother had always said nobody ever did. A nurse in Dubai, from Bamhori, asked if the recording would be long, because she worked twelve-hour shifts. A family in Leicester said their son, who was nine, had been learning the first verse of the founding song from an old cassette and wanted to know whether the singer would do it fast or slow.

I read these in the morning, sitting on the step with my tea. My aunt read them over my shoulder. When we got to the boy in Leicester she said, "Slow. Tell him slow. The children always rush it," and went back inside.

* * *

The baradari is a pavilion in the middle of the inner courtyard of the fort, in front of the old palace. The name means twelve doors. It is a square platform of stone raised three steps above the courtyard, with a flat roof held up on twelve arches, three on each side, scalloped at the top like the edge of a leaf. There are no walls. In the old days it was where the Raja sat in the evenings in the hot season, to catch the wind from the river. In the rains it is where the Alha is sung, because a singer under a roof with no walls can be heard by everyone in the courtyard, and the courtyard can fill with people under tarpaulins and umbrellas, and the rain can fall all round.

By five o'clock the courtyard was full. The town had come up the eleven steps in the drizzle: men in white and checked lungis and plastic sandals, with their umbrellas; women in their good saris with the ends pulled over their heads against the rain, with children on their hips and children running; old men who had been coming to the first sitting for seventy years and had their places, near the front, on the left, under the tarpaulin that Bhagirath had strung from the palace wall. Durries were spread over the wet stone. Someone had brought a gas lamp. Someone else had brought a gas cylinder and a giant iron kadhai, and the smell of frying began to come across from the corner by the stables, where Mehr's mother and three women from the town were making gulgule, the sweet fritters of the rains, flour and jaggery and fennel seed dropped by the handful into hot oil, swelling up brown and knobbly.

On the dais at the back of the baradari, under the middle arch, they had set out a low cushioned seat for the Raja and rugs for his family. On the front of the platform, at the edge of the top step, they had set out a rug for the singer and the drummers.

I had brought four microphones.

Mehr had asked me what I needed, and I had told her: two small ones on stands at the front corners of the platform, for the courtyard and the rain; one on a stand near my mouth but below it, out of the way, for the voice; one hanging low over the drums. She had found the stands. I had brought the rest. I ran the cables along the back of the platform under the rugs and taped them down with my gaffer tape, and plugged them into the recorder, and put on my headphones, and stood in the middle of the baradari and said "one, two" in a normal voice and then sang a single Sa, not loud, and listened.

The baradari sounds like nothing else I have ever recorded. The roof is low and flat and the arches are open, so there is no echo, nothing coming back at you from walls. But the stone floor is hard and the stone ceiling is hard, and between them the voice goes back and forth very fast, so that it thickens, and then it goes out through the arches into the rain and is gone. And the rain is everywhere. It falls on the tarpaulins with a sound like a crowd murmuring, and on the stone of the courtyard with a sound like frying, and off the edge of the baradari roof in twelve little waterfalls, one between each arch, with a sound like a tap left running. In my headphones, my one Sa sat in the middle of all that like a lamp in a dark room.

I took the headphones off. Mehr was watching me from the side of the platform with the tablet in her arms.

"Is it all right?"

"It's beautiful," I said, and she looked at me oddly, because I think I had said it the way you say something you have just found out.

* * *

The house came at six.

The Raja first, in a white achkan and a white safa, walking slowly with his silver-topped stick, and the courtyard stood up for him in a long rustle, and he lifted his hand and the courtyard sat down. Behind him his son, Kunwar Rudra Pratap, up from Bhopal for the occasion, a broad gentle man of fifty-six in a gray kurta, who builds check dams for the state water department and has the sunburnt neck of a man who spends his life in dry riverbeds. Then Mehr's mother, Rajkumari Vasundhara, who had handed her ladle to someone else and come round the side of the baradari in a cotton sari with the hem wet and her hands smelling of fennel. Then cousins, and Rudra's wife, and two little boys in kurtas who were somebody's grandchildren and who had to be lifted onto the dais and told to sit still. They did not.

My grandfather had been carried up the eleven steps in a chair by four young men from our lane, an arrangement he had resisted for two days and accepted in the end only because the alternative was not going. He sat at the side of the platform, by the arch on the right, in a white kurta with his plaster cast in his lap, and he looked out over the courtyard and the town in the rain with an expression I can only describe as that of a general who has been told he must watch the battle from a hill.

My aunt was behind him. She had not come forward. She sat on the stone floor at the back of the baradari, against the pillar, among the women of our lane, with her sari over her head.

Raju sat down at the drums, cheerful, and slapped the big nagariya twice, to wake it up, and frowned.

"Who tuned these?" he said. "These aren't mine."

Everyone in our lane looked at my father, who was standing at the bottom of the steps, in his safari suit, holding an umbrella over nobody.

* * *

There is an order to the first sitting that has not changed in living memory.

The drums begin alone. They go on by themselves for two or three minutes, slowly at first and then faster, the big drum talking and the little drum answering, until the courtyard is quiet, until even the children are quiet, until there is nothing but the drums and the rain. That is how you know it has begun. Then the singer stands and sings the welcome, which is short and is not really a song at all but a sort of calling out, in the Alha meter, of the names of the house: Ranjit Dev who came up the ridge, and his son, and his son, down eleven generations to the Raja who is sitting in front of you. Then the drums again. Then the founding song.

Raju played the opening. He played it well, if fast. And then he stopped, and the courtyard waited, and I stood up.

I want to tell this honestly. I was not good. I was not bad, but I was not good. I stood in the stance my grandfather had beaten into me, feet apart and one forward, and lifted my hand, and breathed from the bottom of the baori, and sang the welcome, and my voice came out clear and true and about two-thirds as loud as it should have been. I could hear it in the open arches. It went out into the rain and did not reach the back wall. It reached the tarpaulin and stopped.

I saw the old men near the front lean forward, very slightly, the way you lean toward a radio that is not quite tuned.

I got through the welcome. I got through the names. And I began the founding song, Ranjit Dev coming up the ridge in his war-crown, and on the fourth line, on the long rising note where he sees the old ruined wall on the rock for the first time, my voice cracked.

Not badly. A small dry crack, like a stick breaking underfoot. The kind of thing nobody would notice in a studio, and nobody would have noticed on the recording if I had not been the one editing it. But in that courtyard, three hundred people noticed. I felt them notice. I felt the whole courtyard draw back, a fraction of an inch, the way a horse draws back from a gate it does not trust.

I stopped. The drums went on without me for a beat, two beats, and then Raju looked up and stopped too.

And in the silence, with only the rain, from the back of the baradari, I heard a woman's voice.

It was very low. It was not singing, exactly. It was saying the next line under her breath, the way you say a phone number to yourself so as not to lose it, in a murmur that would not have carried three feet, except that I had a microphone hanging over the drums and another on the corner of the platform and my headphones round my neck, and through the headphones, tiny and clear, I heard every word.

My aunt. Sitting against the pillar, with her sari over her head, with her eyes shut, saying the fifth line of the founding song for me, so that I would know where I was.

I did not look round. I took the line from her, at the same pitch she had said it, and sang it.

* * *

The rest of the founding song went better. Not perfect. Better. On the line about the spring below the wall, I found the place where the voice is supposed to open, and it opened, and I heard it hit the far wall of the courtyard and come back off the stone of the palace, and an old man at the front said "Wah!" loudly, as if he had been waiting all evening for permission.

Then the drums. Then the moment before the third song.

The Raja stood up.

The courtyard knew. The courtyard had watched this every year for longer than anyone in it had been alive. There was no murmur. The family began to rise, the cousins, Rudra, the little boys, Mehr's mother, who looked at her father and then at me. Mehr did not rise. She was sitting at the side with her tablet, and she stayed sitting.

The Raja walked to the back of the dais and down the three steps on the far side of the baradari, into the rain, and stopped.

He did not go on. He stood at the foot of the steps, under the edge of the roof, just outside the twelve arches, where the water came down off the cornice in a sheet between him and the light. His family stood behind him, uncertain, under their umbrellas. From where the courtyard sat, he had left. From where I stood, at the front of the platform, I could see him through the falling water, the white safa and the white achkan and the silver top of the stick, a shape in the rain, waiting.

I looked at my grandfather. My grandfather was looking at the Raja.

"Sing," he said, not loudly.

So I sang Sujan, from the first line to the ford, which was as far as we had agreed for that night. I sang the road going north and the horse, and the winter of 1857, and the rider with the letter, and Mahipat's sixteen lines, and Sujan standing up in silence and walking out. I sang the stables at midnight and the rags round the bits and Jagdev in the doorway. And on the first beat of the stables passage, under me, without warning, the drums changed.

The big drum dropped. The little drum went tight and quick. The rhythm that came up from behind me was not Raju's hurry but something slower and harder, a walking beat, a stable-yard beat, horses being led in the dark, and it was so right that I nearly lost my place.

I did not turn round. I knew who it was. I had heard him tune those drums in the dark that morning.

When I got to the ford, and the vultures on the chhatris, and stopped, there was a silence, the long full silence of a courtyard that has not decided yet what it thinks. Then the old man at the front said "Wah," again, quietly this time. And then the whole courtyard was saying it, and clapping, and the children were shrieking for no reason, and the rain came down harder, as if it had been waiting too.

I turned round then. My father was sitting at the drums where Raju had been, with Raju beside him looking delighted, and my father had his fingers spread on the two skins to stop them ringing, and he was looking at the floor.

At the back of the platform, my aunt had pulled her sari further over her face. Her shoulders were moving.

And through the falling water at the far side of the baradari, I saw the Raja turn, very slowly, and walk away across the courtyard toward the palace, with his family behind him and his stick tapping on the wet stone. He had not come back in. He had not gone away until it was over.

* * *

Later, after the gulgule had been eaten and the durries rolled and the courtyard swept, I sat on the steps of the baradari with my headphones on and listened back to the fifth line of the founding song. To the gap. To the drums going on without me and stopping. To the rain. And to my aunt, under it all, saying the words.

Mehr sat down beside me. "Do you want me to cut it?" she said. "Before it goes on the page?"

"No," I said. "Dadda said keep it. With my name."

She nodded and wrote something on the tablet. Then she said, "Should I put hers in too? With her name?"

I thought about that for a while, with the rain dripping off the baradari roof onto the steps in front of us, one drop at a time now, slowing.

"Ask her," I said.

The Road Back from Gwalior

It was my aunt who said yes first, the morning after the first sitting.

She said it to Mehr, in the kitchen, with her back turned, while she was rolling out chapatis. Mehr had come down the eleven steps early with the tablet and asked her plainly, the way she asks everything: whether her voice, saying the fifth line, could stay in the recording that went to the families abroad, and whether it could carry her name. My aunt did not stop rolling. The rolling pin went back and forth, back and forth, with the little hollow clack it makes at the end of each stroke on the board, and the chapati grew rounder and thinner, and when it was done she flipped it onto the hot tawa with her fingers and said, "Write Phoolwati. Daughter of Hiralal. Don't write widow."

Mehr wrote it.

By the Sunday, the man in Edison had left a message on the page to say that his family had listened on their Saturday morning, all eleven of them in his sister's living room, and that when the voice under the voice said the fifth line his mother had started to cry and said that was exactly how her own grandmother used to do it at weddings in Khajuri, under her breath, so the young men would not lose their place.

The boy in Leicester wanted to know if the lady could do the whole thing.

* * *

The second sitting was the following Thursday. In between, we did the hardest part of the song.

I had known it was there. I had read it in the book on my first day, sitting on the floor by my grandfather's cot, moving my lips. But reading a thing and singing it are not the same, and the part of Sujan that runs from Kalpi to Gwalior is the part where reading it is easy and singing it is not.

My grandfather taught it to me lying down. His heart was giving him trouble that week, the doctor from Jhansi had come and gone and left new pills, and he was not allowed to sit up for long. So I sat on the floor beside his cot with the book open on my knees, and he lay on his back with his eyes shut and his good hand on his chest, and sang it to me in a whisper, a line at a time, and I sang each line back at full voice, and the whole lane heard every word.

* * *

The eleven who followed the Rani out of Jhansi did not catch her up that night. The song is honest about that. She had the best horses in Jhansi and a small fast escort and every reason to ride as she had never ridden, and Sujan's men had been standing in a yard for eight days under the guns. They rode all night on her track, north and east across the dark country toward the Yamuna, and in the morning they were alone, and they went on.

They reached Kalpi on the second day. Kalpi stands on the high bank of the Yamuna, on the old road between the north and the Deccan, and in the spring of 1858 it was the last great stronghold of the rising in central India, full of soldiers and guns and stores and the forces of Tatya Tope and the Rao Sahib. The Rani was there. The song does not say Sujan spoke to her. It says he saw her, once, across a crowded courtyard, giving orders, and that she had changed her clothes and looked as if she had slept for a week, and he had not slept at all.

They stayed in Kalpi five weeks. It was April and then May, and the heat came down on the plain like a lid. The song has a long passage about the heat, which I did not understand when I first read it and understand better now, having stood in a stone courtyard in Bundelkhand in late June. It says the sun at Kalpi in May would turn a sword-blade too hot to hold, and that men tied wet cloths round the hilts. It says that water was carried up from the river in leather bags and was warm as blood by the time it reached the top of the bank. It says that Bijuri would not stand in the sun at all, and Sujan built her a shade from his own blanket and two lances, and slept beside her on the bare ground.

And it says that Jagdev went down into the town, to the paper-makers' lane by the river, and bought a bundle of paper.

That line has always made the courtyard laugh. A man in the middle of a war, in the heat, with the British coming, going shopping. My grandfather says Jagdev put it in on purpose, to make them laugh, and also to tell them something: that he already knew, at Kalpi, that he would be the one to bring the story home.

The paper is in the wooden box under my grandfather's cot. It is the book. I have touched it.

* * *

On the seventh of May there was a battle at Kunch, a town on the road between Jhansi and Kalpi, where the rebel army came out to stop the British. It was lost. The books say the heat that day was so great that men on both sides died of the sun without a wound on them. The song says two more of Sujan's men died there, and names them, and names their villages. Then on the twenty-second and twenty-third of May the British came to Kalpi itself, and Kalpi fell too, and two more of the twelve were left behind on the river bank below the town.

And then something happened that the books still find astonishing. The Rani and Tatya Tope and the Rao Sahib, with what was left of their army, did not scatter. They went west, to Gwalior, the greatest fortress in central India, whose ruler, Scindia, was the Company's ally. And on the first of June, when they came before Gwalior, Scindia's own army went over to them. Scindia fled to Agra. In a single day, the beaten rebels had the fort and the treasury and the guns of Gwalior.

The song is wild at this point. Jagdev was twenty-six and he had seen something he did not believe, and the meter breaks into a gallop that my grandfather says even he could never sing all the way through without running out of breath. Six of Sujan's twelve were left. They rode into Gwalior behind the Rani's people under the great rock of the fort, and the song says Bijuri went up the road to the gate with her ears pricked and her tail high, as if she had been born there.

Two weeks. That is all they had.

* * *

The British came to Gwalior in the middle of June. On the seventeenth, at a place to the east of the city called Kotah-ki-Serai, there was a fight. The Rani was in it, on horseback, in a cavalryman's dress. A British cavalry regiment, the 8th Hussars, charged the rebel position. In the confusion of that charge and the fighting after it, the Rani of Jhansi was wounded, and died.

The books disagree about how. They disagree about whether it was the seventeenth or the eighteenth. Some say her horse, a new one, would not take a jump across a stream. Some say she was cut down. They agree that she died fighting, and that her own people carried her away and burned her body nearby before the British could reach it, and that the British general who had fought her across half of central India later wrote that she had been the best and bravest of all the leaders of the rising.

She was twenty-nine or thirty. It depends which book.

The song does not describe her death. Jagdev did not see it. He saw only the charge.

He saw the horsemen coming in a long line, at the trot and then at the gallop, with the dust going up behind them like a wall. He saw Sujan wheel Bijuri round to face them and go forward with the other five, the last six of the twelve from Ranmaur, a tiny knot of riders on the edge of a much bigger fight. He saw the lines meet. And then he was in it himself, on the borrowed horse, with a sword he had been taught to use as a boy in the lane below the drum-house and had never once used in earnest, and he saw nothing for a while except what was in front of him.

When it was over, Sujan was on the ground. Bijuri was standing over him.

* * *

I stopped there, the first time. I put the book down on the floor and sat with my back against the cot and did not sing the next line.

My grandfather let the silence be. I could hear him breathing, slow and shallow, and the fan knocking, and, from the kitchen, my aunt grinding something in the stone mortar, a slow grating rhythm, round and round.

"Why did he go?" I said at last. "Mahipat said no. Sujan went anyway. He took eleven men from the villages and nine of them died, and the house didn't even say his name afterward. Why did he go?"

"The song doesn't say."

"I know the song doesn't say. I'm asking you."

My grandfather opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling.

"My grandfather told me," he said, "that Jagdev was asked that question every year for the rest of his life. In the courtyard, after the singing. By the old men, by the young men, by the Political Agent's clerk once, in 1871, who came to hear the song and stayed to ask. And Jagdev always said the same thing. He said, *Because she asked.*" My grandfather rolled his head toward me on the pillow. "That's all. She asked, and his brother said no, and he thought that a house that had got its own land by asking for it should not say no to someone asking to keep hers. It's in the letter. The line in her hand. That was the whole of his reason."

"That's not enough to die for."

"No," my grandfather said. "It isn't. That's why it's a song."

* * *

The rest is short. The song makes it short, as if Jagdev could not bear to stay in it.

He got down. He went to Sujan. Sujan was alive, for a little while, and said something that the song gives in one line and that I will not write here, because it belongs to the courtyard and to the rain. Then he was not alive. And Jagdev, and the two men of Ranmaur who were still standing, carried him out of that place in the dusk to a stream nearby and burned him there as best they could, with the wood they could find, and gathered up what they could gather, and wrapped it in a cloth.

Jagdev took the sword. He took Bijuri, who would not be led by anyone but would follow him, the song says, as long as he carried the sword.

Then they rode home.

It was late June. The rains broke on them on the road. They came south and east in the downpour, three men and four horses, avoiding the towns, through a country full of British patrols and armed villagers and men looking for rebels to hang, crossing rivers that were rising every day. They crossed the Sindh. They crossed the Pahuj. They crossed the Betwa at the ford below Orchha, in flood this time, swimming the horses, and one of the three was swept away and was found the next day on a sandbank, alive, without his horse. On the twentieth day, in the rain, they came along the Jamni and saw the ridge, and the fort on its spine, and the east gate.

That was why we sing Sujan in the rains. It was in the rains that he came home.

* * *

The second sitting was on the ninth of July. It rained from noon, steady and warm. My father tuned the drums without being asked, in the dark, before dawn, and I lay on my mat and listened, and this time I did not get up.

I sang from the ford to the gate. The heat at Kalpi. The paper. Kunch, and the two men. Gwalior, and the gallop that I could not get to the end of without breathing in the middle of a line, and when I did, I heard my grandfather, at the side of the platform, snort, and then laugh. The charge. Bijuri standing over Sujan. The stream at dusk.

The road home in the rain.

And the gate.

The song ends at the gate. Jagdev comes up the eleven steps on foot, in the rain, leading Bijuri, carrying the sword across both hands with the scabbard on it. At the top of the steps, under the arch, stands Raja Mahipat Singh, and beside him a clerk from the political office at Nowgong, a man in a black coat with an umbrella, who has been sent to Ranmaur that week to make inquiries about men from the state who were said to have gone to Jhansi.

Jagdev holds out the sword.

Mahipat looks at it. He looks at the clerk. He looks at the mare, which was his own.

And he says, *I have no brother.*

And he turns, and goes back into the fort, and the clerk follows him, and the doors of the east gate, which have stood open for as long as anyone can remember, are closed for the first time in the song, and Jagdev is left standing at the top of the eleven steps in the rain, with the sword across his hands.

That is where the song of Sujan ends. It does not say what Jagdev did next. It does not need to. Everyone in the courtyard can see the red bundle in his mind's eye, and the rafters, and our lane.

* * *

I sang the last line, *I have no brother*, and the drums stopped, and the courtyard was completely silent.

And in that silence, very clearly, from the far side of the baradari, outside the twelve arches, under the edge of the roof where the water was falling, I heard the tap of a stick on wet stone. Once. Then again. Then going away, slowly, across the courtyard, toward the palace.

He had stayed again. He had stayed outside, again, until the end. And this time, I knew, he had heard what his house had said at the gate.

Singing at the Bottom of the Well

On the first of August I went round the fort with Bhagirath.

He had not asked me. Mehr had suggested it, on the grounds that I had good ears and he had good eyes and between us we might notice something, and Bhagirath had agreed on the grounds that I was Hiralal's grandson and would therefore be useful for carrying the ladder. So at six in the morning, in a fine warm drizzle, I met him at the east gate with the aluminium ladder on my shoulder, and we went round.

He is sixty-eight and as thin as a tent pole, with a gray stubble and a green woollen cap that he wears in all weathers, and a white dhoti tucked up for walking, and rubber sandals. He carries a phone in a plastic bag tied with a rubber band, and a stick, and a small notebook, and a pencil behind his ear. He has walked the walls of the fort every day for thirty-one years. He knows every stone that has moved in that time, and some, he says, that only thought about it.

The white dots are where Mehr said they would be. Small round marks of white paint on a flat stone, or on the rock, or once on the top of a broken pillar, each one about the size of a coin. At each dot Bhagirath stopped, set his feet exactly on either side of it, untied the bag, took out the phone, held it up with both hands at the height of his chin, and took a single photograph. Then he looked at the photograph, frowned, took another one, and put the phone back in the bag and tied the rubber band. Then he wrote something in the notebook in pencil. Then we walked on.

"Why the notebook," I said, at the third dot, "if the picture goes to Mehr?"

"The picture goes to Mehr," he said. "The notebook is for me." He showed me. Each page was a date and a list of places, and beside each place a word or two. *Bastion nine: same. Gate step: brick still there. Chhatri three: water at second stone.* Thirty-one years of them, he said, in forty-four notebooks, in a tin trunk in his house. "The phone sees the wall. I see what the wall is going to do."

Mehr, it turned out, had already photographed all forty-four notebooks. They were on the family page, in the archive, under his name. He knew this. He did not entirely approve.

* * *

We came to the baori last.

The Hansa baori is at the far south end of the ridge, where the fort wall comes down off the rock toward the river, and you reach it through a small gate in the wall, low and narrow, the south gate, the one that Sujan's twelve rode out of in the dark. Beyond the gate there is a flat terrace of stone, and in the middle of the terrace there is a hole in the earth.

It is a long rectangle, perhaps thirty paces from end to end and eight across, cut straight down into the granite of the ridge. You come to its edge with no warning, and look down, and down, and the walls fall away below you in great steps and landings, five of them, each landing a little narrower than the one above, each one with a gallery of short stone pillars along the sides, so that the whole thing looks like an upside-down palace sunk into the rock. A single straight flight of stairs runs down the middle of the long axis from the top to the water. At the far end, opposite the stairs, the shaft goes straight down in a round well, where in the old days a bullock walked a ramp to pull up water in leather bags. The stone is gray and pink and green with moss. Ferns grow from every joint. On the second landing, carved into the facing of the gallery, there is a row of fish, and a pair of parrots with their beaks touching, and a horse.

And at the bottom, after a month of rain, there is water. Green and still and full of floating leaves, with the sky in it.

Bhagirath went down the stairs ahead of me, quick and sure-footed on the wet stone, and I came after with the ladder, slowly, and with every step down the air got cooler and the sound changed.

* * *

I have to describe the sound, because it is the point of this chapter.

At the top of the baori, on the terrace, you hear everything: the rain on the stone, the crows, a motorbike on the road by the river, women's voices from the town. As you go down the first flight, those sounds go thin and high, as if someone were turning down the bass. By the second landing they are faint. By the third, they are gone, and what replaces them is the well.

A stepwell is a stone box open at the top. Sound that is made inside it bounces from wall to wall to wall, and very little gets out through the opening, because the opening is above you and sound mostly goes sideways. So a voice in a stepwell does not die away. It goes round and round. I clapped my hands once on the fourth landing, standing beside the stone with the notches, and listened to the clap go up the walls and come back down and go up again, a long dissolving rattle like a handful of gravel poured slowly onto a drum, and I counted, and it was nearly four seconds before it was gone.

Four seconds. In the best concert hall in Melbourne it is a little over two.

Bhagirath was watching me with an expression of patient tolerance.

"Water's at the third notch," he said. "Write that down. Your hands are drier than mine."

I wrote it down in his notebook, under the date. He took his photograph of the notch stone, standing on the white dot at the edge of the fourth landing. Then he took another of the place on the third landing where the young peepal had been, with its roots treated in June. A tiny new leaf had come out of the joint, bright red, the shape of a heart. He looked at it for a while, and then took out a small pair of scissors, and reached over, and snipped it off, and put it in the plastic bag with his phone.

"It will come back," he said. "They always come back. You just have to come back more often."

* * *

Here is why it matters that a voice in a stepwell does not get out.

After the sword came home in July 1858, the Company's political officer at Nowgong sent a letter to Ranmaur. Manohar found a copy in the house papers, in English, with a Hindi translation clipped to it, a stiff formal letter in a clerk's copperplate. It informed His Highness the Raja that inquiries had established that a party of horsemen from the state of Ranmaur had joined the rebel Rani at Jhansi and been present at Kalpi and Gwalior; that His Highness's own conduct appeared to have been loyal, and his statement that the leader of the said party had no connection with the ruling family had been noted; but that a fine was imposed on the state, of a sum that Manohar says would have been about two years of its revenue; and that the two villages from which the dead men came, Khajuri and Pipraun, were transferred to a neighbouring state that had stayed loyal, as a mark of the government's displeasure.

So the house paid. And the villages of Kalyan and Ramdin, who died in the street fighting in Jhansi, stopped being Ranmaur.

And the song was forbidden.

Not by the British. Manohar has found nothing to say the British ever heard of it. By the house. Raja Mahipat Singh sent word to Nagara Toriya, in the first week after the gate, that the song of the Diwan was not to be sung in the fort, nor in the town, nor anywhere it could be heard by a stranger. And for twenty-one years, while Mahipat lived, it was not.

Except here.

* * *

My aunt told me this part. She told it to me that evening, sitting on the step of our house in the dusk, peeling garlic into a steel bowl, while my grandfather slept.

"After the sittings," she said, "when the men had sung the other songs and gone home, the women of the lane would take the lamps and go down the hill by the back path, to the south gate, and through it, and down the steps of the baori. All the way down, to the bottom landing, by the water. Jagdev's mother. His wife, when he married. His sisters. Later his daughters. They sat on the bottom step with the lamps, and Jagdev sat with them, and he sang it. All of it. Quietly. And the well kept it." She pressed a clove of garlic with her thumbnail and the skin split. "That's how they learned it. The women. Because there were no men in the courtyard to hear it, only the women in the well. The men learned it later, when it was allowed again. The women had it first."

"For twenty-one years."

"Every rainy season. Every Thursday." She dropped the clove in the bowl. "My grandmother said that when you sang in the baori at night, with the lamps, the voice went round and round the walls and you could still hear it after it had stopped, and the old women said that was Sujan listening. It isn't. It's the stone. But they said it."

"When did it stop? The forbidding."

"When Mahipat died. 1879. His son Gajraj Singh sent for Jagdev and said the song could come back into the fort. And then he came to the first sitting, the next rains, and sat on the dais, and before the song began he stood up and walked out. The first time. And every Raja since has done the same." She shrugged. "Gajraj said it was respect. Jagdev never said what he thought it was."

I sat on the step with her for a while, listening to the frogs, which had started up all down the lane in the dusk, hundreds of them, in the puddles and ditches and in the stone channel along the edge of the street, a thick pulsing chorus that came and went in waves.

"Bua," I said. "When the women sang it in the baori. Was it the same song?"

My aunt stopped peeling.

"Mostly," she said.

Then she got up with the bowl and went inside, and that was all I could get out of her.

* * *

The next morning, at first light, I went back to the baori alone with my field recorder and two microphones.

I went down to the bottom landing, where the steps go into the water, and set the microphones on stands on either side of me, facing up the walls. It was not raining. The sky in the water was white, and the well was so quiet I could hear a single drop falling somewhere from a fern on the third landing, every few seconds, and the drop's echo, and the echo's echo.

I did not sing Sujan. My grandfather had been clear: Sujan in the fort, in the season, and nowhere else. I sang the stepwell song instead, the second song in the book, the one he calls the dullest and would least like to lose: Hansa Kunwar and the three years without rain, and the masons, and the baskets of rubble going up the steps, one by one, two hundred thousand of them. It is a work song, really. It has a beat like feet on stairs.

In the well, it was something else.

The voice went up the walls and came down and met itself, and every note I sang was still sounding when I sang the next one, so that the song built up around me as I went, layer on layer, the way the stones of the well were built up layer on layer, until I was standing at the bottom of a column of my own voice that went all the way to the sky. When I stopped, it did not stop. It went on for four seconds, then three, then a faint high ringing like a glass, then nothing. And then the drop from the fern.

I stood there for a while.

Then I took out my phone and sent the recording to Gurtej, in Melbourne, where it was the middle of the Sunday class, with no message.

His answer came back an hour later, while I was climbing the stairs.

*Bro. Where is that.*

*Hansa baori. Bottom step.*

A pause. Then: *Played it for the kids in the gym. Japji says it sounds like a giant singing in a bucket. That's a compliment from Japji.*

Then: *Booked. Landing Delhi 19 August. Mum says I'm staying till the middle of September and then I'm not allowed to leave till you've finished the season. Tell Dadda I'm bringing the sticks.*

* * *

That evening, Mehr showed me the map.

She had redrawn the old state on it, the forty-one villages, with their boundaries as they were in 1857, from Manohar's work on the papers. Thirty-nine of the villages were shaded in the soft ochre she uses for Ranmaur. Two, on the northern edge, toward the Betwa, were outlined in a dotted line and left white. Khajuri. Pipraun.

There were pins in both of them anyway. Fourteen in Khajuri, from Edison and Surat and Muscat. Nine in Pipraun, from Leicester and Bhopal and a place in Ontario called Mississauga. One of the Pipraun pins was Manohar's.

"They're not Ranmaur," Mehr said. "Not since 1858. Not in any paper. But the families keep marking them. I asked one, in Leicester, why. She said, *Because that's where we're from.*" Mehr clicked the dotted line, and a box came up with the date of the transfer and a link to the Nowgong letter and, under it, a line she had added herself: *Kalyan of Khajuri and Ramdin of Pipraun died at Jhansi in April 1858. Their villages were taken from the state because of it. The house did not record their names. The singers did.*

"Nanaji read that," she said. "On Thursday. After the sitting."

"What did he say?"

"He asked me how much the fine was. In today's money." She closed the box. "Then he asked me to find out if there's anyone left in Khajuri and Pipraun from Kalyan's and Ramdin's families. He wants to know their names."

The Brigadier's Sticks

Gurtej came up the eleven steps at ten past six on the morning of the twenty-first of August with a long canvas bag over his shoulder and his turban already a little crooked from the overnight bus, and the first thing he did was step on the brick on the eleventh step.

"Who put a brick there?"

"Bhagirath Kaka. As a warning."

"Of what?"

"Of the step."

He looked at the brick. He looked at me. "This is why your family needs an engineer," he said, and hugged me, and I smelled diesel and cardamom and the inside of a bus, and under it the coconut oil he uses on his beard, which I have smelled every Sunday for five years in a school gym in Craigieburn and had not known I would be so glad to smell again.

* * *

He had brought the sticks.

He unzipped the canvas bag on the floor of my grandfather's front room, while my grandfather watched from his cot and my aunt watched from the kitchen door and my mother brought tea. Inside, wrapped in an old army blanket, were two gatka sticks. Not the light practice sticks we use in Craigieburn, with their foam ends for the children. These were male bamboo, the solid kind the herders cut for their lathis, heavy, a little longer than a man's arm, cured so long in kitchen smoke that they had gone the dark glossy brown of a violin, with the grip bound in thin brass wire and a brass cap at the end. With them was a small round shield of hard leather, the farri, dented, with four brass bosses on its face.

My grandfather held out his good hand. Gurtej put one of the sticks in it.

He weighed it. He turned it over. He ran his thumb down the brass wire on the grip, where it had worn smooth and bright. Then he gave it back to Gurtej, very carefully, the way you give someone back a baby.

"He made them," my grandfather said. "In 1968. He cut the bamboo himself from the clump by the polo-ground tank, and hung it over your great-grandmother's stove for a whole winter to cure, and she complained about it every day. He said every singer should know how to fight, or he wouldn't sing it right." He tipped his head at Gurtej. "I gave them to this one when he went to Australia. I said, bring them back."

"I brought them back," Gurtej said.

"You took ten years."

"Eleven, Dadda. You're the one who taught me to count."

My grandfather laughed, and then coughed, and my aunt came out of the kitchen and made him lie down. But he was still smiling.

* * *

I should tell the story of the man who made the sticks, since he is half of Gurtej.

His name was Inderjit Singh Grewal. He was born in 1934 in a village on the road from Ludhiana to Raikot, in the flat wheat country of central Punjab, the son of a farmer and the grandson of a soldier. That grandfather had gone to France in the first winter of the First World War with his regiment, a Sikh battalion from Ludhiana, and had come home from the mud of Flanders in 1915 with a wound in his leg and a medal and a lifelong dislike of rain. Inderjit grew up on his stories, and joined the army at twenty, and was commissioned into the Sikh Regiment, and spent the next thirty-four years in it, from second lieutenant to brigadier.

In 1966 he was a major, thirty-two years old, posted with his battalion to Jhansi. And on a Sunday in November that year, at an army horse show on the parade ground at Babina, south of the city, he rode in the lemon-cutting.

Lemon-cutting is an old cavalry test of the sword. A lemon is set on top of a post about the height of a rider's knee, and you come at it at full gallop with a sabre and try to slice it clean in two without touching the post or checking the horse. It is very old and very hard, and in 1966 there were still a handful of men in central India who could do it. One was the major from Punjab. Another was a young man of twenty-two from a small former princely state twenty-odd miles away, who had ridden over with two grooms and a gray mare and entered himself in the civilian class on the grounds that there was no other class he was allowed to enter.

They both cut the lemon on all three runs. They rode it off. They both cut it again. On the seventh run the young man's mare stumbled, and his blade went into the post, and the major cut his lemon clean and won, and rode over afterward and handed the young man his own riding cane, because, he said, the mare had deserved a prize more than either of them.

The young man was Kunwar Bhupendra Singh of Ranmaur. The mare was a Bijuri. The cane hangs on the wall of the Raja's study to this day, with the date written on a paper label tied to the handle.

* * *

For three years, until his battalion moved, the major came to Ranmaur at weekends.

The Raja told me this himself, that afternoon, sitting in a cane chair in the stable arcade with Bijuri's head over the half-door beside him, while the rain came down in the courtyard and Gurtej, who had heard it all a hundred times, sat on an upturned bucket and oiled the sticks.

"He came for the horses," the Raja said. "That's what he said. He said there was nobody in the cantonment who could talk about horses for more than five minutes without mentioning polo, and he didn't play polo, he thought it was golf on a horse. So he came here. We rode. We talked about horses. He taught me to cut a lemon properly, and I taught him the country. Every ford on the Jamni, every ruin on every ridge. And then on Sunday evenings he'd go down to the polo ground and teach the boys of the town to fight with sticks."

"Gatka," I said.

"Gatka. He'd learned it as a boy, in his village, from an old man who'd learned it in the army. He did it for exercise, he said. To keep the feet quick. But you could see it was more than that." The Raja turned his head and looked at Gurtej. "Your grandfather moved like water, beta. I've never seen anything like it. Fifty boys from Ranmaur on the polo ground with lathis, and one Sikh major in the middle of them in a vest and a patka, and not one of them could touch him."

Gurtej did not look up from the sticks, but he was smiling.

"And then he heard the Alha."

* * *

It was the rains of 1967. The major came up for a weekend in August and found the courtyard full and the drums going and a singer of twenty-nine on the platform of the baradari with a sword in his hand. My grandfather. The major had never heard Alha. He sat on a durrie at the back, among the townspeople, with his knees up, and listened for four hours, and at the end of it he went up to the singer and said, in Hindi with a heavy Punjabi accent, that he had grown up hearing the dhadi singers in the villages of Punjab, men who sang the old ballads of heroes and battles to a little waisted drum and a sarangi, and that he had thought there was nothing in the world like them, and he had been wrong.

My grandfather has told me this story perhaps a hundred times. He always ends it the same way. "He said, *You people shout even louder than we do.* It was the best thing anyone ever said to me."

They became friends, the singer and the major. Different friends from the Raja and the major. The major came down to Nagara Toriya and sat in this very room, on the floor, and ate my great-grandmother's bafauri, which are dumplings of ground chana dal steamed in a cloth and then tempered in hot oil with mustard seed and curry leaves, and asked for the recipe, and was refused, and came back the next week and asked again. He sang my grandfather a verse of a dhadi ballad about a battle on the frontier. My grandfather sang him a verse of Sujan, which in 1967 he had no business singing outside the season, and has never told anyone but me. And in the dry months of 1968, the major cut bamboo by the polo-ground tank and made a pair of sticks, and taught the singer to fight.

"Because every singer should know how it feels," my grandfather said that evening, when I asked him why. "He said, if you sing a sword, you should know what your wrist does when someone hits it. Otherwise you're only guessing."

* * *

The next afternoon at four, in the inner courtyard of the fort, in a gray drizzle, Gurtej taught gatka.

He had meant to teach only me. He had brought the old sticks and two light practice sticks from Melbourne, and the plan was that we would do an hour of paintra on the stone where nobody would see me fall over, while the town had its afternoon sleep. But Bhagirath saw us from the wall and came down to watch, and Bhagirath's grandson came with him, straight from school, and Bhagirath's grandson told his friends, and by half past four there were eleven boys and two girls between the ages of eight and fifteen standing in a row on the wet flagstones in front of the baradari in their school uniforms with their bags at their feet, waiting.

Gurtej looked at them, and then at me, and then took off his jacket.

"Right," he said in Hindi. "Feet."

I have watched him teach for five years, but I had never watched him teach in Hindi, and it was different. In Craigieburn he is patient and cheerful and slightly formal, like a good swimming coach. In the courtyard at Ranmaur he was something else. He was louder. He was funnier. He called the boys pehelwan, wrestler, and the girls sherni, lioness, and he made them stand in a row and do the paintra step, the crossing circling step, over and over, while he clapped the beat, until they were laughing and breathless and their school shoes were soaked. And then he picked up the old sticks, the Brigadier's sticks, and did it himself, alone, in the middle of the courtyard, slowly at first and then faster, the sticks whirling round him in figures of eight with a sound like tearing silk, his feet moving under him in that pattern, crossing, turning, never still, never where you thought they were.

Bhagirath, at the edge of the courtyard, took off his green cap.

"His grandfather," he said to me, not loudly. "Exactly that. Exactly."

* * *

It was Bhagirath, afterward, who said the thing about Diwari.

The children had gone home, late for their dinners and delighted, and Gurtej and I were sitting on the steps of the baradari getting our breath back, and Bhagirath sat down beside us and took out a bidi he did not light.

"The feet," he said. "The step he does. Our boys do that at Diwali."

He meant the Diwari dance. In Bundelkhand, at Diwali, the young men of the herding families go from village to village in bands, in bright clothes with peacock feathers and bells on their ankles, carrying long bamboo lathis, and dance with them, fighting each other in time to the drums, clashing the sticks together in the air, spinning and ducking and leaping. It is not a fight. It is a dance that is a fight, or a fight that has agreed to be a dance. Every child in Bundelkhand has seen it. I had seen it every year until I was twenty-two.

I had never once connected it with what we did on Sundays in Craigieburn.

Gurtej asked Bhagirath to show him. Bhagirath, who is sixty-eight, said certainly not. And then stood up, and took the light practice stick out of Gurtej's hand, and did four steps of the Diwari, on the wet stone, in his rubber sandals, with his dhoti tucked up and his green cap pushed back, the stick turning in his hand and his feet doing something that was not the paintra and was not not the paintra. Then he gave the stick back and sat down and lit the bidi after all.

"The feet are the same," he said. "The feet are always the same. The sticks are different."

Gurtej was staring at him.

"Can I record you?" I said. "Doing that. For the family page."

Bhagirath considered the matter.

"Next Diwali," he said. "With the drums. Not like this, an old man in a puddle." He blew smoke at the rain. "And put it next to his, the Punjabi boy's. So people can see."

* * *

That evening Gurtej sat on the floor of the front room with his laptop and showed my grandfather the page his own family keeps, his father's side, in Chandigarh. It is not as big as Ranmaur's. But there is a family tree on it that goes back to the soldier in France, and a photograph of that soldier, a young man with a full beard and a turban and a long overcoat, standing very straight in front of a painted backdrop of a garden, in a studio in Marseilles in 1914. And there is a page for the Brigadier, which his widow, Gurtej's grandmother, started building from what everyone in the family remembered, and which now has four hundred entries. His regimental photographs. His letters home from the war of 1971. A recording of him, made in 2013, two years before he died, talking about the first time he heard the Alha, in Hindi, in that heavy accent, laughing.

My grandfather asked to hear it twice. The second time, when the Brigadier said, *You people shout even louder than we do*, my grandfather said it with him, the whole sentence, word for word, and then put his good hand over his eyes.

Gurtej closed the laptop.

"There's another one," he said quietly, to me, not to my grandfather. "A recording. He made it the same week. It's sealed. It opens on the day I get married, whenever that is." He looked at the sticks, lying side by side on the army blanket. "Mum says he talks about Ranmaur in it. She doesn't know what he says. Nobody does."

"Are you getting married?"

"Not this season, yaar." He grinned. "Ask me again when the rains are over."

The Tape from 1996

Colonel Navtej Singh Grewal arrived on the twenty-third of August, in the evening, in a white car with Chandigarh plates that he had driven himself from Punjab in two days, and he came up the eleven steps carrying a cardboard box in both arms.

He is fifty-eight, retired from the army three years. He is taller than Gurtej and quieter, with a gray beard tied up neatly under his chin and a dark blue turban and reading glasses on a cord round his neck, and he has the habit, which Gurtej has too, of standing in a doorway for a second before he comes in, as if checking the room for exits. He touched my grandfather's feet. He shook my father's hand. He said to my aunt, in careful Bundeli, "Is there kadhi?" and my aunt, who had been warned, said there was, and he looked happier than I have ever seen a colonel look.

Then he put the box down on the floor and said to me, "Mehr says you can fix tapes."

* * *

In the box were nine videocassettes in cardboard sleeves, the big old kind, each one labeled in blue ballpoint in a round hand that turned out to be Mehr's grandmother's. *Shaadi. Feb 1996. Tape 1. Mehndi.* *Tape 2. Baraat.* *Tape 3. Courtyard, evening.* And so on, to Tape 9, which said only *Leaving*.

"They've been in a trunk in Chandigarh for thirty years," the Colonel said. "We had them copied onto discs in 2004. The discs don't play any more. Two of the tapes have mold. My wife has been asking me to do something about them for ten years, and I have been saying I will do something about them for ten years." He looked at the box. "I thought, he does this for a living. And he's here."

It took me four days.

I had to find a player first. There is a man in Jhansi, near the Sadar Bazaar, who repairs old electronics in a shop the size of a cupboard, and he had a videocassette player in working order and was willing to rent it to me for a week for a sum that I suspect was the price of the player. I brought it back on my father's bus, on my knees. I set it up on the floor of the office above the gate, because the office has the dehumidifier and a steady power supply and Mehr. I cleaned the two moldy tapes by hand, a few inches at a time, with a cotton swab and a little alcohol, sitting by the open fort-side window in the rain with the tape wound over a pencil. I played each one through once, slowly, and copied it as it played. Then I sat with my headphones on and went to work on the sound.

Videotape sound from a wedding camera in 1996 is a mess. The microphone was on the camera, so it heard whatever the camera was pointed at, and also the cameraman breathing, and the motor of the camera, and the wind, and every child who walked past shouting. Under all that, there is the wedding. You have to take the mess away a layer at a time without taking the wedding with it, which is the whole of my job, and is the thing I am best at in the world, and is the thing I learned on my grandfather's cassettes in the back room in Nagara Toriya when I was fifteen.

I did not mind the four days. I was being useful with my hands, in the season, for the house, in the way I know how. And I was listening to my grandfather's voice when he was fifty-eight.

* * *

This is the story of the wedding, as the tapes tell it, and as the Colonel and Rajkumari Vasundhara told it to me on the evening of the twenty-sixth, sitting in the front room of our house with my grandfather on his cot and Gurtej on the floor and Mehr cross-legged with her tablet, while the rain hammered the awning and the screen of my laptop showed them both, thirty years younger, getting married.

They met in December 1994, on the polo ground below the fort. The Brigadier, retired by then, had come to Ranmaur for a week, as he did most winters, and had brought his son, who was a captain of twenty-six and on leave. The Raja's daughter was twenty-two and had come home from college in Indore. She was out on the polo ground at seven in the morning schooling a young mare over a pole, badly, and the captain was walking past with his father and stopped to watch, and said, loudly enough to be heard, that the mare was dropping her shoulder. She told him to come and do it himself, then.

He did. The mare dropped her shoulder for him too.

"That was it," Rajkumari Vasundhara said, and laughed. "That was the whole romance. He was wrong about the shoulder, and I was right about him."

The Colonel said nothing, and looked at his hands, and smiled.

* * *

There were objections. Of course there were. Two families of different communities, from opposite ends of north India, with different languages and different food and different ways of getting married. An aunt in Datia who wrote three letters. An uncle in Ludhiana who did not come. People who said things at weddings in other towns that came back to Ranmaur by way of the bus stand and the sweet shop.

The Raja, who was then fifty-one, answered them all in the same words. Mehr found the letters in the office papers, and showed me, his carbon copies, all typed on the same old typewriter with the dropping *e*. He wrote: *The boy is the son of my oldest friend. The girl has chosen him. I see no difficulty.* Nine letters, the same three sentences, to nine different people. He never added a fourth.

The Brigadier, the Colonel told me, wrote one letter, to his brother in Ludhiana, and it said: *I have been eating Bundeli kadhi for thirty years. It is time my family learned to make it.*

* * *

The wedding was in the third week of February 1996, over three days, in Ranmaur. The two ceremonies were held one after the other, each in its own family's way, in the morning and the evening of the second day, and the tapes do not show much of them, which is as it should be. What the tapes show is everything around them.

Tape 2 is the baraat, the bridegroom's procession. In Punjab the groom comes to the bride's house on a mare, while his people dance ahead of him to the dhol. In Ranmaur the bridegroom came along the road from the river with a hundred and forty people from Punjab and Chandigarh and three army cantonments, and a brass band hired from Jhansi, and two dhol players from Ludhiana who had come down by train for the purpose, and at the foot of the eleven steps he got down from the car and was put on a gray mare.

The mare was a Bijuri. The daughter of the mare from Kesarmer.

He rode her up the eleven steps. On the tape you can see the crowd hold its breath, and the mare look at the steps, and the captain lean down and say something into her ear, and then she goes up them one at a time, carefully, with her ears pricked, like a lady going upstairs in a long skirt, and the crowd roars, and the dhol players go mad. At the top, under the arch of the east gate, the Raja is waiting. He takes the bridle himself.

I played that bit three times on the evening of the twenty-sixth. The third time, the Raja, who had come down to our lane after dinner to see the tapes, and was sitting on a chair we had borrowed from the neighbours, said quietly, "She was a good mare," and nothing else.

* * *

Tape 3 is the courtyard, the evening of the first day. This is the tape I worked on longest.

There was a sitting. In February. Not the Alha season, and nobody in the courtyard seemed to mind. The baradari was lit with strings of electric bulbs, and the courtyard was packed with wedding guests and townspeople, Punjabi and Bundeli mixed together on the durries, and there were two groups of singers on the platform.

On the left, my grandfather, at fifty-eight, in a white kurta and a red safa, standing, with a sword in his hand, and Raju's father at the nagariya, and a skinny boy of about ten beside them playing the manjira, the small hand cymbals, who turned out, when I asked, to be Raju. My own father is not on the tape. He was at the back of the courtyard, my mother says, holding her handbag. On the right, two men from Punjab, standing, as dhadis do, older, one gray-bearded and one white, in long kurtas. One held the dhadd, a little waisted drum, at his shoulder, squeezing its cords with one hand and striking it with the fingers of the other. The other had a sarangi, the bowed fiddle, braced upright against his hip.

The dhadi singers. The Brigadier had brought them from his own district, for this, at his own expense.

They took turns. That was the plan, and on the tape you can see the plan working for about forty minutes. My grandfather sang a passage of Alha, from the Nainagarh battle, the one where Alha goes to win his bride, because it was a wedding. Then the dhadis sang a passage of one of their own ballads, a story of a hero and a battle and a bride, in Punjabi, to the little drum and the fiddle. Then my grandfather again. The courtyard listened to each in turn, the Bundelis politely during the Punjabi, the Punjabis politely during the Bundeli, everybody clapping at the end.

And then my grandfather sang the new song.

It is the sixth song in the book. He had made it in the weeks before the wedding, about the couple and the dropped shoulder of the mare and the two families, in the Alha meter, in Bundeli with a scattering of Punjabi words that he had learned from the Brigadier over thirty years. And halfway through, at the line where the baraat reaches the foot of the eleven steps, the instructions in the book say that the drummer must stop the nagariya and take up a dhol.

On the tape, Raju's father puts down the nagariya and looks round for the dhol, and there is not one, because nobody had thought to bring one to the platform.

And one of the dhol players from Ludhiana, who has been sitting on the edge of the baradari steps with his drum on his knees, stands up, and steps onto the platform, and starts to play.

The courtyard comes apart. You can hear it even through the hiss and the camera motor. The Punjabis are on their feet. The Bundelis are on their feet because the Punjabis are. Somebody's grandmother is dancing. And my grandfather goes on singing over the top of it, in the Alha meter, to a bhangra beat, which should not work at all and works perfectly.

* * *

That was the bit everyone remembered. The Colonel remembered it. Rajkumari Vasundhara remembered it. My grandfather remembered it and laughed about it from his cot.

What nobody remembered was what came after.

I found it on the fourth day, at about eleven at night, alone in the office with the rain on the shutters and the dehumidifier roaring. I had cleaned the dance off the tape, as far as it would clean, and moved on to the tail of the song, where the dhol stops and the courtyard calms down, and the last lines are sung quietly, as the last lines of a wedding song should be. And under my grandfather's voice, in the background, at the edge of what the camera's microphone could catch, there was another voice.

I took out the hiss. I took out the camera motor. I took out a child who was saying the same word over and over somewhere near the lens. And the other voice came up out of the noise.

It was singing the last line with him. In the Alha meter. In Bundeli. With a heavy Punjabi accent, a little behind the beat, getting one word slightly wrong.

I played it back four times. Then I went down the eleven steps in the rain at half past eleven at night, stepping over the brick, and knocked on the blue door, and my grandfather was awake, because he does not sleep much now, and I put my headphones on his head and played it to him.

He listened. Then he pulled the headphones off and held them in his lap, and he said, "Inderjit."

"I thought so."

"He knew it. He'd heard me working on it, the week before, in this room. He never said." My grandfather was quiet. "I didn't hear him. On the night. There was too much noise. I never knew."

* * *

The next morning I played it for the Colonel, in the office, with Gurtej and Mehr and Rajkumari Vasundhara standing behind him. He listened with his eyes closed and his reading glasses hanging from their cord. When the voice came, he did not move. When it ended, he asked me to play it again, and I did, and then he took off the headphones and sat for a while looking out of the fort-side window at the baradari in the rain.

"He was always a little behind the beat," he said. "In everything. Even marching."

Mehr has put it in the archive. It is in the house's record of the wedding, and on the page that the Colonel's mother keeps for the Brigadier in Chandigarh, and under my grandfather's name on the singers' tree, all three, with the same note: *February 1996. The last lines of the sixth song, sung by Hiralal of Nagara Toriya, with Brigadier Inderjit Singh Grewal singing under him. Neither man knew the other had been recorded. Found and cleaned by Lakhan, August 2026.*

Under it the Brigadier's widow, who is ninety and lives in Chandigarh and does not use computers, had her granddaughter type a single line two days later.

*He practised it in the bathroom for a week. I told him he was flat.*

Kajali at Mahoba

My father drove us to Mahoba in the bus.

It was the morning after Raksha Bandhan, the twenty-ninth of August, and he had taken the forty-two-seater off the Tikamgarh route for the day, which meant that somewhere a bus full of people was waiting at a stop for a bus that was not coming, and a substitute he had hired from a cousin was coming instead, and my father had arranged all of this by phone the night before in his conductor's voice without once mentioning that he was doing it for us. He said he had business in Mahoba. Nobody believed him. Nobody said so. Mehr had put the trip on the family page the night before, and by morning a woman in Doha whose grandmother was from Bamhori had asked for one photograph of the sprouts going into the Kirat Sagar.

There were nine of us. Me, Gurtej, Mehr, Manohar, Raju with his drums, my mother, two boys from the lane who had begged, and, at the very back, by the window, with her bag on her knees and her sari pulled over her head, my aunt.

She had not been to Mahoba since 1979. She had not been to the Kajali fair since she was a girl, when her father took her on the night bus. When Mehr asked her the night before whether she wanted to come, she said no. In the morning, at half past five, she was at the bus stand before any of us, in her good cotton sari, the green one with the narrow red border, with a steel tiffin in a cloth bag and a pot of bhujariya wrapped in newspaper.

My mother saw her, kept her own counsel, and went and sat beside her.

* * *

Mahoba is about a hundred and sixty kilometers from Ranmaur, north-east across country to Mauranipur and then east along the highway through Kulpahar, and in the last week of August it is the most beautiful drive in the world.

I want to be accurate about this, because people who have only seen Bundelkhand in May think it is a desert. It is not. It is a country that waits all year for six weeks of rain, and when the rain comes it goes green so fast you can almost hear it. The red-brown fields I had driven through in June were a deep wet green, knee-high in sesame and pigeon pea and millet, with the water standing silver between the rows. The granite ridges, bare in June, had grass on every ledge and little waterfalls running down their faces in white threads. The old tanks that the Chandel kings had built at the foot of every hill, which in June were cracked mud, were full to the brim and brown and choppy in the wind, with buffaloes standing in them up to their necks, chewing, with egrets on their backs. Every ditch was a stream. Every stream was a river. Every river, when we crossed it, was a fast red-brown flood carrying branches.

And the sky was enormous. Gurtej, by the window, said so, in English, and then said, "Like Melbourne," and then thought about it and said, "No. Bigger."

My father drove with one hand and the horn, like Pintu, and every time we passed a village pond with children jumping into it off a stone wall, he slowed down to watch.

* * *

You have to understand what the Kajali fair is, or what happens there will not make sense.

Kajali is a festival of the rains. In the weeks before it, the women of Bundelkhand fill small pots or leaf cups with earth and sow them with wheat or barley, and keep them in the dark, and water them, so that the grain sprouts pale and tender, almost yellow, in thick little tufts. These are the bhujariya. On the day of the festival the women carry the pots in procession to a lake or a river, and lift the sprouts out of the earth, and wash them, and then go round giving them to each other: to friends, to neighbours, to elders, to people they have quarrelled with. You give someone a few sprouts and they give you a few back and you embrace, and whatever was wrong between you is supposed to be over. The old men tuck the sprouts behind their ears. Children carry them about in their fists all day until they wilt.

In Mahoba, Kajali is something more, because of Alha and Udal.

The story is that in the year of the great war, Prithviraj Chauhan chose the day of Kajali to attack Mahoba, knowing that the women would be out at the lake with their bhujariya and the army would be thin. The princess Chandrawal, King Parmal's daughter, was trapped and could not reach the water. And Alha and Udal, who had been exiled from Mahoba by the king after a quarrel, came back in disguise to defend the city that had thrown them out, and fought on the shore of the Kirat Sagar, and won, and the princess carried her bhujariya to the water a day late. So in Mahoba, Kajali is held a day later than everywhere else. It is held on the day after the rest of Bundelkhand, by eight hundred years of custom, because of a battle.

That, my grandfather says, is the most Bundeli thing he knows. A whole town keeping a festival a day late, for eight hundred years, out of loyalty to two men who were thrown out and came back anyway.

* * *

We reached Mahoba at half past nine. The town was full. My father parked the bus in a field by the road with forty other buses and a hundred tractors and found a boy to watch it for twenty rupees, and we walked in.

The Kirat Sagar is a big old lake on the edge of the town, built by a Chandel king a thousand years ago, with a long stone embankment along one side and steps going down to the water. Around it, on the day of Kajali, there is a fair: stalls of bangles and plastic toys and cheap steel pots; a giant wheel creaking round over the crowd with children screaming in its buckets; tea stalls and pakora stalls and men selling sugarcane and roasted corn; and everywhere, everywhere, women in their brightest saris, red and orange and parrot-green and pink, with the bhujariya pots on their heads.

And paan. Mahoba is famous for its paan, the leaf, a particular dark glossy betel leaf grown in shaded gardens round the town, that the Mahoba people will tell you is the finest in India and that has recently been given some kind of government certificate to prove it. There were paan stalls every ten yards. Gurtej, who had never chewed paan in his life, was given one by an old man at a stall by the embankment because he had admired the old man's mustache, and chewed it gravely with his eyes watering, and pronounced it extraordinary, and spat red into the gutter with the air of a man who has done something irreversible.

At eleven, the procession came down to the lake.

* * *

First there were the drums, a sound I felt in my ribs before I heard it: a band of men with big double-headed dhols and nagaras slung from their necks, beating them with curved sticks, going in front. Then men on horseback, dressed as warriors, in turbans and long coats with swords at their sides, two of them at the front on a white horse and a bay, who were Alha and Udal for the day. The crowd shouted their names as they passed. Then the women, hundreds of them, walking in a long slow river of color, with the bhujariya pots on their heads and the pale green sprouts nodding as they walked, singing the Kajali songs, the rain songs, the women's songs, in a high bright unison that rose and fell over the drums.

My aunt was in it.

I had not seen her go. One moment she was standing beside my mother at the edge of the crowd with her pot wrapped in newspaper, and the next the newspaper was in my mother's hand and my aunt was in the procession, among women she did not know, with the pot on her head and her sari pulled forward, walking, and I could see her mouth moving.

I had my recorder in my bag. I did not take it out.

* * *

There was a stage by the embankment, for the Alha.

It was a plywood platform on scaffolding, with a striped awning and two big loudspeakers and a microphone on a stand, which no Alha singer worth his salt needs, and all afternoon singers from all over Bundelkhand went up onto it and sang. Old men in safas with swords. Young men in jeans and kurtas with sticks. A troupe from a village near Banda with a man who played the dholak with such violence that the awning shook. Each singer had ten minutes. The crowd sat on the grass in front and in the mud and on the embankment steps, and listened, and shouted when it liked something, and talked loudly when it did not.

I had not planned to sing. I am being honest. Mehr had put my name on the list without telling me, at the organizers' table under a tree, and I found out when a man with a clipboard came looking for "Lakhan of Ranmaur, grandson of Hiralal," at three o'clock, and Gurtej pointed at me.

The man with the clipboard looked at me, at my brewery T-shirt and my jeans, and his face said exactly what I expected it to say.

"Hiralal of Ranmaur?" he said. "The one who sang at Mahoba in the eighties?"

"He's my grandfather."

"He sang here in 1982. I was twelve. My father brought me." He was still looking at me as if doubting I could be related to anyone. "He sang the Kirat Sagar battle. Right there, on the bank, before they built the stage. No microphone. You could hear him in the market." He made a mark on his clipboard. "You're after the girl from Hamirpur. Ten minutes."

* * *

The girl from Hamirpur was perhaps twenty.

She came up the steps of the stage in a white kurta and a red dupatta wound round her head and shoulders like a warrior's sash, holding a sword, and the crowd made a noise I had not heard it make all day. Not hostile. Not exactly welcoming either. A kind of collective intake, like a courtyard before a long note. Somebody near the front laughed. Somebody else told him to shut up.

She gave the crowd not one glance. She took her stance, feet apart, one forward, and lifted the sword, and nodded to her drummer, and sang.

She sang Udal's ride to Mahoba. She sang it high and hard, with her chest open and her chin up, and her voice went out over the lake and hit the far embankment and came back, and the man who had laughed stopped laughing, and somewhere in the second minute the crowd stopped being a crowd that was watching a girl sing Alha and became a crowd that was watching someone sing Alha, which is a different thing. When she finished, they shouted for her. The old man with the mustache at the paan stall shouted loudest.

I was standing at the foot of the steps, waiting my turn, with Raju beside me and his drums. And as the girl came down past me, flushed and shining, with the sword held point-down, I looked out over the crowd to where my family was sitting on the embankment steps, and found my aunt.

She was not clapping. She was sitting very still, with her pot of bhujariya in her lap, and she was watching the girl from Hamirpur go down the steps with an expression I had never seen on her face in twenty-nine years. It was not envy. It was not sorrow. It was something like the look of a woman who has just found a door in her own house that she did not know was there.

* * *

I sang the Kirat Sagar battle. My grandfather's piece, the one he sang on that bank in 1982. I had learned it at nine and had not sung it for ten years, and I sang it standing at the very spot, more or less, with the lake behind the crowd, and the giant wheel creaking round over the stalls, and the light going gold over the water, and Raju going like a train behind me.

It was the best I had sung in my life. I know that, because I have the recording, and I have listened to it with my professional ears and my unprofessional ones, and both agree. On the line where Udal sees the city that threw him out and decides to save it anyway, my voice went up the stair and out, and I heard it cross the lake. I did not need the microphone. I pushed it away with my free hand halfway through, and the crowd roared at that, and I did not care.

When I came down, the man with the clipboard was waiting. He did not say anything. He took a sprig of bhujariya from behind his ear, pale green, wilting a little in the heat, and tucked it behind mine, and embraced me, quickly, and went back to his table.

* * *

On the drive home, in the dark, my aunt sat at the back of the bus by the window, and nobody bothered her.

About an hour out of Mahoba, somewhere past Kulpahar, with the headlights on the wet road and the frogs so loud in the fields that you could hear them over the engine, she called me back. I went and sat beside her. My mother moved up to sit with Mehr.

Her eyes stayed on the window and the dark beyond it.

"That girl," she said. "From Hamirpur."

"She was very good."

"She was all right." My aunt was quiet for a mile or two. "Her breathing was wrong. She breathes too high. She'll lose her voice by forty if nobody tells her." Another mile. "Somebody should tell her."

"You could tell her, Bua. Mehr could find her. We could send a message."

My aunt turned from the window and looked at me in the dim light of the bus, and her face was not soft.

"Lakhan," she said, "there's a verse."

I waited.

"In Sujan. A verse the men don't sing. The women's verse, from the baori. Jagdev gave it to his mother and his wife, and they gave it to their daughters, and it came down to me from my grandmother. It isn't in the book. He didn't write it in the book. He said the book was for the fort, and the verse was for the well." She looked down at the pot of bhujariya in her lap. The sprouts were gone; she had given them all away at the lake, to strangers. The pot was just earth. "It's about the gate. What the Raja did after the gate. What he did when nobody was looking."

The bus went over a speed breaker, and everyone in it lifted an inch and came down.

"I've never sung it for a man," my aunt said. "My grandmother told me never to. She said it would get the house in trouble." She was gripping the empty pot. "Your Dadda doesn't know it exists. Your father doesn't. Nobody does, except me, and two old women in the lane who can't remember it any more."

"Why are you telling me?"

"Because the girl from Hamirpur breathes too high," my aunt said, "and nobody has told her. And I'm sixty-three, and nobody has told me either."

The Weavers of Chanderi

My aunt would not sing the verse in the house.

She said so the morning after Mahoba, at the stove, with her back to me, and she said it again that evening, and the next morning, and by the fourth time I understood that it was not a refusal but an instruction. The verse came from the well. It would be sung in the well. And it would be sung there when she said, and not before, and I would stop asking.

So I stopped asking, and on the second of September, a Wednesday, I went to Chanderi with Mehr instead.

* * *

It was Mehr's errand. She had two reasons, and she told me both on the way, in the back of a hired jeep, with Gurtej in the front talking cricket to the driver and the rain coming and going in bursts against the plastic side-curtains.

The first reason was Ratan Kunwar.

Sujan's wife, in the song, is from a house near Chanderi. The song says she was taller than him and laughed louder, and then, after the night in the stables, it never mentions her again. Nothing in the house's papers mentions her at all, because nothing in the house's papers mentions Sujan. But Mehr had found, in the office, a bundle of letters from a small thakur's house in the Chanderi hills, a family related to Ranmaur by marriage, running from the 1840s to the 1920s, and she had found that the family still existed, and still lived in the same house, and had a granddaughter in Bhopal who answered emails. Mehr had written to ask whether, in their own papers, there was any mention of a daughter called Ratan Kunwar who had married into Ranmaur around 1849.

The answer had come back the week before. Yes. One line, in a register of the family's daughters. *Ratan Kunwar, married to Ranmaur 1849. Returned to her father's house in the rains of 1858. Lived here until her death in 1901.*

"Returned," Mehr said. "In the rains of 1858. The same rains Jagdev came home."

The second reason was the weavers.

The House of Ranmaur has bought its cloth from Chanderi for as long as there have been records of the house buying anything. Chanderi is a town in the hills about seventy kilometers south-west of Ranmaur as the crow flies and a good deal more by road, and for seven or eight hundred years it has woven a cloth so fine that the old kings of Malwa and the Mughals and the Bundelas all wore it: a sheer, light, faintly shining fabric, silk in the warp and cotton in the weft, or silk and silk, with small woven motifs in gold thread scattered over it like coins. Mehr's grandmother, the late Rani, wore nothing else in the hot months. In the office there is a ledger of the house's orders from one weaving family in Chanderi going back to 1887, and the family is still weaving, and Mehr had written to them too.

"And the third reason," Gurtej said from the front, without turning round, "is that she's never been, and she wanted to see the Badal Mahal gate in the rain."

"That's not a reason," Mehr said. "That's a bonus."

* * *

The road from Ranmaur to Chanderi goes south-west to Lalitpur, then west, and somewhere in the middle of it, in the hills, it crosses the Betwa on a dam.

I heard it before we came round the bend. A deep, steady, enormous roar, so low that at first I thought it was thunder, except that it did not stop. Then the road came out onto the crest of a ridge and there it was below us: the Rajghat dam, a long gray wall of concrete across the valley, with its spillway gates open in the September flood and the whole of the Betwa coming through them in a great sliding brown wall of water, exploding into white at the bottom and filling the gorge below with spray that hung in the air like smoke. The driver stopped, without being asked, because everyone does. We got out and stood at the railing in the drizzle. The roar came up through the soles of my feet.

It was the same river. The Betwa that runs low and green between the rocks at Orchha in June, past the chhatris and the vultures, and that Sujan's riders forded in the dark going north and swam in flood coming home. It comes up from the south through these hills, through Chanderi's country, and I had never thought of it as a single thing before. I stood at the railing with my ears full of it and thought about the river carrying the rain from here, past Orchha, to the Yamuna, and the Yamuna carrying it to the Ganga, and the Ganga carrying it to the sea, and how none of the people who had stood on its banks in our book had ever seen the whole of it.

Gurtej, beside me, said, "That's a lot of water," which was also true.

* * *

Chanderi is a town on a hillside, under a fort.

The fort is on the hilltop, long and gray, with its walls following the ridge as Ranmaur's do, but bigger, much older, and in worse repair. The town spills down the slope below it in narrow lanes of old stone houses with carved wooden balconies and arched doorways, so steep in places that the lanes turn into stairs. There are old palaces and old domed tombs everywhere, half of them with people living in them, and stepwells and tanks in odd corners, and at the bottom of the town, on the road, standing quite alone in an open space with nothing on either side of it, is the Badal Mahal gate.

It is a gateway to nothing. A tall narrow arch of honey-colored stone, perhaps fifteen meters high, with two slim minarets on either side and a smaller arch set above the main one and screens of carved stone lace between, all of it standing in the open, with no wall and no palace behind it. Whatever it was a gate to has gone. When we saw it, it was raining properly, and the stone had gone dark and glistening, and there were two goats standing under the arch out of the wet, looking at us.

Mehr stood in front of it in the rain without an umbrella for about a minute, getting soaked. Then she took a photograph, from a spot she marked on her phone so she could stand there again, because she cannot help herself, and we went to find the weavers.

* * *

You hear the weaving quarter before you see it.

In the lanes below the fort, behind half the doorways, there is a sound like a slow clock: a soft wooden clack, a pause, a softer thud, a pause, a clack. It comes from every side, out of a dozen houses at once, each at a slightly different tempo, so that walking down the lane is like walking through a room full of clocks that disagree. It is the sound of the handlooms, of the shuttle being thrown across the warp and the beater being pulled forward to pack the weft thread in, over and over, thousands of times a day. I stood in the lane with my eyes shut and listened to it, and Mehr waited for me, because she knows by now.

The family we had come to see lives in a narrow three-storey house of whitewashed stone with green shutters, near the bottom of the quarter. There are two looms in the front room, on the ground floor, set into pits in the floor so that the weaver sits at the level of the ground with his legs in the pit working the treadles. At the first loom sat an old man, very thin, with thick glasses and a white cotton cap, working slowly. At the second sat a young woman in her thirties, with her sleeves pushed up, working fast. Neither of them stopped when we came in. The clack and thud went on.

The young woman's name was Nasreen. She was the one who had answered Mehr's letter. The old man was her husband's grandfather, Rafiq Ansari, eighty-four, and he had been weaving for seventy-two years, and his father had woven before him, and his father's father, back to a man named in their family's pattern book who had come to Chanderi from a village in Ranmaur in the famine of 1897.

"Kherwa," Nasreen said, without looking up from the loom. "On the river. Our family came from Kherwa. When the rains failed, the Raja put the men to work on the tanks for grain, but the old man of our family was a weaver, not a digger, and there was nothing to weave. So he walked to Chanderi with his wife and two children and a bundle of reeds, and a family here took him in." She threw the shuttle. Clack. "My son marked Kherwa on your map last year. From Dubai. He works in a hotel. He said he wanted to know where it was."

I had seen that pin. One of the three in Kherwa. I had not known whose it was.

* * *

They showed us the pattern book after tea.

It is a big flat ledger, older than our book, with stiff card pages, and pasted onto each page is a small square of woven cloth, a sample, with a motif in gold thread and a number and a name written beside it in ink. The motifs are called butis. A coin. A leaf. A pair of swans. A mango. A peacock, a lotus, a bunch of grapes, a star. Hundreds of them. Some pages go back to the 1880s, Rafiq Ansari said, and some were copied from older books that had fallen apart.

Nasreen turned the pages slowly, and Mehr and I leaned over them, and Gurtej, who had been told firmly not to touch anything, stood behind us with his arms folded tight, like a man at an exhibition.

On a page near the front, there was a horse.

It was very small, no bigger than my thumbnail, woven in gold on a ground that had once been red and was now the brown of a dried rose. A horse in profile, running, with its head low and its tail out behind it. The gold had tarnished almost black in places, and in other places it still shone. Beside it, in faded ink, in an old hand, there was a number and three words.

*Ranmaur. Sawari buti. 1851.*

"Sawari," Rafiq Ansari said, from his loom. He had stopped weaving at last. "The riding motif. For a man who rides. Woven for the house at Ranmaur, for a turban cloth, for the Raja's brother. The master of this house wove it, the family that took my grandfather's father in and left us their looms and their book. The only time. They never ordered it again." He pushed his glasses up his nose. "It is in our book because it was difficult. The legs. Very difficult, to make the legs of a running horse with a needle and a thread of gold. My father made me practice it when I was a boy, to learn. I have never woven it for anyone."

* * *

I had a photograph on my phone.

I had taken it in June, on my first night, without really thinking why: the long red bundle in the rafters of my grandfather's room, with my phone held up at arm's length, in bad light. The cloth that wraps Sujan's sword. Faded red, gone brown. Tied with three strings. And at one end, where the cloth was folded back on itself and had frayed with a hundred and sixty-eight years of being touched, a small dark shape in the weave that I had always taken for a stain.

I enlarged it on the phone, as far as it would go, and handed it to Rafiq Ansari.

He looked at it for some time, holding the phone very close to his thick glasses. Then he took his glasses off and looked at it with his naked eyes, closer still. Then he put the glasses back on and gave the phone back to me, and turned to the pattern book on the table, to the small brown square with the running horse, and put one finger beside it, not touching.

"That is ours," he said. "That is the sawari buti. Look at the back leg. The book says the back leg was always too long. Look." He pointed at my phone, then at the sample. "Too long. The same."

Mehr was very still.

"The cloth round the sword in our rafters," I said, "is Diwan Sujan's turban cloth."

"Or the Raja's," Rafiq Ansari said. "The book says, for the house, for the brother. But who paid, it does not say. A turban cloth like that, with zari, in 1851, cost more than a weaver earned in a year. Somebody in the house wanted that brother to have it very much." He picked up his shuttle again. "Bring it, one day. I would like to see the back leg."

* * *

We drove home in the dark. The dam was still roaring as we crossed above it, an invisible roar in the black, felt more than heard. Gurtej slept in the front seat with his head against the window. Mehr sat beside me in the back with her tablet in her lap, not using it, looking at the rain on the side-curtain.

"Jagdev came home with a sword," she said after a while. "The song says he was left at the gate with it in his hands. In the rain."

"Yes."

"But the sword was wrapped. The sword in your rafters is wrapped in a turban cloth that belonged to the house. That was woven for Sujan." She turned to look at me in the dark. "When Jagdev stood at the gate, was the sword wrapped?"

I thought about the song. I knew every line by then. I had sung it twice in the fort.

"The song doesn't say."

"Then who wrapped it? And when?" She looked back at the window. "If the Raja said *I have no brother* and turned his back, how did his brother's cloth end up round his brother's sword, in a singer's house, under a singer's roof?"

I did not answer. I was thinking about my aunt, at the stove, with her back to me, saying that the verse was about what the Raja did when nobody was looking.

Under the Lime

The water had been coming through the ceiling of the Raja's room in the old palace since July, and the first person to know was Bhagirath, because it dripped on his dot.

There is a white paint mark on the floor of the upper chamber at the north end of the palace, the small room with the domed roof and the windows on three sides that the old Rajas used in the cold season, and every first of the month Bhagirath stands on it and takes a photograph of the ceiling. The ceiling is a shallow dome of plaster, divided by painted bands into panels. Most of the panels were whitewashed a long time ago and have gone gray with soot and damp. In the July photograph there was a dark stain in one corner the size of a hand. In August it was the size of a durrie. On the first of September, when Bhagirath stood on his dot, a drop of water landed on the back of his neck, and he looked up, and in the middle of the stain a flake of whitewash the size of a chapati had fallen away, and behind it there was color.

He did not touch it. He took four photographs instead of one, and walked straight to the office, and showed Mehr, and Mehr called a woman in Datia.

* * *

Her name was Shobha. She was about forty-five, small and square, with reading glasses pushed up into gray-streaked hair and paint under her fingernails that would not wash out, and she came from a family in Datia that had been painting walls and ceilings and small pictures on paper for the Bundela courts since, she said, before the English came. Her father had taught her. Her grandfather had taught him. For twenty years she had worked on the restoration of old painted walls all over Bundelkhand, palaces and havelis and the occasional government building that someone had decided was too old to pull down, and she had a way of looking at a stained ceiling that reminded me of the way I listen to a bad recording: patient, unbothered, already peeling the noise away in her head.

She came on the fifth of September, on the bus from Datia, with a canvas bag of brushes and scalpels and little glass bottles, and a folding aluminium platform that Bhagirath and I carried up the stairs of the palace between us, swearing, in the rain.

On the sixth, she started.

* * *

I spent a lot of the next week in that room. I am not sure anyone asked me to. Shobha did not seem to mind, and I was useful, in a small way: I held the lamp, and passed her things, and once, when she wanted to know whether a section of plaster was hollow behind, I tapped it with the end of a brush and listened, and told her it was, and she checked, and it was, and after that she let me tap everything.

Taking whitewash off a painting is slow. You cannot scrape it. You soften it a little at a time, with water and a swab, and then lift it with the side of a scalpel, a sliver at a time, as thin as a fingernail paring, and under each sliver there is a little more of what was there before. Shobha worked lying on her back on the aluminium platform with her face two hands from the ceiling, in a cotton mask, with the lamp beside her head, and she talked while she worked, mostly to the ceiling.

She talked about Datia. About the palace there, Bir Singh Deo's great seven-storey square of stone that I had seen from the train. She had worked on its painted ceilings as a girl, with her father, holding the lamp the way I was holding hers. She talked about the Bundela way of painting, which is not the Mughal way and not the Rajput way of Rajasthan, but something in between and stubbornly itself: bolder, she said, plainer, less fussy, with strong flat colors and thick dark outlines and figures that look straight out at you as if they want something. She talked about Orchha, where the walls of the Raja Mahal are covered from floor to ceiling with paintings in that style, the colors still sharp after four centuries in places where the light does not reach. She talked about pigments: the yellows and the reds from earth, the blacks from soot, a green from a stone, and a blue that came from very far away and was very expensive and was therefore used, she said, only on things the patron wanted remembered.

"And sometimes," she said, lifting a sliver, "on horses."

* * *

There were horses all round the dome.

It took four days to see them. Under the gray whitewash, panel by panel, a procession came out: a line of horses walking round the inside of the dome, nose to tail, each one with a groom at its head, each one painted in strong flat color with a black outline. A bay with a white blaze. A chestnut. A black with red tassels on its bridle. A piebald. Each with its name painted above it in small careful Devanagari, in the old shape with the broken headstroke that I knew from Jagdev's book. Twenty-two horses. The stables of the House of Ranmaur, Shobha thought, in the middle of the nineteenth century, painted on the ceiling of the Raja's private room by a painter who had been allowed to take his time.

"This is good work," she said, on the third day. "This is somebody from my side of the country. Datia, I would say. Possibly someone from my own family, if you go back far enough. Look at the eyes." The horses' eyes were each a single almond of white with a dot of black, looking out of the ceiling straight down at the floor, at us. "That is how my grandfather painted eyes. He said a horse in a painting should always be looking at the person who paid for it."

"Who paid for it?"

"The man who slept under it." She lifted another sliver. "Whoever that was."

* * *

On the fourth day, in the panel directly over the white paint mark on the floor, where the water had come through, she found the gray mare.

I was holding the lamp. I saw it come out of the lime one sliver at a time: first an ear, small, curved inward at the tip. Then a dark muzzle, painted in the same black as the outlines, so that the mare looked as if she had been drinking ink. Then a neck, gray, dappled with small paler spots. Then a saddle, red, with a gold edge.

The saddle was empty.

There was no groom at her head. Every other horse round the dome was being led by a groom, walking calmly in the procession. The gray mare was not walking. She was running, head low, tail out, alone, in the opposite direction from all the others, against the procession, toward the window that looks south along the ridge. And over the empty saddle, tied to the saddle-bow and streaming out behind her as she ran, there was a long red cloth with tiny gold marks on it.

Shobha put down her scalpel and lay on the platform looking up at it with her mask pulled down, for a while.

"Read the name," she said.

I stood on the stool and held the lamp close. Above the mare's ears, in the same small careful hand as the others, there were two lines of writing. The first was a single word.

*Bijuri.*

The second was a date. Not in the English calendar. In the old one, the Vikram Samvat, which runs fifty-seven years ahead of it, and in the month of the rains.

*Sawan, Samvat 1915.*

I did the sum in my head. I did it again, to be sure. Then I got down off the stool and sat on the floor under the ceiling with the lamp in my lap.

"Eighteen fifty-eight," I said. "The month he came home."

* * *

Mehr came up within ten minutes. Then the Raja, more slowly, on the stairs, with his stick and Bhagirath at his elbow. Then Gurtej, who had been in the stables. Then, after half an hour, my aunt, who had been told by Raju, who had been told by Bhagirath's grandson, who had heard it in the courtyard, and who had walked up the eleven steps and across the courtyard and up the palace stairs, which she told me afterwards she had never once climbed in her life.

Nobody spoke much. Shobha lowered the platform, and we took turns standing on the white dot in the middle of the floor and looking up at the gray mare running alone against the procession of horses, with her saddle empty and the red cloth streaming.

The Raja stood there longest. He leaned on his stick with both hands and looked up and did not move.

"This was his room," he said at last. "Mahipat's. Every Raja of Ranmaur has slept in the palace in this room in the cold season, until my father, who moved down to the new house in 1952 because of the stairs. I slept here myself as a boy, when my grandfather was alive. Under all this whitewash." He was still looking up. "So he put it over his bed. His brother's mare, running away from all his own horses, with his brother's cloth on the saddle. And he slept under it every winter for twenty-one years. And somebody, after he died, painted it out."

"Gajraj Singh," Mehr said quietly. "His son. There's a payment in the ledger, for whitewash and two men for the palace, the month after the funeral. I didn't know what it was for."

"The same year he let the song back into the fort," I said.

"And walked out of it." The Raja looked down at last, at me. "He let your family sing it. And he painted out his own father's grief. And he walked out every year before the song began. And told his son it was respect." He shook his head slowly. "I don't think it was respect. I think it was shame. I think he couldn't bear to sit there."

My aunt had been standing by the door with her sari pulled forward. Now she came into the middle of the room, onto the white dot, and stood there beside the Raja, and looked up at the mare.

She looked for a while. Then she said, in Bundeli, low and very clear, not to the Raja but to the ceiling:

"It wasn't shame, Raja-sahab. Not Mahipat's."

Everyone turned.

"I know what he did," my aunt said. "After the gate. I've known it since I was eleven. It's in a verse." She looked at me. "Tomorrow night. In the baori. Bring your recorder."

* * *

That night I could not sleep. I lay on my mat in the back room and listened to the rain, which had settled in steady and warm, and to my grandfather breathing in the next room, slow and rough, and to the fan knocking. At about two I got up and went into the front room and stood under the rafters, looking at the red bundle in the dark.

My grandfather was awake. He was always awake, by then, at two.

"Shobha found the mare," I said.

"Mehr told me." His voice was a thread. "Painted. Over his bed." He was quiet. "Jagdev always said there was more. My grandfather told me that. He said Jagdev used to say, *The song stops at the gate because the fort stops at the gate. But the night goes on.* I thought it was just a thing to say."

"Bua knows the rest."

"Phoolwati?" Even in the dark I could hear his surprise. "How?"

"From her grandmother. From the well. The women's verse." I hesitated. "She said you didn't know it existed."

My grandfather did not answer. The rain came down. The fan knocked. Somewhere a dog barked once and stopped.

"Seventy years," he said at last, very softly. "Seventy years I've sung that song. And my own daughter had the end of it, in the kitchen, the whole time." I heard him move on the cot. "Take me down there tomorrow. To the baori. I want to hear it."

"Dadda, the steps."

"Four boys and a chair got me up eleven steps to the fort. Four boys and a chair can get me down to the well." He settled back. "And Lakhan. Don't record her unless she says."

"She said bring the recorder."

"Then bring it," said my grandfather, "and ask her anyway."

What the Well Kept

We went down to the baori at ten at night on the tenth of September, a Thursday, after the sitting, the way the women of the lane used to, eleven of us, with lamps.

Not electric lamps. My aunt was clear about that. The women had always gone down with oil lamps, small clay ones with a cotton wick, and so we would go down with oil lamps, and Mehr could keep her torch in her bag for the stairs. My mother found nine of them in the trunk where the festival things are kept, and filled them with mustard oil, and the women of the lane carried them, each one cupped in two hands against the drizzle, a small yellow flame bobbing in the dark.

Four young men from the lane carried my grandfather in his chair. They went down the back path from Nagara Toriya, round the outside of the fort wall, through the small south gate, the one Sujan's riders used, and across the stone terrace to the edge of the well. And then down the long straight flight of stairs, one step at a time, very slowly, with my grandfather sitting bolt upright in the chair in a woollen shawl, holding the arms, saying nothing, his face lit from below by the lamps the women carried beside him.

Behind them came the Raja, on his own feet, with Bhagirath at one elbow and Gurtej at the other. He had asked to come. My aunt had said yes, after a long pause, and then said that he would sit where she put him, and he had said that he would.

Mehr came last. I came just ahead of her, with the recorder in my bag and two microphones, and my aunt's yes, which she had given me that afternoon, at the stove, with her back turned: *Record it. With my name. Ask me afterwards if I still want it kept, and I'll tell you then.*

* * *

At the bottom of the baori, by the water, there is a landing of stone about the size of a small room, with the last steps going down from it into the dark green water and the round well shaft at the far end. We set my grandfather's chair against the wall on the left. The Raja sat on a folded blanket beside him. The women of the lane sat on the steps above, in a row, with their lamps in front of them, so that the flames made a curved line of light going up the stairs and the walls of the well were lit from below, gold and moving, with all the carved fish and the parrots and the horse on the second landing swimming in and out of the shadows.

The water was very high, after the rains. Above the third notch. It came to within two steps of the landing, black and absolutely still, and in it the whole well was reflected upside down: the stairs, the women, the lamps, the galleries going down into the dark, so that we seemed to be sitting halfway up a stone tower that went as far below us as above.

It was quiet. The drizzle had stopped. There was only the drip from the ferns, and the little hiss and flutter of the lamp flames, and the well's long whisper, which is the sound of a stone room listening.

I set the microphones on the landing, one on each side, facing up the walls, and pressed record, and sat down at my grandfather's feet.

My aunt sat on the bottom step, at the edge of the water, with a lamp beside her. She had her sari pulled over her head. She did not look at any of us. She looked at the water.

Then she took the sari off her head and folded it back onto her shoulders, and lifted her chin, and sang.

* * *

I am going to say first how she sang, because I am a sound engineer and I cannot help it, and because it matters.

She sang low. Lower than any Alha I have ever heard, lower than my grandfather, lower than me. Not in the high open shout of the fort, the voice that reaches the boy on the back wall, but a full deep voice from the very bottom of the chest, from the bottom of the baori, hand over hand. It was not loud. It did not need to be. In that well, at that depth, a voice like that goes up the walls and round and round and comes back to meet itself, and every note she sang was still sounding when she sang the next, and by the third line the whole well was singing with her, a column of her own voice going up past the women and the lamps and the carved horse to the black sky.

Her breathing was perfect. I listened to it on the recording afterwards, again and again, the way you listen to someone who knows exactly what they are doing. She breathed low and slow and never once in the wrong place. She breathed like a woman who had been practising, alone, at a stove, for fifty-two years.

* * *

Then what she sang.

It begins where the song of Sujan ends: at the gate, in the rain, with Jagdev standing at the top of the eleven steps holding the sword and the doors shut in his face. But it does not stay at the gate. It goes round the outside of the fort, in the dark, the way we had come that night: down the back path, along the wall, to Nagara Toriya. To Jagdev's house. To the door. It is past midnight. The rain is still falling.

And there is a knock.

It is the Raja. Mahipat Singh. Alone. On foot, without a lamp, wrapped in a plain gray blanket like a herdsman, having come out of the fort by the small south gate and round by the path. He has something under his arm. He stands at the door of a singer's house in the rain, and when Jagdev opens it, the Raja of Ranmaur steps inside, and sits down on the floor.

The verse gives him no speech. Not like the sixteen lines in the hall. It gives him almost nothing. He asks for the sword, and Jagdev gives it to him. He holds it across his knees. And then he takes from under his arm a long red cloth, a turban cloth, fine, with small gold horses woven into it, and he unwinds it, and he wraps his brother's sword in it, slowly, the whole length of the blade and the hilt, and ties it with three strings. And while he is doing it, the verse says, he weeps, without any sound at all, so that the only sound in the room is the rain on the roof and the strings being tied.

Then he gives the sword back to Jagdev.

And he says four things. The verse gives them as four lines, and I will not put the lines here, because they belong to the well. But I will say what they mean.

He says: keep him. I can't.

He says: sing him where the Company cannot hear. Sing him to the women, in the water. Let them carry him until it is safe.

He says: take the gray mare to Chanderi, to Ratan Kunwar's father, and take Ratan Kunwar with her, tonight, before the Company's man thinks to ask whose horse it is. She is his widow and she should be with her own people, and the mare is his and should be with his widow.

And he says: one day a Raja of Ranmaur will be able to come to this door in daylight and ask for his brother's sword without losing the villages for it. Until then the sword stays here.

Then he gets up, and goes out into the rain, and back along the path, and in through the south gate, and nobody in the fort ever knows he has been gone.

And Jagdev, the verse says, did all of it. That night he put Ratan Kunwar on the gray mare, and walked beside them south through the hills in the dark and the rain for three days, to her father's house near Chanderi. And then he walked home. And then he went down into the baori with his mother and his sisters and the lamps, and began.

* * *

When she finished, the well went on singing for four seconds. Then three. Then the faint high ringing, like a glass. Then the drip from the ferns.

Nobody moved.

My aunt sat on the bottom step looking at the water. The lamp beside her had burned low, and the flame was a small blue bead.

My grandfather, in his chair, had both hands over his face.

Beside him, on his folded blanket, the Raja of Ranmaur sat very upright, with his stick across his knees, the way the verse says Mahipat sat with the sword. He was looking at my aunt. In the lamplight his face was wet, and he was not doing anything about it.

It was Bhagirath who moved first. He got up from the step where he had been crouching, and went down to the water's edge, and took the little clay lamp from beside my aunt, and poured a few drops of oil into it from the bottle in his pocket, and set it down again. The flame went up yellow.

"There," he said. "So you can see the steps."

* * *

At half past seven the next morning Mehr knocked on our blue door with her hair still wet from washing and her canvas bag over her shoulder, and she had not slept.

"There's a box," she said. "In the treasury. I've known about it since I started. It's an iron box, about this big," she held her hands apart, the length of a forearm, "labeled in English and Hindi, *Revenue, Khajuri and Pipraun*. It's been in the treasury since 1858. Nobody's opened it because the villages were gone, so the revenue was gone, so who would want it? It's on my list. It's been on my list for three years. It's very low on my list." She took a breath. "I opened it at four this morning."

She took a plastic folder out of her bag, and from the folder, a sheet of paper.

It was old. Thick, handmade, cream gone brown at the edges, folded in four and creased so deeply along the folds that it had split in two places. On the front there were eleven lines of writing in Hindi, in a clerk's hand, very upright and regular. At the bottom, a round seal in red, smudged. And under the seal, two lines in a different hand, faster, slanting, with a darker ink.

"The letter," Mehr said. "Hers. To Ranmaur. February 1858. It's real. It's been in the iron box with the lost villages for a hundred and sixty-eight years."

I did not touch it. I looked at the two lines in the different hand at the bottom, the line the song calls the line in the queen's hand, and found that I could read it, slowly. It said what the song says it said. More plainly than the song. The song had not needed to make it bigger.

"Turn it over," my aunt said, from the kitchen doorway.

Mehr turned it over.

On the back, in the middle of the page, in a third hand, a small cramped hand in black ink, there were five lines. Mehr had already read them, and she read them out now for the rest of us, in a low voice, while my grandfather lay on his cot with his eyes open and my aunt waited at the kitchen door, floury to the wrists, and my father, who had been about to leave for the bus stand, stood still in the lane with his keys.

The writer said that his brother Sujan had gone to Jhansi with his leave, and with his mare, and with eleven men of his own choosing. That if the Company asked, the house would say that Sujan had gone without leave, and that the house would pay what it had to pay for saying so. That the sword would stay with the singer Jagdev at Nagara Toriya until a Raja of Ranmaur could go there in daylight and ask for it. That his brother's widow had been sent home with the mare. And that this paper was to be kept with the revenue of the two villages, because the villages were what it had cost, and whoever opened the box would be someone who had come looking for them.

It was signed *Mahipat*. And dated, like the painting on the ceiling, in the month of the rains, Samvat 1915.

* * *

Nobody said anything for a while.

Then my father, in the lane, put his keys in his pocket and came back in through the blue door and sat down on his step, facing in, for once. He looked at his sister in the kitchen doorway.

"You knew," he said. "All this time."

"Half," my aunt said. "I knew half. I didn't know about the paper."

"You never sang it."

"Nobody asked me to."

My father looked at her for a moment longer. Then he looked down at his hands.

"I'm asking," he said.

My aunt stood in the doorway with flour on her hands and did not answer him. But she did not go back into the kitchen either.

On his cot, my grandfather turned his head on the pillow to look at Mehr, holding the paper in its plastic folder.

"Daylight," he said. "It says daylight."

"Yes, Dadda."

"Then tell your Nanaji," my grandfather said, "that the singers of Nagara Toriya will be at home all day on Sunday. And that the door will be open."

In Daylight

Gurtej grew up in cantonments, and in every one of them, at the stone by the parade ground, his father's battalion kept the custom of saying its dead aloud: once a year, every name, slowly, with a breath between. Three weeks before, sitting on the steps of the baradari after a gatka afternoon, he had asked the Raja a question.

"At the battalion's memorial stone they say the names of the dead," he said. "Out loud, one by one. Your riders have never had theirs said in the fort. Not once in a hundred and sixty-eight years." He had looked at his grandfather's sticks, lying across his knees. "Could we?"

The Raja had said yes before he finished asking.

So the day began at seven, in the inner courtyard, in thin sunshine. It was the first morning without rain in eleven days. The flagstones were steaming. The baradari stood in the middle of the courtyard with its twelve arches throwing twelve long shadows west, and the swifts were out over the palace roof in dozens, screaming, the way they do when the sky clears in the rains.

There were perhaps sixty people. The thirteen children from the gatka afternoons, in their school uniforms, though it was a Sunday, because Gurtej had told them it was a uniform occasion and they had not known what else to wear. Their parents, some of them. Bhagirath, in a clean white dhoti and his green cap. The Raja, in a plain white kurta, on a cane chair at the foot of the baradari steps. Mehr, with the list. My father, who had taken the morning off. My grandfather, carried up in his chair. And Colonel Navtej Singh Grewal, standing a little apart, very straight, in a dark blazer with three small medal ribbons on it.

* * *

The list was Mehr's, from the song and from Manohar's work in the papers: Diwan Sujan Singh, and the eleven who rode with him out of the south gate in February 1858, each with his village, and at the end, by my grandfather's wish, Jagdev of Nagara Toriya, who came home.

The Colonel read it. He had asked to. He read it in Hindi, slowly, from a card, one name at a time, the way his battalion did, with a breath between each, in a voice that did not rise. Kalyan of Khajuri. Ramdin of Pipraun. The two who fell at Kunch. The two left on the river bank below Kalpi. The three at Kotah-ki-Serai. The two who came home with Jagdev through the rain, and the one of them who was found on a sandbank.

The children stood still. The swifts screamed over the roof. In the pause after the last name, nobody moved, and in that silence I heard, very faintly, from the town below the fort, a man selling vegetables from a cart, calling out *tamatar, bhindi, lauki*, and it did not spoil anything at all.

My grandfather, in his chair, had his eyes shut. When it was over he opened them and said to the Colonel, "Your father would have read it faster," and the Colonel said, "My father would have mispronounced Pipraun," and both of them laughed, which was right.

Then my father climbed to the drum-house over the gate.

He took the big nagariya with him, and before he went up he slackened its laces until the skin was soft, the way the old drummers did when a Raja died and the great drums were beaten for him. From the arched window above the gate he beat it slowly, one stroke for each name, twelve and then one more, a low loose note that went out over the courtyard and the town like something limping. Most of the courtyard had never heard that sound. The old men knew it at once. Down in the bazaar, my mother told me later, the vegetable man stopped calling his wares and stood with his hand on his cart until it was done.

The Raja said, from his chair, "Wah," very low, which is what we say instead of anything else.

And Bhagirath, at the edge of the courtyard, did four steps of the Diwari, in the sun this time, his stick turning, and all thirteen children shrieked and tried to copy him, and that was the end of the ceremony.

* * *

The Raja came down to Nagara Toriya at three o'clock in the afternoon.

He had said three. My grandfather had said daylight. Three o'clock in September in Bundelkhand, with the sky clear, is as much daylight as anybody could want: hot, white, hard-shadowed, the light coming off the stone of the fort walls like heat off a griddle. He came out of the east gate under the pigeons, and stood at the top of the eleven steps, and looked down.

The whole lane was out. The whole town, it seemed, was out. They had heard. People were standing on the roofs of the houses below the steps, and along the bazaar street, and on the wall of the school, with their children on their shoulders, in silence. My mother had swept the lane twice. My aunt had put a durrie on the floor of the front room and a brass tumbler of water beside it.

He came down alone. He had refused Bhagirath, and Mehr, and his son, who had come from Bhopal again the night before. He came out onto the eleventh step, the top one, in a white kurta and a white safa, a tall old man in the white light, and stopped there, and looked at the brick.

Then he stooped, slowly, one hand on his stick, and lifted it, and moved it off the step to the side, and set it down against the wall. And came on down the steps, one at a time, into the lane.

* * *

He took off his sandals at the blue door, and came in, and sat down on the durrie on the floor.

My grandfather was sitting up on his cot, against the wall, in a clean kurta, with his wrist, out of its cast now and bound in a crepe bandage, in his lap. My father stood by the door. My aunt stood in the kitchen doorway. My mother stood behind her. I stood under the rafters. Gurtej and Mehr and the Colonel had come down after the Raja and stood outside in the lane, with half the town behind them, looking in.

The Raja looked at my grandfather.

"Hiralal," he said. "I have come to ask for my great-great-grandfather's brother's sword."

He did not say anything else. He did not make a speech. He did not need to. The letter was in a plastic folder on the table in the office above the gate. The verse was on Mehr's tablet with my aunt's name on it. The painted mare was on the ceiling over his own boyhood bed. Everyone in the lane knew all of it.

My grandfather looked up at the rafters. Then at me.

"Bring it down," he said.

* * *

I had never touched it.

I had been told at five never to touch it, and I never had, not once, not at nine when I learned the first verse of Sujan, not at fifteen when I was alone in the house and curious, not at nineteen on the night before I left for Australia, when I stood under it for an hour in the dark. I had heard my grandfather say that nobody in the family had untied the three strings since they were tied. I had not known, until three days before, who had tied them.

I stood on the stool. I reached up into the rafters, into the dust and the warm dry smell of old wood, and took hold of the bundle with both hands, and lifted it, and it was heavier than I expected and lighter than I expected, both at once. I got down. I carried it across the room on both forearms, the way the song says Jagdev carried it up the eleven steps, and knelt, and held it out to the Raja.

He took it. He laid it across his knees, as the verse says Mahipat did. He sat for a moment with his hands on it, not moving.

Then he looked at my grandfather. "May I?"

My grandfather nodded.

The Raja untied the three strings.

* * *

The strings were cotton, gone gray and hard and brittle, and the knots were so old that they did not so much come undone as come apart. He laid them on the durrie, one by one, side by side. Then he began to unwind the cloth.

It was very long. A turban cloth is very long. He unwound it slowly, fold after fold, and as he went, the cloth changed. The outside, which had been in the light and the dust and the smoke of the kitchen for a hundred and sixty-eight years, was the faded brownish red I had always known. But the inner folds had been in the dark. And they were red. Deep, clear red, the red of a ripe pomegranate, so bright in the white light from the door that someone in the lane outside made a sound. And scattered across the red, in the inner folds, every hand's width, there was a tiny running horse in gold. Not tarnished. Not black. Gold. Shining. Head low, tail out, and the back leg, I saw, a little too long.

He unwound the last fold. And there was the sword.

It was in its scabbard. The scabbard was wood covered in velvet, once probably red or green, now black and bald with age, with a chape of tarnished silver at the tip. The hilt was iron, the old Indian kind with a round flat disc for a pommel and a curved guard over the knuckles, and on the iron, under the dark of age, there were traces of a gold pattern inlaid into the metal: leaves, I thought, and a border of small flowers. It was not a grand sword. It was a working sword. The grip was wrapped in leather that had worn through in two places where a hand had held it, and the guard had a dent in it.

The Raja held it by the scabbard and drew the blade three inches, no more.

The steel was dark gray, with a faint ripple in it like water under wind, and it was clean. Someone had oiled it before they wrapped it. A thin line of old oil, gone amber, lay along the edge. And near the hilt, on the back of the blade, there was a notch the size of a fingernail, a bright small bite out of the steel.

Outside, the Colonel said quietly, to Gurtej, "Kotah-ki-Serai," and Gurtej nodded.

The Raja slid the blade back into the scabbard. He sat with the sword across his knees, and the red cloth with its gold horses spread out round him on the durrie like a pool, and he looked at my grandfather and did not say anything at all.

Then he said, "Thank you for keeping him."

* * *

He did not take it away. That had been decided before he came down the steps; he told us so, sitting there on the durrie. He had asked for it, in daylight, at the door, as Mahipat had written. It had been given. That was what had been owed, and now it was paid.

But the sword was not going back into the rafters either. The cloth would go to Chanderi, to Rafiq Ansari and Nasreen, to be cleaned and looked at, and so Rafiq could see the back leg. The sword would go up to the office above the gate, where Mehr and Shobha would make a case for it, with both families' names on it, and the letter beside it. And at the last sitting of the season, eleven days from that day, the singer would carry it, unwrapped, into the baradari, and sing Sujan from the first line to the end, all of it, and the women's verse after it.

And the house would sit through the whole song.

"All of us," the Raja said. "On the dais. From the first line to the last. And Hiralal will tell me if I fidget."

My grandfather laughed, and coughed, and my aunt came out of the kitchen, and the room broke up into ordinary noise. Tea. Someone outside in the lane started clapping, and then the whole lane was clapping, and the people on the roofs. My mother brought out jalebis from the sweet shop that she must have bought that morning, before any of this was certain, which tells you something about my mother. The Colonel came in, and took off his shoes at the door, and sat on the floor beside the Raja, and the two of them looked at the sword across the Raja's knees and did not need to say anything.

In the middle of it, my aunt came and stood in front of me, under the empty rafters.

"The last sitting," she said.

"Yes, Bua."

"The women's verse. After Sujan." She looked at the sword, and the red cloth, and the Raja. "Who's singing it?"

I looked at my father, who was standing by the door, and who was looking at his sister.

"You are," I said.

The Whole Song

The last sitting of the season was on Thursday the twenty-fourth of September, and it rained, which everyone took as a kindness.

The rains had been easing for a week. The afternoons had gone clear and hot again, and the evenings smelled of drying mud instead of wet, and the frogs in the lane were fewer every night. On the Wednesday the radio said the monsoon was beginning to withdraw from western Rajasthan. My grandfather, on his cot, said that the monsoon could withdraw from wherever it liked as long as it came to the fort one more time. And on Thursday at four in the afternoon, a long dark bank of cloud came up out of the south-east across the river, and the wind went round, and the pigeons in the gate arch went quiet, and it came.

Not a storm. A soft, steady, last rain, falling straight down out of a gray sky with no wind in it at all, the kind that is going to go on all evening and has no intention of being dramatic about it. It fell on the courtyard and the tarpaulins and the twelve arches of the baradari, and on the people coming up the eleven steps, and on the eleventh step, where there was no longer a brick.

* * *

They had been coming since the morning. Not only from the town.

Mehr had put the sitting on the family page three weeks before, with a note under it in her plain way: *The last sitting of the rains. The song of Diwan Sujan Singh will be sung from beginning to end, with the women's verse after it. The house will sit through the whole song. All of Ranmaur is welcome, and all who are from it.* And under that, a second note, a day later, after she had asked the singers' family: *The sitting will be shown on this page as it happens, for the families abroad, and kept afterwards.*

The thread under the notice had grown to three hundred and forty messages. The families in Edison and Leicester and Dubai and Doha and Auckland and Mississauga had done the arithmetic for their own clocks and posted the answers, one under another: half past nine in the morning, half past two in the afternoon, half past five in the evening, half past eleven at night, half past one in the morning. The nurse from Bamhori had swapped a shift. The boy in Leicester, who was now ten, had asked whether he was allowed to sing along at home, and Mehr had replied that he was, and that he should breathe from the bottom.

And some of them had come in person.

The man from Edison was there. His name was Satish, and he was fifty-four, and he had flown into Delhi on Tuesday with his mother, who was seventy-nine and had not been back to India in twenty-two years, because his mother had said that if the singers were going to say Khajuri's name properly in the fort, she wanted to be standing there when they did. Mehr had found them in August, when the Raja asked her to look. Satish's mother's grandmother's grandfather was a man called Kalyan, of Khajuri, who went to Jhansi in February 1858 with Diwan Sujan Singh and did not come home.

And from Pipraun, on the back of a tractor-trolley with eleven members of his family, had come an old farmer in a white dhoti and a checked turban, called Chhote Lal, seventy-two, who still farmed the same fields his family had farmed for two hundred years and whose great-great-grandfather's elder brother had been Ramdin. He did not have a phone. He did not know about the family page. Manohar had found him by walking round Pipraun asking the old men, and Chhote Lal had listened to the whole story standing in his field, leaning on his hoe, and then said, *We know. We've always known. Nobody from the fort ever asked.*

The Raja had gone to Pipraun himself the week before, and to Khajuri, which had no one of Kalyan's line left in it but a field that was still called by his name, and had stood in both places and said so.

Both families sat on the dais that night. Not below it. On it. On either side of the Raja.

* * *

Others came too. Rafiq Ansari and Nasreen, from Chanderi, in the bus, with the red turban cloth folded in tissue in a flat cardboard box, cleaned and pressed, the gold horses shining down its whole length now. Rafiq had seen the back leg. He had held the cloth to the light in his front room for an hour, Nasreen said, and then said that the man who wove it had been a better weaver than he would ever be, and gone back to his loom. Shobha, from Datia, with paint under her fingernails. Raju, with his own drums and a nephew. Kunwar Rudra Pratap, and Rajkumari Vasundhara, and the Colonel, and every cousin who could be found. Bhagirath, in a new green cap, who had walked the whole circuit of the fort that morning and stood on every white dot, though it was not the first of the month, and taken a photograph at each one, so that the house would have a record of how the fort looked on the day.

And Bijuri. The Raja had her led out of the stables at dusk by one of the grooms and tied under the arcade at the edge of the courtyard, under the tarpaulin, with a bucket of chickpeas. Her near foreleg had a bandage on it. She had knocked it in August, and a vet from Kesarmer in Rajasthan, a woman called Tara Singh who looks after the horses there and whose family's stables had sold the Raja's father the first Bijuri of that line, had looked at it over a video call from the far side of Rajasthan and told the groom exactly what to do. It was healing. She stood under the arcade with her dark muzzle in the bucket and her small curved ears turning toward every sound.

* * *

My father tuned the drums that morning in the dark, as he had every Thursday. This time I got up and sat beside him on the floor and watched, and he let me, and when the big drum was ringing right he handed it to me and said, "Tap it. There. Listen," and I did, and it was the first thing he had taught me about music since I was six.

He played that night. Not Raju. Raju played the small nagariya beside him, and grinned the whole evening, and did not hurry once.

* * *

At seven, the drums began alone.

At six minutes past seven, I stood up on the front of the platform, at the top of the three steps, in a white kurta and a red safa that my aunt had tied for me that afternoon, and in my right hand, unwrapped, out of its scabbard, I held Diwan Sujan Singh's sword.

It was heavier held up than it was across the knees. I had practised with it for a week, in the courtyard in the evenings, with Gurtej showing me how to hold the wrist so it would not tire, the way his grandfather had shown my grandfather with a pair of bamboo sticks in 1968. The steel was dark and rippled and the notch near the hilt caught the lamplight. In the courtyard below, three hundred people saw it and made no sound at all.

My grandfather sat at the side of the platform, by the right-hand arch, in his chair, in his white shawl. My aunt sat beside him. Not at the back against the pillar. Beside him, at the front, on the edge of the platform, in the green sari with the red border that she had worn to Mahoba, with her head uncovered.

On the dais, the Raja sat between Satish's mother and old Chhote Lal, with his stick across his knees, and his family behind him, and did not stand up.

I sang the welcome. I sang the founding song. And then I sang Sujan, all of it.

* * *

I am not going to describe it. I have the recording, and I have listened to it many times since, and I still do not know how to describe it. It took an hour and forty minutes. I did not crack. I did not stop. My voice went up the stair at every place where it is supposed to and did not come down until it was meant to, and somewhere around Kalpi it stopped feeling like my voice at all and started feeling like something that was passing through me on its way out into the rain, and I let it.

I said Khajuri's name loudly. I said Pipraun's. When I came to Kalyan in the street fighting, I turned to the dais as I sang it, and Satish's mother put her hands over her face, and Satish put his arm round her. When I came to Ramdin, old Chhote Lal did not move at all. He sat on the dais in his checked turban looking straight ahead at the rain. But his lips were moving.

At the woman in the turban who touched the horse and went back up to the walls, I did what my grandfather told me in June. I slowed down, and sang her as if she were the whole war. Under the arcade, at the edge of the courtyard, Bijuri lifted her head out of the bucket.

At the gallop at Gwalior, I breathed in the middle of the line. I could not help it. Nobody can. My grandfather snorted again, and the old men near the front laughed, and so did I, and the drums went on.

And at the gate, in the rain, with the doors shut, I sang *I have no brother*, and stopped, and lowered the sword.

The drums stopped.

The courtyard was completely silent. Even the rain seemed to stop, though it did not. Three hundred people sat on the wet durries waiting for the Raja to stand up and walk out. The Raja did not move.

And my aunt stood up.

* * *

She did not come to the middle of the platform. She stood where she was, at the edge, beside her father's chair, a small woman in a green sari, sixty-three years old, and she did not lift her hand or take the stance or look at the courtyard. She looked at the floor of the baradari for a moment. Then she lifted her chin, the way she had in the well. And she sang the women's verse.

Low. From the bottom. Not the shout of the fort. The voice of the baori, the voice for the well and the water and the lamps. In that courtyard, under a roof with no walls, with the rain all round, it should not have carried at all.

It carried. I have no explanation for it, as a sound engineer, except that three hundred people had stopped breathing to listen, and so there was nothing in that courtyard but the rain and her. Her voice went out through the twelve arches and over the durries and the tarpaulins and the umbrellas, low and steady and absolutely clear, and it reached the back wall, and the boy who had climbed onto it to see.

The knock at the door at midnight. The Raja in a herdsman's blanket. The sword across his knees. The red cloth with the gold horses, wound round it, and the three strings, and the weeping without any sound. The four things he said. The gray mare going south in the dark to Chanderi with Ratan Kunwar on her back and Jagdev walking at her head. The well.

When she finished, she sat down again beside her father, and pulled the end of her sari forward over her hair, and folded her hands in her lap.

And the Raja of Ranmaur stood up.

He did not walk out. He walked forward, to the front of the dais, with his stick, slowly, until he was standing above my aunt and my grandfather at the edge of the platform. And he joined his hands before his face, and bowed his head to them. To the singers. In front of the whole of Ranmaur and everyone who was from it, in every kitchen and night shift and small hour where the page was open.

Then he went back and sat down again on the dais between Kalyan's family and Ramdin's, and the courtyard came apart.

* * *

It was my grandfather who ended it.

When the noise had gone on for a while, and the children had begun to run about, and the women by the stables had started the kadhai going again for the last gulgule of the season, he lifted his good hand. Not high. A few inches. Raju saw it first, and touched my father's arm, and my father stopped the drums, and the courtyard noticed, slowly, and went quiet again, row by row, from the front to the back.

He did not stand. He could not. He sat in his chair at the side of the platform, in his white shawl, with his bandaged wrist in his lap, and he looked at me. Then he opened his mouth and sang the first line of the song of Diwan Sujan Singh. The road, and the horse, and the road going north.

His voice was the voice I had heard in my headphones in Footscray in June. Thin. True in pitch, every syllable in its place. And as it climbed toward the top of the phrase, toward the place where the voice should open out over the people, I heard it falter, at exactly the same step, the way it had in June. The missing stair.

And the courtyard sang it for him.

Not loudly. Not all together, at first. The old men near the front, who had heard him sing it for seventy years. Then the women of our lane. Then, one row at a time, the whole of Ranmaur, three hundred voices on the wet durries in the rain, taking the line from him at the place where it faltered and carrying it up the stair and out through the twelve arches to the top.

My grandfather closed his eyes and let them.

On the family page, afterwards, under the recording, the boy in Leicester left a message. He said that he had been standing in his kitchen at half past four on a Thursday afternoon, singing the line with the people in the fort, and that his grandmother had come in from the garden to see what the noise was, and had stood in the doorway, and started to sing it too.

The Seventh Page

After the rains, Bundelkhand dries out from the top down.

The granite goes first. Within three days of the last sitting the ridges had lost their waterfalls, and the little white threads running down the rock faces had become dark streaks, and then nothing. The tanks stayed full, brown and glossy, but the ditches emptied and the lane outside our blue door went from a stream to a path of red mud printed with the feet of goats and children and bicycle tyres, and then to dust. The frogs stopped. The swifts went somewhere else. The fields round Ranmaur turned from green to gold in a week, the millet heads heavy and bending, the sesame pods splitting, and the farmers went out at dawn with sickles, and the sound of the countryside became the sound of harvest: the soft rhythmic swish of cutting, men calling across fields, the threshing floors thumping, and in the evenings the tractors grinding home on the river road with their trolleys piled high and children riding on top.

The sky got very high and very blue. In the mornings there was mist on the Jamni. And in the fort, the stone of the courtyard went pale again, and the moss on the north side of the baradari turned brown and began to flake, and Bhagirath stood on his white dots on the first of October and wrote in his notebook, under every place, the same word. *Dry.*

* * *

The sword is in the office above the gate.

Shobha built the case with a carpenter from Datia: a long shallow box of teak, with a glass lid, lined with plain unbleached cotton, standing on a low table against the wall between the fort-side windows, where the light comes in but the sun does not reach. The sword lies in it in its bald black scabbard, with the blade drawn three inches so that the notch shows. Beside it, in a second, smaller case, lies the letter, open, face down, so that what you see is the back: five lines in a small cramped hand. You can turn it over if you ask Mehr. Most people ask.

The red cloth hangs on the wall above them, on a wooden rod, the whole length of it, the gold horses running across it in rows, the faded outer folds and the bright inner folds side by side, so that you can see how much of it the light took and how much the dark kept.

Under the cases there is a card, in Hindi and English, that Mehr wrote and the Raja corrected and my grandfather corrected again. It gives the names. Diwan Sujan Singh. Raja Mahipat Singh. Thakurani Ratan Kunwar. Jagdev of Nagara Toriya. Kalyan of Khajuri, Ramdin of Pipraun, and the nine others whose names are in the song. The weaver of Chanderi whose name is in the pattern book. The painter of the gray mare, whose name nobody knows. The women of the lane who kept the verse in the well.

And at the bottom it says: *Kept by the singers of Nagara Toriya from 1858 to 2026. Asked for in daylight, 13 September 2026.*

* * *

My aunt said yes.

Mehr asked her, a week after the last sitting, as she had promised she would. Whether she still wanted the recording from the well kept, and the one from the courtyard, with her name. My aunt was cleaning rice on a steel plate on the front step, picking out the small stones and the husks with quick fingers and flicking them into the lane, and she did not stop.

"Keep them," she said. "And write that I sang it with the breath low. So the girls know."

The girls are three girls of the lane, aged eleven, thirteen and fourteen, who came to the blue door the day after the last sitting and asked my aunt whether she would teach them. They come on Tuesday and Friday afternoons after school, and stand in the middle of the front room under the empty rafters in the stance, feet apart, one forward, with their hands out, and my aunt makes them hold Sa until they shake. And on Sunday evenings at seven, on Mehr's tablet, the girl from Hamirpur calls. Mehr found her, through the man with the clipboard at Mahoba. She is nineteen. My aunt is teaching her to breathe from the bottom of the well.

* * *

My grandfather recorded a message.

He did it on the second of October, in the morning, when his voice was best, with Mehr holding the tablet and me holding the microphone, because I would not let him be recorded on a tablet's microphone if I could help it. It is for the singers of Nagara Toriya, and it is set to open on the first Thursday of the rains after he is gone, before the drums begin. He chose the date himself and would not discuss it. My mother left the room.

I do not know what he says in it. I held the microphone and wore the headphones and I did not listen. That is a skill too. When he finished, he looked at me and said, "Good?" and I said, "Good, Dadda," and Mehr sealed it, and it went onto the singers' line on the family tree as a small closed envelope under my name, with a date on it that does not exist yet.

Mehr told me afterwards that she had learned how to do that properly from a woman who keeps the office of a hill house in Himachal, under the snow mountains, a house that has been answering letters from its people since 1952. They had found each other the year before, two young women running the papers of two old families, and they talk on the phone every few weeks, mostly about dehumidifiers. The woman in Himachal had told her to ask three questions before every recording: who may hear it, when, and who decides after you are gone. Mehr asked my grandfather all three. He answered the first two. To the third he said, "Lakhan," and closed his eyes.

* * *

And a vet from Kesarmer wrote to Mehr from Lisbon.

Tara Singh, who had looked at Bijuri's foreleg over a video call in August. She had gone to Lisbon for the last weekend of October, where old houses from different countries had met people who have money for keeping things. She wrote that someone at a long table there had been talking about how much faster songs are lost than walls, and she had thought of Ranmaur, and could Mehr send her the recording of the Kirat Sagar battle from Mahoba, the one where the singer pushed the microphone away, so that she could play it to the women at home who were trying to keep her grandmother's songs alive.

Mehr asked me. I said yes. It is the only recording of mine that has gone outside the house, so far, and it went to a horse doctor in a hotel room in Lisbon, which I find I do not mind at all.

* * *

I made my song in the second week of October.

The rule is that it must be true, and it must be sung in the fort before it is written in the book. I had known for most of the season what I wanted it to be about, and for most of the season I had not been able to start it, because every time I tried, it came out as a war, and it was not a war.

It is a song about walking home.

That is what I found, in the end, when I stopped trying to make it gallop. That the whole of the book, from the first song to mine, is full of people walking home. Jagdev, coming up the eleven steps in the rain with the sword. Jagdev again, walking back alone from Chanderi for three days after he had left Ratan Kunwar at her father's door. Ratan Kunwar herself, riding home on her husband's mare. The weaver from Kherwa walking to Chanderi in the famine with a bundle of reeds, and a boy of his line in a hotel in Dubai, marking Kherwa on a map so that he would know where it was. Kalyan's great-great-granddaughter, seventy-nine, flying from New Jersey to stand in the fort and hear her village named. Chhote Lal on the back of a tractor-trolley. The families with their pins in Edison and Leicester and Mississauga, walking home every time they open the page. The boy in Leicester in his kitchen. Gurtej's grandfather, every winter, driving down from Punjab to a house that was not his and became his. Me, in a car by a river on the other side of the world, singing one passage at a time with the windows shut.

And Mahipat. Walking back round the fort in the dark in a herdsman's blanket, in through the south gate, to his bed under the gray mare. Walking home from the only true thing he could do.

I made it in the Alha meter, because it is an Alha, and because the meter is a horse at a canter and a man walking beside it, looking at everything. I made it in Bundeli, with three words of Punjabi, one of English, and one of the old words from Mehr's list, the word for the third watch of the night, the hour when people walk home and the house is asleep. It is twenty-eight lines long. It is not the best song in the book. My grandfather says the stepwell song is duller, and he would know.

I sang it in the baradari on the evening of the fifteenth of October, under a dry sky full of stars, with no rain at all.

There were not many people. My grandfather in his chair. My aunt, and my father at the drums, and my mother. The Raja on the dais, and Mehr, and Bhagirath at the edge of the courtyard with his cap off. A few people from the lane. Raju. The three girls. Gurtej, on a durrie with his knees up, the way his grandfather sat in 1967, who was flying back to Melbourne with me in five days and had said that he would not miss it for anything, and then had cried through the whole of it, which I will never let him forget.

It was very quiet in the courtyard without the rain. My voice crossed the dry stone and hit the palace wall and came back, clean and plain, and there was nothing to hide in. I sang it anyway.

At the end the Raja said, "Wah," quietly, from the dais. And my grandfather said nothing at all. He lifted one finger, an inch, off the arm of his chair.

* * *

I wrote it in the book the next morning.

I took the book out of the wooden box under my grandfather's cot and unwrapped it from the yellow cotton and opened it on the floor, past the founding song in Jagdev's hand and the stepwell and Sujan, past my namesake's famine and Dhaniram's merger and my grandfather's Punjabi wedding, to the first of the blank pages. The Kalpi paper, thick and cream and slightly furry, bought in the heat of May 1858 by a man of twenty-six who already knew he would be the one to bring the story home.

My grandfather watched from the cot. My aunt watched from the kitchen door. My father sat on his step, facing in.

I wrote it out in ink, in my own hand, which is not good. At the top I wrote the title, and under the last line I wrote my name and the date and the place, the way Jagdev did. *Lakhan, son of Baldev, son of Hiralal. Nagara Toriya, Ranmaur. Kunwar, Samvat 2083.* October 2026.

And then, because the rule is one song per generation, and because I had come home and found that my generation had two singers in it and not one, I turned to the next blank page and wrote at the top, in the same ink, *For Phoolwati's verse. The women's verse from the well, as she sang it in the fort on 24 September 2026.* And left the rest of the page empty for her to fill.

She filled it that afternoon. In pencil first, and then in ink over the pencil. Her hand is smaller than mine and much better.

My grandfather looked at the two pages side by side for some time when she had finished. Then he said, "Jagdev said a few more, and then a few more again," and closed the book himself, with his good hand.

* * *

I left on the twentieth of October. My father drove me to Jhansi in the bus.

I am going back to Footscray, to the studio and the mattress advertisements and the string quartets, and to the school gym in Craigieburn on Sundays, where Japji has been told that I can now do the paintra without stepping on my own stick, and has said she will believe it when she sees it. And I am coming home for the rains. Every year, from late June until the last sitting. Fergus has said he will survive. My grandfather has said he will try to.

On the platform at Jhansi, under the long yellow boards with the queen's name on them, my father put my suitcase down and did not hug me. He took a pair of small clay drums wrapped in a cloth out of the cab of the bus, the smaller nagariya and a little one I had never seen, and put them in my arms.

"For the car," he said. "Melbourne. The windows. You can't do it right without the drums."

Then he hugged me, hard, smelling of diesel and clove, and picked up the suitcase and put it on the train before anyone could comment.

* * *

It is the end of October as I write this, and spring in Melbourne, and still cold. The light goes on late now. On weeknights after the studio I drive down to the river, to the car park under the bluestone wall where the Maribyrnong bends, and park facing the water, with the cranes lit orange to the south and the West Gate standing over everything.

I have stopped winding the windows up.

The nagariya sit on the passenger seat in their cloth. I tap them, and listen, and tune them on the car's heater with the vents on full, which my father would find hilarious and has, on the phone. And then I sing. Not one passage. As long as I like. Sujan, or the stepwell, or my own song about walking home, or the Kirat Sagar battle that my grandfather sang on the bank at Mahoba in 1982, out through the open windows and across the black water and onto the bluestone on the far side.

People walking on the path stop, sometimes, and turn round, and look at the car. A man with a dog has started coming most nights. He sits on the bench by the water with the dog at his feet, and does not look at me, and stays until I have finished. Last night, when I stopped, he lifted one hand an inch off his knee, without turning round, and walked off along the river in the dark.

On the family page this morning there was a new pin, in Footscray, beside mine. It had no name on it. Only the village, typed in English, with a spelling nobody in Ranmaur would ever use. Khajuri.

I do not know who put it there. I have not asked. I will find out, I expect, one evening by the river. There is time. The rains will come round again.