it to stop it ringing. In twenty-five years, he had never scarred the wall around the clock, or singed a whisker on the tiger’s head, and had slaughtered some fifteen brands of clocks: imported wooden and gold ones – Ansonias, Smiths, Junghans – as well as clocks locally made. He had shot wall-clocks and small brass timepieces. He had once executed a Bavarian cuckoo clock, Diwan Sahib said, and got the cuckoo itself when it popped out the third of its five times. On one occasion, when he had run out of alarm clock supplies, he had made a khidmatgar wait in the room all night. At exactly five, the shaking man had had to hold a wristwatch at head height, ringing a brass bell with his other hand so that his master could shoot the watch.
After his morning shot, the Nawab returned to snooze for five more minutes with his head under a velvet pillow, and then he got out of bed to go to his horses. He had five favourites, whom he had named after Mughal kings and queens: Noor, Jahangir, Babar, Humayun, and Mumtaz. When Surajgarh fell to India at Partition and the Nawab realised he had picked the wrong side in the years before, he lingered for some months, then went into exile in Paris, parted from his palace and possessions and lands. He could not take his horses with him and they became an all-consuming worry over his last few days in India. He did not trust anyone else to look after them well enough. The day before his departure, he went at dawn to their stables, rode each of them for a few minutes, patted them, brushed them, watered them, whispered to them, and then shot them with his hunting rifle, one after the other.
The man sitting with Diwan Sahib did not look like one of his usual visitors; he seemed neither a local nor a scholar. He was wiry and long-limbed, too restless to sit still for long. He had a hollow-cheeked, cadaverously handsome face, and close-cropped steel-grey hair. I had to keep myself from seeming curious about his oddly deformed left ear, and a missing finger which I noticed whenever he wrapped his hands around his mug of tea, to warm them. Every time I stole a glance at him, I found his intent, grey-brown eyes on me, and unlike other people who look away when they are caught staring, he did not. He let his eyes linger, then float away to something else, and return again. If I interrupted Diwan Sahib’s story with comments on guns and shooting, from my recently acquired knowledge of Corbett, the man listened with great seriousness. He said very little himself, but when Diwan Sahib silenced my interjections in the acid tones he reserved for ignorant experts, I felt something like a current of sympathy pass between us, leaving Diwan Sahib out.
Now the man spoke. “I can understand the Nawab perfectly, I would have done the same myself.”
“Shot the horses?” I said.
“I’d rather kill something I loved? Than think of it belonging to someone else?” His statements ended in a question mark. A whisper of California rippled through the accents of his English. He did not smile and signpost a joke as he spoke. Instead he looked away with a slight frown, as if a troubling memory had poked its foot through a door in his head. He got up from his chair with such abruptness that it fell, and said, “It’s been too long since I came back here. Is my room still O.K.?”
Diwan Sahib introduced us at last. “This is Veer,” he said. “I know we are related – not sure how, but I know we are – maybe a nephew via some roundabout route? Veer, this is the love of my life, Maya, and I would certainly shoot both her and myself if she so much as threatened to leave my house for someone else’s.”
* * *
Diwan Sahib’s house was a higgledy-piggledy mansion built on many levels. It had doorways that turned out to be cupboards and cupboards that led into other rooms; it had attics, trapdoors, a basement. It had staircases that disappeared into darkness and so many rooms that I had not been inside all of them; nobody admitted it, but I think even Diwan Sahib thought the further reaches of the house were the domain of ghosts and spirits better left alone.
He used for the most part only two central