White Mughals Read Online Free PDF

as—surprisingly—potatoes and peas. This was interesting enough, but initially seemed relatively unremarkable, and I found maddeningly few references either to Kirkpatrick’s religious feelings or to his personal affairs. Moreover, much of the more interesting material was in cipher. No sooner did Kirkpatrick begin to talk about his amorous adventures, or the espionage network he was involved in setting up, than the clear and steady penmanship would dissolve into long lines of incomprehensible numbers.
    It was only after several weeks of reading that I finally came to the files that contained the Khair un-Nissa letters, and some of these, it turned out, were not encoded. One day, as I opened yet another India Office cardboard folder, my eyes fell on the following paragraph written in a small, firm, sloping hand:
    By way of Prelude it may not be amiss to observe that I did once safely pass the firey ordeal of a long nocturnal interview with the charming subject of the present letter—It was this interview which I alluded to as the one when I had full and close survey of her lovely Person—it lasted during the greatest part of the night and was evidently contrived by the Grandmother and mother whose very existence hang on hers to indulge her uncontrollable wishes. At this meeting, which was under my roof, I contrived to command myself so far as to abstain from the tempting feast I was manifestly invited to, and though God knows I was but ill qualified for the task, I attempted to argue the Romantic Young Creature out of a passion which I could not, I confess, help feeling myself something more than pity for. She declared to me again and again that her affections had been irrevocably fixed on me for a series of time, that her fate was linked to mine and that she should be content to pass her days with me as the humblest of handmaids …
    Soon after this I found some pages of cipher which had been overwritten with a ‘translation’, and the code turned out to be a simple one-letter/one-number correspondence. Once this was solved, the whole story quickly began to come together.
    I had one more major break when I stumbled across a secret East India Company Enquiry into the affair, with sworn testimony taken from witnesses and detailed, explicit questions getting astonishingly frank and uninhibited answers; as I held the Enquiry in my hands any lingering doubts I had disappeared: there was wonderful material here for a book.
    For four years I beavered away in the India Office Library, returning to Delhi and Hyderabad occasionally to examine the archives there. Inevitably, in India there were problems. In Delhi, in the vaults of the Indian National Archives, someone installing a new air-conditioning system had absent-mindedly left out in the open all six hundred volumes of the Hyderabad Residency Records. It was the monsoon. By the time I came back for a second look at the records the following year, most were irretrievably wrecked, and those that were not waterlogged were covered with thick green mould. After a couple of days a decision was taken that the mould was dangerous, and all six hundred volumes were sent off ‘for fumigation’. I never saw them again.
    That same monsoon, the River Musi flooded in Hyderabad and the BBC showed scenes of archivists in the old city hanging up to dry on washing lines what remained of their fine collection of manuscripts.
    Gradually, despite such setbacks, the love story began to take shape. It was like watching a Polaroid develop, as the outlines slowly established themselves and the colour began to fill in the remaining white spaces.
    There were some moments of pure revelation too. On the last day of my final visit to Hyderabad, after three trips and several months in the different archives, I spent the afternoon looking for presents in the bazaars of the old city behind the Char Minar. It was a Sunday, and the Chowk was half-closed. But I had forgotten to buy anything for my family,