It was a few days before Diwali that news of the Badshah Jahangir’s death was heard in Dilli. No one was allowed to light a lamp or kindle a fire in their hearth for some days. Our elders said that anyone seen smiling or heard laughing during the next forty days would have his head cut off. My mother would not let me go out to play with the other boys lest I forgot not to shout or laugh. That is why although I was only a small boy I can never forget that badshah’s death.

When I asked my Bapu the name of the badshah who had died, he said, ‘What will you do with the badshah’s name?’ None of the sweepers or cobblers in Rikabganj knew his name. Only the Mussalmans who lived in the sarai alongside the mosque and the contractor, Lakhi Rai, who lived in a big stone house with his wives, eight sons and their wives knew the badshah’s name. These Mussalmans and Lakhi Rai’s family went about with long faces as if their own mother’s mother had died. Some people feel very big if they can cry over the deaths of big people.

‘What have we poor untouchables to do with kings!’ I remember my Bapu saying. ‘They are all the same to us. One goes, another comes, zulum goes on.’

I did not know who zulum was. When I was a little older my Bapu told me that zulum was not a man but what the rich did to the poor. We untouchables were the poorest of the poor. No one did anything to us except run away if we came near them. That, said my Bapu, was also a kind of zulum. It was in our karma. We had done bad things in our previous births. That was why we were born black and had to do all the dirty work.

My Bapu called every badshah a zalim. This one who had just died, said my Bapu, was a very bad man because he drank more wine than Uncle Reloo who was drunk most of the time. Uncle Reloo told me that the badshah could drink twenty cups of arrack and eat tolas of opium every day and yet poke his queen and the other women of his harem every night. He told me that his queen had been married before. But when she saw the badshah who was only a prince at the time she knew at once that he would become a badshah. So she put some magic powder in his cup of wine and made him fall madly in love with her. The prince had the busband murdered and when he became badshah he made her his queen. Uncle Reloo said that it was not the badshah but this queen who had ruled over Hindustan.