Zakarya Khan, governor of Lahore, made a show of resistance before he came to us with the shawl of submission over his head. He pleaded that he had misunderstood our motives for coming to Hindustan. We knew he was lying. We recalled the saying of Hazrat Ali Murtaza: ‘Accept his excuse who seeks your forgiveness,’ and allowed him to kiss our feet and offer twenty lakh rupees towards the expenses of our troops.

We spent sixteen days in the pleasant surroundings of Shalimar Gardens, a few miles south of the city. The days began to get longer, the sun began to get warmer. At Shalimar the silk cotton trees burst into large red blossoms. Gardeners said that from the colour of the simbal (that was what the natives called it) one could foretell the heat of the summer to come; the brighter its fiery red the fiercer the sun’s rays would be.

Our agents in Delhi informed us that Mohammed Shah had raised a huge army to impede our progress towards Delhi. We ordered our troops to resume march as we realized that if we tarried much longer in Lahore the spring would turn to summer and the heat would become too oppressive for our warriors.

We followed our advance guard till we arrived at the village Tilauri where our tents had been pitched. A few musket shots away the Mughal army was entrenched between the town of Karnal and the canal named after one Ali Mardan Khan.

The next morning we rode out to see the disposition of the enemy’s forces. He had indeed come in great strength—upwards of 3,00,000 men. Yet it was apparent that the Mughal was still a baby in the art of war. Despite being twice as numerous as us, and possessed of over 2000 war elephants, thousands of camels mounted with swivels, parks of artillery and innumerable cavalry, he had thrown high breastworks about his forces, and thus deprived himself of the power to strike at us. Allah had verily deprived him of sense and delivered him into our hands!

We ordered our mobile columns to cut off the Mughal’s food supplies. Verily has the learned Saadi said: ‘When a warrior is full, he will be brave in fight; but if his belly is empty, he will be brave in flight’. We let our enemy go hungry for a few days. When his stomach was empty we struck him at various points to create confusion in his mind. He fired his artillery in all directions without ever hitting us.