It would take an ink-well full of tears to write of the way we were treated. At all hours people peered through the windows to gaze at us as if we were some kind of animal. The gates of our dungeon would be suddenly thrown open for parties of sahibs. Our womenfolk hid their faces against the wall. We had to stand up and salaam every white man and woman. They taunted us: ‘You wanted to become Emperor of India, did you?’ Sometimes a young gora imitated the bleating of a goat. ‘Buddha man where are your young wives?’ he would ask. And all of them would laugh. We accepted the insults as the will of Allah.

Our request for pen and paper was refused. We saved pieces of charcoal from our hookah and used the walls of our dungeon as our slate. We spent our time in prayer and in composing poetry.

In our younger days we had composed a verse on a lover’s complaint at being imprisoned and tormented by his beloved. These lines which had become very popular ran somewhat as follows:

Why should our beloved jailer not torment us?
May God not place anyone in anyone else’s mercy.

How appropriate were these lines when the jailer was not the beloved but an enemy!

The worth of the white man’s plighted word was soon made clear to us. He called us savages because our troops had killed white women and children. People who knew swore that we had done our best to prevent these killings. The sahibs refused to believe us. For the three dozen of their own killed they slew more than a thousand times three dozen. Despite solemn assurances conveyed to us by Rajab Ali, that one-eyed product of evil seed, that bootlicking bastard, we were put up for trial. The sahibs were our accusers, our attorneys and our judges. They lined up men who had eaten our salt—Hakeem Ahsanullah, the dervish Hassan Askari, Rajab Ali, Ghulam Abbas, Mukund Lal—to repeat parrot-wise what they had been told to say.

It grieves us to record that amongst those who turned their tongues against us was the half-caste Ayesha Aldwell. We had risked our own life to save the life of this woman and her three daughters. This Ayesha’s mother had taken a gora husband. Ayesha had been brought up as a Mussalmanni. But as she inherited a lighter skin from her father and from him learnt to git mit in English she passed off as a white woman and married on old gora. We could not save her husband. But as she recited verses from the holy Quran and made her daughters repeat the kalima, we were able to intercede on her behalf. We had hoped she would testify to all that we had done for her. She proved false to both faiths, the Muslim and the Christian. May Allah punish her!