The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge, and India's Quest for Independence by Anita Anand

Author:Anita Anand [Anand, Anita]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2019-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

SUNAM, SPRING 19329

“What’s the matter with you?”10

Manjit Singh Kassid was looking over his shoulder at the man behind him, who could not seem to sit still. They had been hunting on the back of Kassid’s camel and Udham kept shifting and groaning.

“My back, it still hurts.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?”11

Manjit felt foolish for even asking the question. Udham had already shown him the scars on his back.

Rumor had it that Udham had gone straight to Kashmir after his release to recover his strength, but nobody really knew for sure. Months later he had turned up at Kassid’s door, looking haunted and thin. The British had wrecked his body, leaving him almost unrecognizable. As Kassid wrote sadly in his blue exercise book, “He was once a strong, very jolly person.”12 The man who faced him was a ghost of someone he used to know.

Gently Kassid and others in Sunam coaxed Udham back to health. Most avoided the topic of Udham’s recent incarceration, but Kassid was one of the few who encouraged him to talk about his time in prison. The answers were more robust than the man delivering them: “I would incite other prisoners inside, you know, against the treatment they gave out in there. . . . I started some strikes, refused to cooperate, got others to refuse too. . . . They flogged me at least once a month, with a cane, here.” Udham still winced when he touched his back, even though the beatings had stopped months before.13

Though the welts had hardened and turned silver, it soon became clear that under the surface the scars of his rigorous imprisonment were as raw and angry as the day he had got them. Udham was more emotionally volatile than ever before. One day, Kassid remembered taking Udham to see a mutual friend in Sunam. Bhai Hoshiar Singh kept a picture of Maharajah Duleep Singh in his sitting room, the last Sikh monarch of the Punjab. Many homes in the province had the same print: a reproduction of a portrait of Duleep by the court artist Winterhalter, painted at Buckingham Palace, showing a beautiful teenager bedecked in jewels and silks.

Duleep’s story was Punjab’s humiliation. He had been forced to sign over his kingdom to the British when he was only eleven. His mother had been taken from him and locked in a tower, and he in turn had been exiled from his kingdom and all he knew, ending up in Britain. The maharajah’s life had ended in penury, and he had died alone and broken on the floor of a Parisian hotel.

A poem was pinned under Hoshiar’s picture of young Duleep: “I have been thrown to the far-flung place, had everything, all that I once cherished, my Kingdoms and my very life taken from me. I am now in a foreign place, so far from my people. So far from my homeland.”14

Udham read the poem and stared into Duleep’s face for the longest time. Suddenly, and without warning, he broke down, crying inconsolably till his bony body shook with the effort.

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