SHE HAS MY NAME....A short story published in Hachette Book of Indian Detective Fiction Volume 1

SHE HAS MY NAME by Timeri N Murari She waited exactly where she had told him she would. Round the corner from the metro station, down the quiet, residential street with free parking. She was prepared to wait all day. She had her phone, a book, a thermos of coffee and samosas. He would come. Would she recognise him? He would have to change his appearance as his bearded features were recognisible in the newspapers and on television. But he could not be able to disguise those heavy-lidded, piercing eyes. It had been many years since she had seen him in the flesh. He came into the country for the body of his daughter. He knew it was a trap but believed she should lie in the land of his birth, and not in the enemy's. She had been killed, so young and beautiful, to pay for his sins against the State. The State had shaped him on the murder of his father, a man of wisdom and steadfastness of purpose against the injustices of the State, when he was around the same age as his daughter. It had murdered his daughter to draw him out, knowing that he would not rest until he had recovered her body to lie beside the graves of his father, mother and grandparents. His brothers too lay in the same graveyard. The men who helped him enter the country on his new passport, with a false name, and in the photograph clean-shaven and so youthful, did not ask for money. They wanted only a favour, to kill a man for them, and then they would take him and his daughter’s body safely back to his homeland. They were from his country, exiles who claimed to support the cause, and were overly deferential to him. You are our hero, they said in unison, and bowed in unison, expecting him to be swayed by such flattery. They gave him the photograph of the man he would kill, a gun, and left him outside the building, telling him they would wait for him in the car. When he returned to the street, the car had gone. This betrayal didn't surprise him. He expected that, always. He didn’t drop the weapon but tucked into his waistband, and walked unhurriedly up the street towards the metro station. It was winter in the city and he wore a light, leather jacket, pressed jeans and an open neck shirt. He didn’t look out of place but a good citizen. It was mid-afternoon, and the street deserted. The town and the streets were familiar. The homes were behind high walls, the gates protected by sleepy guards in crumpled uniforms. He passed a parked car in which a man and a woman were arguing fiercely with the windows closed. He didn’t pause when the man slapped her hard, and only hesitated when he heard the shot, a muffled crack. He glanced back as the woman climbed out of the car. Inside, the man slumped against the window. Will you help me? she asked. He said nothing but returned to the car and helped her heave the body onto the back seat. He guessed it a shot to the heart, no sign of blood, quick and clean. He took the gun, a .38 automatic, levered a round into the chamber and returned it to her. She dropped it in her handbag. Ride with me, she said and he climbed in. The imprint of the man’s palm was fading from her cheek as she drove. You don’t say much, she said as she steered quickly through traffic, but then you never did. He nodded and, knowing he was safe, fell asleep. When he woke, it was dusk and they were deep in the country. I’m taking you home. Is that okay? He merely closed his eyes in agreement. How have you been? she asked. She turned into the drive, a long one, to a house set well back. It showed no lights, and she was not bothered he hadn’t answered. We’ll bury him in the rose garden, she said, he loved roses and he’d like that. She pointed to the side of the house. There are gardening tools there. Obediently, he went and found them and they took turns digging up the rose bed, the soil was soft and loamy. She took the dead man’s feet, he took the shoulders. They dropped him in the grave and shovelled the earth back. When they finished, he meticulously patted the earth flat and then helped her re-plant the roses. He couldn’t tell the colour in the darkness but their smell reminded him of his homeland where roses blossomed to the size of a fist, and caressed the air with their perfume. Why did you marry him? he asked when they were sitting in her catalogue kitchen, gleaming with gadgetry, all wasteful in his eyes. His taste in food was austere and simple - leavened bread, spiced vegetable, pungent onions - enough to sustain him in the mountains. He noted, but said nothing, that she had used a key to open the front door while the kitchen one was unlocked. She poured herself chilled Chablis but didn’t offer him, as she knew he didn’t touch alcohol. I fell in love, I suppose, why else does one marry? She had a worn beauty, like a well-rubbed coin, still revealing the profile of a queen or a princess. He was gentle in the beginning, she continued, then he became the beast, as all men do with the passing of time. He knew you were coming and he knew I’d be waiting for you. I never stopped waiting for you, and he knew that too. He knew my password, it’s her name. When I typed it in I thought of her and now when I do I am reminded of her. You took your time. I have time, he said. So do they. How did they kill our daughter? He waited until she refilled her glass, the wine sending a faint blush through her cheeks. They found her found hanging from the clothes hook on the back of the door in her room, she said in a whisper. They said it was a suicide, young people do that in their depressions, they said, and then they said it was a drugs trip. My heart broke into small pieces when I saw my dead daughter and it will remain in lost pieces until the day I die. I didn’t know until then how frail is the heart, it broke like dropped china. He waited, letting her weep, without consoling her. Always patient. He knew what she would say before she said it. You’re to blame because of who you are, she screamed at him, they killed her knowing it was only way to hurt you but they don’t know you as well as I do that you can’t be hurt by your daughter’s death. You feel nothing, nothing, you never did. He waited until she stopped crying, pouring himself a glass of water from the tap, savouring its cool sweetness, envying her only for that convenience. He had forgotten the ease of such a life, a tap, clean water, the very simplicity unavailable in his land. He drank slowly, remembering the times he had thirsted for water. Remembering too, despite his reluctance to recall the past, that she was wrong in her screamed accusation. He had felt, he had experienced, love. She had forgotten that in her anguished rage. There was that long winter of tenderness in their lives, the winter in which she conceived the daughter who was now dead. He had felt love for her though he had not articulated his emotions. And that was his fault, love needed to be spoken out aloud, and not confined to the heart. He had not spoken it so long ago, when they were young, because he knew he would not remain in her country long. She would not survive in his; the harshness would have killed her. When they assassinated his father, he had left her, without saying goodbye, never expecting to return. Knowing he had left a part of him in her body. He had under estimated her determination to make him remember, and had sent him photographs of the daughter, wrote about her too, and sent those messages to an email address that was not in his name or even remotely connected to him, except through layers of intermediaries. From that distance, he had watched his child grow into a beautiful young woman who also wrote to him. She wanted to know her father, meet and embrace him, though she knew too, from reading the newspapers, that he was considered a dangerous man, incapable of human warmth. His replies to her long, longing letters, were curt, dismissive of her suggestions, not knowing that rejection to a woman’s heart only increased her loving. The daughter knew, despite his curtness, that she had touched him and he had read her letters, otherwise he would never have even replied. By doing so, he realised now, that even his curt replies had endangered his daughter’s life. He had revealed, to those who watched for such signs, his vulnerability. If only he had stayed silent. He rose and washed the glass, letting the water run, listening to its music, and then wiped the glass clean before placing it in the rack. She remembered that he had always been meticulous in his movements, keeping them minimalistic, never wasting energy. He had the slight stoop of a man who crouched close to the earth in his movements, which brought him down to her height, almost. He’d lost some weight but wasn’t skinny, just lean and muscled and tried to imagine what kind of a haunted life he led. When he washed his hands under the running tap, she thought he was trying to wash the blood off his hands as he used the soap to scrub them, like a surgeon before an operation. Of course, his hands could never be cleansed. When she had known him long ago, he had not killed anyone, and was just an innocent boy she fell in love with. A solemn young man, yet with a wry sense of humour, and honeyed skin she loved to caress. That skin looked coarser, tiny scars criss-crossing the backs of those cleansed hands, and his eyes no longer held any humour. She could not see any laugh lines. Breaking the silence to distract him from hearing their approach, she said, my daughter insisted on using your name, you know, insisted, even though she had never set eyes on you and knew you only through my bitterness. I wanted her to use my husband’s name. He had adopted her, but when she reached eighteen, she dropped his name and changed it to yours. You had no right to her life, and she lived only another 18 months with your name. He nodded, yes she told me and I advised her, strongly, not to. It would mark her out for life. She was reckless? She heard beyond the question he asked, for the first time showing some curiosity for his daughter. She was brave, she replied, and she was beautiful and clever; she danced and sang and laughed with abandon. She was so alive, unlike other girls her age who walk and talk as if they’re dead, and she had a halo of friends who surrounded her wherever she went. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, commit suicide, not hang herself from a hook on the back of her bedroom door. The coroner said she had, no matter how much I insisted that the authorities murdered her because of her father. The coroner was one of those kindly looking men with metal hearts. He said I was mad with grief, as she was my only child, and I was fantasying such conspiracies. The authorities are kindly people too, he had said, they lived by the law and would not, could not, murder an innocent child for sake of punishing her father. The State would not do that, as it upheld high moral codes, respected human rights and practised democracy. It was men like her father who murdered the innocent, that’s what he told me in front of everyone. I begged him to order an autopsy but he said it was unnecessary. She had committed suicide. The Investigator, and here she used two fingers of both hands to place that word in quotation marks, sat in the front row, and he too looked at me with kindness and sympathy, as if understanding my unremitting pain. The Investigator was the one who broke the news of my daughter’s death to me. He came to the house early Sunday morning with his mourning face to tell me that there had been an accident, that my daughter had hung herself from the hook on the back of her bedroom door. I didn’t believe him, she had called me the evening before, she called every evening, and told me she was going to a party with her friends as she had finished her assignments. She had that discipline too; she wouldn’t party until her work was completed. He listened without any movement, wishing he had met his daughter. She had wanted to meet him when she changed her name but he had coldly discouraged her. A curt: No. You married when you went home, didn’t you? Did you fall in love? And when he shook his head, just once, she continued: How many children? Three, two boys and a girl. He paused, not wanting to continue but he did in spite of his reticence. A missile hit our home, when I was very distant from them. It was the rumour I was there that killed them. In the silence, she wondered whether he had mourned that loss, and poured herself the third glass of wine, giving herself the false courage to continue with the evening. You’ve come to revenge my daughter’s death, haven’t you? No, he said, revenge against the State is futile. As she has my name, she must lie in the graveyard in my home. Where is she now? She had to laugh aloud at his audacity, though she knew the dangers of her contempt. I buried her in the land of her birth, in the town’s graveyard. She was my altar when she was alive, now her grave’s my daily pilgrimage. She will remain here. Who would she know in the graveyard of your ancestors? She didn’t even know your language and I will not allow her to lie among such strangers. Please, I beg you, allow me that, she said, though he heard no pleading note in her voice. It was more mocking. He felt no remorse when he knew that, because of her defiance, he would have to kill this woman he had loved. His daughter had to lie in the family graveyard, even as one day he will lie beside her there. Despite their years apart, she still knew how he thought and waited for them to come for him. They were near, just beyond the door. They both waited as he had been listening to the silence and knew it had been disturbed and, seeing her look, knew they were here. You told them? he said. Yes, I told the Investigator you would come for her. You knew that? Yes Yet, you came. For you and for her. She has my name. What did they promise you for me? I wanted you take your revenge but you won’t will you? No, I told you that. He still had the gun in his waistband; it felt so heavy, dragging him down. She saw, for the first time, that he was tired, not so much physically but spiritually. The Investigator came through the back door, not quickly, cautiously, and two armed men, who remained in the shadows, followed him. Their guns aimed at him. The Investigator stood facing them both with all the authority of his State. A square man, with a square face, receding dark hair and unforgiving eyes. Give me your weapon, he said quietly to the man, and accepted the gun slid across the polished table. He picked it up, hefted it, a 9mm automatic, then freed the clip. It was full and there was one round in the chamber. He sniffed the barrel. It hadn't been fired recently. He placed it far out of reach from the man and sat down. He had a gentle voice, it calmed the spirit of the listener. I’ve waited many years for us to meet. Patience pays off. You killed my daughter? The State ordered me. You are too famous and protected in your land. Unreachable. It was unfortunate but how else could I get you, so well hidden away in your land. Like a serpent in its hole, I had to tempt you out, somehow. I know your culture and your traditions; you couldn’t allow her to remain here. It was my persistence. I did not know you had a daughter here until she changed her name and it came up on our computers. I traced you back to the days when you were here, and read your communications with her. Even though your responses were brief, I knew she had touched you. Otherwise, you would never have exposed yourself. He sat very still facing the Investigator, and she knew the men would kill him as soon as they could. He knew that too. They would call it an “encounter”. He glanced at her, and she caught the tiny glint of admiration in his eyes. The Investigator turned to the woman and said, Thank you for helping me, and keeping me informed on his movements. Otherwise I could never have brought justice to this terrorist. Of course, he will be tried in a court of law. We believe in our democracy and just rule of our laws. And found guilty? That is up to the judge. And justice for my daughter? There is a reward of course, he smiled. There are only three of you? She asked. He’s a dangerous man, as you yourself said. Three are more than enough. When he turned to one of his men, she opened her purse that lay on the table. She took out the gun with which she had killed her husband, and killed the Investigator first, and then his two companions. I believe in revenge she said in the silence that followed the explosions. I wanted him here alone; I wanted to hear him boast about my daughter’s murder. I knew he would come himself so he could boast about catching you. You had to do it, not me, to free you of the hate for the man who killed our daughter. I can never be free of that. You will look after our daughter? Yes, I will. He reached over and took the gun. Carefully, he wiped it clean of her fingerprints and then gripped the weapon in his hand, pressing down firmly on both the butt and the barrel, then placed it back on the table between them. He smiled, reminding her of that youth, and she felt it gentle as a goodbye kiss. He rose, picked up his own weapon, tucked it into his waistband and walked through the door. She thought of offering him a lift but knew he would find the way back to his own land. ©Timeri N. Murari.

THE MARRIAGE

THE MARRIAGE. 1973 PUBLISHED: MACMILLAN, UK & India. It has often been stated that the most difficult task an author can undertake is the writing of a purely contemporary novel; for detachment as well as narrative skill is required. It is rewarding to find the necessary expertise in Timeri Murari’s The Marriage…an ingenious Romeo and Juliet type of story set in the Midlands. It is to Murari’s credit that he appreciates the shortcomings of his own nationals as surely those of the indigenous workers and it is this impartiality that makes The Marriage an important social document'. CONTEMPORARY REVIEW, London. -Mr Murari is able to present the blossoming of love between Leela and Roger with great tenderness and grace. Furthermore, the homesickness and love for India is woven through the story so skilfully that India’s presence is overpowering, and England seems unreal and ghostly. Immigration, a self-exile of sorts, and the particular types of corruption, human limitations, and blindness which follows, are crucial problems for many of us. I would recommend The Marriage because it deals with themes and ideas which are worth reading about and discussing, and because it’s a good story, well told. WORLD LITERATURE WRITTEN IN ENGLISH. -Back to Enoch country, and The Marriage, where the extremes of Enver Carim are heavily muffled and prejudice is conducted far more decently. Unlike Carim, Timeri Murari approaches his subject with painstaking fidelity to the grey realities of life. The novel is set in an Indian community in the industrial Midlands and is more concerned with the problems and compromises of integration than with the apocalypse of breakdown. Two stories are inter- woven to create a sense of the personal and social tensions between immigrants and indigenes: Tekchand, the leader of the Indian community, is trying to arouse his fellow workers to take official action against an extortion racket, run by Indians and whites, by which new workers are forced to 'buy' their jobs, while Roger, a young Englishman, hopes to establish a relation- ship with Leela, Tekchand's daughter. In both stories, the Indian characters find themselves in conflict with their racial roles and instincts. Murari patiently evokes the realities of trade unions, work and the tangled threads of prejudice and fear, and even though Roger is not much more than a pleasant nonentity as a character, he also manages to establish the boy's affair with Leela surprisingly well. The two stories merge in a clever and plausible climax, as a result of which Tekchand is blackmailed into dropping his case against the racketeers, and Leela is forced to leave Roger in order to play her role as the submissive daughter. In the respective failures of Tekchand and his daughter, the novel acknowledges the obstinate strength of racial identities. It is convincing because of the author's sincerity and sympathy in dealing with all the main characters. NEW STATESMAN. -The tragedy is in the contrast between the Indian islanders and the native ones, between a closed primitive mentality and an environment that rejects them. THE SUNDAY STATESMAN, Calcutta.

New Savages

THE NEW SAVAGES. 1975 Published: Macmillan UK. -'a classic piece of reporting on the young of Liverpool 8'. THE GUARDIAN. The New Savages would hardly amount to much as fiction, if it were not for its threatening status as fact. Timeri Murari's documentary novel of teenage violence, in Liverpool could be described as a workmanlike job: its generalisations are of the kind one might find in an intelligent newspaper, and its psychological and physical particularities offer little imaginative stimulus. But this would be to ignore the strengths of the book. It presents convincingly the language, the values and the rhythm of a world of ghetto life which the contemporary novel has rarely managed to penetrate. The act of attention that preceded its writing called for a sustained sympathy for which we should be grateful. Perhaps I've just read too much fiction which is a celebration of the author's intelligence and sensitivity, or a release of his resentments, but I was thankful for a novelist who tried to present characters who were not projections of himself. THE TABLET -The author spent two months in the area in an attempt to understand the subtle but dangerous change from traditional adolescent gang fighting over territory to the new battles over race. He has one immense advantage over most social scientists in that he writes easily and well. The book is recommended for its sensitive handling of the feelings of young blacks growing up in the slums of our cities. TIMES EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT. -The New Savages bears the marks of one who has spent months on location researching and he manages to characterize the anxiety and enjoyment of routine violence without patronising or glamorising adolescent energy. TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT. The publication of this book was opposed by people who are deeply concerned and involved in the whole Liverpool scene, and possess a much more comprehensive knowledge of the ghetto situation there than Timeri Murari could have accumulated in his admirable two months of round-the-clock investigation. Nevertheless this prophetic state- ment on conditions there ought to reach a wide public. Liverpool is but a microcosm of our national situation. Through the pages of this book one lives the homely experiences of white and black teenagers in two whole days of their Jives. And one comes from it appalled by the black despair that has settled like a cloud in this problem area. The choice of material for the book has obviously been selective, creating fictitious types like Marko, the half- caste, experiencing the conflict of uncertain parentage, tender towards the ageing aunt who cares for him, tough with his black peers and in their company moving slowly towards self-destrucpon, and Bicklo, the cocky leader of the, white gang of Boot Boys, who move from their territory in constant street-fighting with the black people. Trenchy is caught continuously in this ferment of strife and crime. He typifies the struggle of many of his generation, who wrestle alone with a current which exerts a steady downward pull into the vortex of violence and crime around them. The white negro sensitivity is daily brutalised in the dirt and squalor of a senseless existence where he searches faces for meaning. As night comes down in the end of a forty-eight hour vigil in their ghettoes, the reader jolts to an ending. He is left with a host of unanswered questions and a desire for further knowledge and discussion. FRONTIER

INTERVIEW ON THE FINAL CONTAGION

 

 

THE FINAL CONTAGION.
LUME BOOKS, UK, has just re-published my plague novel, THE OBLIVION TAPES. It was first published in the US/UK and German in 1978. The new title as you can see is THE FINAL CONTAGION.
 

Why I wrote it: .

 

Back in the 1976, I remember reading a study, Population Resources Environment by Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich. It was a massive study, very complex and thoroughly researched which warned about the possibility of a conflict between the rich and poor nations for diminishing natural recourses. The authors did not suggest genocide. But I thought then, with the exploding population, there was a possibility of forces trying to control the growth. When I wrote the novel, the theme became darker that there would be some drastic action one day.  My novel was a warning. My friends who read the early drafts asked me not to publish it. However, an American, British and a German publisher bought the rights.

To be honest, I had forgotten about that novel after 40 years until the Coronovirus struck the world. I do not see the virus as fulfilling my prescient thoughts back then. However, with climate change today a major concern for human survival, I think now it is nature striking back as us. I wanted that novel republished, as I believe even more that we are all reaching a tipping point in our survival, and the world may end with my novel’s prediction.

 

GUNBOAT JACK, A NOVEL.

Situated in the literary landscape that encompasses E.M. Forster's Passage to India, this brilliant magical novel is about the clash of two cultures - ancient India and modern West - carried out in an epic struggle that is at once part mythic, heroic past and the everyday present.
At the book's centre if Nicky, the young Prince of Tandhapur, on the edge of manhood, torn between his roots as an Indian aristocrat and his western education, passionately devoted to his family's pride, power and dignity in an India that is fast abolishing the role of rajahs.
Nicky's father has allowed the control of his family, its fortune. The great palace itself with its splendours and Victorian opulence, to pass into the hands of his English advisor and mistress, Miss Hobbs. A woman of singular determination and boundless ambition, she has cut the Rajah off from his own children, even from the old Rani; from everyone in fact, except Nicky, who sets out to regain his heritage and defeat the invader.
But the time is 1952, not 1542, Nicky's ally is not a Mongol prince but a stranded American boxer. His test of courage is not a duel with jewelled swords but a boxing match with Miss Hobbs's son, a match which gradually comes to signify all the tensions and conflicts of India and of the family, embracing the Rajah himself, his bullying mistress, the young princess who has to choose between a western education and an arranged marriage, the fate if the American boxer, who is in love with an Anglo-Indian girl, and above all the future of Nicky himself.
Filled with rich, sensuous, potent scenes and images, fast paced, deeply moving, romantic and gripping, Field of Honour is a major work of fiction.

Graham Greene 'I was very much impressed.’

-Hugely dramatic, thrilling indeed. FINANCIAL TIMES.
-Murari can set an exotic scene, enrich it with romantic intrigue, and power it with a dramatic climax. A good novel about man's basic struggle against society, his fellow man and himself. For readers who want suspense with sustenance- LIBRARY JOURNAL.
-A first rate story-teller makes the most of the incongruity of circumstances. -DAILY TELEGRAPH.
-A backwater setting with fascinating characters is brought to life here by skilful, good old-fashioned story telling. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.
-Timeri Murari's FIELD OF HONOUR, starts at a disarming level. However, some 70 pages into the story, it quickly acquires grip and subtlety. Murari's use of language is accurate and skilled, and his story is satisfyingly well told. TIMES EDUCATIONAL SUPPLEMENT.
-There are insightful observations, like the author's delicate delineation of the position of the English in the twilight zone of postpartition India or the small details of life in the rajah's household he provides. ASIAN WALL STREET JOURNAL
- He focuses on two groups of misfits in the new India. The Anglo-Indians talk of England as 'home' yet are reluctant to leave for a land they don't know. And the native aristocracy that has absorbed (and been corrupted by?) the western values of its colonial masters lives uneasily in this fledgling socialist democracy. Murari links these two worlds with Gunboat Jack, a spent American boxer who is stranded in Bangalore, where he lives restlessly with the Anglo-Indian community. This is a fascinating tale, powerfully told. THE COURIER-JOURNAL.
-Like filmmaker Jean Cocteau Murari believes every man has his reasons. This is a story of aristocratic cruelty and nobility, of ancient traditions meeting modern exigencies, told so swiftly and well. THE CHARLOTTE NEWS.

 

EMPRESS OF THE TAJ, INSEARCH OF MUMTAZ MAHAL.

I will tell you the story of this woman Arjumand and how she loved and how she eventually died, but first you must travel with me over 2000 miles through the cities and villages and jungles of India by train and bus. It will be a journey that will take you many weeks and three hundred and fifty years….

 

An extraordinary book that combines travel- and history-writing with brilliant storytelling to give us a portrait of Mumtaz Mahal, in whose memory Shah Jahan built the Taj, and also a portrait of India before it was changed by liberalization.

In the early 1980s, researching for his bestselling novel TAJ, author Timeri Murari began the first of his journeys in the footsteps of Arjumand Banu, the precocious daughter of a Mughal nobleman. Arjumand went on to become Mumtaz Mahal, chief consort of the Emperor Shah Jahan, and empress of the Mughal kingdom until her death in 1861, giving birth to their fourteenth child. Over the next two decades, the grieving Emperor had the Taj Mahal built in her memory – their final resting place, and the world’s most enduring symbol of love.

Timeri went on his journeys at a time before air travel was common in India, when they were protracted affairs and undertaken mostly by train. Accompanying him was his wife Maureen and sister Nalini, his talismans in the face of the many difficulties that travel in India throws up.  In these travels of discovery—in Delhi; in Agra, the centre of Mughal power and site of the Taj Mahal; in the desert cities of Rajasthan, where Shah Jahan waged campaigns, Mumtaz Mahal at his side; and in Burhanpur in the Deccan, where the empress breathed her last – the author found fascinating glimpses of an empire at its zenith, and of consuming love. Intertwined with these insights were the shabby realities of modern India – the obstinacies of the bureaucracy that controls monuments, the industries which deface them, and a citizenry that remains unaware of its own history.

A brilliant meld of travel and history writing, Empress of the Taj, is not only the story of a fabled queen, and the magnificient obsessions of royalty; it is also an invaluable record of a lost era of India.

Publisher: Speaking Tiger. www.speakingtigerbooks.com or Amazon.

 

 

 

Anodya Mishra Scroll In

Travellers and tourists from around the world visit India every year to savour a view of the iconic Taj Mahal. The white marble mausoleum was commissioned in 1632 by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. For almost four centuries now, it has been sitting on the banks of Yamuna in Agra, telling the tale of Shah Jahan’s love for his wife Mumtaz.

While the world considers it a symbol of a man’s undying love for his wife, it is also perhaps an embodiment of the power an emperor possessed to build one of the greatest monuments ever. However, the story of the woman who lies in this tomb has been lost in the pages of history. Her identity is associated with her death, and any signs of her life before the Taj was known is associated with her husband.

Thus, it is her voice that is the subject of Timeri N Murari’s quest in Empress of the Taj: In Search of Mumtaz Mahal. Essentially, the book is an account of Murari’s travels around India searching for bits and pieces of information on Mumtaz Mahal, which helped him write his earlier book, Taj: A Story of Mughal India, back in 1985.

So, Murari, who has spent much of his working life in the UK and America, travels through the hills and plains of India, in both comfortable and harsh conditions, searching for his muse, Arjumand, who is remembered by the world today as empress Mumtaz Mahal. He shuttles between the past and the present, constantly drawing himself back to his protagonist.

The search for Arjumand takes him on a tour around the Mughal capitals of Delhi and Agra, the Rajputana territories of Udaipur, Ajmer, and Jaipur and finally, towards the last leg of his journey, Murari visits Burhanpur, Arjumand’s initial resting place. The book doesn’t attempt to stick to one theme and explores a mosaic instead. Travelling as he was in the 1980s, Murari uses both memory and immediacy to write of his journey and, in the process, provide a glimpse of modern India more than three decades ago. His troubles with the Indian Railways, encounter with riots, conversations with unemployed youth, accounts of nepotism and politics, and his love for the grandiosity of royals, are all intermingle here.

Ghosts of the past

“History, as I am to gradually discover as I excavate a shard of our past, is either gossip fashioned into fact, or worse, outright distortion...”

Unlike many historians (and like some novelists), Murari has a romantic take on history. He writes in a Herodotean style – one which looks at history as an art – rather than the scientific Thucydidean one. With Arjumand being the focus of Murari’s research, it is no surprise that history is viewed romantically. But does he take this approach just for the purposes of writing this book? Or is it simply easier to view the past through the lenses of nostalgia, romance, and beauty?

Travelling around Delhi towards the beginning of his journey, Murari gives his readers a history lesson. Describing the changing landscape of Delhi from a mud settlement to a thriving capital, Murari writes, “No one knows when mud turned to brick and when the name changed but here Delhis lie on Delhis”. This refers to the seven historical cities of Delhi, which are today divided into administrative districts of the same city.

What is fascinating is that while Murari travelled around these cities almost 40 years ago, his experiences leave you with an uncanny feeling that alternates between “nothing has changed” and “it has been a lifetime”. One is bound to travel through space and time and get muddled somewhere in this transition while reading this account because, on the one hand, Murari travels in the 1980s while reminiscing the 1600s, and on the other hand, we are reading this account almost forty years later, in the 21st century.

Murari’s own observation about the past is worth noting. He writes, “The past, not only here but everywhere in the world, comes down to us in fragments, bits of a puzzle we piece together”. Here, Arjumand is the puzzle that has taken over his mind, and he is trying to search for fragments of her and put them together. He feels her ghostly presence everywhere he travels and “with the romantic imagination of a novelist”, he attempts to set up a narrative around the purpose of her presence in each of the places he visits.

On approaching their guest house in Mandu, which lies amidst the ruins of another forgotten empire, Murari “imagines himself ensconced in those rooms sitting on the balcony and listening to the ghostly music and laughter”. However, his perception of reality is far removed from the actual surroundings – his wife and his sister aren’t too keen on dining with ghosts and sleeping in rooms infested by mice and prefer to spend the night in a place away from the ruins.

Living and dying a nomad

“Briefly, in death as in life, she led a nomadic existence but then as the marble sarcophagus settled down with her, eternity claimed her forever...”

Murari travels through India, his homeland, in search of Arjumand, an empress who was travelling around the same places hundreds of years ago. Arjumand came from the family of a Persian nobleman who had yet travelled all the way from Persia to the Mughal Empire in search of a better life. She had married into the royal Mughal family, who traced their lineage to the nomadic tribe of Mongols.

Thus, Arjumand’s life, by birth and by marriage, was supposed to be a nomadic one; but was her death to be nomadic too? She died in Burhanpur, far from her native land of Persia. There her body rested for a few years, before being transferred to another temporary tomb in Agra, and finally being buried in Taj Mahal.

Arjumand’s nomadic existence reminds Murari of his own life. He writes, “What better proof of our nomadic existence than my mother’s death in Lahore, 2000 kilometers from our ancestral home in Madras.” Paralleling Arjumand’s life with his own, Murari seems to be searching for his own self and for stories from his past through this journey. There is constant banter between him and his sister throughout the journey as they try to locate their collective memories in their individual ones.

Being the child of a government employee, Murari had had a fair share of moving around, leaving him with fragments of memories from everywhere and a feeling of uncertainty about home. However, during one of his journeys, his wife Maureen is engulfed with a sense of foreignness while traveling in India. At that instance, a realisation dawns upon him when he writes, “India can never frighten me. I suppose that is the definition, for me, of home”.

Murari’s search for Arjumand ends with Burhanpur. As they near Burhanpur, Murari has second thoughts about visiting the her first grave. He considers letting Burhanpur remain a “figment of his imagination and a figment of India’s memory, long forgotten on the banks of Tapti”.

However, after his initial apprehensions, when he is finally standing at the tomb with the sun setting, there is a deep sense of closure in the reader’s mind. Murari’s “private pilgrimage” comes to an end. He makes one final journey the next day, early in the morning, to look at the grave a second time, this time all by himself. “The grave begins another day of solitude on earth, protecting nothing, marking nothing but memory”.