On the seventeenth of June, scouts spotted General Rose’s army in the distance. We rode out to nearby Kotah-ki-Serai. There were fifty-eight cannons at the rani’s disposal; if Tatya Tope took charge of the front line at Kampu, Gul Mohammad took Kotah, and the Nawab of Banda took Katighati . . . the British would have nowhere to go.
I won’t describe for you the bloodshed and cruelty I saw that day. I don’t wish to remember it, and I don’t like to accept that I am capable of the acts I committed. I will only say that nothing in Jhansi prepared me for what I saw in Gwalior. We fought for hours in the brutal heat, and by the time the sun set there were patches of earth so slick with blood that our horses had trouble keeping upright.
At the hottest part of the day the tide began to turn against us. General Rose overcame the gunners in Phoolbagh, seized their cannons, and there was chaos as our own cannons were used against us. Our soldiers attempted to flee, crossing the Sonerekha River and heading for Morar, but there were too many of them and so they became easy targets.
“Don’t go by river!” Arjun yelled. But Mandar and the rani were already halfway across.
Even today, I can’t accept what happened. Before Mandar’s horse could gain the banks, a bullet pierced her chest. I drew my bow, and my arrow found the man who shot her, but Mandar was already face down in the muddy waters of the Sonerekha when I reached her. The rani herself made it to the far side of the water when a British soldier raised his arm to slash her with his sword. And there was a moment—a brief but eternal moment—when anything was possible. I thought of weapons that didn’t exist with which I might have saved her. I thought of Lord Hanuman, our winged god, flying in to take her in his arms. I thought of pushing back time, forcing it to reverse, so that she never crossed the river in the first place. The pain of it was—and still is—that his blow struck her neck and cleaved our way of life: one moment the queen of Jhansi was healthy and alive. An instant later she was gone. One second, one, is all that separates life from death.
Her hand went immediately to her neck, and before the British soldier could slash at her again, Arjun’s arrow pierced his heart.
Even in the chaos of fleeing soldiers we were at her side at once. For a few brief moments, she opened her eyes. Then she slid from her saddle into Arjun’s arms. I pointed to a house in the distance, and he lifted her onto his horse. By the time we reached it, her face had gone pale.
“She’s bleeding heavily,” I said.
We laid her down on the cracked earth, then stripped her of her armor so we could see the wound.
“It’s deep,” Arjun confirmed.
“Rani!” I wept, but her body was rigid. In the golden light of sunset, she might have been sleeping. “Rani,” I kept repeating, “rani!” I laid her head in my lap, but she was already with her father and son.
Epilogue
1919
My hands are trembling now. I put down my diary, and suddenly, it doesn’t matter that sixty-one years have passed. I can still taste the dirt of the battlefield in my mouth; hear the screams of the men and horses in my ears. There was a time I used to read these words over and over, as if reliving my trauma could change it somehow. Shri Rama was the one who instructed me to put my diaries away. I was becoming a tree rooted in the soil of tragedy, he said, and with every fresh reading I was watering the roots, sinking deeper, allowing my pain to grow stronger. “Plant your roots in fresh soil,” he told me. And so my words were shut away. Until now, when Miss Pennywell and all of her readers will find them.