When we reached the queen’s room, I wrapped myself in my warmest shawl, then excused myself and went into the courtyard. Arjun found me beside the fountain.
“Did you hear?” I said. My breath fogged up the night air. It was going to be a cold December.
“Yes. But she must have known it was coming.”
I sat back. “Why?”
“Didn’t you hear the way the British spoke of the raja at his funeral?”
I thought back, but nothing stood out to me.
“You speak better English than I do,” he said, “but even to me it was obvious. They were calling the raja a prince, not a king. And the painting that Captain Malcolm presented to the rani . . . Did you see it?”
“No. The rani refused to hang it.”
“Because it shows the governor-general meeting with the raja, and they are both seated on Western chairs—at equal levels.”
I gasped.
“When that letter arrives in a few weeks”—his voice grew low—“there is going to be rebellion. The sepoys won’t stand for it,” Arjun predicted, “and the rani is going to be in a very delicate position. If she supports the rebels, the British will kill her. If she supports the British, then the rebels will do it.”
“What do you mean kill?”
“There is going to be war, Sita. The British are coming to take over our kingdom.”
I felt as if someone had pushed the breath from my chest. “But what about the appeal?”
“Did an appeal work for the Mughal emperor or Baji Rao?”
Despite the cool air, my head began to feel dizzy. My entire life was the rani. What would happen to the Durga Dal? What would become of the cooks and gardeners and thousands of other people who depended on her throne? What would become of Jhansi?
“Our job is to protect the rani and rajkumar at all costs,” Arjun said. “There may be dangerous times coming. I want you to be careful.”
“They’ll listen to an appeal. They have no reason to take Jhansi. We haven’t violated any treaty,” I reasoned.
But Arjun didn’t look convinced.
Chapter Nineteen
1854
When the rani announced that we would be practicing yoga with Shri Rama every morning, the Durgavasi were upset. With so many problems threatening Jhansi, no one thought we should be spending our time doing salutations to the sun.
“The goal of yoga,” the rani announced, “is to remind us that we are not oxen; we can put down the burden of our worries whenever we want.”
Most of the Durgavasi laughed privately at this. Within weeks, however, my body felt more limber and my mind felt sharper.
I know that in the Western world, yog—or yoga as it has come to be called—is seen as exotic. It’s something mystics practice with their hands resting, palms upward, while they close their eyes. All sorts of nonsense exist about this form of meditation, but I will tell you what yoga is and what it isn’t. Yoga is not something a person practices with music or mirrors or any other distraction. Its purpose is less about samyoga than it is about viyoga, which is to say, it is more about disconnecting than it is about connecting, which many Westerners find strange, until they hear it explained. The reason a person practices every day is to disconnect from their deep connection to suffering.
The author of the ancient Yogatattva Upanishad believed that without the practice of yoga, it was entirely impossible to set the atman free. The atman, of course, is the soul. And just as the rani said, we are so burdened down by our daily worries that many of us have become no different from beasts. We walk around eating and drinking and caring very little about our purpose in this life. Some of us are not even very clever beasts. We are merely trudging through our work, yoked to some terrible master or job. The goal of yoga is to change all of this; to remind the human who has become like an ox that their yoke and harness can be taken off, even if it’s only for a few minutes a day, and that through silencing the mind, we can silence greed, and hunger, and desire as well.
Of course, this all sounds very nice. But the theory of yoga and the practice of it are very different. One is easy to learn, the other takes much time and dedication.
Eventually, even Mandar, who had scoffed the loudest when the rani decided that we must embrace yoga, was noticeably calmer. But yoga can’t change reality, and on the fifth of December, the letter arrived from Major Ellis: Jhansi was indeed to be annexed by the British East India Company. And as advised by the major, the rani appealed. A response arrived on the twenty-fourth of February. The rani’s father delivered it to her in the library, where I was sitting with Kashi on a soft yellow cushion, reading with the rani and Anand. He joined her on her wide orange cushion and waited while she read.