Why Lalun Why?

“When Wali Dad sings that song his eyes glow like hot coals, and Lalun leans back among the cushions and throws bunches of jasmine-buds at Wali Dad”.

Two images from this scenario are particularly striking and require a close analysis. The first image: that of Wali Dad singing to Lalun with overflowing passion, is a clear indication of the level of importance that was attached to her. This importance is further enforced by another one of Wali Dad’s songs: “Lalun is Lalun, and when you have said that, you have only come to the Beginnings of Knowledge”. The mention of the chandelier which was gifted to Lalun by a “petty Nawab” and Lalun’s belief that the City would tear the limbs of anyone who tried to rob her coupled with the fact that her salon was always populated seem to attach to her an aura of royalty that was not to be paralleled.

The second image however is a clear indication of what she thought of herself. To bring this out in an even more glaring light, one must consider the event in which Wali Dad tells Lalun that the narrator would have him leave her. To that Lalun puts forward, as a rhetoric, a metaphoric situation which borders on a parallel existence. She calls herself the Queen, Wali Dad the King and the narrator the Vizier who wants the King and the Queen separated. This drawing of similarities with a certain royalty coupled with the second image of the first scenario, among others, presents the parallel universe in which she believed she existed: it puts forward the fact that she attached a certain form of exotic pseudo-Mughal royalty to herself.

With this sense of royalty that the City attached to her, and which she attached to herself, came an inherent disdain for the British presence in India. This inherent disdain can be seen when she abruptly tells Wali Dad to stop conversing in English with the narrator. One can argue that the fact that she puts up well with the narrator, who is an Englishman, effectively negates the proposed contempt that she holds for the British. As a counter, one can say that the narrator did not possess even nearly enough of the stereotypical English persona in him to be regarded with contempt by Lalun. Even if he did possess that modicum of “English nature” in him, the fact that she eventually uses him in her plans to free Khem Sigh shows that she never really associated any sort of indispensable importance to him.

Her sense of royalty is solidified with her helping Khem Singh to escape. To see this point more clearly it is imperative to first highlight the legend of Khem Singh. He was a leader of twenty thousand men with whom he fought against the British thrice, with one of the three times being the 1857 mutiny. He was the “Great Man” the struggles of whom came to be identified with saving the Mughal royalty in India. Her sense of royalty dictated a rise of precisely that royalty as the dominant power in India. For that it was essential for her to go to that one man the track record of whom listed three mutinies against the British.

Why Lalun decides to free Khem Singh possibly has no satisfactory answer other than, given the circumstances in which her existence was born and bred, it was the only natural thing for her to do as this exotic pseudo-Mughal royalty was to her, a home.