This book uses fiction to tell the (largely unread) story of Sindh

The week after General Charles Napier defeated the last of the great Sindhi chieftains of Hyderabad, he sent a one-word telegram to the Governor General to inform him of the victory.

“Peccavi,” he told his clerk, Jephson, a young man from Dorset who had only landed in Karachi three weeks before, and was suffering from a terrible case of dysentery.

“Sir?” said Jephson, wondering if he had misunderstood. The twinges in his stomach were crippling his concentration, and the army doctor had filled him up with so much castor oil and calomel that his head seemed to be swimming. His mother had warned him about the malaria, about the typhoid, and about the heathen women (she was far too genteel to use the word “whores”), saying that each malady, taken singly or all together, could ruin a young man’s life forever; but she had never told him that a simple flux could give him so much misery.

“Are you deaf, man?” said the general.

He raised his chin and stared at Jephson; he was short-sighted and to glance down his high-bridged nose lengthened the distance between his face and the object of his vision, making it easier for him to focus his unsettling blue eyes on Jephson’s quavering fingers. “Write it down. Peccavi. Oh, for Christ’s – didn’t you learn Latin at that damned hole you call a school?”

“Yes, sir,” murmured poor Jephson, a sudden spasm twisting through him. He wrote down the word painstakingly and waited, pen poised above paper, for further instructions, massaging his stomach surreptitiously with his free hand.

Napier clenched his hand, then brought it down onto his table with such force that Jephson jumped in his seat. His face dark as the bark of a burnt tree, he proclaimed: “Six thousand dead at Miani. Five thousand at Dubba. I have Sindh, and for that I have been paid sixty thousand pieces of silver.”

Only then did Napier’s telegram make sense to Jephson – “peccavi” being the Latin phrase for “I have sinned”.

Jephson looked up at the general, but the man was far away in his thoughts, mulling over his recent victories, no doubt. The persecution of Mir Rustam and his escape into the Thar Desert, pursued by Napier and a group of his very best English officers and native sepoys. The thousands of Sindhis marching into the battle of Miani Forest, falling to their knees as their bodies were blown apart by the English cannons. And the Talpur traitor, Ali Akhbar, who called off the Sindhi cavalry at the last minute during the battle at Dubba, his bribe money jingling in his pockets as he fled the hamlet on his dappled stallion, another gift from his grateful employer: Napier himself.

In truth, Napier was thinking about his wife and three daughters, who had all inherited their mother’s dark Greek skin and Mediterranean temperament. He had betrayed Sindh for their sakes; the blood money given to him by the Company – whose directors he called “a parcel of shopkeepers” – would pay his daughters’ dowries; and what was left would be used to appease his wife’s formidable appetite for expensive clothes and ruthless entertaining.

Not a moment too soon, because his youngest daughter was threatening to elope with a minor, disgraced aristocrat, and a suitable marriage had to be arranged quickly. And nothing was done quickly in this world without very great sums of money.

Napier, a career soldier, was haunted at night by dreams in which he was paraded through the streets of Calcutta with a sign hung around his neck, on which was painted a single word: MERCENARY.

And so the telegram was sent, and the Company was very pleased, and General Napier was made Commander-in-Chief of India for a time, and his daughter married a captain in the Guides; and Jephson got over his dysentery but was struck down the next year by typhoid and buried in the military cemetery in Karachi, while his mother in her cottage in Dorset wept copious tears and embroidered countless cushion-covers and pillowcases with his name.

For the next one hundred years, Sindh became a distant outpost of the Bombay Presidency.

The British built railway lines and barrages, irrigating the fertile lands of the Indus basin until they blossomed into patchwork quilts of wheat, rice, cotton and fruit orchards that stretched up and down the Indus River for a thousand miles.

The British governed Sindh hand in hand with the local rulers, achieving their supremacy through a delicate balance of collaboration, bribery, and brutality pioneered by Napier and carried on by a proud line of Governor Generals with equally high-bridged noses and clerks of questionable education and dubious health.

But Sindh was the land of the Sufi saints, who wandered all over South Asia, converting millions to Islam, that relentless religion that had roared out of the Arabian deserts with all the strength of an army of lions. With their gentle ways and their message of peace and love, the Sufi saints sang and composed poetry and bewitched the Sindhis into the worship of Allah and his Messenger, long before the British ever set foot on their shores.

The Sufi saints were buried in tombs all around the province; and over the centuries and generations their bones crumbled into the sand, imbuing all of Sindh with a peculiar strength that red the souls of warriors, and would one day inspire them to throw off the yoke of British occupation. Then the Land of the Su s would merge with the Land of the Five Rivers, the Land of the Pakhtoons, and the Land of the Baloch in 1947 to become a greater entity, a newly-birthed country: the Land of the Pure.

The story of General Napier’s telegram is only a rumour, originating from that famous cartoon in Punch which shows the general clutching a telegram in his hand that reads “Peccavi”. But it is true that one hundred and sixty years after it was sent, the only tribute to the Conqueror of Sindh remains in the form of Napier Mole Road, an area in the Karachi ports famed for two things: the bridge which connects Karachi to Keamari, and its red-light district, where prostitutes hope to become movie stars, especially if they possess the light skin and blue eyes that may or may not have been gifted to them by some distant British ancestor.

Excerpted with permission from A Season for Martyrs, Bina Shah, Speaking Tiger.