With the first light of dawn, Jaffer was up at the deck, looking at the brightening reddish eastern sky. He would always remember and cherish the beautiful dawns and dusks of India. He leaned on the railing and watched the heaving ocean and tuned his body with the bobbing ship. Yes, he must write home, and send the letter by the first vessel returning to Mandvi.

Squatting on the deck floor and with pad on his knee, he started writing carefully in Gujarati:

Bapaji,

Assalamu Alaikum

Inshallah this letter will greet you and the family in the best of health. By the grace of Allah, I am fine and am on my way to Jangbar, having boarded the Sagar Samrat in Mandvi. I beg forgiveness of you and Maa for leaving home without your permission, but I know it in my heart that as your first-born, Maa and you would not have let me go. So I had no choice but to leave home and then advise you of my whereabouts.

Three of us left home together; Mongi (auntie) Fui's Peera, Sumar and myself. Peera decided to go to Mumbai. He said that he had some relatives from the Rawhi family who would help him get settled. He assured me that he would write to you on reaching Mumbai and so I hope that his letter has reached you long before mine. Sumar decided to come with me to Africa so please convey to Mongi Fui and Rawji Fua of Sumar's welfare. I shall take care of him as much as he is taking care of me.

Bapaji, I feel that Hindustan is torn apart from within by the British (East India) Companywalla. The Great Famine of 1856, Chappaniya Dukal, has devastated the land. There is no fodder for cattle nor food for humans. Hindustanis, women, children and men, are dying like flies.

The Moghul badshahat has corroded to the core and is now therefore totally ineffective to govern the country. The Rajas and Nawabs are deep in their conspiracies, tearing the country apart. The British Companywalla have mischievously played one Raj against the other, each time like the monkey in the panchatantra story, taking a bite of the roti as the cats quarreled. The East India Company has slowly and surely swallowed Hindustan until the whole of Hindustan becomes theirs, of Rani Mata Victoria.

Hindustan until now was a Hindu body with a Muslim soul, a strange apparition, but it has survived hundreds of years. But now Hindustan has lost its soul. It is neither Hindu nor Muslim. She will now sing God save the Queen, the national anthem of Britain. Any British commoner, to an Indian, will now be a Sahib.

Punjab has now been pacified, conquered and annexed to the British Raj. The irony of Hindustan's misfortune is that henceforth, revenues of the rich Punjab will fuel the expansion of the Raj. It will be our people and our wealth which will deliver Hindustan to the Raj.

What Lord Dalhousie, Governor General of the Company, did was clearly inspired by the Raj's greed for more revenue. It is daylight robbery of the property of Hindustan and it hurts to be alive and not be able to do anything. Bapa, we are not Nawabs, landed aristocracies or princes; but surely we are Hindustanis and our life blood is being sucked while we lie hopelessly in watch. Our zamir and independence are being destroyed.

Dalhousie never anticipated the long range political implications of the changes set in motion, no more than he anticipated the violent aftermath of his reign which was primarily a reaction to the events of 1856, and most of all to the annexation of the Shia Ithna-Asheri state of Oudh, one of the richest regions in India. This was his worst blunder. Never before had the Company blatantly ignored a treaty it had honoured for more than half a century.

Can you visualise this, Bapa, the column of troops that marched north from Cawnpore to take control of Lucknow were ranked with men who had been born in the very land that they were now invading. No shot was fired. Nawab Wajid Ali Shah came in his black mourning robes to place his turban in the hands of the Chief Commissioner, Sir James Outram, pleading for his homeland and his legal rights. That proved futile. He raised no armed resistance, within or outside his palace walls.

He left peacefully for Calcutta with his entourage to appeal directly to Dalhousie. But the Governor General was on the eve of his departure for home, a sick and lonely man with no other interest in India or a Nawab whose throne he had usurped.

Nawab Wajid Ali thought that in London he might find a more sympathetic ear. So he took his case there only to be confronted with the same expressionless wall of British faces as he had encouraged in Lucknow and Calcutta. He returned to India a bitter and disappointed man. He was now willing to take arms with his countrymen who were among the forty thousand brahmans and kshaytriyas of Oudh who formed the backbone of the Sepoy Army of Bengal.

The annexation of Oudh undermined the faith of the Bengal Army, and in general, the people of Hindustan. Further, Lord Charles John Canning, successor to Dalhousie, enacted several unpopular measures during his first year in Calcutta. The most distressing of these to sepoys was the General Service Enlistment Act which required Indian soldiers to accept service "anywhere", whether in the home province or across "dark waters" - "kala pani". The Act allowed the Raj to use Indian soldiers to fight British wars in any part of the world.

Some soldiers said that British missionaries were conspiring with officials to send all brahmans and other high caste Hindus overseas so they would become permanently polluted and thus easier targets for conversion to Christianity. Canning's Company Sarkar passed another Act in 1856 permitting Hindu widows, those lowliest of outcastes, to re-marry, as though the abolition of "Sati" had not been intrusion enough into the household customs and traditions of India's majority community.

Calcutta's vernacular press was quick to point out that in 1850, Dalhousie had carried through a Disabilities Act which permitted native converts to Christianity to inherit property. Put all together, to the masses it looked like a concerted policy, and Christian conspiracy, aimed at undermining the very foundation of Hindu orthodoxy.

Of Dalhousie's three great "engines of social improvements"; the railway, uniform postage and the electric telegraph, they were all introduced to strengthen the grip of the British Raj over India.

I recall a few words of my brother Rashid. He loves the great Urdu poet, Mirza Asadullah Ghalib, and recites his verses often. Ghalib lived in Delhi and was a witness of life in the Moghul Darbar. He had long foreseen the break-up of the old system, and two years before the mutiny, he had written: