Description

Lucknow, the spring of 1856. The British East India Company has just deposed Wajid Ali Shah and annexed the kingdom of Awadh. The Lucknow court is in chaos. The Nawab has been exiled to Calcutta. And his junior begum — the formidable, learned, twenty-eight-year-old Hazrat Mahal — has stayed behind to hold what remains of the city, of her son’s birthright, and very soon, of an entire uprising.

Into her court, that summer, comes Aftab Hussain Kazmi — a twenty-five-year-old munshi from a noble but impoverished Kashmiri family, hired to draft her private correspondence in Persian, Urdu, and the careful Avadhi diplomacy of a court fighting to survive. He has been told the begum is exacting. He has not been told she is beautiful in the way certain kinds of intelligence are beautiful — that is, dangerously.

Over the months that follow, as the city slides toward the great revolt of 1857, Aftab finds himself drafting two sets of letters every night. The official ones — to Nana Saheb, to the talukdars of Awadh, to the rebel sepoys gathering at Chinhat. And the other ones, in a locked drawer of his writing desk, addressed to her, in a verse he has never let her read.

When the Residency falls and Lucknow rises, Aftab will have to choose between the woman he serves, the woman he loves — and the country those two women have together decided to set on fire.

Sweeping, sensuous, and meticulously researched, *Begum ka Khat* is a historical romance for readers of *Indu Sundaresan* and *Anuja Chandramouli* — a love story set in the most beautiful, most doomed court in Indian history.