Steampunk World

The Little Begum Indrapramit Das

Bina looked at the metal bones covering her worn and stunted limbs, cold against her legs and feet, lovingly layering the scars of her disease. These new hands and feet were heavy, lead and steel woven with leather straps onto the outside of her body. She had watched her sister Rani make them with fire and scrap, bending the pieces with hammer and heat, her second-hand British goggles flickering with the light of the workshop’s tiny forge, sparks flying off her skin as if she were invincible. Bina did not feel invincible wearing them, these skeletal gloves and boots. They trapped her already strength-less arms and legs, weighed them down till she felt more helpless that she’d ever been, especially with Rani standing over her, ten years older, so much life in her limbs.

“When the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan’s dearest wife Mumtaz died giving birth to their fourteenth child, his grief was so all-consuming he could barely think, let alone rule an empire. So he decided he would build a monument to his grief, to honour the woman who had been so important to him.”

“The Taj Mahal!” said Bina. She knew some history from her time in the boarding houses, and the stories Rani told her. She let Rani go on.

“That’s right. Shah Jahan gathered the best craftsmen, the best metalworkers,”

“Like you!” said Bina. Rani smiled and nodded.

“…and the best engineers in his realm, and they built a monument, a metal being to house and guard his wife’s body. The Taj Mahal was the greatest automaton ever built—over 300 feet tall, plated in ivory, its massive limbs inlaid with lapiz lazuli and onyx and other precious stones, its contours cleverly crafted to look like a palatial tomb when it crouched at rest like a man folded on his knees with his head to Mecca, the spiked tanks on its back raised to the sky like graceful white minarets. To look upon the Taj Mahal walking along the banks of the Yamuna and across the water lapping its metal ankles as if the broad river were a little stream, was to see the impossible.

And that’s because it was impossible. That metal and ivory giant couldn’t walk, not even with the most powerful and intricate steam engines and hydraulics built by the empire’s best engineers. It would topple and crash before taking a single step. No, it needed a pilot who had the gift of telekinetic thought, to lift its every component, to give it a human soul to go along with the machinery.”

Like me, Bina didn’t say. She realized why her sister was telling her this story.

“Shah Jahan tried piloting it himself. He failed. Very few, after all, are born with the talent of telekinesis, a truth the Emperor did not learn easily. But he did learn it eventually. After scouring the Empire with recruiters, he found, perhaps aptly, that Gauharara Begum, the final daughter Mumtaz had left him with, was the one he was looking for, when one day she lifted an elephant into the air and gently put it down just by looking at it. She was eight at the time, like you. So with teary eyes Shah Jahan asked his little daughter Gauharara if she would pilot the walking palace that guarded her mother’s remains within its chest. Gauharara said that she would be honoured.”

“And so she did. She was carried by the Emperor’s guards through the winding tunnels of the vast being, past its engines and gears and pipes, past the chamber in its heart that held Gauharara’s mother, past its tanks, and she was placed in its head, in a soft cavern of quilted walls. The little Begum made the Taj Mahal walk, looking out of its filigreed eyes to the empire her father ruled, once with the help of her mother. Gauharara Begum took the huge metal and ivory beast across the land, with the aid of a faithful crew that ran its engines. The Empire celebrated this wonder amongst them striding in the distance, colourful pennants like hair lashing behind it, breathing steam.

But before long Shah Jahan’s third son, Aurangzeb, ordered that the giant never be piloted again, because it was blasphemous to create such automatons, that this lifeless walking idol was a mockery of Allah. Aurangzeb had his father and his beloved Gauharara put under house arrest at the Red Fort in Agra, and after a war of succession with his brothers, became the next Mughal Emperor in a sweeping victory. Shah Jahan died imprisoned, and Gauharara died many years later of old age. Aurangzeb was a devout, efficient Emperor, but oversaw the last years of the Mughal Empire that was. The Emperors that followed led it to its decline, and eventually, they were easily defeated by the British Empire with their airships and tanks. Perhaps if the Mughals had made more automatons to rid the Taj of its solitude, and kept them walking, they’d have kept this land too. They could have thrown airships from the sky, and crushed tanks under their feet. The Taj Mahal never walked again, folding into its rest by the banks of the Yamuna, where to this day its empty tanks gleam like minarets on the horizon, its scalp and shoulders shorn of pennants.”

Bina nodded, looking straight at her sister’s grease and oil covered face glimmering in the candlelight, at her coarse tattooed hands between her knees. She smiled. Somewhere in the slum, a stray dog barked.

“I know why you told me that story,” Bina said. She wondered if their mother or their father had taught Rani to tell that story. Or both.

“Of course you do. You’re a clever girl,” Rani said.

“You told it really well. But it’s just really sad,” Bina murmured.

“One day,” her sister said, putting her warm palm on Bina’s cheek. “You’re going to see the Taj Mahal at rest by the banks of the Yamuna. You’re going to walk, walk with me, and we’ll get out of here and go north to see it. Understand?”

Bina shook her head. As if to check, she tried moving her stick-like legs. They barely complied, distant, far-off limbs attached to her body through some unfathomable fog that cut off her brain from their worn-out nerves. “We’re in a slum. We can’t get good doctors like the babus and the sahibs. I’m not going to walk. You should stop saying that I will.”

Rani knew not to insist any further. She looked ashamed, which hurt Bina. But she was angry, and didn’t say anything. Rani blew out the candle next to the mat and pulled the blanket over Bina, kissing her on the forehead.

“Do you remember, Bina, years ago, the first time I told you the story of the Taj Mahal? What I said to you?” Rani asked.

Bina’s eyes welled up before she could stop herself. Her legs, weak and immobile and worn away to skin and bones by her sickness, remained that way under the exoskeletal harness her sister had spent hours and days making. All those days, and Bina had thought it was just another project repairing parts for the British and the babus with their various steam-powered machines.

“Am I going to hop in the Taj Mahal and make it walk again? Is that what you want me to do?” Even as Bina asked these questions, she felt her voice rising. She was horrified that she was shouting at her sister after everything she had done for her, but she was.

She couldn’t see her sister’s reaction through the tears. “No, Bina,” she laughed, obviously letting her little sister cry without drawing attention to it. “No. But there’s a reason we’re all here in this slum, a reason that the British laws don’t allow telekinesis for people like us, for everyone who isn’t white. There’s a reason Aurangzeb, ambitious, devout Aurangzeb, was terrified by his father’s creation, and his sister’s power. There was a time a little girl made a giant walk. Even if that’s not true, even if it was a whole army of telekinetics who made the Taj Mahal walk, that’s an impossible feat. It’s a miracle. Now I’ve seen you lift the pots and pans with your telekinesis, Bina. I’ve seen you lift the scrap in my workshop. If you can lift those, you can lift these. They’re the same. You’re good at it. I know it. You’re getting big. You know, you know this. I hate to say this. I can’t carry you forever. I wish I could, but I can’t.”

“Even if I could move this. If I ever went out, the British would see this skeleton, and they’d kill us probably.”

“I’ll cover your hands and feet with cloth, we’ll say your limbs are scarred if anyone ever asks. We’ll figure it out.”

“I…”

“No,” Rani’s voice was suddenly hard. “No more excuses. I’ve seen you pick up things with your mind. This harness is a thing. Your arms and legs are in it. You’re going to pick them up, and pick up your arms and legs.”

Rani held out her hands. “Take my hands,” she said. And almost without thinking, Bina did, her exoskeletal fingers grasping at Rani’s flesh. Rani held her hands, winced, and pulled her up.

Bina heard the metal joints around her thin legs creak, the straps tighten with new movement like unused muscles, and she felt the pieces of metal in the harness around her float like dust in sunlight, drifting as her mind vanished into a profound numbness, dominated only by the image of a child in a padded chamber, sitting calmly in the centre of her skull. She felt the pieces of metal float and lift her legs and arms, which filled with the sparkling tingle of blood moving fresh through their weakened vessels.

She was standing. By herself. Held up by metal, metal held adrift by a little child in her head. The leather soles under her exoskeletal feet squeaked as she nearly fell down in shock, but corrected herself.

Rani watched, her mouth open, arms held out to grab her sister if she fell.

Bina was shivering violently.

“My little Begum,” Rani said, her voice trembling ever so. “Come forward.”

“I can’t move,” Bina said, voice thick.

“Why?”

“I…I’m scared,” she said.

“My Begum. I know. I know. But I’m here. I won’t let you fall. Just look, look at your hands. Look what they’re doing.”

Bina looked at her hands, at the metal fingers flexing and unflexing by her side, their parts moving and clicking, joints bending, blessing her deformed fingers with intricate movement. “Oh, god,” Bina said. The metal fingers seized, stopped their clicking.

“Don’t,” Rani said. “You’re thinking too much. You were moving them without even thinking of it.”

“Okay,” Bina whispered.

“Bina. You’re standing. You haven’t done that in years. Don’t be afraid.” Bina thought of the years and years of being curled in her sister’s powerful arms, letting the sun warm her face on their morning walks by the river.

“I’ll fall if I move,” Bina said.

“I’m here if you do.”

Rani took off her necklace and held it out. “Use your fingers. Take it.”

Her hand shook as she raised it. She watched the little gears spin in the joints, the fingers bending to grasp the necklace. She held it in between her metal fingers. “Wear it,” Rani said. Her arms floated up, her hands passing her head, and she felt the necklace around her neck. It was a string tied to a featureless coin their father had hammered, to practice telekinesis with their mother, passing it between their hands through the air. Bina didn’t remember this herself. The coin hung against her chest.

“That’s it. You’re doing better than I could have ever hoped.”

Bina nodded. She closed her eyes, and pennants unfurled from her scalp in the sunlight flashing off her great ivory-plated shoulders. She breathed in deep, felt the giant bellows in her, the furnaces in her torso flare with life. Felt the entire engine of her machinery close around the twin tombs deep inside her, protecting them. She breathed out, steam rushing from the ports on her head and back, gushing ribbons of cloud into the pale sky. Her hands were huge, big enough to pick up cattle, elephants. Underneath her was their entire slum, sprawled across the banks of the Hooghly, in the distance the white palatial city of the British, of Calcutta, airships hovering like balloons above it, tethered to the land with strings she could snap with her fingers. An army of British soldiers couldn’t stop her. They’d flee, or be crushed, their bullets glancing harmlessly off her towering body.

“We’ll travel?” Bina asked, her voice breaking.

“We will. We’ll go to Delhi. We’ll find a way to get you new medicine. We’ll see the Taj Mahal. I promise.”

Bina felt dizzy, her own height strange to her. She heard her metal fingers clicking again, moving again. Flexing. Unflexing. She thought of the little Begum pilot in the padded chamber in her skull, her resolve, looking out at the world through the windows of a giant’s eyes. This little Begum didn’t have an Emperor for a father, and a dead Empress for a mother. In fact, she was no Begum, just a girl. This little girl had a father and mother who were metal-workers, who were shot by the British when it was discovered they were both telekinetic. This little girl had a sister with whom she was sent to be ‘civilized’ in an imperial boarding house. This little girl had a sister who kept them both alive over years on the streets, found them refuge working metal like their parents had, in a slum where people went to die because it was cheap, a sister who kept her alive when she fell sick, and stayed sick.

Bina felt a fire in those bellows in her chest, burning, licking at the massive grinding gears. She closed her metal hands into fists. She thought of the little girl in her skull, and this time there was an older girl beside her—her sister, safe inside the padded chamber, looking out across the empire through those huge windowed eyes, that empire once Mughal, now British, perhaps one day something else entirely. They looked out together, to the snap and flutter of pennants catching the wind outside. The little girl would keep her sister safe in that chamber.

“Walk, Bina,” said her sister. So she did.