The Daria Dowlat had not been built to impress, but rather for comfort. Only two storeys high, the building was made from huge teak beams over which stucco had been laid, then modelled and painted so that every surface glittered in the sunlight. The whole palace was surrounded by a two-storeyed verandah and on the western outer wall, under the verandah where the sun could not fade it, the Tippoo had ordered painted a vast mural showing the battle of Pollilur at which, seventeen years before, he had destroyed a British army. That great victory had extended Mysore’s dominion along the Malabar Coast and, in honour of the triumph, the palace had been built and received its name, the Daria Dowlat or Treasure of the Sea. The palace lay on the road leading to the island’s eastern tip, the same road on which was built the fine, elegant mausoleum in which the Tippoo’s great father, Hyder Ali, and his mother, the Begum Fatima, were buried. There too, one day, the Tippoo prayed he would lie at rest.
The Daria Dowlat’s garden was a wide lawn dotted with pools, trees, shrubs and flowers. Roses grew there, and mangoes, but there were also exotic strains of indigo and cotton mixed with pineapples from Africa and avocados from Mexico, all of them plants that the Tippoo had encouraged or imported in the hope that they would prove profitable for his country, but on this day, the day after the mill fort had been swamped with smoke, fire and blood, the garden was filled with two thousand of the Tippoo’s thirty thousand troops. The men paraded in three sides of a hollow square to the north of the palace, leaving the Daria Dowlat’s shadowed facade as the fourth side of their square.
The Tippoo had ordered entertainment for his troops. There were dancers from the city, two jugglers and a man who charmed snakes, but, best of all, the Tippoo’s wooden tiger organ had been fetched from the Inner Palace and the soldiers laughed as the life-size model tiger raked its claws across the redcoat’s blood-painted face. The bellow-driven
growl did not carry very far, any more than did the pathetic cry of the tiger’s victim, but the action of the toy alone was sufficient to amuse the men.
The Tippoo arrived in a palanquin just after midday. None of his European advisers accompanied him, nor were any of his European troops present, though Appah Rao was in attendance, for two of the five cushoons parading in the palace gardens came from Rao’s brigade, and the Hindu General stood tall and silent just behind the Tippoo on the palace’s upper verandah. Appah Rao disapproved of what was about to happen, but he dared not make a protest, for any sign of disloyalty from a Hindu was enough to rouse the Tippoo’s suspicions. Besides, the Tippoo could not be dissuaded. His astrologers had told him that a period of ill luck had arrived and that it could only be averted by sacrifice. Other sages had peered into the smoke-misted surface of a pot of hot oil, the Tippoo’s favourite form of divination, and had deciphered the strange-coloured and slow-moving swirls to declare that they told the same grim tale: a season of bad fortune had come to Seringapatam. That bad luck had caused both the fall of the mill fort and the destruction of the guns on the outer western wall and the Tippoo was determined to avert this sudden ill fortune.
The Tippoo let his soldiers enjoy the tiger for a few moments longer, then he clapped his hands and ordered his servants to carry the model back to the Inner Palace. The tiger’s place was taken by a dozen jettis who strode onto the forecourt with their bare torsos gleaming. For a few moments they amused the soldiers with their more commonplace tricks: they bent iron rods into circles, lifted grown men on both hands or juggled with cannonballs.
Then a goatskin drum sounded and the jettis, obedient to its strokes, went back to the shadows under the Tippoo’s balcony. The watching soldiers fell into an expectant silence, then growled as a sorry party of prisoners was herded onto