Fiction: Militancy and madness reach the quiet town of Patiala, triggering unexpected changes

It was not an easy world to live in, particularly if you belonged.

As an outsider you could move on: a posting here, then on to yet another town. For Patiala was a town like any other in Punjab, with mushrooming supermarkets and beauty parlours and food joints; boys on bikes, hanging out where all the girls would be, and now, increasingly, the girls too, hanging out with the expectation of being found. You could simply pass by, spurning the old-world ambience and the sense of has-been royalty that settled on everything like winter fog. You could zip past the sprawling, majestic houses with their arched doorways and long cool verandas, sheltering behind the groves, and miss them altogether. You could absorb the town entirely through the Quickie Chicken Soup Corner or the General Merchant Store at Baees Number Phatak, the railway crossing, with its display of stacked socks, underwear, banians and pointed bras.

But if you belonged to the place, the past had a presence that was impossible to ignore. The Patiala Royal House, with its coat of arms which went back to the 18th century, was a “real” working palace with a current king and queen, and it continued to...

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