We have lost the Mughal empire—for make no mistake of it, it is lost already—to the greed of a company of pink-fleshed men who know nothing of what it means to honour the laws of governance, who perhaps do not even know what it means to honour the integrity of having been born a human being!
In mid-nineteenth century Delhi, a typing Afghan woman who has been captured from her home by a sepoy and sold in a slave market finds herself being gifted to Bahadur Shah Zafar. The world she has been thrust into is one of intrigue and betrayal almost held together by poetry.
'The time now is for listening,' Ghalib explains. 'And then it will be time for delivering. And later, for reciting. After all that—after the listening and the delivering and the reciting have all been ingrained, then, only then, shall we begin to compose. For it is a very serious business creating verse, sacred even, for in every act of creation, we rise up and we join the Divine.'
It is a world that will soon be wrecked by the first war of independence against the British in 1857 although, as dishonourably as the British act in the wake of the war, there are tales of love and loyalty elsewhere.