After the four hour procession through the dirt and carnage finally drew to an end, the stallion galloped toward the Saiyar Gate.
I hunched low over the reins, cutting through the whistling gale, my chest burning with a singular, incandescent fury.
Behind us, tethered to the saddle, dragged the broken husk of Britain’s illustrious general, a man in his mid-fifties, once lauded as the empire’s brilliant military mind, now reduced to a bloody trail in the mud.
Unconscious, his back was a gory canvas of exposed crimson, split muscle, and shredded uniform.
The procession had etched a violent, indelible signature into the roads of Jhansi.
The citizens, once paralyzed by the terror of British siege engines, felt a sudden, euphoric dawn of safety.
So too did the burdened girl from Bithoor, though the axis of her realization spun on an entirely different plane.
As we halted within sight of the British picket camps beneath the towering shadow of Jhansi Fort, a dark, vindictive thrill gleamed in my eyes.
But deeper beneath that vengeance, the furnace still roared: the agony of her stolen youth, the echo of her silenced laughter, and the relentless psychological cruelty inflicted upon her soul.
I had become the devil, coming to reclaim the light of my North Star, a light the East India Company had tried so ruthlessly to extinguish.
I dismounted with a heavy thud.
Grasping the coarse jute rope looped tight around General Hugh Rose’s neck, I dragged his limp, bruised, and blackened body across the stones toward a jagged Babool tree.
I anchored the tail of the rope around a nearby boulder and took a long, ragged breath.
Hot, unshed tears stung my eyelids, tears brewed from raw anger, bitter resentment, and a love that tore at my ribcage.
I glared down at the battered, barely breathing figure of General Rose.
Look at what you did to her!
Look at the gauntlet of hell you forced my Manikarnika to walk!
First, her husband was ripped away from her.
Then, that fragile, celestial bliss of motherhood…
shattered in just four short months as her tiny boy breathed his last right in her helpless arms!
And what did your Empire do?!
Like bloody vultures waiting for a carcass, you pounced on a grieving, broken widow!
Even when the mutinous sepoys cornered her with drawn blades in her own palace, she didn’t want your war!
She still clung to that naive, heartbreaking hope that the British Crown would hear her.
‘They made promises,’ she told herself.
‘They will listen!’ She stood her ground through the terror, clutching her little Damodar to her chest, praying with every beat of her bleeding heart for the storm to just pass…
so they could live in quiet, simple peace!
She believed in your justice!
She poured her soul into frantic, desperate letters, begging you to see her innocence, begging you to clear her name!
And how did you answer her?!
You tore at her honor!
You spat on her pleas!
You denied her peace, ripped away her dignity, and decided that she didn’t even have the fundamental right to exist!
I would see her rule like the queen she was born to be.
I would ensure that Manikarnika—that laughing, bright-eyed girl from Bithoor—never dies, at least not here.
For her sake, I would dance the Tandava on the chest of the British Empire itself.
Blood-red tears clouded my vision as my body moved with feral, animalistic instinct.
“Pleafe!
Lef me go!”
The garbled, muffled plea slipped through Rose’s broken jaw and bloody lips.
“Pleafe!
I bel you!”
“Shut up!” I roared, my voice fracturing against the quiet night, a brutal mix of fury, pity, and heartbreaking agony.
I remembered every line of the history books, every document your precious Empire used to erase her.
I lunged down and snatched him up by his blood soaked collar, yanking his mangled face inches from mine.
“Do you have any idea what you did to her?!
You sat in your tents reading your goddamn maps, pretending you were civilized, while you destroyed a nineteen-year-old girl!”
I shoved him back into the dirt, my teeth grinding.
“Do you know how many petitions she signed?
How many insults to her honor she swallowed?!
Her husband died!
Her child died!
And what did you do?!”
I hauled him up by his shirt once more, the fabric ripping in my grip.
“You marched upon a broken mother with bayonets fixed, threatening to steal what little life she had left!
You turned the girl who came to Jhansi with innocent dreams into a traumatized shadow who sleeps with a naked dagger under her pillow!
She is so utterly broken that she wakes up screaming from nightmares of your men slaughtering her!”
My raw thoughts spilled out as venom, my entire frame trembling under the crushing weight of her grief.
Seizing the loose end of the jute rope, I hurled it over the thickest branch of the Babool tree and pulled with every ounce of sinew in my body.
The coarse fibers tore viciously into my palms, carving red furrows across my skin.
My own blood slicked the rope, but the excruciating sting only locked my grip tighter.
I pulled harder.
The noose buried itself deep into Rose’s throat, instantly crushing his windpipe.
His eyes rolled back into his head, wild with primal terror and suffocation.
Agonized tears squeezed from his swollen eyelids as his legs kicked frantically against empty air.
His fingernails clawed desperately at the rough rope, trying to pry loose thedemon’sngripg beneath him.
“Feel the noose!” I screamed at the twitching body.
“Feel it choke the air from you!
This is what you inflicted on her life!”
Rose’s mind went numb as his vision swam in darkness.
His boots thrashed against the bark, his body straining against the hanging weight as his life was wrung out second by second.
“She just wanted to live!” I howled into the darkness.
“She sent letters!
She sent envoys!
She took her case to your courts!
It was “You” and your soldiers who drove her into the fire of rebellion!”
A thick drool of bloody saliva trickled from the corner of Rose’s open mouth.
His thrashing gradually turned into feeble twitches, then stopped altogether.
His eyes remained bloodshot and blank.
Blood dripped freely from his open wounds onto the roots below.
The grand “Golden Boy” of the British army hung limp and lifeless before the palace walls of Jhansi.
The adrenaline snapped.
My knees buckled, and I collapsed onto the hard, packed earth.
Violent sobs tore from my throat, echoing through the still air.
My chest heaved with her pain, and I slammed my bloodied, skinless fists into the soil over and over again, driving my knuckles into the dirt.
“Why?!” I wept, staring up at the hanging corpse through a veil of crimson tears.
“Why is everyone so adamant about killing her?!”
I slammed my fist into the earth one last time.
“The Company wants her dead!
The rebels left her to die!
What did she ever do to deserve this?!
Why couldn’t you just let her live?!
She didn’t do anything wrong…
so why?!”