Now that the government is planning to commemorate 150 years of the First War of Indian Independence with crores or rupees, what has my family got?” Sultana Begum holds forth, arms akimbo, outside her makeshift stall on Howrah’s Foreshore Road as a motley crowd hangs on to her words. “Look at our state and tell me, what have we got staying on in this land?”

Sultana Begum’s current “state” parodies the regality of her lineage. A century and a half since her great grandfather-in-law, the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, was led away from his throne to exile in Rangoon by the British, the palaces have made way for a single room in the Howrah slum where Sultana shares sleeping and breathing space with four others. A hole in the cane and bamboo ceiling lets in the only fleck of natural light into the room that anyway, says Sultana, belongs to a compassionate Dharam bhai. A provisional kitchen occupying the corner of an alley, which slum-dwellers are passing by constantly, has replaced the erstwhile royal kitchen. “Our kitchen is on the national highway,” Sultana’s daughter, Madhu Begum, jests.

Survival for the seven-member family of the late Mirza Bedar Bakht, the great grandson of Bahadur Shah, who married Sultana in 1965, is a tiring, daily effort. Since 1967, when the Central government allotted a monthly allowance of Rs 400 for the family under the ‘Various Special Cases’ category, the figure has remained unchanged. Her petitions to the government and Sonia Gandhi to raise the amount, she says, have gone unheeded. Once though, Sonia’s office wrote back to say that the matter had been referred to the Home Ministry.

... contd.