The Palace of Darkened Windows

A sun-bleached railway carriage rattles across the Deccan, carrying Arlee Eversham—luminous, restless, half-hatched from her chrysalis of Edwardian propriety—beside Aunt Eva, whose corseted certainties creak louder than the teakwood benches. At a whistle-stop bazaar, two vectors of desire intersect: Billy Hill, laconic as a cigarette ember, all Oklahoma dust beneath the solar topee, and Captain Falconer, Raj nostalgia carved in pink granite, epaulettes flashing like bayonets. The Nawab’s invitation—inked on saffron paper heavy as a bloodstain—should have been a passing curio; instead it becomes a trapdoor. One misdelivered letter later, Aunt Eva sweeps into the palace expecting tiffin and trivial anecdotes, only to vanish behind latticed marble where shadows have teeth. Arlee follows, propelled by guilt and a vertiginous hunger for the unknown, and finds corridors that coil like cobras, courtyards where fountains weep rosewater into infinity, and a harem whose velvet walls absorb every scream into silk. The Rajah, a connoisseur of captivity, collects Occidental orchids; the women are wired into place by emerald anklets, their reflections multiplied in cracked mirror-work until identity itself frays. Yet Arlee, cipher though she seems, smuggles out a cry—an emerald sewn with a hairpin into the neck of a messenger pigeon. Billy, drunk on dread, recruits Falconer whose jealousy curdles into reluctant valor. They breach the palace during the Festival of Lamps, when every balcony drips fire and confusion. In the harem’s innermost sanctum, Arlee swaps places with her aunt—an act of substitution as ancient as myth—so that when the rescue erupts in a cataract of bullets and torch-smoke, Falconer drags out the wrong woman, his arms full of Eva’s indignant plumage while Billy spirits Arlee into the mango-scented night. The film ends on a dawn horizon: two silhouettes aboard a steamer churning toward Bombay, the palace receding like a fever dream, its windows still dark, still watching.