Heera Mandi did not believe in royal blood.
It believed in cash, in song, in silence kept at the right moment, and in the kind of smiles that could turn a room into a court even when the walls were peeling and the lamps were cheap. If there were crowns in that quarter of Lahore, they were worn inside the mind and paid for in advance.
My mother used to say we were not merely surviving there; we were reigning.
"Remember this, Tehseen," she would whisper as she fixed my braid with fingers that never shook, "a palace is only a place where people obey. If they obey in a kotha, it is still a palace. If they disobey in a fort, it is only a prison."
She spoke like that—half proverb, half warning—because she was the matron, and matrons did not speak the truth plainly. They wrapped it in velvet so it could pass through the teeth of men who believed they were the only ones allowed to bite.
I grew up behind curtains that were heavier than they looked. From the street, our house seemed like any other: carved wood, balconies that leaned out like gossip, the faint perfume of sandal and smoke drifting through shutters. But inside, everything was measured.
How long a guest waited before he was offered tea.
How quickly a girl learned the difference between a compliment and a purchase.
How to listen when men thought you were decoration.
How to be present without being touched.
My earliest education was not letters. It was pattern.
My mother's name, among those who mattered, was spoken the way one speaks of a bank: with respect, with suspicion, and with relief that one does not owe it money. She had begun as a dancer, they said, and ended as a matron because the city itself had decided she was the only woman in that lane who could keep order without calling the police.
In Heera Mandi, order was not morality. Order was survival.
It meant the girls ate.
It meant the men paid.
It meant the street did not erupt into blood because one drunk noble mistook ownership for affection.
It meant the brass band at the corner played when it was told, and kept quiet when it was told.
And it meant I was kept hidden in a way that made me visible.
I did not understand this at first. As a child, I only knew that my mother's protection came with rules. I could sit behind the screen during mehfils, but not in the front. I could learn music, but I could not be seen practicing on the balcony. I could speak Persian with my mother in the mornings, but in public I must never sound like I belonged to any world except this one.
"Why?" I asked once, small and angry, because children are born with the audacity adults spend their lives crushing.
My mother pressed a finger to my lips, gently, as if I were an instrument to be tuned.
"Because you are not for them," she said. "And they will not forgive you for it."
That sentence stayed with me longer than any lullaby.
Persian came to me like a memory I had never lived. My mother spoke it when she was tired, when she was afraid, when she wanted to remind herself that she had not always belonged to the lane. She said our blood was Persian, and not the kind that wandered, but the kind that had once been served by others.
"Royal," she called it, as though the word itself could stitch a torn destiny.
I used to stare at her when she said it, trying to imagine a crown on her head, trying to imagine a throne in a house where men knocked with coins in their fists.
"Where is the proof?" I asked.
She smiled with sadness that did not ask for sympathy. "Proof is for courts," she said. "Not for fate."
Sometimes she told me stories that felt too precise to be invented. A garden with water channels that sang. A city where the air tasted of roses and books. A family name that was spoken like a prayer. Then, always, the fall—always the same: a betrayal, a flight, a burning, a carriage at midnight, a child hidden in the arms of a servant.
When she spoke of it, her eyes did something I learned to recognize later in politicians and liars: they grew distant in a way that made the lie look like faith.
I wanted to believe her. Every child wants to believe her mother is more than the world says she is.
But in Heera Mandi, "royal" meant nothing. The lane did not care who your ancestors were. It cared whether you could hold a room.
My mother understood this perfectly. That is why she made my voice my inheritance.
I first sang not for men, but for the house.
It happened on a night when rain bullied the rooftops and the lanterns kept flickering as if ashamed of their own light. The power had failed, and the girls were restless, and the older women were snapping at one another. The street outside was loud with drunken laughter. The kind of laughter that comes before trouble.
My mother called me into the main room.
It was usually sacred space—where guests were entertained, where the carpets were kept clean, where the cushions were arranged just so. That night it was only women and darkness and the smell of wet dust.
"Sing," she said simply.
I hesitated. I was young. Too young to be asked that.
"Ammi—"
"Sing," she repeated, and her voice was not cruel but it did not allow debate. "For us. Not for them."
Someone struck a match. Someone lit a lamp. The shadows jumped across the walls.
I began with a note so soft I barely heard it myself. It trembled like a bird at the edge of flight. And then something steadied. Not outside. Inside me.
The room quieted. The quarrels died. The girls—those who had learned to survive by mocking anything tender—stopped smiling. The older women, who usually guarded their expressions like money, let something soften.
My mother watched me as though she were watching a prophecy unfold.
When I finished, the lamp was still flickering, but the air felt calmer, as if the house itself had exhaled.
My mother came to me and touched my cheek with her thumb.
"Do you see?" she whispered. "This is power. Not the kind men think they have. The kind that makes them sit down."
That night, I understood what she was building around me.
Not a cage.
A fortress.
She did not want me to become a jewel sold to the highest bidder. She wanted me to become a weapon that could not be easily disarmed.
And yet, in that lane, every weapon is eventually tested.
Men began to ask about me. At first it was innocent curiosity—whose daughter is the matron hiding, why is there music in the mornings, who is the girl who never appears? Then it became suspicion. Then it became hunger.
One evening, I heard a man say, loud enough to be heard, "A matron does not hide a girl unless the girl is worth stealing."
My mother's face did not change when the words reached her, but I saw her fingers tighten around her hookah stem until her knuckles whitened.
That was the first time I realized her protection was not only maternal.
It was political.
In Heera Mandi, every girl is a treaty. Every girl is a currency. Every girl is a war.
My mother kept me safe by making me valuable in a way that could not be consumed in one night.
She arranged for tutors. She arranged for privacy. She arranged for the kind of training that made people whisper, not leer. She made me learn languages and poetry and history, not because she thought it would make me "respectable," but because she knew knowledge is the one ornament that cannot be torn off in rage.
And then the radio happened.
Radio was a miracle in those days—an invisible theatre, a stage without a doorway, a room that entered every other room. In Heera Mandi, it was at first a novelty. Men would laugh and demand songs from it as though the box were a servant. Women would listen from behind curtains, pretending not to care, while their eyes glittered at the idea of a voice that could be heard without a face being bought.
When I first heard a singer on the radio, I felt my spine straighten. The voice came like smoke through walls, as intimate as prayer, as public as a parade.
That is where I wanted to live.
Not in the lane.
In the air.
My mother sensed it before I spoke it. She always did. She had raised herself into matronhood by learning to read desire as though it were handwriting.
"You will go where they cannot reach you," she said one dawn, pouring tea as if she were simply discussing the market. "You will sing for the whole city, and they will not be able to touch you, because they will not know where to place their hands."
I remember looking at her then, seeing the tiredness she hid beneath her authority. Seeing the calculation behind her love.
"And when they ask who you are?" I asked.
She stared into her cup for a long moment.
"Tell them your name," she said. "Only your name. Let them build the rest as they please."
So I became Tehseen on the radio, and the city made its own story about me. Some said I was a nobleman's daughter. Some said I was a widow. Some said I was a lost princess, because people love princesses most when they can pity them.
My mother never corrected them.
In Heera Mandi there are no royals, she had said.
But outside, in the imagination of the public, royalty is simply the name given to a woman no one can easily claim.
And then came Partition—except in our world it did not arrive like a single axe-blow. It arrived like a long tremor under the floorboards. Dominion negotiations. Independence across the border. Clocks being wound differently in two places that had once shared the same morning.
And in the middle of it, my voice became useful to men who did not care for music until they needed it to prevent riots.
That is the secret beginning of your story.
A girl raised in a quarter that taught her to survive men becomes a minister in a cabinet that must survive a nation.
Not because she is forgiven.
Because she is necessary.