Summary of the Lesson

A strange journey begins. Professor Gangadharpant Gaitonde, a historian, is travelling by the Jijamata Express from Pune towards Bombay. As the train speeds through the familiar ghats, he plans to reach a big library and browse history books to understand how things around him have become so different — and then to return to Pune to talk it over with his friend Rajendra Deshpande, if such a person even exists in this world.

A different India. At a station called Sarhad, an Anglo-Indian officer checks permits, for "this is where the British Raj begins." His fellow passenger, Khan Sahib, is travelling on to Peshawar by the Frontier Mail. In Bombay, Gaitonde is stunned to find the East India Company still flourishing — its headquarters, 'East India House', standing proud — though history books in his own world said the Company had been wound up after 1857. British banks and department stores line the streets. At Forbes building he asks for his son, Vinay Gaitonde, but no such employee exists.

The point where history changed. At the Asiatic Society library in the Town Hall, Gaitonde reads his own five-volume history. The first four volumes match what he knows; the change lies in the fifth. He converges on the exact turning point: the Battle of Panipat, which in this world the Marathas won handsomely, routing Abdali and chasing him back to Kabul. This victory established Maratha supremacy in the north; the East India Company shelved its expansionist plans and was reduced to a few pockets near Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. India was never enslaved; it grew into a self-respecting democracy, keeping the Mughal ruler in Delhi only as a powerless figurehead, and leasing Bombay to the British until 2001.

The Bakhar and the missing chairman. Seeking how the Marathas actually won, Gaitonde finds an old chronicle, Bhausahebanchi Bakhar, with a three-line account of how a bullet brushed past Vishwasrao's ear — the difference of a sesame seed saving his life. Absent-mindedly he slips the Bakhar into his pocket. That evening at Azad Maidan he sees a public lecture with an unoccupied presidential chair. Unable to bear it, he rushes to take the chair, but this world has long abolished the custom of a chairperson. The angry crowd heckles him, pelts him with tomatoes and eggs, and finally swarms the stage — and Gaitonde vanishes. …