Note 135 — Chapter I

The ferries over the rivers had been stopped because before K͟husrau’s defeat orders had been given to all the jagirdars and the superintendents of roads and crossings in the subah of the Panjab that as this kind of dispute had arisen they must all be on the alert. Ḥusain Beg wished to transfer the men from the boat with firewood and grass to the other, so that they might convey K͟husrau across. At this juncture arrived Kīlan,135 son-in-law of Kamāl Chaudharī of Sodharah, and saw a body of men about to cross in the night. He cried out to the boatmen that there was an order from the king Jahāngīr forbidding unknown men from crossing in the night, and that they must be careful. Owing to the noise and uproar, the people of the neighbourhood gathered together, and Kamāl’s son-in-law took from the boatmen the pole with which they propel the boat, and which in Hindustani is called ballī, and thus made the boat unmanageable. Although money was offered to the boatmen, not one would ferry them over. News went to Abū-l-Qāsim Namakīn, who was at Gujarat, near the Chenāb, that a body of men were wanting to cross the river by night, and he at once came to the ferry in the night with his sons and some horsemen. Things went to such a length that Ḥusain Beg shot arrows at the boatmen,136 and Kamāl’s son-in-law also took to shooting arrows from the river-bank. For four kos the boat took its own way down the river, until at the end of the night it grounded, and try as they would they could not get it off. Meantime it became day. Abū-l-Qāsim and K͟hwāja K͟hiẓr K͟hān, who by the efforts of Hilāl K͟hān had assembled on this (? the west) side of the river, fortified its west bank, and the zamindars fortified it on the east.