Tufangchis
Surrey, British Columbia, 2021: Angrez Singh, a jobless physics graduate and reluctant history teacher, dies with his hand on a homemade coilgun and wakes in 1821, six years old, inside the body of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's eldest grandson. He knows exactly how the Sikh Empire is fated to fall, and exactly how little time he has to stop it.
Foreword
This is the story of Angrez Singh, formerly of Surrey, British Columbia, formerly thirty-two years of age, formerly an engineering-physics graduate of the University of British Columbia who could recite most of an undergraduate degree from memory and could not, for the life of him, get hired to use any of it. In the spring of 1821, by means he never fully understood and eventually stopped trying to understand, he woke up inside the small, squalling body of Kanwar Nau Nihal Singh, eldest grandson of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the Lion of the Punjab.
He knew, to the year, how the story was supposed to end. He knew the Sarkar had eighteen years left to live. He knew that the empire the Sarkar had built out of nothing would be gone within ten years of the old man’s death: sold off, drowned in its own court intrigues, handed to the British without the Khalsa Fauj ever losing an honest fight. He knew the body he now wore had, in the unaltered record, nineteen years left before its own appointment with a falling archway.
He had, in other words, all the time in the world, and no time at all.
In the life he left, he had been a maker of guns. Not a good one. The thing that killed him settled that question for good. But he had spent his last years winding copper around a steel tube in a cold garage, chasing with capacitors the same end the armies of his new century chased with powder and a yard of smouldering cord, and he had loved the chase past all sense. He had not worked out, yet, what to do with the fact that the people he had woken among kept a Guru who, a little over a century before, had saluted the arrow and the gun in his own verse, and then put both into the hands of the poorest and lowest men of the land, and made of them soldier-saints who broke the backs of the empires that came for them. Or that the kingdom in whose cradle he now lay was held together, when everything else failed, by the men who carried the guns: the tufangchis, the gunslingers of the Khalsa. He would have years to learn what that meant. He would need every one of them.
This is the account of how he began.