A Place With No Map? (3)

He had rehearsed it so many times in the dark that when the summons came he was almost calm.

Almost.

It did not come from the small upper room. A chamberlain fetched him down instead to the office where the maps were kept, and the Sarkar was already in it, which was wrong, because the Sarkar did not go to rooms; rooms were brought to him. The old draughtsman stood against the wall with the face of a man who has been asked a great many questions in a short time and has answered every one. The cloth map of the northern territories lay open on the table, and on it, where the last fold of the hills came down to the plain, sat a thumb of red wax.

Because the thing the histories never told and could never tell was that the histories were written by men who had only read about him. On the page he was a small pock-marked one-eyed man. In the room he was a pressure. The single working eye came up off the map and settled on his grandson, and the air in the little room reorganised itself around that eye the way it always did, and Angrez felt his rehearsed calm thin out like cheap paint.

‘Steady,’ he told himself. ‘He is your grandfather and he loves you and he has personally had more people killed than you will ever meet. Both of those are true at once. Hold both. Don’t drool, you’re eleven, drooling would be weird now.’

“Mirpur,” said the Sarkar, telling him, not asking. He had a prodigious memory for the faces of people who wanted something, having spent fifty years surrounded by nothing else. “Lahna Singh tells me you have been measuring the hill maps. Faqir tells me you have been asking the customs men what the road to Bhimber costs to keep. My draughtsman tells me you stood over this for an hour.” One finger came down beside the wax. “You leave a trail, putt. You are quiet, but you are not yet quiet enough. I have walked your trail to its end, and I am standing at the end of it before you. So you may keep the speech. Tell me instead why I should not laugh, and send you back to your munshi.”

So much, Angrez thought, for the deniable approach. There was no being clever at this man. There was only ever being true, in a small frame, and letting him build the large thing himself.

“Because the court is soft, Dada ji,” he said, and let the contempt in it be real, because it was real and because the Sarkar shared it. “Pita ji is soft. The young kanwars are being raised to be ornaments. They learn the darbar and the horse and the hawk and how to wear gold, and not one of them, not one, is being raised the way you were raised, in the open, in the cold, with a real thing to do and real men to learn it from. I do not want to be an ornament. I want a place away from the soft rooms where I and the boys after me can be made into something the kingdom can use. Walled. Quiet. Hard. A rakh with a purpose.” The rest of the speech had been about asking, and the asking had been taken out of his hands. He found that the one line he had built it all to carry would stand without it. “I do not want to be raised to inherit this, Dada ji. I want to be raised to keep it.”

The old draughtsman looked at the floor with great attention.

The Sarkar was not a sentimental man, whatever the songs said. He had wept exactly once that the boy had ever heard of, over the Akali, martyred on his elephant. But something moved behind the working eye now, something that the boy, who had spent two lifetimes studying this exact man, recognised with a small private ache as longing: the longing of a great old lion who had built an empire out of nothing and looked around his own court and saw, everywhere, soft sons.

He did not laugh. He looked at the wax, and then at the draughtsman, and said, “Tell him what I told you this morning.”

“Crown land, Kanwar Sahib,” said the old man, to the floor. “Held direct, not under Jammu. The Sarkar’s men, the Sarkar’s flag.” He glanced up, and risked it. “And the Dogras may swallow it however it goes down.”

“It has been yours since sunrise,” the Sarkar said. “I did not wait to be asked. A thing a man is asked for, he has already refused once, in somebody’s head, and I did not want this one in any head but mine. Now tell me why there.”

“Because it is far from the soft south, Dada ji, and the soft southerners who come up to measure us and call it friendship.” He let that one sit, because the Sarkar was not a fool about the British either, whatever the settled policy said, and the boy wanted the old man to half-see the real shape of it without ever having to be told. “A place that is ours and no one else’s. A place that is nobody’s business but yours.”

And then what humour there had been went out of the great voice. “When I was ill,” the Sarkar said, “you prayed over me in the dark. I have never told you what I caught of it, and I will not now. But I caught enough. You asked Him to leave me long enough to finish the work.” His look held the boy, steady and unsentimental. “I cannot promise you He listened. So take your hill, putt, and begin the part of it that does not require me.”

The draughtsman found something that needed doing to the map-weights.

“And you will tell me, putt, the day it stops being a place where boys learn to shoot, and starts being something else. Because everything in this kingdom starts being something else. I will not ask you what you are really building. A man should be allowed one secret from his Dada. But the day it grows teeth, I want to be the first to know. Not the last.”

He did not wait to be answered. He had never in his life waited on the answer of a boy of eleven, and he saw no reason to begin in a map office. He was through the door, with the chamberlain scrambling after him, before Angrez had got out the Yes, Dada ji he had been carrying for three weeks, and the boy stood there with it still in his mouth, unspent, and thought, behind the obedient face, with a lurch that was equal parts terror and love: ‘He knows. Not what. He never knows what. But he knows there’s a what, he’s always known there’s a what, and he is going to let me have it anyway, because he would rather be betrayed by a grandson with teeth than be served forever by sons made of cushion. God. I do not deserve this man and I have seven years to save him and I am going to spend them lying to his face.’

The draughtsman was rolling the map. “He does that,” he said, not looking round. “One gets used to it, Kanwar Sahib. Or one does not. Nobody has.”

He went out of the map office with a hill in his pocket and grief in his throat, and both of them, he was learning, were just the cost of the work.