A Place With No Map? (4)

The Wazir was waiting in the gallery.

He was always waiting in the gallery. Angrez had come to think of Raja Dhian Singh less as a man and more as a condition of the building, like damp, like the kallar, something that was simply present in the walls of the Lahore Fort and that you learned to live alongside and never, ever turned your back on.

“Kanwar Sahib.” The beautiful controlled face inclined with its flawless courtesy. “I hear the Sarkar has given his clever grandson a mountain.”

‘And he heard it before I’d crossed the courtyard,’ Angrez thought. ‘Of course he did. The walls report to him. I am going to build a secret in this man’s brother’s hills and he already knows about the front door.’

“A hunting estate, Wazir Sahib,” said Angrez, in his most ordinary boy’s voice, the one he had spent eleven years sanding down to nothing. “In the hills. For the boys to ride and shoot. I am told the deer are good.” He let himself look faintly embarrassed, a child who had asked for a large toy and got it. “It is more than I should have asked for. Dada ji is too kind to me.”

“In the hills,” Dhian Singh agreed pleasantly. “At Mirpur.” The faintest warmth came into the warm voice, the warmth of a man turning a stone over to see what was under it. “It is good country, Mirpur. My brother knows it well. The hill people can be difficult, Kanwar Sahib, with outsiders. Walls, garrisons, a great deal of trouble and expense, all for the shooting of deer that one might shoot, with respect, rather closer to home.” The head tilted, a half-degree, the most dangerous thing in the kingdom. “One wonders what a serious boy wants with such a quiet, walled, faraway place. So far from everyone. So hard to see into.”

There it was. Not a question. Dhian Singh never asked questions; questions could be remembered and held against you. He simply set the true thing down in the middle of the floor between them, and waited to see whether the boy’s eyes went to it.

Angrez had been getting ready for this exact sentence for three weeks, and he had decided, after long thought, that the only defence against a man who could smell a lie was to hand him a true thing so small and so sad that it filled the whole space where the big true thing should have been.

“Because here everyone watches me,” he said, and let his voice do something young and tired and honest. “You watch me, Wazir Sahib. Everyone watches me. I am the Sarkar’s grandson and I cannot cross a courtyard without three people deciding what it means.” He looked down. “I only wanted somewhere far away where I could be bad at things in private. Where I could fall off a horse and not have it discussed in the darbar. Where I am not, every minute, the Sarkar’s clever grandson.” He looked up, and let the boy show, the real exhausted boy under the dead man, because that one at least did not have to be invented. “That is all it is. It is a sad reason. I would be grateful if you did not repeat it.”

And he watched it land.

He watched the great cold intelligence behind the beautiful face take the small sad true thing, and weigh it, and find it plausible, because it was plausible, because it was, in fact, also true, and file it, with what might even have been a flicker of something almost like sympathy, or what passed for sympathy in a man like that, which was the satisfaction of having correctly assessed a weakness.

“Of course, Kanwar Sahib,” said Raja Dhian Singh, gently. “A boy should have somewhere to be a boy.” He inclined his head and moved on down the gallery, and Angrez let his heart slow and did not, by the smallest muscle, allow himself to feel that he had won, because he had not won. He had bought a season. Maybe two.

‘He doesn’t believe the deer,’ he thought, walking back through the old gallery where the white kallar still bloomed on the Mughal wall. ‘Not really. But he believes the loneliness, because the loneliness is real, and a man like that trusts a real weakness more than a clever lie. So now I am, in his book, a sad clever lonely boy with a toy fort in his brother’s hills. He’ll have it watched. He’ll have a man inside the wall inside a year, I’d put money on it. And the work from here is to make sure that the thing his man sees, when he gets inside, is exactly and only boys learning to shoot deer.’

He stopped at the blooming wall, out of an old habit, and looked at the white salt, and did not touch it this time, because he had grown out of the gesture and into the thing it stood for.

---

His mother caught him the night before he left for the hill.

She did it the way she did everything, without warning and without raising her voice, sending the women out of the room on an errand that did not exist and then simply being between him and the door: Bibi Chand Kaur, thirty now and sharper than the whole court gave her credit for, looking at her firstborn the way she had looked at him in his cradle, as though there were a thing in his face that the words around it kept hiding.

“Sit,” she said.

He sat. ‘And here is the one person in this kingdom I have never once managed to fully fool,’ he thought. ‘Careful. She has not got the Wazir’s information or the Sarkar’s memory. She has something worse. She has known me since before I could lie.’

“They have given you a fort,” she said.

“A hunting estate, Mata ji. In the hills. For the boys to learn the soldier’s trade.”

“In the hills.” She said it almost exactly the way Dhian Singh had said it, and the echo went through him cold, because the two most dangerous readers in the kingdom had landed on the same word, the beautiful cold man because it was his trade, and this woman because she was his mother. “Four days’ ride away. Behind a wall. Where I cannot come, and the court cannot come, and your father certainly cannot come, and only your grandfather’s men can come. You are eleven years old, and you have arranged to be sent to live behind a wall four days from your mother, and you arranged it yourself, and you are pleased about it. Do you know how that looks to me?”

“Like a boy who wants to be a soldier,” he tried.

“Like a boy his grandfather is taking from his mother,” she said, and there was no heat in it, which was worse than heat. “I watched it happen to your father, in a smaller way. The Sarkar found him soft, and gave up on him, and he went into his pigeons and his box and his soft warm nothing, and now there is a man in this house who is heir to the greatest kingdom in Hindustan and cannot hold a darbar for an hour, and his own son looks at him the way you look at a wall with the damp in it.” Her voice did not change. “And now the Sarkar has found you hard, and he wants you, the way he wanted your father and did not get him. And you are not even making him take you. You are running toward it. The foundry, the account-rooms, and now a hill full of his soldiers four days away. One morning I will look up and my son will be a thing the kingdom uses, and not a thing that is mine at all.”

The part of him that ran the long game was already composing the deflection, the gentle plausible half-confession that would make her stop. He opened his mouth to use it, and then made the one genuinely reckless choice of the whole arc, which was to tell her something true instead.

“You are not wrong,” he said.

She blinked. It was the first time in eleven years he had ever seen her surprised.

“You are not wrong, Mata ji. I am running toward it. Not because I love him more than you. Because I am frightened, all the time, of a thing I cannot explain to you, and the only thing that quiets the fright is work, and the work is up in that hill.” He let her see as much of it as he safely could, which was more than he had let anyone see since a saint on a hill above the Kabul river. “I am not being taken away. I am going. The difference matters, even if it looks the same from here and costs the same. I will always come back to this room. But I cannot promise you I will stay a thing that is only yours, because I do not think I was ever only that, and I think you have known it longer than anyone alive.”

It was too much, and he knew it the moment it was out. He had spent eleven years never saying one true sentence to a person who could be hurt by it, and he had just said three to the sharpest of them all.

She looked at him for a long, long time, and he could not read what was assembling behind her eyes, and that frightened him more than the Wazir ever had, because the Wazir only wanted to know whether he was useful, and his mother wanted to know what he was.

Then she pulled him in, hard, the way she had not done since he was small, and held him, and said into his hair, fierce and low, “Then go and do your terrible important thing in your hill. But you will write to me. In your own hand. Every week. So that I know which of you is coming back down.”

‘She is the one,’ he thought, his face against his mother’s shoulder, undone and loved and afraid. ‘Not the Wazir. Not the British. Her. She will spend the next twenty years quietly working out what I am, and she is the only soul alive I would almost be glad to have do it.’

“Every week, Mata ji,” he said. “I promise.”

---

The chiefs were a different problem, and a louder one, and he heard about it sideways, the way he heard everything, from Lahna Singh, who heard everything in the foundry because the foundry was where men came to complain.

“They are saying,” Lahna Singh told him, not looking up from the bore he was truing, “that the Sarkar’s grandson has caught the firangi sickness. That he wants walls and drills and the foreign way of doing things. That first it is the boy with his counting games and his hill fort, and next it will be everyone’s jagir measured with a chain and every sardar’s horsemen counted like sacks of grain by some clerk with a foreign book.” He glanced up, and there was a warning in it, an old man’s warning, fond and serious. “You frighten them, Kanwar. Not much. Not yet. But the old families did not get to be old families by waiting until a thing was a large threat before they cut it down. Be careful in the hills, putt. A boy can have an accident in the hills, and the hills belong to people who would not weep.”

Angrez took the warning. He had eleven years of practice taking exactly that warning, going all the way back to a tired clerk in a revenue office who had told him he was clever in a way that got noticed.

But that night he understood, lying awake, that the warning was also the whole map of the thing he was up against, set out in one foundry-man’s grumble. The British in front, patient and literate, waiting for the giant to die. The Dogras at his shoulder, beautiful and cold, building their own kingdom in the hills. And the old chiefs all around, the feudal aristocracy that the Sarkar had bound to himself with land and could not unbind without breaking the kingdom, every one of them allergic, in his blood and his bones, to exactly the kind of measured, counted, drilled, written-down, foreign-tasting future that was the only future in which the Punjab survived.

‘That’s the real wall,’ he thought. ‘Not the British. Not even the Dogras. Them. The good brave loyal men who would die for the Sarkar tomorrow and who will not, cannot, be reformed, because the reform is the one thing that threatens them more than the British do. The British only want the kingdom. The reform wants to change what they are.’

So he did not reform them.

That was the whole trick of it, and he worked it out on the same sleepless nights he spent worrying about the hill, because the two problems turned out to be one problem in different clothes. You could not change what the chiefs were. Touch a jagir, count a sardar’s horsemen, turn one rupee of a great man’s grain-due into cash, and the whole feudal weight of the Punjab would come down on you inside a month, and you would have earned it, because those were the things that made a chief a chief, and a kingdom that broke them broke itself. The British, when their turn came, would break exactly those things, and the chiefs would help them do it to one another, and that was the ending he had already read.

But there was a great deal of the kingdom that no chief owned.

He had seen it two years before, the morning he first sat in the working durbar and watched a frightened farmer stop a collector with a piece of paper. The small dull machines. The things the Sarkar did now by sheer force of being himself. Those were nobody’s hereditary right. No sardar owned the honesty of the weight in a bazaar, or the speed of a poor man’s complaint up the road to Lahore, or the grain in a state store against a bad year. Those things lived in the gaps between the great men, in the common floor of the kingdom, and a boy could put his hand into that gap and not one chief would feel it move, because not one chief had ever thought it worth holding.

So that was where he put his hand. One screw at a time. And he learned, in the doing, the other half of the art, which was that he must never once propose a reform. Reform was a foreign word with the smell of the chain and the clerk’s book on it; let the chiefs catch that smell on him and they would know him for the firangi-sickness Lahna Singh had warned of. So he never proposed. He noticed. He admired. He left spaces, the way a charming Scotsman had once left them for him at a stable rail, and he let better men fill the spaces and believe the filling was theirs.

He did it first at the working durbar, on a morning when the Sarkar was hearing the customs of the Multan road and half the room was asleep with its eyes open.

“Faqir Sahib,” he said, in the puzzled voice of a boy at a sum, “the ser weighs one thing in the Anarkali bazaar and a fatter thing at Kashmiri Gate. I had my own hand weighed at both. Is that not strange.”

The room woke in pieces, each piece hearing its own office. The kotwal’s man said that every bazaar kept its own weight. Faqir Aziz-ud-din said that the great Hari Singh Nalwa himself had kept one honest weight through all Kashmir. The Sarkar, who loved the small folk and liked it said of him, asked what one true ser cut in brass would cost, was told almost nothing, and said then let the kotwal of every town keep one; and a clerk wrote it down.

‘One,’ Angrez thought, and took care not to look pleased. A pleased boy gets remembered.

He never had to say the rest. A customs man remarked that a grievance out of Multan took a month to climb to Lahore because the relay-horses stood too far apart, so that a man could starve of a collector’s theft long before his paper arrived, and the Sarkar said a few more posts and a sarai or two on the worst stretch would let his justice ride as fast as his tax. The keeper of the stores recalled the year famine had bitten the hill country and the Sarkar had sent grain by the thousand sack to be given out from temple and mosque, so that whole valleys came through a season that, across the river in the Company’s lands, buried the poor by the thousand, and wondered whether a full granary ought not to stand in good years too. And a man of the mint said that the Nanakshahi rupee was the purest coin between Kabul and Delhi, and that it would be a small holy shame to let one light or clipped or cheating piece go out under the Gurus’ own couplet, and ought not the assay to be tightened a little, for the honour of the thing.

Four small machines, and the boy had spoken one sentence, about his own hand.

Not one of those touched a jagir. Not one counted a sardar’s horse. Each was dressed in something the court already loved, the Sarkar’s name, or the Gurus’ honour, or Hari Singh Nalwa’s example, or the welfare of the small that a Sikh king is sworn to keep, and each, once a grown man had taken it up as his own bright notion, went on working whether the boy was in the room or not. That was the entire point. He was not trying to be remembered. He was trying to leave behind the smallest possible machines that would keep turning after the great heart stopped: an honest weight, a faster road for a poor man’s paper, a full granary, a coin a stranger could trust.

‘And it is so slow,’ he thought, in the part of him that was a man in a hurry with a date in his head. ‘God, it is slow. I want to do all of it. I want to survey the land and mend the revenue and put a school in every town and a written code in every court and break the whole rotten lovely feudal thing and build a state that does not need a Lion to run. And I can have none of it, not yet, maybe not ever, because the morning they see the chain coming is the morning they feed me to an elephant and call it loyalty. So I take the weight. I take the granary. I take the relay and the honest coin. I turn the screws I am allowed to turn, and I bite my tongue about the rest until I am bigger, or the world is.’

He had increased his pace. He had only learned to do it where the increase did not show.

He had a hill. He had two friends, an inventor and an old Musalman gun-smith, and a grandfather who had handed him a secret with his eyes open and asked only to be told before it grew teeth.

It was a beginning. He made himself feel the size of it, the way he always did, and then he made himself begin anyway, because the first brick never feels like enough, and he had laid a first brick before, and he knew the only thing to do with the feeling was to set the second.

Notes

1. Hari Singh Nalwa enforced correct weights and measures as governor of Kashmir (Empire of the Sikhs). The free grain given out through mosques and temples is Gupta’s account of the Kashmir famine of 1833, which the novel lets the boy cite within these months. The Nanakshahi rupee changed above the Company’s (Gupta, Vol. 5, on currency). The four small reforms are the novel’s invention.