Darbar Sahib

He had been to Amritsar before, carried, for festivals he had been too small to remember. He had never been sent, and he had never, in this life, been set down at the edge of the great tank to stand on his own feet and look. He went carrying the Sarkar’s word for Desa Singh and the Giani, and a list of accounts to prove, and under all of it a smaller private wish he told no one: to find Lahna Singh again, who he knew was up there somewhere among the scaffolding, doing for the Guru’s house what he did for everything.

He came through the gateway and down the worn steps to the edge of the sarovar, and the breath went out of him, because he knew this place.

He knew it the way you know a face you have loved and not seen for many years. The pool lay still and grey-green and enormous under a washed pale sky, the causeway running out across it to the shrine at its heart, and it was the same. The kirtan came across the water from the inner sanctum, a ragi’s voice with the saranda moving beneath it, winding the Guru’s word out over the water the way it had wound out over that water every dawn for two hundred years, and it was the same. The sangat went slowly round the marble parkarma, barefoot, heads covered, the high and the low and the whole and the broken all levelled into one unhurried circle, and it was the same. He had walked this parkarma once in another body in a faithless century, a visitor with a borrowed scarf and half a heart, and even then, even so, he had felt the thing this place did to the air inside a person, the stillness that was not the same as silence. And it was here now, unchanged, exactly itself.

And it was not finished.

That was the thing that took him by the throat as he stood at the head of the steps. The shrine at the centre of the water stood half-wrapped in bamboo scaffolding. The gold he had known, the gold that had given the place the name his own century used for it, was going on in sheets and panels, and broad stretches of the upper storeys still showed the bare brick and lime beneath, patient, waiting. Out on the platforms men were at work even now, small with distance, beating and fitting and burnishing leaf onto the curve of a dome. The image he had carried in his head his whole first life, the finished golden thing on ten thousand calendars, the thing any Sikh child of his old century could have drawn with its eyes shut, did not yet exist. It was being made. He was standing here watching it be made.

‘The picture isn’t real yet,’ he thought, and something turned over slow and hard in his chest. ‘The gold I grew up knowing, the print that hung on my Bibi ji’s wall, here and now it is scaffolding and bare brick and a row of men with hammers. It does not exist. And not one grain of that matters, because the thing the gold is only a coat for has been here the whole time, finished from the beginning, finished before the first brick was laid. They are not building the holiness. The holiness was here long before the gold, and will be here long after it, and the gold is only the coat the love is making for it.’

He did the errand properly, because it was a true errand and because doing dull things properly was the whole of what he was. He walked the works with the overseers; he looked into the accounts Desa Singh’s men kept and found them, to his quiet relief, honest and exact; he watched Giani Sant Singh’s people see to it that no rite was skipped and no gilder laid hand to the shrine without the right word first said. And on the second day, up on the scaffolding with gold-leaf on his fingers, he found a face he knew.

“Kanwar Sahib,” said Lahna Singh Majithia, not bowing, because he never did, and unsurprised, because he never was. “Come to count my gold, have you. Your grandfather sent the one man in the Punjab who would actually do it.”

“He sent the one too small to be bribed not to,” said Angrez, and the Sword of the State barked his short laugh, and showed the boy how a sheet of beaten gold was floated and pressed down onto the curve of a dome without tearing, the metal so thin it moved like breath. “Beat it thin enough and laid right,” Lahna said, with the flat pride of a man who reckoned his work in centuries, “and it does not flake and does not tarnish. They will stand where you are standing in two hundred years and it will still be throwing the sun back at them.” ‘And there is the whole of him,’ Angrez thought, with a small jolt of recognition, ‘and the whole of me. Neither of us has ever once cared about a thing except how long it will hold after we are gone.’ For an hour the prince and the mechanic were exactly what they were, two people who could not leave a beautiful problem alone, kneeling on a plank above the holiest water in the world.

It was afterward, alone, that he crossed the parkarma to the Akal Bunga.

It stood facing the Harmandir Sahib across the water, lower and plainer and far older in feeling than the rising gold of the shrine: the Akal Bunga, the seat his own century would learn to call the Akal Takht, the Throne of the Timeless One. He knew what it was. He had taught what it was. The Sixth Guru had raised it across from the shrine on purpose, the temporal throne set within sight of the spiritual one, the sword and the prayer placed deliberately where each must always see the other, so that no Sikh might ever again pretend that the faith and the rule of the world were two separate things to be kept in two separate rooms. Miri and piri. The seat from which the Khalsa spoke to kings as an equal, because it answered to a King higher than any of them.

And it was the seat Akali Phoola Singh Ji had held.

The grief came up quiet and complete, the way it always did when the Akali came back to him. Here. The old terrible blue-clad man who had knelt in the dust at Amritsar and looked at a strange grave baby for the length of one breath and seen, alone in a kingdom of thousands, the truth, and loved it, and ridden away within the fortnight to die on an elephant above the Kabul river. He had sat here. This had been his place, the throne of the Khalsa’s own conscience, the one seat in all the Punjab before which the Sarkar himself had once been made to stand and bare his back. Angrez stood before it with his small bare feet on the cold stone and felt, for a moment, almost held.

And then, because he could never not know the things he knew, the other image came.

For one terrible instant the courtyard changed around him. Smoke swallowed the parkarma. Tank tracks scarred the ground where the sangat walked. Hindustan’s fauj rolled into the Guru’s house, turned its guns upon the Takht, and began another Jung Hind-Punjab. The seat of the Khalsa answered in fire until stone and timber and memory came down together.

And the man who had once held this seat was a hundred and fifty years in his grave, with no hand left to raise against any of it: Akali Phoola Singh Ji, the one soul in a whole century who had looked at a strange grave child and seen the truth and loved it, and told him to make the second life worth the road he had walked to reach it. The burning seat, the broken Takht under its June sky, was what waited at the end of that road if he walked it badly.

He could not promise that no enemy would ever come; no one who had read any history could promise that. He could promise only one thing, and he promised it there, barefoot on the cold marble with the half-gilded shrine burning soft across the water at his back: that if this seat ever fell, and the Khalsa’s sovereignty with it, it would not be his doing. Not through treachery worked quietly inside his own house. Not through a treasury that men spent like water because the strength had always been there to spend. And never, while he had breath, through a kingdom left standing on one failing back with nothing built beneath it. If the Khalsa ever lost the power to keep its own holy places under its own hand, it would not be because the thing had rotted quietly from the inside while the one boy who could see the rot grew up clever and harmless and did nothing.

Then the smoke was gone.

The Akal Bunga stood whole before him. No tracks scarred the parkarma. No armoured machines waited beyond the gates. The Takht still belonged to the Khalsa, and beyond its walls the Punjab still answered to a Sikh Sarkar.

The Guru’s house was being made ready to outlive the man who gilded it. The Sarkar’s kingdom was not.

Not yet.

He was nine years old. He bowed his head to the Akal Bunga, low, the way the Akali had once taught a whole courtyard to bow without ever once asking it to.

“I will not let the kallar take it,” he whispered.

End of Book Three: “Darbar Sahib”

To be continued.

Notes

1. The gilding of the Harmandir Sahib (the Golden Temple) at Amritsar, the sheathing of its upper storeys in gold-plated copper, with the marble and inlay work below, was financed by Ranjit Singh and carried on through the 1820s and 1830s. The administration of Amritsar and of such works lay with Sardar Desa Singh Majithia (d. 1832), governor of the hill country; his son, Sardar Lahna Singh Majithia, the engineer and gun-founder of this story, was himself associated with the affairs of the Darbar Sahib. Giani Sant Singh (d. 1832) was the head granthi of the Darbar Sahib through this period. The shrine being still unfinished in 1830-31 is consistent with the long span of the work.

2. The Akal Takht, the Akal Bunga or “Throne of the Timeless One,” stands facing the Harmandir Sahib across the sarovar at Amritsar. It was raised by Guru Hargobind, the sixth Guru, as the seat of miri-piri, the principle that temporal authority (miri) and spiritual authority (piri) are inseparable; from it the collective will of the Khalsa is declared. Akali Phoola Singh Ji served as its Jathedar in the early nineteenth century, the office from which he had once summoned Maharaja Ranjit Singh himself to account before the Panth.

3. In June 1984, the armed forces of Hindustan, the Indian Army, entered the Darbar Sahib complex with tanks and heavy weapons and attacked the Akal Takht, leaving the seat of Sikh temporal authority severely damaged. The protagonist’s foreknowledge of it belongs to the premise of this novel.