Kallar in the Wall? (1)

On the day of Diwali, in the year 1830, Maharaja Ranjit Singh held the great darbar at the Lahore Fort, and his grandson Nau Nihal Singh, now nine years old, was for the first time in his life seated in the inner ring.

He had grown into the body the way you grow into a coat you were promised you would. Tall for nine, pock-marked of cheek like the Sarkar, sharp-jawed like his mother, he had earned a reputation in the women’s quarters and the schoolroom alike for being a serious, quick, watchful boy who could be relied upon not to embarrass the house. The household had a settled opinion of him by now, and the settled opinion was that he was a credit. Nobody held a stronger opinion than that, because Angrez had spent nine years making sure nobody got the chance to form one.

Seven years had gone by since a saint rode an elephant into the guns above the Kabul river, and they had not been quiet years, though the boy had spent them being quiet inside them.

Away beyond the Indus the frontier had caught fire, and was burning still. A Sayyid had come up out of Hindustan, Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareli, a grave and learned man who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca and come home certain, and he had raised a green banner in the Yusufzai hills and called the tribes to a holy war; and of the two great powers that fenced the Pathan country, he had chosen to strike the nearer and the newer one, which was the Sarkar’s. For four years it had smouldered and flared along the trans-Indus country, Akora and Saidu and Hund and Zaidah, names that came down to the darbar in dispatches and went back up from it in fresh regiments. It had eaten seasons and treasure and good men. Budh Singh Sandhanwalia had borne the worst of the early years of it; Hari Singh Nalwa held the Hazara on little more than the sound of his name; and this very year the Sayyid had done the thing that made the whole frontier hold its breath, and taken Peshawar itself.

The court spoke of the holy war the way a household speaks of a fire two streets over, with concern, and with a settled private confidence that it would burn itself out before it reached the good rooms. And the boy in the inner ring, who had spent those years doing the one thing a small prince was perfectly placed to do, which was to sit in the outer rings season after season and listen and gather and forget nothing, did the single piece of arithmetic nobody else in the hall could do, which was the date.

‘You win this one, Dada ji,’ he thought, as the frontier news passed along the rings of grandees. ‘Come the spring, in a hill town called Balakot, Sher Chacha finishes it, the Sayyid and the war together in one morning, and the guns of Amritsar fire for it and you are very pleased. And it will have cost you five years and a fortune and the whole of the frontier’s attention; and the entire time you were staring northwest at a man with a banner, the thing that actually ends us sat quietly off to the southeast with a notebook, and measured. The loud holy ones you can always beat. It is the quiet literate ones who keep the books, and I cannot teach this court to be afraid of a book.’

The inner ring was not a small promotion. The darbar hall ran in rings of precedence outward from the Sarkar’s low gold chair, and where a man sat told the whole court exactly what the Sarkar thought he was worth that season. All his short life Nau Nihal had spent in the outer rings, on cushions, among the lesser kanwars and the visiting boys of the Sandhanwalia branch. Tonight a chamberlain had walked him past all of that, past the sardars and the diwans, and seated him close enough to the gold chair that he could have leaned over and touched his grandfather’s knee.

What it meant, he understood. The whole hall understood what it meant. His father, Kharak Singh, sat above him on the dais, soft and pleasant and a little glazed, and the distance between the father’s place and the son’s place had, that evening, become a thing the court could measure with its eyes.

Angrez kept his face still and his hands folded and let none of it show.

Inside, he was running the room.

---

It was the best chance he had ever been given to study the thing he had to save, and he did not waste it.

The Sarkar first, because the Sarkar was always first. Fifty now, and the smallpox eye had not improved with age, and the good eye did all the work of two and did it better than most men managed with both. In a hall blazing with other men’s jewels he sat low and plain and pulled the whole of it toward himself without appearing to try, and Angrez, who had spent nine years close to that gravity and still felt it, thought: ‘Not the treasury. Not the army, not the law. Him. One small failing body, and everything in this hall leaning on it without knowing, and I am the only one here who has read the date it gives way, written down in a book.’

Then the Wazir.

Raja Dhian Singh stood at the Sarkar’s right hand, where he had made himself indispensable, a strikingly handsome Dogra of about thirty-five with a still, attentive, beautifully controlled face. Angrez watched him for a while and felt the old cold settle in. He knew this man. He knew what this man’s brothers were building up in the hills at Jammu, knew the patience in that controlled face, knew that when the load-bearing wall came down it would be men like this one who picked through the rubble first and walked off with the best of it. The histories had a great deal to say about Raja Dhian Singh, and almost none of it was the kind of thing you wanted said about a person standing that close to your grandfather.

‘You,’ Angrez thought, behind a nine-year-old’s blank attentive face. ‘You I am going to have to be very, very careful about.’

Then the rest of it, ring by ring. The Sandhanwalia chiefs, the Sarkar’s own distant cousins, sitting together and not quite hiding the resentment of men who felt the Dogras had taken what was theirs by blood. In their own corner the European generals, Allard and Ventura and the others, the men who had built the French Legion, tolerated and used and quietly hated by every chief in the room who understood that a drilled brigade was a leash on the old feudal levies. And the foreign minister, Faqir Aziz-ud-din, calm and grey and courteous, the one man in the hall Angrez trusted on sight and had trusted for nine years.

And the wealth. God, the wealth. The shawls, the plate, the heaped trays of the Diwali offerings, the regalia, the famous stone on the Sarkar’s arm that the British would one day take and set in a crown and pretend they had been given. Ten crore of rupees, an English captain had once reckoned the treasury at Gobindgarh. Ten crore. There was more portable wealth in that one hall than in whole countries Angrez had lived in, in the life before.

In the middle of the richest court in Asia he sat and thought, with the flat private despair of a man who has read the last page: ‘And in nineteen years it is all going to be gone, and most of the men in this room are going to help.’

Through the long hours of it, the business of the kingdom went on around the offerings the way it always did, and one piece of that business Angrez would carry with him for the rest of his second life, though at the time it passed almost unremarked.

The Sarkar gave the order for the gold.

It was not a new thing. The work at Amritsar had been going on for years, the slow sheathing of the upper storeys of the Harmandir Sahib in gilded copper, the marble and the inlay-work and the patient making-beautiful of the holiest place the Panth had. What the Sarkar did that night was approve the next great phase of it, the carrying-forward of a thing long since begun; and he did it almost in passing, between an offering and a petition, and the whole shape of his power was folded into how little it seemed to cost him. The administration of it and the spending, the lakhs of rupees and the keeping of honest account of them, he laid on Sardar Desa Singh Majithia, who held the hill country and the affairs of Amritsar and could be trusted with the kind of money that does not come back of its own accord. The sacred and artistic execution, the gold-work and the gurbani and the right observance of every rite that touched the Guru’s house, he placed with Giani Sant Singh, the head granthi of the Darbar Sahib, because some things were not an administrator’s to weigh. And the practical contrivances, the scaffolding and the beating of the leaf and the hundred mechanical riddles of cladding a living shrine in soft metal without marring a line of it, those, the Sarkar said, his clever mechanic could see to under the Giani’s eye: Desa Singh’s own son Lahna, who was good with that sort of thing, so long as the clever son remembered whose house it was and did not run off inventing.

Angrez watched the order given and felt the size of the man move through him once more. One sentence, dropped between an offering and a petition, and gold would travel, and the finest hands in the Punjab would gather at Amritsar, and the Guru’s house would grow more glorious, all of it humming into motion off a single quiet word from a single failing old body. ‘He can do that,’ Angrez thought. ‘He can put out one hand and make the Guru’s house shine for the next two hundred years. There is nothing in Asia he cannot summon, once he decides to want it. And that is the very thing that is going to make saving him so hard, because a man who can do anything simply by being himself never has to learn to build the thing that will do it once he is gone.’

---

He saw the kallar on his way out.

The darbar had run long, and a chamberlain was walking him back through a side gallery toward the women’s apartments, past the older part of the fort, the part the Mughals had built and the Sikhs had patched. It was a damp night, and one wall of the gallery, an old wall, a thick one, had bloomed.

He stopped without meaning to.

A pale crust was spreading up the brick from the floor, a faint white efflorescence, feathery, almost beautiful in the torchlight, the way frost is beautiful. He knew exactly what it was. Anyone who had grown up around old masonry in a wet country knew the look of it. It was kallar. The white salt that wept up out of the ground and through the brick and crystallized in the pores of the mortar, and that loosened, grain by patient grain, the bond of every wall it touched, so that the wall stood looking solid and sound for years and then one season simply slumped, because the inside of it had quietly turned to powder.

For longer than a nine-year-old should look at anything, he stood and looked at the white bloom on the old wall.

Because he knew the other thing about that white bloom, too. He had taught it. Saltpetre, three-quarters of every charge of powder in the magazine of that fort, three-quarters of the firepower of the artillery that an English visitor would shortly call a match for any artillery in the world and the most powerful arm of the Sikh nation, was won from efflorescence exactly like this, leached out of old walls and saline earth and boiled and crystallized clean. The same white crust that fed the guns that made the Sarkar’s empire was the crust that wept through its walls and ate its fields to barren ground.

‘There it is,’ Angrez thought. ‘The whole kingdom in one wall. And no one will look at it until the season it slumps.’

‘And an hour past,’ he thought, the gold of the darbar still bright behind his eyes, ‘one word made the Guru’s house immortal. Here is the other wall the same kingdom owns. For this one there is no word, and no one whose work it is even to look.’

“Kanwar Sahib?” said the chamberlain.

“Coming,” he said.

Off to bed he went. But he had found, that night, the thing he had been looking for since he was old enough to look. Not the disease. The disease he had always known. He had found the image of it, the one he could hold in his head and turn over, the one that told him where to put his hand.

You did not save a wall like that by adding another storey. You did not save it with a bigger army or a richer treasury or a more glorious darbar. Those were more powder. You saved it, if you could save it at all, by getting at the salt.

---

He lay awake a long time that night, which by nine he had learned to do without anyone hearing him do it.

The whole of his first life he had spent loving this kingdom from a great distance, in books, in a classroom in Surrey, in his grandmother’s stories, and the love had been a clean and useless thing, the love you have for the dead. He did not have that love any more. He had the other kind now, the kind that came from sitting close enough to touch the Sarkar’s knee, from his mother’s hand on his head, from a soft kind father he was going to have to fight to keep alive. It was a much worse kind of love. It came with a clock attached.

‘All right,’ he thought, into the dark. ‘We are done watching.’

He was nine. Nine years he had spent being careful, being small, being a credit and nothing more, banking every clever thing he might have said and saying none of it. That first year in the cradle, he had told himself that the time would come to start, and that he would know it when it did, and that he had years before it mattered.

The years were fewer now. He had watched a good number of them go by from a cushion in the outer rings.

‘And I am the only person in this fort who has read how this ends,’ he thought. ‘So. Carefully. Slowly. Without anyone ever seeing the hand that does it.’

Before he slept, he worked out exactly where a nine-year-old was allowed to put his hand without anyone screaming, and the answer surprised him, and pleased him, and he fell asleep almost smiling for the first time in a long while.

The answer was: the boring places. The places nobody guards because nobody believes a child could do any harm there. The account books. The workshops. The dull rooms where the actual machine of the kingdom turns over, and where a clever boy with the right kind of cover could turn a screw or two before anybody thought to ask why.

Half of his eighteen years were already gone. He meant to use the next one.

Notes

1. Diwali: the autumn festival of lamps, kept by Sikhs and Hindus alike. For the Sikhs the day also marks the release of Guru Hargobind, the sixth Guru, from imprisonment at Gwalior, together with fifty-two Hindu princes, in the early seventeenth century, and is remembered as the Bandi Chhor, the freeing of the captives. Ranjit Singh kept it with enormous state ceremony at Lahore and Amritsar.

2. Kallar (ਕੱਲਰ): the white saline efflorescence that blooms out of damp ground and old masonry in the Punjab, crusting and crumbling walls and turning fertile land into barren, salt-poisoned soil. Saltpetre (potassium nitrate), the chief ingredient of gunpowder, was historically refined from exactly this kind of efflorescent crust, leached from old walls and saline earth and boiled clean. The same white salt that armed the kingdom thus also rotted its walls and its fields, which is the spine of this part of the story.

3. The valuation of the Gobindgarh fort treasury at Amritsar at roughly ten crore rupees (about ten million pounds sterling) is recorded by Captain William Murray, British political agent at Ambala, in the 1830s.

4. Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareli (1786-1831), who after pilgrimage to Mecca proclaimed a holy war to restore Muslim rule and, judging the Sikhs the more vulnerable of the two powers on the Pathan frontier, marched against them; he raised his banner in the Yusufzai country and based himself near Nowshera from late 1826. The struggle occupied Ranjit Singh’s frontier for some five years, its engagements including Akora, Saidu, Hund and Zaidah, and reached its height when the Sayyid took Peshawar in 1830. He was defeated and killed, with his companion Shah Ismail (Maulvi Muhammad Ismail), by a Sikh force under Kanwar Sher Singh at Balakot in May 1831. The account follows Hari Ram Gupta’s History of the Sikhs (Vol. 5); the numbers the sources give for the men engaged are often rhetorical, and Sayyid Ahmad and his movement are treated here with respect.