Kallar in the Wall? (2)

The first of the boring rooms he got himself into was the most important one in the kingdom, and almost no one thought of it as a room at all.

Some weeks after Diwali he asked, in the bright voice of a boy who wanted to learn to be useful, to be allowed to sit in at the working durbar, the real one, the one the Sarkar held most mornings up in the octagonal tower of the fort they called the Musamman Burj, with the brown river sliding past below the windows. It was not the jewelled night-court of the festivals. It was the room where the kingdom was actually run: reports read, orders given, and above all the accounts gone through, the Sarkar working down the revenue of one district and the customs of one road with the single good eye and a memory that forgave nothing.

What undid him, quietly, was the petitions.

He had taught this kingdom to bored teenagers for years, and somehow no book had ever told him the thing he watched that first morning: that any man in it, any man at all, a cultivator, a widow, a muleteer, could come before the Lion of the Punjab on a plain sheet of paper, or drop a folded grievance into a box that stood near the palace for exactly that purpose, and be heard. That the Sarkar kept men whose whole work was to ride out and invite complaints, so that the small could be heard against the great. A knot of frightened farmers from somewhere down toward Multan stood in front of the old man and said, through a spokesman whose voice would not hold steady, that the revenue-collector over their parganah had taken above the assessment, had carried off their oxen and their cooking-pots against a debt they did not owe, and that the collector was a man of Kanwar Kharak Singh’s.

His father’s man. A small grinding cruelty done in his soft, kind father’s name, four days’ walk away, by someone his father had never met and would never once think of.

The Sarkar heard the whole of it without moving, and then said, plainly, that it would be stopped; and a clerk wrote it down; and the farmers touched the ground and wept; and the court moved on to the next thing. And Angrez sat in the ring of grandees and felt the two things he would go on feeling, in one proportion or another, for the rest of his second life.

The first was a clean, astonished respect. ‘It works,’ he thought. ‘There is a thing here that actually works. He has built a kingdom where the smallest man can put a paper in a box and stop a great man’s collector. By the standard of this century that is very close to a miracle.’

The second came with the clock. ‘And it runs entirely on him. The box works because the Lion empties it. The collector stops because the Lion says stop. There is no machine under the man, only the man, and every kardar from here to the Khyber knows it, and is counting the seasons the same as I am. The justice in this kingdom is exactly one heartbeat deep.’

He walked out along the river-gallery with his whole fog of a project narrowing, all at once, into a short hard list. The honest weight in a bazaar. The box that heard the small. The granary against the bad year. The relay that could carry a poor man’s complaint up to Lahore before the man who had wronged him got there first. Dull, repeated, reliable things, every one of them a thing the Sarkar did now by sheer force of being himself, and every one of them, in principle, a thing that could be written down and worn into habit and rule and office until it kept turning over on its own after the great heart had stopped.

---

The trouble with knowing how a kingdom dies is that it does not tell you how to keep it alive.

Angrez knew the ending of the Sikh Empire the way a man knows the ending of a film he has watched too many times. He could recite the sequence of deaths, name the year the British crossed the Sutlej and the year they reached Lahore and the order in which the court murdered itself in between. None of it told him what to do on a Tuesday in 1830 with the hands of a nine-year-old and a head full of physics nobody in this century had a use for.

So he did what he had always done when a problem was too big to hold. He took it apart.

The kingdom ran on land. That much he had got from the account books before, in stolen pieces, and he confirmed it now in the weeks after Diwali by the simple method of being a curious boy in rooms where curious boys were tolerated. Out of every three rupees the state took in, two came off the land, in grain, in kind, at harvest. The other rupee came off salt and customs and the tribute of beaten princes and the lapse of dead men’s jagirs. It was an enormous income. The Sarkar’s revenue ran to three crore in a good year, and there were a great many good years.

And nearly all of it went out again the way it came in, which was the part that kept Angrez awake.

It went to the army. It went to the chiefs, who held their land on the promise of bringing horsemen when the Sarkar called. It went into the toshakhana as shawls and plate and jewels, dead wealth, beautiful and inert, wealth that did nothing but sit and glitter and wait to be carried off by whoever held the fort on the wrong morning. Almost none of it went into the slow unglamorous thing a whole modern education had taught Angrez to look for, the thing that quietly turns a rich country into a strong one and a strong one into a lasting one. He had a name for it that meant nothing here, and a hundred small pictures of it that meant everything. A road built to carry a cart of grain to a market and not only a gun to a siege. A coin a Multan trader would take without first biting it and weighing it and looking at you the way his grandfather had taught him to look at strangers. A school that went on teaching the granthi his scripture and the soldier his drill, and also, in the room next door, taught a boy to survey a canal, keep a clean ledger, set a broken arm and prove a barrel true, so that the kingdom raised some of its own clerks and surveyors and bone-setters and gun-smiths and did not have to buy every clever foreigner who would take its salt. And under all of them, a way of taking the harvest that did not need ten thousand watchers the state could neither pay enough nor trust at all, standing over the peasant to stop him hiding his own grain.

That last one was the part he kept coming back to, because it was so stupid, and so fixable, and so completely unfixed.

---

The clearest picture of it came from an old munshi of the revenue office, a dry, kind, overworked man named Ganpat Rai, who made the great mistake of answering the Kanwar’s questions honestly because the Kanwar asked them so well.

“Why does the state take grain, Munshi ji?” Angrez asked him, sitting on a stool in the records room with his chin on his hands, the very picture of a bored clever boy filling an afternoon. “Why not coin? Coin is easier to carry.”

“Because the peasant has grain, Kanwar Sahib, not coin,” said Ganpat Rai, not looking up from his ledger. “If we asked for coin he would have to sell his grain to a moneylender to get it, and the moneylender would rob him, and then we would have a poorer peasant and a richer moneylender, which helps no one.”

‘That is actually a good answer,’ Angrez thought, revising his opinion of Ganpat Rai sharply upward. “But then someone has to watch him cut the grain, so he doesn’t hide it.”

“Someone has to watch him, yes.”

“A lot of someones.”

“A great many someones.”

“And those someones have to be paid.”

“They are paid,” said Ganpat Rai, and here at last he looked up, and there was something tired and knowing in his face, “out of the grain. And some of them, Kanwar Sahib, since you are clever enough to have asked the first question, take a little more grain than the state told them to, on the way, and the state never knows, because the only person who could tell the state is the peasant, and the peasant is more frightened of the man with the stick than he is of a kardar three days’ ride away.”

Angrez sat very still.

A tired honest clerk who thought he was indulging a child had just handed him the entire disease in three sentences. The state could not see its own foundations. It taxed in a way that required ten thousand pairs of eyes, and it could not trust a single pair of them, and so the wealth bled out at every joint between the peasant and the treasury, and nobody could say how much, because the system was built so that nobody could ever say how much.

‘Kallar,’ he thought.

“Thank you, Munshi ji,” he said, and meant it more than the old man could possibly know.

“You ask good questions, Kanwar Sahib,” said Ganpat Rai, going back to his ledger. “Better than is comfortable, if I am honest. Try to ask easier ones in front of the kardars.”

That too went into the file. The honest man had just warned him, gently, that he was already being clever in a way that got noticed. He took the warning. He had nine years of practice taking exactly that warning.

---

So he had his disease, and he had his image of it, and now he needed his first move. What it could not be took a long time to settle before he could decide what it would be.

It could not be the army. The army was the single most dangerous thing in the kingdom to touch, a thing that thought of itself as the Khalsa itself, the body of the Guru’s own, and a kanwar of nine who started suggesting reforms to the Khalsa Fauj would be, at best, laughed at, and at worst, remembered. It could not be the chiefs, who would cut down a boy who threatened their jagirs without the boy ever knowing which smiling sardar had ordered it. It could not, for years yet, be anything that looked like power.

It had to be small. It had to be dull. It had to be the kind of thing a clever child might wander into and improve by accident, the kind of thing that made grown men say what an able boy and not what a dangerous one. And it had, if he was any good at this at all, to be a thing that proved a principle, so that the next move and the move after that could grow out of it the way a wall grows out of one good brick.

Where the sample of his own old life had taught him to look, there he found it: in the most boring room with the most underestimated people. He would not start with the kingdom’s money. He would start with the kingdom’s counting.

He had watched the munshis reckon, and they reckoned in the old Persian way, in the accountancy hand, beautiful and slow and almost impossible to check. A column of figures in that hand was a column of figures a second man could not easily prove right or wrong without doing the whole sum again himself. And a sum that cannot be cheaply checked is a sum that can be cheaply cheated, which was the whole disease in miniature, sitting right there on every page of every daftar in the fort.

There was no need to teach the kingdom modern accountancy. He was nine. He needed to teach exactly one room one small trick of checking, the kind of trick a boy might bring back from a game, and he needed to do it in front of the one man at the Lahore court who would see a clever child and feel nothing but delight.

There was such a man. Angrez had been saving him.

---

Everyone in the fort knew Sardar Lahna Singh Majithia, and almost nobody knew what to do with him.

A sardar of the first rank, he spent his days in a workshop. He cast the Sarkar’s great guns in the foundry inside the fort, and in the hours he could steal he made other things: a clock that showed the hour and the day and the month together, instruments for watching the stars, a gun of his own design that the foreign visitors exclaimed over. The Sarkar had given him the title Husam-ud-Daulah, the Sword of the State, and did not entirely know what to make of him either, except that the man was useful past the point of any single battle, and was let alone to be useful in his own strange way.

He was, in short, the only person in the kingdom of Lahore who was already known to be exactly the kind of person Angrez was hiding being.

A boy could be clever in that man’s workshop and it would mean nothing. A boy could ask how a thing worked, or suggest how it might work better, and Sardar Lahna Singh would not narrow his eyes and wonder what was behind the child’s face. He would laugh, and hand the boy a tool, and the worst that could happen, the very worst, was that an inventor would decide a prince was a promising apprentice.

It was the safest door in the fort. Angrez had known it was there for years, and had made himself wait until he was old enough to walk through it without being carried.

On a cold bright morning a few weeks after Diwali, Kanwar Nau Nihal Singh told his attendants he wished to see the great guns being cast, which was an entirely ordinary thing for a young Singh of nine to wish, and presented himself at the door of the foundry of the Sword of the State.

Notes

1. The Lahore court’s accessibility is well attested. Ranjit Singh held a working durbar most mornings in the Musamman (Saman) Burj of the Lahore Fort, where he examined the accounts of the provinces in person; any subject could petition him on a plain sheet of paper or through a box kept near the palace, and he deputed agents to invite complaints, so that grievances against revenue-collectors and kardars, and even against the officers of his own sons, were heard. Hari Ram Gupta records among the sample cases cultivators complaining of exactions by a collector “under Kanwar Kharak Singh,” which the Maharaja ordered stopped. Nau Nihal Singh’s own celebrated administrative reforms belong historically to his brief regency of 1839-1840; the novel brings the instinct forward.