Kallar in the Wall? (3)

The foundry was the first place in nine years that Angrez had walked into and wanted, with his whole modern heart, to simply stay.

It was hot and loud and it smelled of charcoal and scorched metal and the particular sweetness of molten bronze, and it was, by the standards of the century, a temple of competence. Men moved with purpose. Things were measured. A mould the size of a small boat lay packed in its pit, waiting for the pour, and over it all, in a leather apron, sleeves shoved up scarred forearms, stood a broad unhurried man of about fifty with the calm absorbed face of a person who has solved a great many problems and expects to solve the next one too.

Sardar Lahna Singh Majithia looked at the small richly dressed boy his foreman had nervously announced, and did not bow and scrape, and did not coo, and did not perform the elaborate alarm that the arrival of a kanwar usually produced. He looked at the boy the way he looked at everything, as a thing that might or might not turn out to be interesting, and said:

“You will keep your hands where I tell you, Kanwar Sahib, or you will go home with fewer of them. Past that, you may watch.”

‘Oh,’ thought Angrez, with a rush of something he had not felt since the workshop in Newton, since before all of this. ‘Oh, I like you.’

“Yes, Sardar ji,” he said, and went and stood exactly where he was told, and watched the pour, and asked nothing for a full hour, which cost him a great deal and bought him more.

When the metal was in and the worst of it was done and the men were standing back wiping their faces, Lahna Singh glanced over at the boy who had not fidgeted and had not chattered and had watched the whole thing with the still attention of a much older person, and said, more curious than before:

“No questions? Every other child I have ever let in here asks why the fire is hot.”

“I have about forty questions, Sardar ji,” said Angrez honestly. “I did not want to waste your pour on them.”

The Sword of the State looked at the Sarkar’s grandson for a moment with new eyes, and then, for the first time, smiled.

“Come back tomorrow,” he said. “Bring two of the forty.”

---

He went back the next day, and the day after, and within a fortnight the foreman had stopped being nervous about the small kanwar who came and sat on an upturned crucible in the corner, and Lahna Singh had begun, without quite deciding to, to talk to him.

It was the easiest cover Angrez had ever worn, because it was barely a cover at all. In that workshop he let himself be cleverer than he had let himself be anywhere in nine years, and the cleverness simply vanished into the noise, because in that room a clever boy was the least remarkable thing present. He could ask how the bore of a gun was trued and get a real answer. Better still, he could watch the Sardar struggle with the casting of a fussy piece and offer, carefully, a thought, and have the thought taken seriously, or laughed at on its merits, which was its own kind of glory.

---

The foundry cast cannon, but it made more than cannon, and the more was what pulled hardest at him.

Off the main floor, past the great mould-pit, a low shed sat where the noise dropped to the patient rasp of a file, and in the shed an old man worked the breech of a matchlock with the slow exactness of a person who had been doing it for fifty years and meant to die at the bench. A Musalman out of Kotli Loharan, the village of smiths in the Sialkot country whose gun-barrels travelled the length of the kingdom and well past it, he went by the name of Ustad Ilahi Bakhsh, and the first thing he ever said to the Sarkar’s grandson he said without looking up.

“Keep your hands off the barrels. A prince’s oil rusts my work the same as a beggar’s.”

‘Two of them now,’ Angrez thought, with real joy. ‘The whole of this fort is full of men whose first instinct is to tell me not to touch things. I have come home.’

The Ustad made and mended the tufang, the matchlock, and the long heavy wall-pieces, and he held the old craft in his hands the way Lahna Singh held the new. When the boy had earned an hour by sitting still and asking little, the old man showed him how a Kotli barrel was made: a ribbon of hot iron wound round a rod and forge-welded down its whole length, coil biting into coil, until it would take the blow of the powder firing behind the ball and not burst, the way the cheap Kabuli barrels burst, he said, with thin satisfaction, often enough to spoil a Pathan’s whole morning.

Angrez listened, and spent his careful two questions out of forty, and underneath the listening ran the cold audit he could never switch off.

‘It is beautiful work,’ he thought, ‘and it is the wrong work.’ In the other life he had handled the children of this gun, behind museum glass, the matchlock giving way to the flintlock and the flintlock to the cap and the cap to the cartridge, every step shaving away the long helpless moment a man knelt to reload while another man rode him down. The irregular thousands of the Khalsa still carried the first gun in that line. Down the river the patient measuring men carried a later one, and were not even the best in the world at it, and it would be enough. He already knew the year it would be enough.

None of it did he say. He was nine, and a boy who told the armourers of the Khalsa that their guns were generations behind the world was a boy who had said one clever thing too many. So he put it away in the long room in his head where he kept the things he would need and could not yet speak, and he thanked the Ustad, and went back to his corner, and waited for a better day to be clever on.

---

And one afternoon, watching the accounts-boy of the foundry add a long column of the day’s charges of metal and charcoal and labour, and watching Lahna Singh frown over the total because he could not easily tell whether it was right without adding the whole thing again himself, Angrez made his move.

He made it the way he had planned it, as a game.

“Sardar ji,” he said, “do you want to see a trick? A boy showed it to me.” There had been no boy. There was never a boy. The boy was two hundred years away and did not exist. “It tells you if a long sum is wrong without your having to do the sum twice.”

Lahna Singh, who collected tricks the way other men collected horses, set down his frown and said, “Show me.”

So Angrez showed him. It was a small thing, an old thing, a thing for casting out the nines: you took each number and added its own figures together, again and again, until one figure was left, and you did that to all the numbers you had added, and to your answer, and if the kingdom of arithmetic was in order the two had to agree, and if they did not agree, then somewhere in that beautiful column a figure was wrong, and you knew it before you had checked a single line. It did not tell you where the error was. It told you, in the time it took to breathe, that there was one, which was the whole point, because the slow part of finding a mistake is not fixing it. The slow part is suspecting it is there.

Lahna Singh did the foundry’s column over, by the trick, and the trick said the total was wrong.

He did the column the long way, frowning, and the column was wrong. The accounts-boy had set down a four as a seven, three lines up, the kind of slip that happened a hundred times a day in a hundred rooms across the kingdom and was almost never caught, because catching it had always cost more than the slip.

The Sword of the State sat back on his stool and looked at the nine-year-old for a long, long moment.

“Who,” he said slowly, “did you say showed you this.”

“A boy,” said Angrez, holding his face exactly, exactly still. “I forget his name.”

Lahna Singh did not believe him, and Angrez could see that he did not believe him. But he could also see the thing he had gambled the whole move on, which was that Sardar Lahna Singh Majithia, alone among the men of that court, did not care where a good trick came from. He cared that it was good. A lifetime spent being the man who brought strange useful things into a court that did not always know what to do with them had taught him, better than anyone in Lahore, that you did not interrogate a gift. You used it.

“Hm,” said the Sword of the State, and that was all he said about where it came from, then or ever, and Angrez understood that he had just found, at nine, the first true ally of his second life.

---

The trick got out the way a good cheap thing always gets out, which is fast.

The foundry used it first. Then the foundry’s clerk showed his cousin in the artillery accounts, who showed a friend in the toshakhana, who carried it at last into the revenue daftar and set it down in front of old Ganpat Rai, the dry honest munshi who had handed the Kanwar the whole disease in three sentences one afternoon and never known what he had done. Ganpat Rai had spent thirty years proving long columns the slow way, twice and three times over, and here was a way to learn in a breath what had been costing him an hour, and he was far too good a clerk to be too proud to take it.

He used it the next week on the grain-assessment of a parganah down toward Pak Pattan, and the trick said the long column was wrong, and the long way proved the trick right: three rooms off, a tired clerk had carried a figure across as a six that should have been a five, and the one wrong stroke had quietly added a fifth again to what a single village owed the state. Caught after the demand went out, it would have been a flogging for the clerk, who was honest, and a broken season for the village, who were not lying, and one more small handful of the kingdom’s trust bleeding away at a joint that nobody watched. Caught before, by a counting-game a boy had carried in from a foundry, it was a struck-out six and a corrected five and nothing else at all. Ganpat Rai sat and looked at the mended figure a while. Then he asked, mildly, of the room, where a thing like that came from, and was told the Sword of the State had it off some clever child, and he said nothing, and went back to his ledger, and used it every working day for the rest of his life.

Within two months the casting-out of nines was quietly in use in half the counting-rooms of the fort, and nobody could quite say where it had come from, except that the men of the foundry said it had come from the Sword of the State, and the Sword of the State, asked directly, only said that a clever child had reminded him of an old method, and let it lie.

It was a small thing. Angrez was the first to know how small. It did not reform the revenue system. It did not get at the salt in the wall. A determined cheat could still cheat past it, and the great structural theft of the kingdom went on exactly as before, because the great structural theft did not live in honest arithmetic mistakes.

But it proved the principle, and the principle was the whole game: a thing that can be cheaply checked is harder to cheat. One checkable brick, set into the machine of the kingdom in a way no one could trace to a frightening source, and the kingdom had taken it without a murmur and asked for more. Now he knew that it could be done. He knew, too, how it felt, and how the cover held, and how fast a good cheap idea could travel through rooms full of overworked men who only wanted their work to be a little less impossible.

In the life before, he had been a teacher. He recognized the feeling. It was the feeling of a lesson landing.

Alone in his room that night, he let himself be quietly and enormously pleased for about the length of time it took the feeling to curdle into the next thought, which was the thought that always came now, and which he was beginning to suspect would never stop coming.

The thought was: ‘Somebody is going to wonder where the clever child gets it.’

And the somebody he was most afraid of had a still, beautiful, attentive face, and stood every evening at the Sarkar’s right hand, and forgot nothing.

Notes

1. The matchlock (tufang) remained the common firearm of the Khalsa’s irregular horse and foot through Ranjit Singh’s reign; Hari Ram Gupta counts matchlockmen in the tens of thousands. The barrels of Kotli Loharan, in the Sialkot district, were the most prized in the region for their strength and finish. The state’s regular infantry, drilled by French and Italian officers, carried the musket, while the older arm kept the matchlock, a weapon long obsolete in Europe, where the flintlock had given way to the percussion cap and would soon give way to the cartridge. The gap in small arms between the Khalsa and the Company was real, and it would tell in the Anglo-Sikh wars; Angrez Singh’s private alarm at it is the historian’s hindsight.