Kallar in the Wall? (5)

After that the shape of his days changed, quietly, in a way that nobody outside the family quite noticed and nobody inside it quite questioned.

The lessons with Bhai Gurmukh Singh went on as before, and so did the gatka and the riding, and he still sat where a kanwar sat at the public darbar, and was, to the eyes of the court, exactly what he had always been, a serious able boy growing up the way well-made princes grew up. But three mornings a week he went to the foundry, and the foundry came to feel more like a home than the haveli ever had, because the foundry was the one room in the kingdom where the part of him that was Angrez Singh of Surrey was allowed to breathe.

Lahna Singh taught him as if he were an apprentice and not a prince, which was the highest compliment the man knew how to pay. The lessons came in iron and fire: how a gun was bored and why it burst, how an alloy was judged, how the great clock kept its three kinds of time. And Angrez, in return, paid out his strange knowledge in careful coin, a thought here, a question there, never too much at once, never anything that could not be mistaken for an unusually bright boy reasoning aloud. Let the Sword of the State assume, as the Sarkar assumed, as the whole kingdom now comfortably assumed, that the Kanwar simply had the kind of head that worried at how things worked. It was true. It just was not the whole truth, and the part it left out was the part that could get him killed.

In the low shed at the edge of the works, Ustad Ilahi Bakhsh let him watch the matchlocks come apart and go together again, and gave him the gossip of the barrel-trade, and never once asked why a prince should care to know it. The old man took it for granted that every Singh was born wanting to know how a gun was made. In this one case he was righter than he could have guessed.

And once a fortnight or so, in the small upper room, he brought the Sarkar a loose thread.

Nothing large. He was not a fool. What he brought the old man were small fixable things, dull true useful things that a boy who sat in counting-rooms might plausibly notice: a kardar whose returns never quite balanced, a duty that cost more to collect than it brought in, a stretch of road that would carry twice the trade for the price of one bridge. The Sarkar listened to every one with the same fierce delight, and acted on perhaps half of them, and said, every single time, the same thing at the end, which was: ‘What else have you seen, putt.’ And in those mornings Angrez learned more about how power actually moved in the kingdom of Lahore than nine years of watching from the cushions had taught him, because he was watching it now from beside the hand that held it.

Two things were going up at once, and only one of them was visible. The visible one was a reputation as the Sarkar’s clever, dutiful, harmless grandson. The invisible one was a map: of who could be trusted and who could not, of where the rot lay and what fed it, of which threads, when he was bigger and stronger and the clock had run further down, he would be able to pull hard enough to matter. In the new year he had added a wall to that map that frightened him more than the rest of them put together: the army itself, and the gun-bearers who were its oldest and proudest and least governable part. He had only looked at that wall. He knew better, for now, than to lay a single finger on it.

---

It was Faqir Aziz-ud-din who showed him, without meaning to, where the next great danger lay.

The foreign minister had taken to the Kanwar the way thoughtful old men take to thoughtful young ones, and sometimes, after a darbar, he let the boy walk with him a while in the garden, and answered the boy’s questions because the boy’s questions were, frankly, more interesting than most of what the minister heard in a working day.

“Faqir Sahib,” Angrez asked him, on a soft evening early in the new year, picking his moment with the care of a man laying a charge, “why do the Angrez come up the river to Sind?”

The Faqir glanced down at him, mildly surprised. “You hear a great deal, in your counting-rooms.”

“I hear they are surveying the Indus. Measuring it. For trade, they say.”

“For trade, they say,” the Faqir agreed, and there was the faintest dryness in it.

“Do you believe them?”

The old minister walked a few steps in silence, and when he answered it was not the answer of a man who had failed to think about it for years.

“I believe,” he said at last, “that the English never measure a river they do not one day mean to own. I am not a child, Kanwar Sahib, and the Sarkar is no fool, whatever the English prefer to tell one another. We see the surveyors. We see the agents, and the courteous letters, and the maps. But to see a danger and to be able to afford a quarrel with it are two wholly different things.” He stopped by the cold fountain, and for once spoke to the boy more as he might to a man. “Consider where we stand. The Afghans at our back. The hills full of chiefs who would rise the morning we stumbled.” He did not name the third danger, the one that sat in the hall behind them sharpening its courtesies, because he was a careful man and the boy was a child; but his glance went to it, for half a breath, and came back. “And to the south, beyond one river, the strongest power the world has yet built, sitting quiet and patient and smiling. The treaty on the Sutlej is the single thing that lets the Sarkar turn his whole face to the north and the west and not have to guard his back as well. It is not love, putt. It is not trust. It is the price of fighting one war at a time instead of three at once, and it is the most clear-eyed bargain in this kingdom. It is also far too heavy a thing for a boy. Carry your counting-games. They suit you better, and they let an old man sleep.”

And Angrez, who had asked the question for the precise purpose of learning whether the cleverest head in Lahore saw what he saw, walked beside him in the cooling garden and felt the particular vertigo of being argued into silence by a man who was completely right and completely doomed in the same breath.

Because the Faqir was right. Had Angrez sat in that same chair with the Faqir’s knowledge and not one day more of it, he would have counselled exactly this peace, and defended it, and been right to. The one thing he had that the Faqir did not was not cleverness, for the Faqir was cleverer than he was, and it was not suspicion, for the Faqir had suspicion to spare. It was the date. The Faqir was playing for time, beautifully, on the entirely reasonable assumption that time was a thing the kingdom still had. Angrez knew the year the bill fell due, and the man who would come to collect it, and how much of the work the kingdom’s own quarrels would do for the English before a single Company soldier ever had to cross the Sutlej. He knew that all the wise swallowed suspicion in the world bought a kingdom nothing at all unless it also spent the borrowed years building something that could stand on its own legs the morning the friendship ended. The wise men were not asleep. They were doing the right thing. And the right thing, by itself, with no clock laid against it, was going to lose.

And it had already begun. The first pieces were moving this very year, while the whole court looked the other way, and Angrez was the only soul in the kingdom who could see the shape of the board.

‘There is the other salt,’ he thought, looking south past the garden wall toward the river and the patient measuring men. ‘Not in our wall. In theirs. And the only difference between those men and me is that they believe they have all the time in the world, and I know to the year how little of it there is.’

“You are right, Faqir Sahib,” he said aloud, in his ordinary boy’s voice. “It is too large a thought for me. Will you tell me instead how a treaty is written? I have never seen one.”

And the Faqir, charmed, told him, and Angrez listened to every word, and filed it with the rest, because a boy who meant one day to keep the English off this kingdom was going to need to know precisely how the English wrote down a promise.

---

He looked in on his father before he slept that night, which he had begun to make himself do.

Kharak Singh was awake, in a soft warm haze, pleased and unfocused, the small lacquered box closed on the table beside him. He smiled at his son with real affection and no urgency at all and asked him if he had had a good day, and Angrez said yes, Pita ji, a good day, and sat with him a while, and watched the man he was going to have to save drift gently nearer the edge of something the man himself could not see.

‘Not this year,’ Angrez told himself, the old promise. ‘You have years. But that box is going to be the hardest of all of them, because it is the one rot a man pours into himself.’

None of it got said aloud. He pressed his father’s soft hand, and said goodnight, and went to his room, and lay down in the dark.

Across the city a watch-drum marked the hour. Somewhere in the old fort a wall stood looking solid with its heart turning quietly to powder, and somewhere to the south men with instruments measured a river they meant one day to own, and between the two of them a boy of nine who carried a dead man’s century in his head lay awake in the dark and made himself reckon the year out honestly, the good of it against the size of what was still coming.

It had been a good beginning. He had stopped only watching. One good thing had been started, one true friend had been made, one private hour earned with the most powerful man in Asia, and he had survived the notice of the most dangerous one. It was not nothing. By the standards of a boy of nine it was a very great deal, and he made himself feel the size of it before he let himself feel the smallness.

Because it was small. Against the nine years still left it was very small, and against what was coming up the river it was smaller still.

‘Give them a good answer,’ the Akali had said to him once, a lifetime and a fortnight ago, on the day before he rode up a hill to die. ‘An answer worth the road you walked to get here.’

“I’m working on it, Baba Ji,” Angrez said, very quietly, to the dark, to the one person he had ever been able to say anything to. “Slowly. But I’m working on it.”

He knew now that it could be done. And down the river, later that year, a great gaudy meeting was waiting that the whole court thought was about friendship, and that Angrez Singh, alone in the kingdom, knew was about a wall.

He meant to be ready for it.

His eyes closed, and for the first time in a long while he did not feel like a man trapped inside a chapter he had already read. He felt, just slightly, like a man holding a pen.

Notes

1. Husam-ud-Daulah (“Sword of the State”): the title conferred by Ranjit Singh on Sardar Lahna Singh Majithia, a sardar of the first rank who was also the foremost mechanic, gun-founder and inventor of the Lahore court. He cast the state’s heavy artillery in the foundry inside the Lahore Fort, built astronomical instruments and a calendar-clock, and designed a gun of his own, and is recorded by contemporaries as one of the most remarkable men in Ranjit Singh’s service.

2. Casting out nines: an ancient and very simple method of checking arithmetic, in which the digits of each number are repeatedly summed to a single figure; if the check-figures of the parts do not agree with that of the whole, the calculation contains an error. It detects most accidental mistakes at almost no cost. The historical Lahore daftars kept their accounts in the Persian accountancy hand, which was elegant but laborious to verify.

3. The British survey of the Indus, conducted in the early 1830s under the cover of commercial intent, and the meeting of Ranjit Singh and the Governor-General Lord William Bentinck at Ropar in October 1831, are historical. Contemporary Sikh statesmen, Faqir Aziz-ud-din foremost among them, were not blind to British ambition, but the Lahore Durbar’s settled policy was friendship with the Company across the Sutlej frontier.