Kallar in the Wall? (6)

The Sarkar sent for the two of them together, the son and the grandson, on an evening early in the new year, in the same small upper room where he took the things he wanted to look at without the court watching him look.

It was not, Angrez understood the moment he was brought in and found his father already seated, a small occasion dressed as a small one. The Sarkar did very little by accident. He had put the heir and the heir’s heir in one quiet room with him, alone but for a single trusted attendant at the door, and he meant to speak of the one thing the whole court spent its days arranging itself so as not to mention, which was the morning the Sarkar would not wake up.

He came at it sideways, the way he came at everything worth coming at.

“They tell me,” he said, to neither of them in particular, turning an empty cup in his scarred hand, “that I have built a great thing. The greatest between Delhi and Kabul. They have told me so for thirty years. And for thirty years I have known the thing they are too pleased to say, which is that I have kept it alight the way a man keeps a fire alight by standing in the wind with his own back to it, and that a fire kept up by one man’s back goes out the day the man steps away.” The one eye came up, bright and unsentimental. “I am not going to live forever, whatever I pay the hakims to tell me. So I am going to ask my son and my grandson one question, and I will have the true answer and not the courteous one. What keeps a kingdom on its feet after the man who made it lies down?”

Kharak Singh was quiet for a while, and Angrez watched his father gather himself, and felt the old protective ache under his ribs, because he knew what the court said about this soft and gentle man, and he knew the court was not wholly wrong and was missing very nearly everything.

“The Panth, Pita ji,” Kharak said at last, simply. “The faith keeps it. Not the army. Armies change masters in a morning; you have bought enough of them yourself to know it. A kingdom of the Khalsa stands because the people in it believe that it is theirs, theirs and the Guru’s, and they will go on giving it their sons and their grain long after they have stopped being afraid of any one man. You did not only conquer the Punjab. You gave it a throne that bowed to its own faith, and that is why they love you, and love lasts where fear does not.” He opened his soft hands, a little helplessly, a man who knew his own measure. “I cannot rule the way you rule, Pita ji. I know it. Everyone in this room knows it. But I know what I would be the keeper of, and it is that. Keep the people’s faith that the kingdom is the Guru’s and their own, and be just to them, and they will forgive a great deal of weakness in the man on the cushion. Lose it, and all the strength in Asia will not hold them a season.”

The Sarkar looked at his son for a long moment, and something moved in the great rough face that Angrez had rarely seen there when it turned toward Kharak: a plain, surprised respect.

“That,” the Sarkar said quietly, “is a truer thing than the men who laugh at you will ever be clever enough to understand. Keep saying it, putt. After I am gone, say it then most of all.”

Then the eye came round to Angrez, and Angrez felt the familiar lurch, the small cold drop that came whenever the sharpest mind between two oceans turned its full weight onto him.

“And my grandson, who thinks about dull things,” said the Sarkar. “What keeps a kingdom standing?”

He could have deflected. He was nine; a fumble was always within reach. But his father had just said a brave and naked thing in front of the Lion of the Punjab, and Angrez found that he did not want to answer that courage with a child’s evasion. So he gave them a piece of the truth, cut down to a size a boy could be caught holding.

“The boring things, Dada ji,” he said. “The ones I bring you. A kingdom keeps standing after its king if the things the king does can go on being done without him. If the weight in the bazaar is honest because there is a rule that says it must be, and not only because the king would be angry to hear that it was not. If grain reaches the starving district because there is an office whose whole work is to send it, and not only because the king happened to remember. If the next man knows what to do on his first morning because it is written down somewhere, and not only carried in one old head that the ground will have one day.” He looked up, and let the careful child’s words carry the dangerous grown thought folded inside them. “You hold it with your back, Dada ji, the way you said. Pita ji holds it with the people’s faith. I think it has to be held by habit as well. By a hundred small machines that keep turning when nobody strong is watching them. Faith and habit. Build those, and one day it does not need a great back at all.”

The Sarkar sat a long while with that, the empty cup forgotten in his hand.

“Faith and habit,” he said at last, and there was something near to wonder in it, and something near to grief. “My son would keep the soul of the thing, and my grandson would keep its bones, and between the pair of you, you have named me the two things I have never once in my life had to think about. Because I had this.” He lifted the scarred hand, the hand that had taken the Punjab off the Afghans and the chiefs one piece at a time. “I never needed the faith written into an office, or the habit written into a book, because I was the office, and I was the book, and I was the back, all three at once, and it worked. That is the joke of it. It worked so well that I never built the thing that works when I am not in the room.” He set the cup down with a small final click. “Your grandfather is the best argument there is against your grandfather. Remember that, both of you. After.”

‘He has said it himself,’ Angrez thought, with the particular vertigo of a man who has spent a whole career teaching a subject and just heard the subject state the thesis cleaner than any essay he ever marked. ‘Fifty years the finest ruler in Asia, and he has diagnosed the whole disease in four sentences, sitting in a small room with a cup he forgot to drink. He is completely right. And he will die with the cure half-built anyway, because the cure takes longer than any one life, and he has always known that too.’

Then the Sarkar did the practical thing, because beneath all of it he was, finally, always a practical man.

“You like dull rooms,” he said to Angrez, and the old humour flickered back into the eye. “Here is a dull errand worthy of you. The gold on the Guru’s house, at Amritsar. Desa Singh sends me accounts and Sant Singh sends me blessings, and between the two of them I cannot tell how the work actually goes. So carry my word to Sardar Desa Singh and to Giani Sant Singh that it is to go on without stint and without haste; and look into the accounts; and walk the whole of it, and ask your tiresome questions, and come back and tell me the truth of how my gold is spent and whether the Guru’s house will be the finer for it.” The flicker became, almost, a grin. “Take your habits to Amritsar, putt. See whether they survive a building site.”

End of Book Two: “Kallar in the Wall?”

To be continued.