The Field of Cloth of Gold? (1)

A few months after he came back from Amritsar, the fever came to Lahore. He had given his report of the gold, in the small upper room, and the Sarkar had heard the whole of it out and asked one question, which was whether Lahna had remembered whose house it was, and been told that he had, and that had been the end of the errand.

It came up out of the low wet ground at the turn of the season, the way sickness always came to that city, and it went through the crowded lanes by the river first and then climbed, the way such things climb, into the better houses, and at last into the fort itself. Angrez watched it move with the cold attention of a man who had once been made to memorise how a plague walks a city, and could not for the life of him say what it was. A fever. A bad one. It came with heat and shaking and a deep ache in the bones, and in the worst cases the heat would not break and the patient went down into a kind of burning sleep and did not always come back up. He suspected it passed from person to person, from the way it travelled, and he made the household boil its water and keep the sick apart, to the polite bafflement of everyone. Beyond that he was as helpless as any hakim in the city, because he did not know whether the thing burning through Lahore lived in the blood or the gut or the breath. Nobody in the world would know for another fifty years. And knowing its name would not have saved a single life in 1831 in any case.

And then it took the Sarkar.

The Lion of the Punjab was fifty years old, and he had used the body hard, and when the fever closed its hand on him it closed hard. Within two days he was in the burning sleep. The hakims came, and the European doctors he kept came, and they bled him, which Angrez had to leave the room to keep from screaming about, and they dosed him, and they argued in low voices in the corner, and not one of them would say the word, because the word, in that fort, in that year, was the end of the world. Only the new man among them, the Hungarian Honigberger, bled nobody; he put one drop of something on a lump of sugar, made up under Faqir Aziz-ud-din’s eye because the Sarkar would swallow no firangi physic that had not been, and asked that nothing be expected of it.

This was not the blow that would come three years later, the burst vessel that would leave half a face on the floor. Angrez knew that one was still ahead, and lived in dread of it; this was a different thing, a fever a strong man could fight and win, and the Sarkar was, even gutted by it, a very strong man. But a fever can kill a strong man as dead as a weak one, and for six days nobody in the fort could promise it would not.

Nau Nihal did not leave.

He was a prince of ten, and there were a hundred people whose place it was to sit with the Sarkar before his was, and not one of them could make him go. He did not make a scene about it; a scene would have been noticed, and noticed things got managed. He simply arranged, with the quiet competence he brought to everything, to be there, a boy doing his duty by his grandfather, who could be allowed a corner. He slept on a durree against the wall of the sickroom, or at the foot of the great bed on the nights they let him, and he ate almost nothing, and he woke, every time, the instant the rhythm of the old man’s breathing changed, the way you wake at a change in a sound you have been listening to in your sleep.

And his father did not leave either, which surprised the court and did not surprise Angrez in the least.

Whatever else Kharak Singh was, whatever the court made of him, he loved his father plainly and without calculation, and he sat the long hours too. It was Kharak, not any servant, who noticed that the boy had stopped eating and began, every few hours, to fold food into Nau Nihal’s hands and stand over him until some of it was gone. And it was Kharak who, hearing two diwans in an antechamber begin, in the low careful voices men use, to speak of what would have to be arranged if the worst came, went white, and then very quiet, and told them in a voice nobody in the fort had heard him use before that they would not say one more word of that under this roof while his father drew breath, and that he would remember which of them had said it. They went. For a few days, in the worst of it, the soft and doomed and discounted heir was simply a frightened son guarding his father’s dignity, and he did it well, and Angrez filed it away with a complicated ache, because it was one more thing the histories had never troubled to record about the man they had reduced to a weakness and a box.

The worst night was the fourth.

Toward the dead middle of it the breathing changed in a way Angrez did not like, a slow shallow scraping, and the hakim on watch dozed in his corner, and Kharak had been persuaded an hour before to go and lie down, and for a little while it was only the boy, and the burning old man, and a single lamp.

And Angrez, who had not wept in two lifetimes, not when he died and not since, who had held everything for ten years behind a face he had trained like an instrument, put his forehead down on the edge of the great bed beside the slack scarred hand, and broke.

It came out of him in Punjabi, very low, in pieces, the way prayer comes out of a person who has run clean out of every other thing to do.

“Please,” he said. “Waheguru. Not yet.”

“Not him. Not yet. I know everyone goes. I know You take everyone. Just not this one yet.” His breath hitched. “Do You know what he made? He made it real. Out of nothing. With these two hands.” A breath. “There is no one else.”

He pressed his face harder against the cool edge of the bed.

“Do not take him yet,” he whispered. “Do not take the man the Sikhs are going to remember for three hundred years. There is nothing under him yet. There is only him, and I am not ready, and they are not ready, and if You take him tonight You take the whole of it with him. Leave him with me. I will do the rest.”

That was all. He did not say more; he had learned, even broken, that more was dangerous. He stayed with his face on the bed and his shoulders going in silence for a while, and then, because he was who he was, he made himself stop, and wiped his face dry, and lifted his head, and went back to the watch.

He had no way to know that somewhere down in the burning dark the old man had surfaced just far enough, for just long enough, to catch a piece of it. Not the words, most of them. But pieces. A grandson’s voice, cracked the whole way open, praying over him in the dark. And one fragment that would not leave him afterward, that he would carry up out of the fever and turn over for days: the child had prayed for him the way a man prays over a shaheed at his samadh. The man the Sikhs are going to remember for three hundred years. The boy had grieved him as though he were already history.

The fever broke on the sixth day.

It broke the way they sometimes do, all at once, near dawn. The heat went out of him, and the terrible breathing eased, and he slept, a true sleep this time, and the old hakim felt his brow and put his face in his hands. Word went out through the fort and then the city that the Sarkar would live, and Lahore made a sound that Angrez felt come up through the floor. The Lion was not finished. Not this year.

Angrez sat back against the wall, out of the way of the rejoicing, and found that he was shaking, and let himself, for once, not stop it.

Notes

1. The spreading fever of 1831 that nearly takes the Sarkar in these chapters is the novel’s invention; there is no record of an epidemic fever or of so grave an illness in 1831 (Gupta notes only that in June 1831 he took Dr Honigberger’s medicine and was better on the third day), and its cause is deliberately left unnamed, since no physician of that year could have known it. Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s documented serious illnesses were that of 1826 and the severe stroke of 1834, which left him diminished but ruling until his death in 1839. The fever is offered here as plausible fiction, and the bond it forges between the Sarkar and his grandson is the counterfactual on which this part of the story turns.

2. Dr J. M. Honigberger, whom Hari Ram Gupta calls “the Hungarian Honigberger”, was a homoeopath in the Maharaja’s service. In June 1831 the Maharaja agreed to take his medicine provided it was made up in the presence of Faqir Aziz-ud-din: one drop on a lump of sugar, morning and evening, with no change on the first day and the patient considerably improved on the third (Gupta, History of the Sikhs, Vol. 5). That he bled nobody follows from Gupta’s word “homoeopathic”, not from any record. His place at this invented fever is the novel’s invention.