The Field of Cloth of Gold? (3)

In the high summer of 1831, the King of England sent Maharaja Ranjit Singh a present, and the present came up the river, and Nau Nihal Singh, who was ten years old and had been alive twice, was the only soul in the Punjab who understood that the present was a measuring-tape.

It was a beautiful present. That was the first thing the court said about it, and it said so at length. Five English horses, the like of which no one in Lahore had ever seen: enormous, placid, feather-footed dray-horses, four mares and a stallion, each the size of a small elephant and twice as calm, bred on a cold wet island to haul beer-wagons, and now standing in the white heat of the Lahore plain blinking at a kingdom that had assembled to admire them. With the horses had come a carriage. A great lacquered English state-coach, all glass and gilt and buttoned velvet, slung on leather springs, built for a paved London street.

Nau Nihal stood at the edge of the durbar in his good clothes, his face arranged into the bright, blank, dutiful pleasure expected of a prince at the giving of gifts.

Inside, the part of him that was Angrez Singh of Surrey looked at the carriage and went cold.

‘You have sent us a carriage,’ he thought. ‘To Lahore. Where there is not one mile of made road a thing like that could cross without dropping a wheel into the first nullah. You did not send it to be driven, did you. You sent it so you would have a reason to float it up the Indus. And on the way up the river, while your beautiful useless coach sat in the bottom of a barge, somebody with a notebook took the soundings.’

---

The two men who had brought the gift were presented to the Sarkar with all the ceremony the occasion demanded, and Angrez watched them the way he had once watched a faulty circuit, looking for where the current actually ran.

The first was Captain Wade, the British agent down at Ludhiana, a careful grey official who had been managing the Company’s business with Lahore for years and had the particular tiredness of a man who spends his life being courteous in two languages at once. Angrez had heard his name in the counting-rooms. Wade was the post the dispatches came through, the polite hinge on which the whole Sutlej frontier turned, and he gave nothing away, which Angrez respected and feared in roughly equal measure.

The second man was younger, quicker, and far more dangerous, and almost nobody else in the hall could see it.

His name was Burnes. He was a Scotsman not yet thirty, with a traveller’s brown face and an easy, attentive charm that the begums and the sardars warmed to at once, and he had just spent a season coming up the Indus from the sea with the dray-horses, and he had loved every mile of it. Angrez could tell he had loved it. He had the specific shine of a man who has been let loose to measure a thing he has wanted to measure his whole life. He moved through the Lahore court like a guest at a wedding, delighted and curious and warm, and his eyes never stopped working, and Angrez, who knew exactly that shine because he had worn it himself in another life over a workbench, knew the young Scotsman at once for what he was. Not a soldier. Not a diplomat. ‘A surveyor,’ he thought. ‘They have sent a surveyor dressed as a friend, and he has just mapped the only river that matters, and he enjoyed it so much it doesn’t even feel like a crime to him. It feels like a holiday.’

The Sarkar was enormously pleased with all of it. He had the horses walked up and down. He had the stallion’s mouth opened and its teeth examined and pronounced the beast a king among horses, which it was. He climbed into the carriage and sat in it and laughed at the springs and asked, through the Faqir, how fast it would go, and was told, gravely, that on a good English road a team like this would carry a man twelve miles in an hour, and the Sarkar said that this was a marvel and a half, and that he looked forward to the road.

‘There is no road, Dada ji,’ Angrez thought, watching the old man’s face, the good eye bright with real pleasure over the gift and, underneath the pleasure, doing arithmetic that never stopped. ‘And you know there’s no road. You’re sitting in their measuring-instrument telling them how much you love it, and I cannot for the life of me tell where the loving stops and the counting starts. I don’t think you can either. You taught yourself a long time ago to do them in the same breath.’

---

It was Burnes who came for him before the visit was out, and Angrez had been half dreading it and half longing for it, the way you long for and dread the one examination you have studied your whole life to sit.

He found the boy at the stables that evening, where Angrez had drifted to look at the dray-horses up close, the great gentle giants that had carried a survey up the Indus in their saddlebags. Burnes leaned on the rail beside him, easy as anything, a busy man of consequence making room in his evening for a child, and the easiness was the first tell. Men like Burnes did not spend an evening on a ten-year-old unless the ten-year-old was, for some reason, worth an evening.

“The largest horses your grandfather has ever seen, they tell me,” Burnes said, in his warm careful Persian. “He has had them measured twice.”

“Dada ji measures everything twice,” said Angrez, which was true and harmless and, he hoped, exactly what a fond grandson said. ‘And so do you,’ he thought. ‘You have measured the river and the guns and the horse, and now you have a spare evening, and you have decided to measure the one instrument in this whole household that nobody thought to guard. Hello, Lieutenant. I have been waiting for you for two hundred years.’

It began so gently that a real child would never have felt the hook go in. Burnes did not ask questions. He marvelled, and left spaces, and let the spaces do the asking. He marvelled at the drilled brigades and wondered how a man kept such an army paid so far from the sea, and left a space. He marvelled at the great guns and wondered who cast such fine pieces, and where, and left a space. He marvelled at the blue hills to the north, said he had always longed to see Kashmir, and wondered whether a man could even get a cart up the roads to Jammu, and left a space.

Angrez stood at the rail in the cooling dark and understood, with a clarity that had nothing of the child in it, that he was being robbed. Politely. Expertly. In a language of compliments, by a man who would go back to his lodging and write down every space the boy filled and send it down the river to be added, grain by grain, to the pile they were building against the day.

‘And here is the examination,’ he thought, his heart going hard. ‘No fumbling out of this one. A clever child and a stupid child are both useful to him, the clever one for what he knows, the stupid one for what he spills. I cannot be careful. Careful is a thing he would notice and write down too: the Maharaja’s grandson was oddly guarded. I have to be a fountain. I have to pour, and pour nothing.’

So he poured.

He chattered. He told Lieutenant Burnes, with a child’s bright pride, a great many things the man could have had from any bazaar in Lahore, and a few that were gently and deliberately not quite true. The army was enormous, oh, enormous, more men than anyone could count. The guns were cast by a great magician of a sardar inside the fort, and Angrez was not allowed near the fire (true, useless, and it sat the foundry tidily in the one fort the whole world already knew, and breathed not a syllable of Kotli Loharan). The roads north were terrible, just terrible, you could hardly get a goat up them, a cousin of his had nearly frozen on the way to Jammu and sworn never again (he had no such cousin; but the roads, he dearly hoped, now sounded not worth a cart, let alone a survey).

And while he poured, he read.

Because the questions were a map. A man shows you what he is afraid of by what he needs to know, and Burnes, marvelling and leaving his clever spaces, was drawing the boy a careful diagram of exactly what kept Calcutta awake. He never once asked about the cavalry. He asked about the money, and the guns, and, over and over under the compliments, the roads north, the passes, the long road that ran up through the Punjab toward Kabul.

‘You don’t want Lahore,’ Angrez thought, beaming up at him, lying about goats. ‘Not yet. You want to know whether an army could ever march past it, north, to the passes, because the road to Kabul is where your real game is going to be. You are not measuring us to eat us. You are measuring us to find out whether we are a door or a wall. And that, Lieutenant, is worth more than everything you have had out of me tonight, and you gave it to me for nothing, because it never once crossed your mind that the door might be taking notes on the locksmith.’

“You are a serious boy,” Burnes said at last, and ruffled the child’s hair with what Angrez was almost certain was real affection, which was the strangest part of the whole encounter. “You will be a great help to your grandfather one day.”

“I hope so, Lieutenant sahib,” said Angrez, and beamed.

‘And you are a brave and clever and decent man,’ he thought, watching him walk back toward the lights, ‘and in ten years this game of yours is going to get you torn to pieces in a street in Kabul by men who will smile at you first, and I know that, and I cannot tell you that either. We are the same kind of fool, you and I, Lieutenant. We just read different books. Mine has the last page in it.’

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That night Angrez lay awake in the guest-wing of a borrowed haveli, because the gift had been given at a country seat a half-day from Lahore and the household had stayed over, and he did the thing he did, which was to lay the year out in his head like a column of figures and look for where it came out wrong.

It came out wrong everywhere.

He knew this gift. He had taught this gift, to bored seventeen-year-olds in a portable classroom in Surrey, with a projector that overheated. The Indus survey. The British had wanted, for thirty years, to know whether the great river of the Punjab could carry boats, because a river that could carry boats could carry trade, and trade was the thin end of every wedge they had ever driven into anything, and behind the trade came the residents and behind the residents came the regiments and behind the regiments came the flag, and they had run that exact play on half the princes of Hindustan and it had worked every single time. They could not simply send a survey expedition up the Sarkar’s river; that would be an act of war, and they were not, this year, in the mood for one. So they had wrapped the survey in a gift. A gift cannot be refused. A gift must be escorted, with honour, slowly, up the whole length of the water, by men who happen to have lead-lines and notebooks and an ardent young Scotsman who loves rivers.

It was, Angrez thought, genuinely beautiful work. He hated it the way you hate a rival who is better than you. He had spent his whole first life among people who solved problems by measuring, modelling, and writing things down, and he had loved those people and been one of them, and here they were, the same tribe, the literate patient measuring tribe, and they had come for the kingdom he was trying to save, and the terrible joke of it was that he was the only person in that kingdom who thought the way they thought, which meant he was the only person who could see them coming, and he was ten, and he had to pretend he could not yet do joined-up writing.

‘They count,’ he thought, into the dark. ‘That is the whole of it. That is the thing this court does not understand about them, and the thing I understand too well. We run on omens and gifts and the size of a man’s tent and the story a gesture can be made to tell. They run on numbers written in a book. And a thing you have written in a book, you can act on a hundred years later, in a cold office in London, long after the man who wrote it is dead. That is what makes them the foe. Not their guns, though God knows the guns are coming. It’s that they never forget, because they never trust their memory. They write it down.’

Somewhere out in the dark a watch-drum marked the hour. The borrowed haveli creaked. One of the great English horses, stabled below, shifted and blew through its nose, a huge homesick sound.

‘All right,’ Angrez thought, and felt, under the dread, the old cold focus settle, the one good thing the bad nights gave him. ‘They have measured the river. There is going to be a meeting, on the bank of a different river, this very autumn, the biggest gaudiest meeting this frontier has ever seen, and the whole court is going to think it is about friendship. And I am going to be there. A clever, charming, harmless little prince, ten years old, allowed along to see the great durbar. Nobody watches a child at a party.’

He turned the next thought over slowly, because it was the first genuinely useful thing his uselessly specific knowledge had handed him in months.

‘They are going to spend a week measuring us. Fine. I am going to spend a week measuring them back. And I am the one person on either side of that river who already knows how the book ends.’

He slept, eventually. He dreamed, as he often did, of a garage that smelled of solder, and a slug going clean through plywood, and a voice somewhere above him asking who was in there. He could never, afterward, remember whose voice it was.

Notes

1. Lieutenant Alexander Burnes (1805-1841) travelled up the Indus to Lahore in 1831, escorting a gift of five English dray-horses (four mares and a stallion) sent by King William IV to Ranjit Singh, to which Sir John Malcolm, Governor of Bombay, added a state carriage of his own; the journey doubled as a survey of the river’s navigability, the fruit of which appeared in his Geographical and Military Memoir on the Indus. Burnes was regarded even by his own side as an ardent expansionist. Captain Claude Wade was the British Political Agent at Ludhiana and the channel for the Company’s dealings with Lahore. The “useless” carriage, of no practical use in a country without metalled roads, was noted as such by the British agent William Murray; the gift’s real value to its givers was the pretext it gave for taking soundings of the Indus. Gupta has Burnes received and the presents given at Lahore itself, on and after 18 July 1831; the country seat and the borrowed haveli are the novel’s invention. The sources vary on the horses: Empire of the Sikhs has all five presented; Gupta has one lost in the Indus on the way.