The Field of Cloth of Gold? (4)

The court went down to the river in the last week of October, and the river it went down to was the Sutlej, and the place was a town called Ropar, and the thing they built there in the space of a few days was, by some distance, the most extravagant object Angrez had seen in either of his lives.

He had thought he was ready for it. He had read about it. He had stood in front of a class and called it, drily, the Ropar interview of 1831, three words and a date, the sort of phrase that fits in a footnote and lands in a teenager’s ear as a small grey noise. He had known it was modelled, on purpose, on a thing called the Field of Cloth of Gold, where two European kings three centuries before had camped on a French field and tried to bankrupt each other with magnificence for a fortnight. He had known the comparison was apt.

He had not known what it would feel like to be a small person standing inside it.

Eight acres of the Sarkar’s camp went up on the right bank, a city of tents the colour of arterial blood, scarlet pashmina worked with silver and gold thread, with carpets of gold brocade laid outside on the bare dust so that no royal foot need touch the ground, and beds inside under jewelled canopies, and a dining-pavilion in which the plates were gold and the cups were gold and the very basins for washing the hands were gold, and between the pavilions they had planted beds of roses and scented herbs, planted them, in the dust, for a week, so that a kingdom could smell of attar while it out-hosted an empire.

And on the far bank, on the British side, rose the thing that Angrez could not stop looking at: a double-storeyed house of shimmering silver, a villa on wheels, a great gleaming box of a building thrown up out of poles and silvered cloth so that the chief guests could sit on its upper floor and have an unbroken view of everything, the parade-ground, the river, the festivities, the whole performance.

‘Of course they built a box to watch from,’ Angrez thought, the first time he saw it across the brown water, blazing in the low sun like a struck coin. ‘Of course they did. We built a place to be magnificent in. They built a place to see from. Look at the two camps and you have the whole war in one glance. We are the show. They are the audience, and the audience brought opera-glasses.’

A bridge of boats had been thrown across the Sutlej, planks lashed over moored barges, swaying gently, and over this bridge, on the morning of the twenty-sixth, the Sarkar crossed to pay the first visit, up on the lead elephant in a howdah of beaten silver, in a coat of saffron yellow, with three thousand horse and eight hundred foot strung out behind him and the whole of it caught in the river-light, and Angrez, on a smaller elephant well back in the line, holding very still so as not to disgrace the house, watched his grandfather ride across a swaying bridge of boats toward the silver box where the British waited to take his measure, and felt his throat do something complicated.

Because the old man was magnificent. There was no other word and Angrez looked, as he always looked, for a smaller one, and there wasn’t one. Fifty years old, blind in one eye, pock-marked, small, in a plain saffron coat among sardars dripping with diamonds the size of river-pebbles, and he pulled the entire morning toward himself across that water without appearing to do anything at all, and ten thousand men arranged their attention around him the way they breathed, without deciding to.

‘And they are going to wait for you to die,’ Angrez thought, watching him, with a grief that had no business being this sharp in a child’s chest. ‘They are not going to fight you, Dada ji. You’re too good, and your army’s too good, and they know it. They did the arithmetic, the same arithmetic you keep doing about everyone. So they will simply be friends with you, and feast you, and measure you, and wait. It is a good plan and it costs them nothing. You are the only thing holding this together, and you are one bad night’s sleep from sixty, and they have all the time in the world. I know the year. And I am sitting on an elephant at a party, and I cannot tell you.’

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The whole court had come. That was the part the histories had flattened, and the part that pressed on Angrez now with an almost physical weight: they were all here, every name, the entire cast of the catastrophe, gathered in eight acres of scarlet tents for a week, alive and laughing and throwing each other coloured powder, and only he knew which of them would kill which.

His father was here, Kharak Singh, heir to the kingdom, soft and pleasant and a little glazed at the edges, doing his duty in good clothes and drifting, between duties, toward the small lacquered box. His uncle Sher Singh was here, another of the Sarkar’s sons, big and handsome and good-humoured and fond of the boy, who in the unaltered record would take the throne over his father’s family’s corpses and lose it to a musket-ball at a garden party of his own. And the Dogras were here, all of them, clustered, beautiful, controlled: Raja Dhian Singh the Wazir at the Sarkar’s right hand as always, and his brothers, Gulab Singh up from Jammu with the hill-cold still on him, and Suchet Singh the youngest and handsomest, and Dhian Singh’s own boy, Hira Singh, a child not much older than Angrez whom the Sarkar petted and favoured openly and seated near his own person, the only child at that durbar more indulged than Angrez was.

Angrez watched Hira Singh get his cheek pinched by the Lion of the Punjab and thought, without heat, the way you note a fact: ‘You poor doomed beautiful boy. They are going to use you and they are going to get you killed, and you are going to spend your short life thinking you are the luckiest child in Asia.’

And then he stopped that line of thinking, hard, because it was a luxury and a trap. He could not grieve all of them in advance. He had tried, in the early years, and it had nearly broken him, the walking through a room full of people and seeing their death-dates hanging over them like the little labels in a museum. You could not live like that. You learned, instead, to put it in a drawer and shut the drawer and work the problem in front of you.

The problem in front of him was the silver box across the river, and the men inside it, and the week.

‘Right,’ he thought, as his elephant came down off the bridge onto the British bank and the band struck up something brisk and English and absurd. ‘Eyes open. Mouth shut. Be adorable. Count everything.‘

Notes

1. The meeting of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck, took place at Ropar on the Sutlej from 26 October to 1 November 1831, and was consciously staged in emulation of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the 1520 meeting near Calais between Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France. The scarlet pashmina camp and the bridge of boats are recorded, as is a double-storeyed silver bungalow on wheels; Gupta makes it the Maharaja’s own, set up in his camp, where the Governor-General was entertained in its upper storey on 27 October. Placing it on the British bank as the watchers’ box is the novel’s liberty. Ranjit Singh’s entourage of over a hundred included his heir Kharak Singh, his son Sher Singh, and his grandson Nau Nihal Singh, along with Hari Singh Nalwa, the Dogra brothers Dhian, Gulab and Suchet Singh, the favourite Hira Singh, and Generals Allard and Court. The Sikh escort numbered some 16,000 cavalry and 6,000 infantry; the British came with Lancers, two battalions of native infantry, Skinner’s Horse, a mounted band and eight guns. The figures and the list of princes are those of Empire of the Sikhs; Gupta gives 10,000 horse and names only Kharak Singh.