The Field of Cloth of Gold? (5)

For a week the two camps tried to drown each other in pleasure, and Angrez, who had a child’s licence to be anywhere and a dead historian’s eye for everything, drifted through all of it taking inventory.

He learned the British by watching them watch the Sikhs.

When the Sarkar’s troops paraded, the British officers smiled and clapped and exclaimed at the cavalry, the famous wild Ghorcharhas, the magnificent armoured horse, and Angrez watched the officers’ faces while they clapped and saw that the cavalry did not frighten them in the least. They had seen brave horsemen. They had broken brave horsemen, at Assaye and Laswari and a dozen other fields whose names the sardars did not know, with infantry that stood in squares and did not run and fired by volley on the word of command. The Ghorcharhas were a glory and a relic and the British applauded them the way you applaud a beautiful old song.

But when the Fauj-i-Khas marched past, the French-drilled brigades that Allard and Ventura had built, rank on rank, the muskets all at the same angle, the whole mass of men moving and halting and wheeling as one animal on a shouted word, Angrez watched the British officers stop smiling. Just for a moment. He watched them lean fractionally forward and go quiet and begin, unmistakably, to count. That they understood. That was their own invention looking back at them out of brown faces, and they had not quite believed, until they saw it, how good the Sarkar’s version had become, and Angrez filed the moment away with a grim satisfaction. ‘The drill,’ he thought. ‘That is what costs them sleep. Not the bravery, never the bravery. The drill. The leash. The thing every chief in our own camp hates and the British fear, and I have just read it off the muscles in a Lancer’s jaw. Hold that. Hold it carefully. It is the most important thing I have learned all week.’

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The festivities themselves were a fever-dream, and Angrez enjoyed them, which annoyed him, because he kept catching himself having an actual marvellous time inside the most consequential trap of the century.

There were the Amazons. The Sarkar kept a guard of women, recruited from the Punjab and Kashmir and Persia, drilled and uniformed and armed with bows, and when one of the senior English officials asked, with the particular strangled politeness of a man asking to see something he has heard scandalous things about, whether the famous female corps might perhaps appear, the Sarkar was delighted to oblige, and the Amazons came out in garments made specially for the week and sang a Punjabi wedding-song called Motian Wala Banna, the pearl-bedecked bridegroom, and danced it with enormous grace, and the English party gave them a thousand rupees and did not know where to put their eyes, and Angrez, ten years old, watched the whole spectacle and thought, with the helpless honesty of the very young, ‘I have absolutely no idea what is happening but I am extremely glad I was allowed to come.’

There were the illuminations every night, and the fireworks, and on one evening, when the English, men and women both, were thoroughly and helplessly enjoying themselves, the Sarkar reached into a bowl of the bright lac-dyed powder that the dancing-girls had been scattering, and threw a great handful of crimson and gold full into the face of the Governor-General’s people, the way you would at the spring festival among your own, and there was a frozen half-second in which an empire and a kingdom hung on whether the joke would land, and then the English sahibs roared with laughter and threw it back, fistfuls of it, at the Sarkar and the sardars and the dancing-girls and each other, until the whole pavilion was a single laughing cloud of rose and saffron and everyone in it, conqueror and conquered, friend and surveyor, was the same impossible colour.

Angrez stood at the edge of it, lightly dusted in pink, and felt his heart break very quietly down the middle, because it was beautiful, and it was real, every grain of it, and none of it was going to matter at all.

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On the fourth day they showed each other their toys, and the toys were guns, and that was the afternoon Angrez had been waiting for.

The Sikhs went first, because the Sarkar could never resist going first. Targets were set up across the field and the great sardars rode at them and shot, and Hari Singh Nalwa, the most feared soldier on the frontier, the quiet man whose name the trans-Indus mothers used to hush their children, put ball after ball into the centre of the mark with an economy that made the English officers murmur, and the Sarkar himself, fifty and one-eyed, went down the line at a full gallop and cut a lemon clean in two with his sword and on the next pass picked a banana off the ground on the point of it, and the British applauded with what Angrez judged to be, for once, entirely real admiration. The old man could still do anything on a horse. Anything at all.

Then the British returned the courtesy, and the British courtesy was a battery of horse artillery, and it was not really a courtesy at all.

They wheeled the guns out, the bright nine-pounders with their teams and their limbers, and they put on a display of speed and drill, unlimbering and firing and limbering up and moving and unlimbering and firing again, gun-crews moving like the parts of one machine, the salutes crashing out across the river flat in a rhythm so fast and so even that it did not sound like men working at all, it sounded like a thing being operated. And the Sarkar leaned forward and watched it with the whole of his one good eye, and did not applaud, and when it was over he had the guns brought close and got down and examined them, the carriages, the elevating-screws, the bores, the very shot, turning the iron balls over in his scarred hands, asking the Faqir to ask question after quiet question.

Angrez, allowed near because a curious child near the guns is a charming sight, stood at the Sarkar’s elbow and looked at the British nine-pounders with the eyes Lahna Singh and old Ustad Ilahi Bakhsh had given him, and understood, with a falling sensation, exactly what he was being shown.

‘This isn’t a present,’ he thought. ‘This is a quotation. They’re showing us the price. Look at the drill, Dada ji. Forget the guns, the guns we can almost match, Lahna Singh can almost match the casting. Look at the men working them. That speed isn’t bravery and it isn’t even practice, not only practice, it’s a system, it’s the same drill as the infantry, it’s writing-things-down made into flesh, and they brought it three hundred kos to fire it off in front of you so that you would do exactly what you are doing right now, which is stand here and start to count the gap. They want you to see the gap. A friend doesn’t show you his sword. They are showing you the sword, and smiling, and calling it a salute, because the whole point of the week is to make you understand, in your bones, without one rude word ever being said, that the gap exists and that it is patient and that it is theirs.’

He looked up at his grandfather’s face, at the old fierce arithmetic running behind the one eye, and knew the Sarkar had understood it too, perfectly, instantly, without any help from a dead schoolteacher. The Sarkar had been reading men and reading threats for fifty years. He did not need the future. He could read the present down to the bone.

‘You see it,’ Angrez thought, half in awe and half in despair. ‘Of course you see it. You’ve seen it all week. You knew before you crossed the bridge. The difference between you and me, Dada ji, is that you think you have years to close the gap, and I know exactly how many you have, and it is not enough, and the only thing I can do about it is be a clever boy in a counting-room and pull the threads I can reach.’

That night, for the first time at Ropar, the Sarkar sent for him.

Notes

1. Empire of the Sikhs records that General Lake defeated the Marathas in 1803; the names of the two fields, Assaye (won by Arthur Wellesley in the Deccan) and Laswari (won by Lake in the north), both of that year, are given from memory. [VERIFY]

2. Ranjit Singh’s corps of women, drilled and armed, was shown to the British at Ropar at the request of one of the Governor-General’s officials; the unit performed the Punjabi wedding song Motian Wala Banna (“My Pearl-Bedecked Bridegroom”) and was rewarded with a thousand rupees. The exchange of lac-dyed coloured powder between the Maharaja’s party and the English guests, in the manner of the spring festival, is likewise recorded.

3. The British staged a horse-artillery demonstration at Ropar; Ranjit Singh examined the guns, carriages and shot minutely afterwards. Empire of the Sikhs judges that it took Bentinck’s artillery demonstration at Ropar to bring home the full scale of the reform needed; the Maharaja was an exceptional horseman who, at this meeting, cut a lemon in two and picked up a banana on his sword-point at the gallop. Hari Singh Nalwa was noted as a fine marksman and swordsman. Gupta dates the artillery practice and the Maharaja’s feats of horsemanship to 31 October, the last day; the novel brings them forward.