The Field of Cloth of Gold? (6)

The Sarkar had taken a small private tent for himself at the centre of the scarlet city, away from the public pavilions, and it was there, by lamplight, with the noise of the festival a soft roar beyond the cloth walls, that he received his grandson, alone but for a single body-servant who might as well have been a tent-pole for all the notice anyone took of him.

“Well,” said the Lion of the Punjab, without preamble, the good eye bright and tired. “My lion has been to a party. Tell me what my lion saw.”

Angrez had learned, over a year of these private hours, that this was not small talk. It was the question, the only question the old man ever really asked him, what else have you seen, and that the entire strange privilege of his second life turned on his answering it well, truly, and small, every single time, in the register of a clever child and never one inch above it.

So he did not say I saw an empire taking the measurements for our coffin. He thought it. He did not say it.

“I saw the English count, Dada ji,” he said.

The Sarkar went still.

“When our horsemen rode,” Angrez went on, in the careful voice, picking each plank of it before he set his weight on it, “the English clapped, and they were happy, and their faces stayed soft. When the drilled paltans marched, they stopped clapping, and their faces went hard, and their eyes went like this.” He moved his own eyes, just slightly, side to side, the small involuntary flick of a man tallying a column. “I think they were counting our battalions. I think the horsemen do not frighten them and the paltans do. I do not know why. I only saw their faces do it.”

It was all true. It was the truth offered as a child’s bright observation, a thing seen, not a thing concluded, and he watched the Sarkar take it and build on top of it, with his own fifty years, the large correct conclusion that Angrez had needed him to reach without being led, because a Sarkar led is a Sarkar who stops trusting the boy who leads him.

“Hm,” said the Sarkar. The cartwheel-on-gravel voice had gone very low. “Allard says the same. Ventura says the same. They have said it for years, and the sardars laugh at them, because the sardars love the horse and despise the foot, because any fool can sit a horse and it takes a low man two years of drilling to stand in a line. And here is my grandson, ten years old, who watched it off the faces of Englishmen at a dance.” He reached out and took the boy’s chin in the old scarred hand and turned it to the lamp, and the eye weighed him. “You see the way they see, putt. That is a rare and an uncomfortable thing in a child. Where does it come from.”

‘Careful,’ Angrez thought, the cold sweat starting under the silk. ‘Here it is. He asks it every few months and one day a wrong answer ends everything. Give him true and small. Give him a weakness he can believe.’

“I think it is because I cannot do the other thing, Dada ji,” he said. “I am not brave like Hira, or strong, or good on a horse. The men frighten me a little, if I am honest, the big sardars. So when I am in a room I watch faces, because faces are how I tell whether I am safe. I have watched faces my whole life. I expect I am only good at the English because I am frightened of everyone.” He let himself look down, a small embarrassed prince confessing a small shameful thing. “It is not a brave way to be.”

‘And the genuinely unforgivable part,’ he thought, holding the small downcast face exactly where it needed to be, ‘is that all of that is true. I do watch faces. The sardars do frighten me. I have simply left out the one line that matters, which is that I am rather older than my grandmother, and a foreigner, and dead. The most dangerous lies are the ones you do not have to make up.’

The Sarkar looked at him for a long moment.

And then the great rough face cracked, not into the laugh this time, but into something gentler and more dangerous, a tenderness, and he drew the boy’s head against his shoulder for a moment, the saffron coat smelling of attar and horse and gun-oil, and said, gruffly, into the small turban, “The bravest men I have are fools, putt, and the cleverest are cowards, and I have spent my whole life trying to keep enough of each. Do not be ashamed of the watching. The watching is worth ten lances. But.” He held the boy off and the eye sharpened again. “Clever for your Dada. Quiet for everyone else. We have said this.”

“We have said this, Dada ji.”

---

He almost left it there. It was a good night’s work. He had landed the one true intelligence that mattered, the drill, the gap, the thing to fear, and he had landed it deniably and survived the question, and the wise move, the move he had trained himself into over ten careful years, was to take the win and go to bed.

But the other thing was burning a hole in him, the thing about the river that was not this river, and he had read the next twenty years, and he could not make himself not say it.

“Dada ji,” he said. “May I ask a small thing. A child’s thing.”

The Sarkar waved the hand: go on.

“They are going to give you a paper, aren’t they. A promise. Of friendship. Faqir Sahib said you wished for one in writing.” He had heard it in the counting-tents; the Sarkar had been pressing, all week, for a written assurance of the eternal friendship of the two states, and the British had agreed, and a document was being drawn. “I have never seen how the English write a promise. Would it be a very wrong thing, if I asked Faqir Sahib to let me look at it? I should like to see how they make the words.”

It was the most harmless request in the world, a bookish boy wanting to see a curiosity, and the Sarkar snorted and said the boy could look at any paper in the camp that the Faqir would let him near, and that he had never in his life met a child who asked to see a treaty for fun, and that Waheguru distributed his gifts on a system no man would have chosen.

So the next day Angrez sat in the foreign minister’s tent, and Faqir Aziz-ud-din, who liked the grave thoughtful boy and was glad of an hour’s quiet from the festival, showed him the draft of the assurance, the careful Persian and the careful English side by side, the eternal friendship, the two states, the abiding amity, and read it out to him in his beautiful level voice while Angrez listened with his whole body.

And it was exactly where the dead historian had known it would be. Not in what the paper said. In what it did not.

The promise was about the Sutlej. The friendship, the amity, the eternal good faith, all of it was built, carefully, on the line the two states had already agreed to twenty years before, the river Sutlej as the boundary between them, you on your side and we on ours, and on that settled and comfortable line the English were happy, this week, to swear undying love in two languages on good paper.

And about the Indus, the paper said nothing.

Nothing at all. Not one word about the great western river, the one Burnes had just spent a season measuring, the one whose trade the British were already, this very month, drawing up other papers to seize, the one the Sarkar’s armies stood along and the British meant to take the use of. The promise bound both states, beautifully, eternally, to a frontier that was not in dispute, and said not a syllable about the frontier that was.

Angrez looked at the two columns of careful script and felt the cold go all the way down.

‘There it is,’ he thought. ‘That’s the whole game, written out fair in front of me. They will give you any promise you like about the wall you already share, because it costs them nothing, it’s already standing. And they will simply decline to mention the wall they’re coming for. And in ten years, when they walk up the Indus, they will be able to say, with clean hands and the paper in them, that they never promised anything about the Indus at all. The lie isn’t in what they wrote. The lie is in the white space. They’ve left the future out of the document on purpose, and everyone in this camp is so happy about the word eternal that nobody’s reading the silence.’

He sat with it a moment. Then, because he had to, because a thread you can reach is a thread you must pull, he said, in the small puzzled voice of a child working through a reading lesson:

“Faqir Sahib. It is a beautiful promise. But it is all about the Sutlej. Why does it not say anything about the other river. About the Indus.”

The Faqir’s pen stopped over the paper.

For a long moment the old minister did not answer. When he did, it was slowly, and he was not, Angrez understood, talking to a child any more, or not only to a child.

“That,” said Faqir Aziz-ud-din, “is a very large question, Kanwar Sahib, to come out of a very small reader.” He looked at the boy for the length of a breath, the grey courteous unreadable face, the man who had stood in front of the English and turned a question about the Sarkar’s blind eye into a compliment about the splendour of his face, the most diplomatic man in Asia, and Angrez saw something move behind the courtesy, something that was not suspicion, quite, but was a long way past charm. “It is the question I have been asking them all week,” the Faqir said, “in rooms you are too young for. And they smile, and they speak of friendship, and they do not answer it. You have read in one morning what it took me a week to be sure of.” He folded the paper, gently. “Do not ask it again where the English can hear you. And, Kanwar Sahib. When you are a man, and they ask you whose grandson you are.” He paused. He did not finish the sentence; he could not have known why those particular words made the boy’s breath stop. He only said, “Be a careful one.”

Notes

1. The written assurance of “eternal friendship” that Ranjit Singh pressed for, and was given, at Ropar concerned the existing Sutlej frontier settled by the Treaty of Amritsar in 1809; it was silent on the Indus and Sind, where British ambitions were in fact directed. On the very day before Bentinck reached Ropar he had instructed Henry Pottinger to prepare a mission to Sind aimed at opening the Indus to trade, and the Indus Navigation Treaty followed in December 1832. By the record the assurance was asked for and drawn up on the last evening; the novel has it in draft earlier in the week. Faqir Aziz-ud-din, Ranjit Singh’s foreign minister, conducted the Lahore court’s dealings with the British; the celebrated reply that, asked in which eye the Maharaja was blind, “the splendour of his face is such that I have never been able to look close enough to discover,” is attributed to him.