The Field of Cloth of Gold? (7)

On the last day they exchanged the gifts, and the gifts were a competition the Sikhs won, because the Sikhs always won the gifts and never noticed that the gifts were the only thing they were being allowed to win.

The Governor-General gave the Sarkar guns, real ones this time, nine-pounder horse artillery complete with teams and harness, and a model of an iron bridge that the English had had built specially in Calcutta, a little perfect suspension-bridge in miniature, and fifty-one robes of honour, and horses with golden saddles, and an elephant in gold trappings. The Sarkar gave back twice as much and finer, jewelled Afghan swords and gilded Persian guns and shields and a bow and quiver worked in gold and elephants with seats of carved silver and pearls and shawls beyond counting, and to the Governor-General’s lady, who had charmed everyone, a careful tender heap of women’s things, six-and-twenty garments and brocades and a thumb-ring and pearl earrings and the long scarves and the bracelets, chosen, Angrez suspected, by someone who actually knew what a woman would want, which ruled out every man in the camp.

Angrez watched the model bridge change hands and laughed out loud before he could stop himself, a real startled child’s laugh, and turned it hastily into a cough.

‘A bridge,’ he thought, delighted and appalled. ‘They gave us a model of a bridge. A thing for getting an army across a river it could not otherwise cross. As a present. They have a sense of humour after all, the murderous literate bastards, they just keep it in a locked drawer with the soundings. Here, friend, have a little iron bridge, to remember us by.’

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The court packed up its scarlet city and went home up the road it had no carriage for, and Angrez rode back toward Lahore with a week’s worth of inventory settling into its drawers in his head, and the inventory came out, when he totalled it, to one short and terrible sum.

The friendship was real and it meant nothing. The Sarkar was magnificent and he was mortal. The army was the finest between Calcutta and Constantinople and its drilled heart, the one thing the English feared, was the one thing his own sardars despised. The gap in the guns was real and the British had crossed three hundred kos to make sure the old man felt it. And the foe was patient, and literate, and never, ever in a hurry, and had just spent a week being charming on the bank of the wrong river, having already measured the right one, and had written a promise that left the future blank on purpose.

He had gone to Ropar a clever child who had read the ending. He came back something a little worse: a clever child who had now met the people writing it, and liked some of them, and understood in his skin how good they were at it.

There was one consolation, and he turned it over on the long dusty road home the way you warm your hands on a small fire. He had been right about the party. Nobody had watched the child. He had spent a week three feet from the most dangerous men of the age and they had let him wander, and he had come away with the only two things worth having: the knowledge of exactly what the English feared, and the proof, written in their own careful hand, of exactly where they meant to strike. He had carried both to the Sarkar in the register of a frightened boy who watched faces, and the Sarkar had filed them, correctly, and acted on neither yet, and Angrez understood that this too was part of it. You did not win this by being right. You won it, if you won it at all, by being right early, and quietly, and often, for years, until one day all the quiet rightness you had stored up finally weighed enough to move something.

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He looked in on the Sarkar one last time before the camp dispersed, sent for, again, in the small private tent, and found the old man looking at a map.

It was a map of Hindustan, and across great swathes of it, east and south, the territory under the Company lay coloured in red, and the Sarkar was looking at the red with the one good eye, and he did not turn when the boy came in.

“They showed me this,” the Sarkar said. “Bentinck’s people. With pride. All the red. To make me understand how small my green is beside it.” He was quiet a moment. “My sardars want me to cross the Indus and take Sind, and put a little green on the far side of the river to spite the red. I have told them to remember the Marathas, who put two hundred thousand men in the field against this red, and what the red did to them.” He laid one scarred finger on the map, on the small green patch of the Punjab, hemmed in the corner. “A man came to me once, a clever man, and looked at this map, and said a foolish brave thing. He said, one day all of this will be green. And I told him no. I am not a fool and I am not a young man. I will tell you what I told him, putt, because you are the only one in my house who watches faces, and you will need it.”

He turned, finally, and the one eye was not fierce now and was not tired. It was simply clear, the clearest thing Angrez had ever seen, a man looking straight at the truth of his own situation with no flinch in him at all.

“One day,” said Maharaja Ranjit Singh, “all of this will be red. I cannot stop that. No man living can stop that; it is too big, and it is too patient, and I have only the one life and it is half gone. What I can do is keep it green while I breathe, and leave it strong, and leave it whole, so that when the red comes it costs them. That is the whole of a king’s work, in the end. Not to win forever. No one wins forever. Only to make the losing dear, and to leave the house standing as long as you can for the ones who come after.” He looked at the boy a moment longer. “You will remember I said this.”

“I will remember, Dada ji,” said Angrez, and could not say anything else, because his throat had closed. The old man had just described his grandson’s whole life’s work back to him without knowing it, and had got all of it right but one thing.

‘And the one thing is everything,’ Angrez thought, looking at his grandfather looking at the red. ‘You think the house comes down because the red is too strong. It doesn’t. The red never beats us in an honest fight, not once. The house comes down because the week you die, the men in this very tent start cutting each other’s throats over the rubble, and hand the red the keys to make the cutting stop. It isn’t the foe that ends us, Dada ji. It’s us. The foe only has to keep its papers, and wait.’

He looked at the small green patch in the corner of the map, hemmed by all that patient red.

‘Eight years,’ he thought. ‘You have eight years, Dada ji, and you don’t know it, and I can’t tell you, and the stroke that starts the clock running in earnest is closer than that. So here is my work, the real one, the one you just described to me without knowing you were describing it. Keep you alive and keep you whole as long as the body will hold. And get ready, quietly, in the boring rooms, for the night the wall comes down, so that when it comes, this house does not eat itself. That’s the answer, Baba Ji. That’s the answer to your question. I’m still working on it. But I think I finally know what it is.’

Across the camp a bugle blew, an English bugle, brisk and tidy and final, calling the red empire home from its lovely week on the bank of the wrong river. The Sarkar turned back to his map. His grandson stood at his shoulder and looked at all that red, and for the first time was not only afraid of it. He had spent a week inside the thing that was going to eat his grandfather’s kingdom, and it had pinched his cheek and fed him sweets and told him its whole method to his face, and had never once thought to wonder what the child was writing down.

End of Book Four: “The Field of Cloth of Gold?”

To be continued.

Notes

1. At Ropar the Governor-General presented Ranjit Singh with nine-pounder horse-artillery, a specially-made model of an iron suspension bridge, fifty-one robes of honour, caparisoned horses and an elephant; the Sikh gifts in return were markedly more lavish, those for Bentinck’s wife including some twenty-six garments and pieces of jewellery. Ranjit Singh’s clear-eyed realism about British power is well attested: shown a map of India with Company territory in red, he is said to have remarked that one day the whole map would be red, and he repeatedly restrained his commanders from provoking a confrontation, invoking the fate of the Marathas. The judgement that the Sikh kingdom fell not to British arms in open battle but to the court’s own fratricide after his death in 1839 is the settled verdict of the histories, and the burden the protagonist carries alone.