The Lion in Winter? (2)

He had described this room to seventeen-year-olds. He had stood in a portable classroom in Surrey and explained, with a teacher’s awful tidy distance, that the Maharaja’s health declined from the mid-1830s, that a series of strokes reduced him, that the question of the succession was effectively open from this point. He had assigned an essay on it.

The classroom had not mentioned the smell.

The sickroom in the Lahore Fort smelled of camphor and sandalwood and, under them, of a body that had stopped doing some of the work of being a body, and Nau Nihal came into it off four days of road still in his riding clothes because he had refused to stop and change, and he saw what the histories had been too polite, or too far away, to tell him.

The Lion of the Punjab was small in the bed.

That was the thing the dead man could not get his mind around, and the live boy could not get his heart around, and for a moment in the doorway the two of them were one stunned creature with one thought. The Sarkar had always been small. Five foot something, the books said, and they were right, and it had never once mattered, because the smallness had been the joke the largeness told, the horse-thief the British kept mistaking for a king. Now the largeness had gone somewhere, drained out of one whole side of him, and what was left was just a small old sick man in a big bed, the right hand curled on the coverlet like a dead leaf, the famous eye filmed and wandering, the mouth pulled down at one corner so that the face Nau Nihal had loved since the cradle now wore, all the time, a small permanent expression of contempt it had not chosen.

‘Oh,’ thought Angrez, from very far down. ‘Oh, no. Oh, Dada ji, no.’

He did not say it. He went and knelt by the bed where the good eye could find him, and he took the dead-leaf hand in both of his, and he waited.

---

The room was not empty, which was the second thing the classroom had left out. A kingdom’s sickroom is the most crowded place in the kingdom.

They were all there, arranged around the bed in the careful concentric rings of a darbar that no one had called, every one of them performing grief and watching everyone else perform grief, and Nau Nihal, kneeling, read the room the way he had been reading rooms his whole second life, and did not like a single thing the reading told him.

The outermost ring was not in the room at all. It sat in the anteroom and along the gallery, and it was made of news-writers, every one of them with a master somewhere and a courier waiting, and the masters were not all inside the kingdom. At Ludhiana, across the Sutlej, Captain Wade read what his own man sent him and judged the death to be near, and wrote to the Governor-General to ask whether it would not be proper, in that event, to move a part of the Ludhiana force up to Firozpur, with a regiment of horse from Karnal behind it, and his own office along with them. It is in the record. He was a careful officer, and he was early by five years.

Nearest the bed were the men whose business the bed was. There were two hakims, the senior of them grave and courteous and grey, and between them, with two fingers laid on the good wrist and his eyes half shut, sat Faqir Aziz-ud-din, who wrote the Sarkar’s letters to the English and mixed the Sarkar’s medicines, and had never seen why a man should not do both. He did not take the fingers away when the boy knelt. He spoke low, across the coverlet, in his careful level Persian, as one man of the household to another.

“You will wish to know what is being done, Kanwar Sahib, and you are owed it. He has been bled, a little. He takes what the Gulab Khana sends, when he can be brought to swallow. The Brahmin’s amulets are washed morning and evening and he drinks the water. Alms have gone to the poor of the city in his name, and the astrologers have been sent for, and they will certainly find something. No firangi doctor has been called. The one the English sent up from Ludhiana eight years ago cost a hundred rupees a day, and the Sarkar would not swallow one of his powders. He held that English physic was made for a cold country.” The half-shut eyes opened a little. “I tell you all of it so that you will know that nothing has been left undone. It is a different thing from knowing that anything has been done.”

‘He can’t breathe lying flat. Listen to him.’

“Faqir Sahib,” said Nau Nihal. “He breathes badly on his back. At the hill, when a man is hurt in the chest, the old soldiers sit him up against a saddle. Could he not be raised, a little, on bolsters.” It was true of the old soldiers, and it was as far as a boy could go.

It was the senior hakim who answered, kindly, and for the whole faculty. The Kanwar had ridden four days and was tired, and the sound of such breathing was hard on the young, and it did him credit that he felt it. But the Sarkar must lie level and be kept still until the humour had settled, and on that the physicians were agreed.

Nau Nihal looked at the Faqir. The Faqir looked at the wrist.

“The physicians are agreed, Kanwar Sahib,” he said. “In thirty years I have found that a king can survive almost anything except that. But they are agreed.”

The fingers stayed where they were, and the boy stayed where he was, and the breathing went on.

His father was there. Kanwar Kharak Singh, the heir, the man who would be Maharaja the instant the bed gave up its occupant, sat near the head of it looking genuinely stricken and entirely lost, a soft kind man watching his terrifying father become mortal and plainly having no idea at all what was now required of him. His eyes were wet. His hands were empty.

He had seen his son. It took him a moment, through the wet, and then he leaned a little toward the man who stood at his elbow, where Chet Singh Bajwa always stood, and said the one thing he could find to say.

“Look at him, he has come four days. Someone should bring the boy something.”

And Chet Singh went to see to it, because seeing to things for Kharak Singh was what Chet Singh Bajwa was for. Then Kharak Singh turned back to the bed, and the face that had been a father’s for a moment was a son’s again.

‘He loves him,’ Angrez thought, watching his father, with a grief that forked two ways at once. ‘That’s the worst of it. He loves him, and he is going to inherit the whole impossible thing, and he is going to be eaten alive within a year of getting it, and he has no more notion of how to stop it than that lamp does. Pita ji. You poor doomed gentle man. They are already deciding what to do with you. Look at them.’

Because the Dogras were there too.

Raja Dhian Singh stood at the foot of the bed where the Wazir stood, exactly where he had stood for fifteen years, beautiful and grave and perfectly composed, and the grief on his face was flawless, and Nau Nihal could not find the bottom of it, which was, as ever, the most frightening thing in any room the man was in. His brother Gulab Singh had come down from the hills. Hira Singh, Dhian Singh’s son, the one boy the Sarkar petted as he had once petted Nau Nihal, knelt close to the pillow where the Sarkar could see him too. The whole Dogra weather-system had assembled around the failing heart of the kingdom, and it was not waiting like a family. It was waiting like an audience that already knew how the play ended, and was only being polite about the timing.

‘You’re counting,’ Angrez thought, not looking at the Wazir, feeling him the way you feel a cold draught. ‘You’ve been counting for fifteen years and now the sum is finally moving. You won’t do anything yet. He might still recover, and a man who moves on Ranjit Singh and guesses wrong does not get a second guess. But you are standing at the foot of the bed where a son should stand, and my father is sitting up by the pillow where you have decided he is harmless, and that is the whole future of this kingdom, arranged around a sickbed, for anyone with the eyes to see it.’

The good eye found him. The wandering steadied. And the Sarkar of all the Punjab, who could no longer use half his face, looked at his grandson kneeling in four days of road-dirt, and did the only thing he still could, which was to grip, once, weakly, with his left hand, the one the stroke had spared, the boy’s two hands.

And then he spoke, with enormous labour, out of the working corner of his mouth, three words, slurred and ruined and unmistakable, and they were not for the room, they were pitched low and meant only for the boy, and they were the most frightening and the most loving thing anyone said to Nau Nihal Singh in the whole long disaster of that year.

“You. Came. Fast.”

‘I will always come fast,’ the boy thought, holding on, his face perfectly still and his whole chest caving in. ‘I am the only one in this room who came fast because he loves you and not because he is measuring how long you have left. And I am also, God forgive me, measuring how long you have left, because I am the only one who knows the number, and that is the curse you handed me with the hill, and I would not give it back. Rest, Dada ji. You have five years. I am going to spend every one of them.‘

Notes

1. The sickroom of 1834 is the novel’s staging; the illness is the record’s. Hari Ram Gupta (History of the Sikhs, Vol. 5) has the stroke of paralysis in 1834 and says the Maharaja never fully recovered from it; Empire of the Sikhs calls it more serious than the illness of 1826. His slight stature, the blind left eye and the marks of smallpox are in every account. “You. Came. Fast.” is the novel’s invention.

2. Captain Wade, the Company’s political agent at Ludhiana, expected the Maharaja’s death in 1834 and asked the Governor-General whether part of the Ludhiana force should not be advanced to Firozpur, backed by a regiment of cavalry from Karnal, and his own office moved there (Gupta, Vol. 5, chapter 17). The news-writers in the anteroom are the novel’s staging of a well-attested trade.

3. Faqir Aziz-ud-din was the Maharaja’s foreign minister and, Gupta says, “a notable physician” and his personal one; with his brother Faqir Nur-ud-din he superintended the Gulab Khana, the royal dispensary. The amulets washed in water and the astrologers are Gupta’s, of 1834: he has them for a bowel complaint reported that March, and the novel brings them to the stroke, as Note 2 to part (5) says. Alms were given in every illness. Dr Murray came up from Ludhiana for the illness of 1826 at a hundred rupees a day, and the Maharaja would not take his medicines, thinking them made for a cold climate. No European doctor is recorded at the sickbed of 1834. The bleeding, the two hakims, the bolsters and the Faqir’s remark are the novel’s invention.

4. Raja Dhian Singh succeeded Jamadar Khushal Singh at the Maharaja’s door (the library disagrees on when: the essay Reform and Resistance has him in high office from 1818, which this Book’s “fifteen years” follows; Empire of the Sikhs, followed in the Note to Book Two (1), keeps the Jamadar there until about 1826), and on Baisakhi 1828 he was given the title of Raja Kalan, the seniormost Raja (Gupta); his elder brother Raja Gulab Singh held Jammu; his son Raja Hira Singh was the Maharaja’s acknowledged favourite, allowed a chair in the public darbar along with the heir while the chiefs sat on the floor (Gupta, who has the two of them in chairs at the Basant gathering of 23 January 1836). Their places round the bed are the novel’s arrangement. Chet Singh Bajwa is noted in Book Two.