The Lion in Winter? (5)

The Sarkar did not die. That was the strange long mercy and the strange long cruelty of that year, and the histories recorded the fact of it and could not record the weight.

He mended, by degrees, the way a great fortress mends, never back to what it was, the right hand never closing fully again, the speech come back but thickened, the prodigious memory still there but reaching for things now, slower, like a man feeling for a step in the dark. He ruled. He insisted on ruling, was carried to the darbar and propped and obeyed, and the kingdom, which ran on the single fact of him, ran on a little longer on the cracked remainder of him, because a cracked Ranjit Singh was still worth more than any whole man the age could offer, and everyone knew it, and that knowing was the only thing holding the lid down.

The court set about mending him with everything it had, which was a great deal, and his grandson set about it with a wooden ball, which was not.

The court went first. The Brahmin Ram Singh’s two amulets were washed in water morning and evening, and the water carried in for him to drink. The astrologers were sent for, Pandit Madhusudan and two others, and they read the horoscope, and found Saturn bent on harming him, and named what Saturn would take to go. It took an image of gold set with a sapphire, a pair of black shawls, and an Acharj Brahmin of Mathura, found after a great search, who was bathed in oil and rubbed from head to foot with the black of a frying pan, dressed in black, given five hundred rupees and two gold earrings, set on a black horse in black trappings, and marched to the Sutlej between two regiments and put across it. Thousands came out to watch Saturn leave the kingdom. The housewives shut their doors as it passed, in case it turned in. On the far bank the Company’s river guards would not admit the planet without a permit, and let it through only on proof that it lived in Mathura. A court that cannot cure its king can at least be thorough.

Nau Nihal came the morning after Saturn left, early, before the darbar, to the chamber where the Sarkar lay among his physicians, and he brought the ball in his sleeve. It was shisham, the carpenters’ hard dark wood, turned to the size of a small pomegranate, and he had had it off a toy-seller’s tray in the bazaar below the fort for a few coppers.

‘You wanted me in Lahore, Wazir Sahib,’ thought Angrez. ‘Here I am.’

“What is that,” the Sarkar said.

It came out thick, and slow, and at the head of the couch Jamadar Khushal Singh drew breath. He had kept the Sarkar’s door before the Wazir had it, and since the stroke he had found himself a new office: when a question of the Sarkar’s was slow to be answered, the Jamadar said it over again, clearly, for the room.

“A ball, Dada ji,” said Nau Nihal, before he could.

“I can see a ball. What is it for.”

“It is for the hand.”

“The hand is dead.” The good hand flicked at the physicians. “Ask them. They have told me so in three languages.”

So Nau Nihal gave him the reason he had been saving for a week. At the hill, he said, when a horse went lame the old troopers did not leave it standing in its stall, because a leg left standing set like mortar and the horse never went sound again. They walked it out every dawn, a little, and then a little more. It was true of horses, and true of the old troopers, and it was put in the one language he had ever known his grandfather take physic in.

“I am not a horse,” said the Sarkar.

“No, Dada ji.”

“A horse I would have shot.”

Nobody in the chamber found anything to say to that.

‘So much for the horse.’

The senior hakim was a grave, courteous old man who had been taking that pulse for thirty years, and he said, with a physician’s bow to a prince, that the Kanwar’s devotion did him honour, but that the humour was not yet settled, and until it settled the limb must on no account be worked; that rest, and the electuary the Gulab Khana sent up each evening, were the whole of the cure; and that he forbade it.

The eye came up, slowly, and found the hakim.

“Give me the ball,” said the Lion of the Punjab.

The hakim looked, with some hope, at the Jamadar.

“The Sarkar says to give him the ball,” said Jamadar Khushal Singh.

‘Still the worst-behaved man in Asia. Oh, thank God.’

Nau Nihal knelt, and set the ball in the right hand, and folded the fingers round it one at a time, and took his own hands away. It had been a hand that took hold of a visitor’s and kept it half an hour, pressing the stranger’s fingers while the questions came, so that envoys went out of his tent working their knuckles. Now it lay open round the ball like something a servant had forgotten to clear.

“Close it, Dada ji.”

Nothing happened. Nothing went on happening, while the boy counted twenty under his breath and the second hakim wrote it down.

“Again.”

Nothing.

“Again, Dada ji. The troopers say a little, and then a little more.”

The ball struck the doorpost. He had thrown it with the left hand, and he had never in his life thrown anything with the left hand, and it missed his grandson by a yard and the second hakim by less.

“Out,” said the Sarkar. “The physicians. The Jamadar. The horse-doctor also.”

That one the Jamadar did not need to say again.

The hakims had it all over the fort by noon, the senior one with no malice at all: that the Kanwar had been two years among grooms and old troopers on his hill and had come down unable to tell his grandfather from a remount. Grief took boys so, they said, in the hands. It would pass. The household heard a different part of the story. The Sarkar had thrown something. They had been fielding his cups for thirty years, and nothing the physicians had said since the stroke gave the kitchens and the stables half the comfort of the news that he had thrown a thing at the Kanwar, and missed.

Nau Nihal went back the next morning. The ball was not by the doorpost where it had fallen. It was on the couch, beside the good hand, and no servant would own to having put it there.

He knelt, and folded the dead fingers round it one at a time. He went every morning he was in Lahore after that, and was thrown out of about one in three.

And in the late warm evenings, when the darbar was done and the performers and the petitioners and the Dogras had gone, the Sarkar took to sending for his grandson.

Not the darbar. The small upper room. The room for the things he wanted to look at closely before he decided whom they belonged to.

---

“Sit, putt,” the Sarkar said, on one such evening, the working hand waving Nau Nihal down onto the durree by the low couch where they propped him now. “Sit where the eye can find you. The eye is lazy these days. It wants its lion close.”

So Nau Nihal sat where the eye could find him, the way he had since the cradle, and for a while the old man just looked at him, the good eye doing its slow careful work, and the boy let himself be looked at, and did not perform, because he had learned that this, the not-performing, was the rarest gift he could give the one person he had ever wanted to give gifts to.

“They think I do not see it,” the Sarkar said at last, slow and thick and perfectly clear. “They think the stroke took the eye too. It did not.” The hand moved, a small contemptuous gesture at the whole fort, the whole court, the whole circling weather of it. “I see Dhian Singh measuring the curtains for a house I am still living in. I see your father weeping and praying and reaching for his box. I see the Sandhanwalias counting their cousins. I have seen it all coming for years, putt, the way a man on a hill sees the weather, and I built and I fought and I married and I bought, faster and faster, because I thought if I made the thing big enough and rich enough and frightening enough it would not be able to come apart.” The ruined mouth pulled. It might have been a smile. “It is going to come apart. I know that now. The stroke taught me that, which is the one good thing it did. A man cannot lie to himself with half his face on the floor.”

‘Fifty years the finest liar in Asia,’ the part of him that was Angrez thought, with the bleak dry humour that was the only kind the room allowed, ‘and it took a burst vessel in his head to make him finally stop lying to himself. There is a whole lecture in that about the limits of charisma, Dada ji, and I am going to give it to absolutely no one, on absolutely any day but this one.’

Nau Nihal said nothing. There was nothing a boy could say, and the dead man inside him knew better than anyone alive that there was nothing true that could be said, and so he did the only honest thing, which was to take his grandfather’s good left hand and hold it.

“You see it too,” said the Sarkar. It was not a question. He had stopped, this year, asking the boy questions whose answers frightened him. “You have seen it since you were small. I do not know how, and I have decided, putt, that I am too old and too tired and too fond of you to find out how. A man is allowed one grandson he does not interrogate.” The hand turned in the boy’s, gripped, weakly, with a ghost of the old cartwheel strength. “So I will not ask you what you are. I will ask you one thing only, the thing I have been keeping for the evening I was sure of you, and I have been sure of you since you came up off that road still in your dirt. When it comes apart. When I am gone and the wolves are in the house and your gentle father cannot hold the door. Will you be the one who is hard enough.”

‘No,’ thought Angrez, with despair, because he knew it, all of it, the poisonings and the murders and the boy under the archway, ‘no, Dada ji, I am not hard enough, nobody is hard enough, the thing that is coming cannot be held by hardness. I know exactly which of them dies, and how, every single soul in this room, including me.’

And then, under the despair, the other voice. The one that had got on no elephant but had been, for thirteen years, quietly choosing to do the work anyway.

“Yes, Dada ji,” said Nau Nihal Singh. “I will be the one who is hard enough.”

It was a lie, and it was a vow, and it was the truest thing the boy had ever said, all three at once, and the Lion of the Punjab heard all three in it, because he had spent fifty years listening to men promise him things, and he closed the good eye, and for the first time since the stroke he looked, for a moment, at peace.

Notes

1. That the Maharaja went on ruling after the stroke is the record’s: Hari Ram Gupta’s court diary (History of the Sikhs, Vol. 5) has him at the Darbar Sahib on 12 August and 15 September 1834, holding the Dasahra darbar and inspecting the parade on 12 October, and on tour by the Chenab at the end of that month.

2. The sending away of Saturn is in Hari Ram Gupta’s History of the Sikhs (Vol. 5, the chapter “Personality and Place in History”), told of the Maharaja’s illness of 1834: the two amulets given by a Brahmin, Ram Singh, washed in water that was drunk morning and evening (Gupta cites the newspaper Jam-e-Jahan Numa of 12 March 1834); the astrologers Madhusudan, Bahlu Ram and Dalpat Rae; the gold image set with sapphire, the black shawls and the black horse; the Acharj Brahmin of Mathura, of the order the astrologers had named for the office, bathed in oil and blackened with the soot of a frying pan; the two regiments, the thousands who watched, the shut doors, and the British river guards who asked for a permit. Afterwards five thousand rupees went to the poor. The illness Gupta means was reported that March; the novel sets the rite after the stroke, which is its liberty. The record gives Saturn no opinion of the permit.

3. Two habits of the Maharaja are from the same chapter of Gupta. After the paralysis his questions could not always be followed, and when an answer was slow Jamadar Khushal Singh repeated the question. And his grip was famous: he would sometimes keep a visitor’s hand in his own for half an hour, pressing the stranger’s fingers. The envoys’ knuckles are the novel’s inference.

4. The Gulab Khana was the Maharaja’s own dispensary, a two-storeyed building beside the southern gateway of the Badshahi Masjid, where electuaries, tonics, essences and rose water were prepared for the royal family under Faqir Aziz-ud-din and Faqir Nur-ud-din (Gupta, Vol. 5). The two hakims, the forbidding, the wooden ball’s purchase and its flight are the novel’s invention. So is the lamed horse: the reason the protagonist gives for his method is his own, chosen because the Maharaja was a horseman who kept over a thousand horses (Empire of the Sikhs); the method itself is discussed in the Notes to Book Seven. The hakim’s reasoning from an unsettled humour is written from a general knowledge of the Unani tradition and not from a source in the library [VERIFY].

5. The Sandhanwalia sardars were the Maharaja’s collaterals (Gupta). The conversation in the small upper room is the novel’s invention.