The Lion in Winter? (6)

The crisis of 1834 passed the way the worst things in that kingdom always passed: not with a resolution, but with everyone agreeing, for their own reasons, to pretend it had.

It even had a ceremony. When the hakims allowed that the worst was over, Pandit Madhusudan was asked to fix an auspicious hour for the ghusal-e-sehat, the bath of recovery, and at the hour he fixed the Sarkar was bathed in warm water, and the nobles came with their congratulations and their offerings for charity, and a thousand rupees went to the poor of Lahore and several thousand more to the poor of other towns. Eleven guns were fired from the fort. That night the city was illuminated. It is not every kingdom that will announce with cannon that nothing has happened.

The Sarkar lived. The court exhaled and went back to its slower scheming. The inspection went up to Mirpur and came down again with a dull and glowing report, and the hill became, officially and forever, a charming royal nothing. Kharak Singh wept and prayed and reached for his box and remained, on paper, the heir to the richest throne in Asia. Raja Dhian Singh resumed his flawless service with one new fact filed in his perfect memory. And Bibi Chand Kaur, in the women’s quarters, bored and brilliant and newly enlisted, began, very quietly, to listen.

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The inspection had gone up a fortnight after the gallery, and Nau Nihal was on the hill to meet it and show it round.

There were two of them, and they had been chosen with care. One was a munshi lent from the daftar of Diwan Dina Nath, who had been made minister of the finances that year and lent clerks freely, as new ministers do: a thin, exact man who travelled with his own inkstand. The other was a Dogra commandant of the Wazir’s own picking, broad and cheerful, with a brother serving under Zorawar Singh in the snows beyond Kishtwar and a great deal to say about it. They stayed three days. They saw everything.

The munshi asked for the stores, and was given the stores, and the books of the stores, and sat down with them as a man sits down to dinner. He found the grain as entered and the powder as entered and the saltpetre two maunds better than entered, which troubled him more than a shortage would have, until the school’s own clerk showed him the entry carried forward. He proved the long columns by a counting-trick with nines that had reached the daftar from somewhere a few years before. They proved. He looked at the Kanwar afterward with something like tenderness. He had spent his working life among the accounts of princes and had never before met a set that balanced.

The commandant wanted the armoury and the boys. He counted the muskets and looked down a few, watched the cadets ride, watched them shoot by turns at a whitewashed board under the eye of a risaldar who plainly thought little of commandants, and pronounced it a very pretty school. Then, because it had been named to them, they were shown behind the second wall, by the Kanwar himself, a little pink with pride.

It was a long low shed, and it was a boy’s heaven. There were books left open face down. There was glassware, and a row of crucibles, and a brass clock of the Majithia Sardar’s that told the hour and the day and the month together and had been taken half to pieces to see why. At one bench a press was stamping brass buttons, each with a small lion on it, and at another an old Musalman was filing a breech-plug and did not get up.

“And this, Kanwar Sahib,” said the commandant, picking a barrel off the old man’s bench and putting his eye to it.

“That one shot wide,” said Ustad Ilahi Bakhsh, without looking round. “Put it down. It is there to shame me, and it does not need your help.”

The commandant put it down, and nodded, soldier to craftsman.

“The buttons are for the boys’ coats,” said Nau Nihal. “The horn ones crack in the cold.” It was true. It had been true for almost a week.

“May I,” said the munshi, and took one, and turned it to the light, and asked what a hundred of them cost to strike. He wrote the answer down.

Lahna Singh came in toward the end, wiping his hands, and was civil for as long as he could bear it, which was not long. The great man interrupted at his hobby was a part he had played at Lahore all his life, and it was the easiest work he did that week.

On the last evening the commandant gave him some advice. He gave it as a soldier and an uncle, walking the wall with his hands behind his back. It was a fine school. But twelve cadets, with their horses and their servants and their powder, were a great many mouths for a hunting lodge, and there were men at Lahore who counted mouths. He would say in his report that twelve was the proper number for such a place, and the Kanwar would be wise to let it be seen that twelve was all he could manage. Then nobody could ever say that he was raising anything.

‘And there goes the second dozen,’ thought Angrez. ‘And the third.’

“You are very good, Commandant Sahib,” said Nau Nihal. “Twelve is as many as I can look after.” It was true. The commandant had just made it true.

“Then we understand one another,” said the commandant, and clapped him on the shoulder, and went in to his dinner.

The report went down to Lahore, and it fixed the school at twelve, and at twelve it stayed. What the court news-writer made of it, in the letter that went round the chiefs that week, was this:

The rakh of the Kanwar Sahib at Mirpur was visited by order and found in good order: the deer plentiful, the wall sound, twelve youths of good family at their exercises. The Kanwar Sahib keeps also a workshop of clocks and curiosities after the fashion of the Majithia Sardar, being fond of such things. Nothing further was observed.

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Nau Nihal went back up the hill in the first cold of the year, because the work did not stop, because the work could never stop now, and on the road north he let himself, for the length of one cold afternoon, simply grieve: for the small ruined man in the big bed, for the soft doomed father, for the fierce mother he had wasted thirteen years hiding from, for the kingdom that did not know it was dying and for the one boy in it who could not stop knowing.

Then he put it away, the way he had learned to put everything away, in the long cold room in his head, and he did the arithmetic, because he could not stop doing the arithmetic, and the arithmetic had changed.

It had a date in it now that everyone could see.

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For thirteen years he had carried the future alone, a man who alone knew what was coming. That had ended in a sickroom in the spring. The Sarkar saw it now, the shape of the end, if not the hour of it. Chand Kaur saw enough of it to stand beside him. Dhian Singh saw it and was glad. The whole kingdom had felt, in the long days the Lion lay still, the floor move under it, and some animal part of every man in it now knew what the boy had always known: that the wall was not forever, that the load it bore was going to come down, and that the only questions left were when, and onto whom.

‘So the secret part is over,’ thought Angrez, on the cold road, watching the blue hills come up. ‘Not my secret. That one I keep till the archway. But the big one, the one I have been the only keeper of since the cradle, that the clock is running, that one belongs to everybody now. I am not the only one in the kingdom who can feel the end coming any more. I am only the one who has read it to the year. And that, it turns out, still changes everything, because a man who knows the year can spend it, and a man who only smells the weather can only flinch.’

He had five years until the heart in the big bed stopped. He had a hill that made the future’s weapons and an inspection certifying it made toys. He had a mother who could hear the whole house and a father he had not yet given up on saving and a grandfather who had looked at the unknowable thing in him and chosen, with love, not to know. He had a cold map in his head with a date on it that read 1839, and behind that one a worse date that read 1840, with his own name on it and a falling stone.

It was not enough. It was never going to be enough. He had stopped, somewhere in that long terrible spring, expecting it to be enough, and found that the work went easier once he had.

Far to the west, on the frontier the boy had never seen, in a fort above a pass called Jamrud, a quiet economical man who had once ridden under a child’s window with a city screaming his name had three years left to live, and did not know it, and the boy did, and was going to have to watch that one come true too.

The Lion of the Punjab was in his winter.

His grandson rode up into the hills to forge, while the light lasted, against the dark he alone could see the hour of.

End of Book Six: “The Lion in Winter?”

To be continued.

Notes

1. The bath of recovery is recorded for 1834 by Hari Ram Gupta (History of the Sikhs, Vol. 5): Pandit Madhusudan fixed the auspicious hour, the Maharaja bathed in warm water, the nobles offered congratulations and charity, a thousand rupees went to the poor and several thousand to other places, a salute of eleven guns was fired and the city was illuminated. Gupta names neither the city nor where the guns stood, and does not say which illness of that year the bath closed; Lahore, its fort and the stroke are the novel’s placing.

2. The succession crisis the novel dramatises is historical in its essentials. Ranjit Singh’s decline left the question of the succession open; his heir, Kanwar Kharak Singh, was widely regarded as weak and was dependent on opium; real power gathered around the Dogra wazir Raja Dhian Singh and his brothers Gulab Singh and Suchet Singh, with the Sandhanwalia sardars (Ranjit Singh’s collateral kin) as their rivals. After Ranjit Singh’s death in 1839 these fault-lines opened into the cascade of court murders that destroyed the kingdom within a decade. Bibi Chand Kaur’s alliance with her son here is the novel’s invention, consistent with her historical fierceness and her brief, doomed bid for power after 1840.

3. The inspection, both inspectors, the limit of twelve cadets and the news-letter are the novel’s invention; there was no Mirpur works to inspect. Diwan Dina Nath did become finance minister in 1834, and in the same year Raja Gulab Singh, “without informing Maharaja Ranjit Singh”, sent Zorawar Singh from Kishtwar to annex Ladakh (Gupta). The court circulated news-letters of this flat kind; this one is written for the occasion, and is wrong in the usual way, by being accurate.

4. Sardar Hari Singh Nalwa, governor on the Afghan frontier, was killed at the battle of Jamrud in April 1837, defending the Khalsa’s westernmost gains against an Afghan attack while Maharaja Ranjit Singh was occupied with the festivities of Nau Nihal Singh’s wedding. His death removed the one man capable of holding the trans-Indus frontier and is reckoned, in this account as in the histories, among the hinges of the coming collapse. It falls in the arc to come.