Chapter 2 of 6
Whose Grandson Am I? (1)
On a fine spring afternoon, with warm sun and the smell of the mustard fields still hanging in the courtyard air.
“That will be all for today, Kanwar Sahib.”
“Thank you, Bhai Ji. Waheguru ji ki Fateh.”
Hadn’t he just turned six? The boy sent out the old munshi with manners that did not match his age, waited for the heavy pardah to fall back across the doorway, listened until the man’s jutti had clip-clopped out of the inner courtyard, and then stretched out his cramped little legs and said, very quietly, a single English word.
“Fuck.”
He squeezed the calves that had gone dead under him from an hour of sitting cross-legged on the durree.
Through the carved jharokha above him, a thin band of pale Lahore sky lay across the line of the haveli’s tiled roof. He looked at it and sighed.
“Hai Rabba. It is a fine thing to be born a kanwar. But why must it be this kanwar. And on top of that, why does Maharaja Ranjit Singh have to be my grandfather.”
A longer sigh followed.
“And why am I not even happy about being reborn.”
The boy who had said reborn, a thing no one within a thousand miles of him would have believed, was Angrez Singh of Surrey, British Columbia, lately of a half-garage in Newton, presently and inexplicably installed in the body of Kanwar Nau Nihal Singh, eldest grandson of the Sarkar-i-Khalsa, the heir to the heir.
The first time he had opened his eyes, Angrez had assumed he was in a hospital.
It was a reasonable assumption. The last thing he remembered was a concrete floor. So when he opened his eyes onto a ceiling, it took him several seconds to register what was wrong with it.
It was made of carved wood.
‘…what kind of hospital has a ceiling like…’
He tried to turn his head, and his head did not turn. Something soft and tight held it in place.
‘Neck brace.’
When he tried to raise his right arm, the arm did not raise. It seemed to be somewhere else entirely, bound, possibly cast.
‘Whole-body cast. Stroke, then. Or the fall. Or…’
With what felt like a tremendous effort he rolled his eyes down to look at himself.
The thing he saw was small.
Small in a way that no part of him, however broken and trussed, had any right to be. The visible portion of it was wrapped, head to foot, in clean white cotton. There were no toes at the end of it. There was no torso to speak of. There was just a small swaddled length, and at the near end of it, blurred and impossible, his own two infant hands.
’…’
A face came into view above him. A young woman’s face, exhausted and luminous and frightened, bent low over a sick child and willing it to live.
“Stay with me, putt,” she said, softly, in Punjabi. “Stay.”
And Angrez Singh, thirty-two years old, dead of a coilgun in a country two hundred years and ten thousand kilometres away, looked up into the face of the woman who would, in a little over twenty years, be murdered by her own court for the crime of trying to rule it, and thought, with the full weight of a grown man’s terror:
‘Oh, no.’
It took him three days to accept that he had been born.
It took him another three months to be sure where.
The language came almost at once. It surfaced the way a song you have not heard since childhood surfaces, complete and unbidden, and that was the first clue, because the Punjabi in his small new ears was Punjabi, yes, but old, formal, threaded with Persian at the edges in a way that the Surrey gurdwara’s Punjabi had never been. The second clue was the wood smoke. The third was the absence, total and disorienting, of any sound he associated with the existence of the engine.
No cars. No planes. No hum of a fridge through a wall. Nothing, all day and all night, but voices, animals, water, bells, and the wind.
So he lay in his swaddling and counted the rafters and ran the deductions the way he had once run a multimeter across a faulty board, methodically, terminal by terminal, refusing to let panic short the circuit.
Conclusion 1: I have been reborn. This is not a metaphor and it is not a coma. I have checked. The hands are the hands of an infant and they are mine.
Conclusion 2: The language, the smoke, the silence, the wood. This is pre-industrial Punjab. Sikh-era or Mughal-tail. The Persian-laced court Punjabi says court. Somebody important.
Conclusion 3: They keep calling the woman ‘Bibi ji’ and they keep calling a man who visits ‘Kanwar Sahib,’ and once, only once, an old attendant forgot herself and crooned over my cradle a lullaby about ‘the Sarkar’s little lion,’ and the word ‘Sarkar’ in this room, in this courtyard, in this fort, can mean exactly one man.
There, in the cradle, he had stopped for a long moment.
Conclusion 4, provisional, pending confirmation, please God let me be wrong.
Confirmation came eleven days later. A one-eyed man with a magnificent beard, dressed as plainly as a trooper, came into the women’s courtyard without announcement, and the courtyard reorganised itself around him in the space of a breath. Attendants scattered like pigeons. The senior women were on their feet before they had decided to stand, and the ordinary racket of the place, water and gossip and a fretting child, dropped into a held hush, the way a field goes still before weather. He was small, and plain, and in no hurry at all, and he carried the whole of that courtyard on the strength of one working eye as though it weighed nothing. He lifted Angrez out of the cradle in two scarred hands, as easily as a man lifts a melon, held the baby at arm’s length, and considered him a long moment out of the eye that worked, and said, in a voice like a cartwheel going over gravel:
“This one. This one has something behind the face. Look at him looking at me.”
And every attendant in the courtyard laughed nervously and agreed that yes, Sarkar, what an intriguing child, Sarkar, how he stares, and the one-eyed man laughed too, delighted, and bounced the baby once, and the baby, Angrez, who knew exactly whose hands those were, who had stood in front of a class and described those exact scarred hands, did the only sensible thing available to a creature with no other defences.
He made his face go slack and stupid and infant-blank, and he drooled.
‘Hide,’ he told himself, with his whole soul, while Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Lion of the Punjab, beamed at him from a distance of one foot. ‘Whatever else you do in this life. Hide.’
Last conclusion, he thought, as the Sarkar handed him back and the courtyard exhaled. I am Nau Nihal Singh. My grandfather is the Sarkar. The year is 1821. And I am the only person alive who has read the last chapter of this book.
Eighteen years.
Hai Rabba.
It was a fatal misunderstanding on the part of everyone in that courtyard, fatal not to them but to a great many comfortable assumptions about how the next two decades were going to go, that the strange, too-still baby they had all settled on as merely intriguing was nothing of the kind.
His mother did not suspect, and keeping it that way was the closest work he did.
Bibi Chand Kaur was nineteen years old and sharper than anyone in that haveli gave her credit for, and she loved her firstborn with a fierce, total, undivided attention. She thought him a grave and watchful baby, which he was, and an unusually quick one, which he also was, and she was proud of it in the ordinary way of young mothers and looked no further, because there was no reason under heaven for a mother to look further than that. Even so, she was the one person he could least afford to slip in front of, which made her the one he performed for hardest. When she held him up so their faces were level and studied him a moment too long, the way her own father studied a man he was deciding whether to trust, Angrez gave her back nothing but the warm, vacant, milk-drunk eyes he had spent months perfecting. He gurgled.
Then he reached up and grabbed her nose, because the parenting manuals he had read in another life, for a niece he now understood he would never meet, said a baby of eight months would do exactly that, and because making his mother laugh was the surest way to turn her back to ordinary things.
It worked, every time. She would laugh, and call him a little badmash, and hold him close, and that was all it ever was.
But he lay awake that night, insofar as an infant lies awake, in the broken, surfacing way of infant sleep, and he understood, with a clarity that frightened him more than the fever had, that the hiding was not going to be a phase.
It was going to be the work of a lifetime. The whole of it. Every day, for as long as this strange second life lasted, he was going to wear a mask in front of every single person who loved him, and the better he loved them back, the more carefully he was going to have to lie.
And of them all, he thought, his mother would be the hardest to keep it from, and the longest. Not yet. For now she saw a grave, bright, watchful child and nothing more, the way the whole house did. But clever did not fade. Somewhere down the years, when he was older and could no longer fold every quick thought out of sight, when he started to make things and mend things and notice what a boy his age had no business noticing, the sharpest pair of eyes in the house would be hers. He filed it under things to be afraid of later.
‘Okay,’ he thought, into the dark, in English, the way he thought all the things he could not afford to think out loud. ‘Okay. New plan. Version one point zero. Step one: stay alive. Step two: stay hidden. Step three…’
Sleep took him before step three, the way it takes babies, mid-thought, with no warning at all.