Chapter 3 of 6
Whose Grandson Am I? (2)
A man who has spent his adult life studying a person, and is then made to share a room with him, learns something fast.
The person refuses to stay the size of the page.
Years of teaching Ranjit Singh had left Angrez with a Ranjit Singh in his head: five foot something, blind in the left eye from childhood smallpox, pock-marked, unprepossessing, famously unbothered by his own plainness. The British keep waiting for a king and getting a horse-thief, one of his own ministers had supposedly said. A man whose entire legend rested on the gap between how little he looked like a conqueror and how completely he was one.
That was the Ranjit Singh of the lecture hall. The portrait was accurate, as far as a portrait can go, and it had not prepared Angrez for a single minute of the man himself.
Because the Ranjit Singh who came into the women’s courtyard, not often, the Sarkar was a busy man and a baby is a baby, but often enough, did something to a room that Angrez had no file for. The talking did not stop when he entered; that would have been ordinary. What stopped was the pretending. Every person in that courtyard, from the senior court ladies to the girl who carried water, arranged themselves, the instant he appeared, around the single fact of his attention, the way iron filings arrange themselves around a magnet without being asked and without being able to help it. The one working eye moved over a space and the space reported to it.
In a hundred books Angrez had read the word charisma. What he had not understood, until he was lying in a cradle being looked at by it, was that it was a physical force, like the two thousand volts, and that some men were simply wired to carry the charge.
“How is my lion today,” the Sarkar would say, which is what he called the baby, and the baby would be presented, and the one eye would go over him with the same swift completeness it gave to a horse, a gun, or a man asking for a jagir, and every single time it lingered a half-second too long, and every single time Angrez drooled and gurgled and grabbed and gave the most aggressively unremarkable performance of infancy that human history had ever staged.
‘He notices,’ Angrez thought, each time, in the cold sweat that no one could see under the milk-fat. ‘He notices there’s something. He doesn’t know what. He just files it under “remarkable child” and moves on, because he is the busiest man in Hindustan and he has an empire to run and he does not have time to interrogate a baby. Thank God. Thank God for the empire.’
The love came at once and complete, the old man lodged in him before he could plan for it, which was inconvenient, and which made the lying worse.
His father was a different problem.
Kanwar Kharak Singh, heir apparent to the Sarkar, father of the body Angrez now wore, was soft. There was no kinder word; Angrez looked for one for years and never found it. Soft in the body, soft in the voice, soft in the eyes, with the gentle, faintly unfocused warmth of a man who liked very few things and disliked nothing strongly enough to do anything about it. He was not cruel. He was not even stupid, quite. He was simply a wide, still pool of a man, and his father the Sarkar was a river in flood, and they had never once in their lives understood each other.
Fondness for the baby came off him in a vague, dutiful way. He visited, patted the small head, said warm and soft and weightless things, and then drifted back to the things that actually held him: his horses, his pigeons, his favourites, and, increasingly, even this early, the small lacquered box that an attendant carried for him and that Angrez recognized, the first time he smelled it, with a lurch of grief, for exactly what it was.
‘Pita ji,’ he thought, watching his soft, kind, doomed father be gently absent in a doorway, the opium settling into his afternoon. ‘We are going to have to do something about that box. Not today. You have years. But, soon.’
The arithmetic ran on its own; he could not stop doing the arithmetic. His father would outlive the Sarkar by some sixteen months, set aside within months of taking the throne and then slowly, deliberately poisoned by his own court while everyone pretended it was a stomach ailment, and would die having ruled nothing in fact, and his son, the real Nau Nihal, the boy whose body this was, would shove him aside to get there, and would himself last thirteen months.
Three generations. The grandfather a giant. The son a ghost. The grandson a tyrant who never grew up.
And then, Angrez thought, the British, and the auction, and the end.
He was, he reminded himself, the one who got to change it.
If he could just stay alive long enough to be allowed to.
He kept a list. Writing it down was out of the question. He was a baby, and later a toddler, and a toddler caught writing fluent analysis of the Lahore Durbar’s structural weaknesses would not be called intriguing, he would be called something with consequences. So he kept it in his head, and he revised it the way he had once revised lecture notes, and he came, over many months of cradle-bound thinking, to organize the entire catastrophe into five problems.
Once, in a fat book by a historian named Hari Ram Gupta, he had read them as a numbered list, set out as the five things Ranjit Singh could not solve and did not. He had assigned the list to high schoolers. He now understood it was his to-do list.
Problem one: the family. A divided house. Sons each certain the throne was his, a soft heir, a fierce daughter-in-law, a grandson groomed to grab, every one of them with a faction, every faction with a knife.
Problem two: the court. A cabinet of brilliant, ambitious men held together by nothing but the Sarkar’s own person. Dogras on the rise. Sandhanwalias seething. The instant the magnet was gone, the filings would fly apart and start cutting.
Problem three: the army. The Khalsa Fauj, the finest fighting force between Constantinople and Calcutta, loyal to the Khalsa, to the Panth, to the idea of itself, in a way that no king could fully command and that would, after the Sarkar, curdle into a praetorian monster that made and unmade governments by acclamation.
Problem four: the Sarkar’s body. One bad stroke a few years off, in the unaltered record, and a worse one after it. A great heart in a small failing frame, and no successor anywhere who could carry the charge.
Problem five: the foe. Patient, literate, well-financed, and never, ever in a hurry. The Company. Already, this very year, sniffing up the Indus, drawing its slow ring around the Punjab through Sind and the Afghan passes, waiting (Angrez knew exactly how long they were willing to wait) for the giant to die.
Five problems. One of them solved itself with a coffin. The other four were going to be the work of his life, and he had, at present, the political capital of a teething infant and the upper-body strength of a sack of flour.
‘Right,’ he thought, lying in the warm dark while his mother’s breathing slowed in the next room. ‘So we have time, and we have the body of a national hero in the making, and we have a grandfather who already half-suspects there’s a person in here. That’s our hand. Play it slow. Play it hidden. Don’t spook the magnet.’
Learning to roll over had taken him a humiliating amount of effort, and he was absurdly proud of it.
‘Step three,’ he thought, finally, all those months later, finishing the thought he had fallen asleep on. ‘Step three: become the kind of man this kingdom will let save it, without anyone ever finding out it was saved by a dead schoolteacher from Surrey.’
Somewhere out beyond the haveli, a watch-drum marked the hour. A peacock complained about something. The Punjab turned over in its sleep, eighteen years from the edge of the cliff, and did not know it, and had in its cradle the one creature who did.
He practised rolling over until he was too tired to be afraid.