Whose Grandson Am I? (3)

On the first anniversary of his birth, they held a banquet that frightened him.

Not because of the noise, though the noise was tremendous. The whole haveli thrown open, the courtyards strung with marigold, the ragis singing in one corner and a knot of sardars getting loudly happy in another, every branch of the family that was speaking to every other branch arranged in careful concentric rings of precedence. What frightened him was the tray.

He knew about the tray. That they did it here he had not known, but the moment the women brought it out and set it down in front of where he sat propped on a bolster, dressed in more gold thread than a one-year-old has any structural ability to support, he understood exactly what it was, because every culture he had ever read about seemed to have invented some version of it: the small ritual divination in which you set objects before a baby on his first birthday and let the whole assembled clan read his destiny off whatever his fat hand happened to close around first.

There was a kirpan, a small bright blade of real steel. There was a pothi, a little gilt-edged volume of scripture. There was a gold mohar. There was a kalam, a reed pen. There was, off to one side, a string of horse-bells, for the boys who would be nothing but soldiers, and a set of weights, for the boys who would be nothing but merchants.

And the entire courtyard went quiet to watch a one-year-old choose.

‘Oh, you have got to be kidding me,’ Angrez thought, swaying gently on his bolster. ‘This is a load-bearing decision. They are going to talk about this for the rest of my life. Whatever this hand grabs, I am stuck with as a personality for twenty years.’

He looked at the objects.

Every modern instinct said grab the pen. The pen was reform. The pen was administration, schools, a codified law, the slow boring constitutional work the kingdom actually needed and never got. Grab the pen, signal scholar, manage expectations down, be the bookish harmless kanwar nobody fears.

But he had not been a baby for very long, and he had already learned the hard limit of the thing: this body had instincts of its own, fast ones, older than thought, and a bright sharp shining object eighteen inches from a one-year-old’s hand is a force that even a thirty-two-year-old soul cannot fully veto.

His hand shot out (traitor, he thought) and closed around the hilt of the little kirpan.

The courtyard inhaled.

And then Angrez did the only piece of genuine improvisation of his entire first year, the only moment in which the dead schoolteacher and the live baby acted as one creature with one intention: he did not let go of the sword, but he reached out his other hand, deliberately, slowly, with as much visible intention as a one-year-old can perform, and he laid his small open palm flat on the pothi, on the scripture, and he left it there, one hand on the steel and one hand on the Word, and he looked up.

For a heartbeat nobody understood.

Then an old woman near the back, somebody’s great-aunt, the kind of woman every family keeps for exactly this purpose, said, in a carrying voice, the two words that decided the matter:

“Sant sipahi.”

The courtyard came apart.

Sant sipahi. The saint-soldier. The scripture in one hand and the sword in the other, the highest thing the tradition knew how to wish on a boy, the whole ideal of the Khalsa folded into a single image, and a child of one had reached out, unprompted, and taken both. Sardars who had been politely bored a moment before were suddenly on their feet. The ragis swung, without being asked, into a shabad. And up on the dais, the Sarkar, who had been watching the tray with the indulgent half-attention of a grandfather and the total attention of a king, both at once, because that was the only way he knew how to watch anything, threw back his head and laughed, the cartwheel-on-gravel laugh, and slapped his thigh, and said to the man beside him, loudly enough for the whole courtyard to hear it and carry it out into the city by nightfall:

“Did you see. Did you see my lion. The Guru’s book and the Guru’s sword and he would not choose between them. He took the lot.”

A sword in one hand and a holy book under the other and a kingdom rearranging its expectations of him, and Angrez sat there in the middle of it and thought, with the particular despair of a man watching a plan he did not make come true around him:

‘Well. So much for harmless and bookish.’

It was, he would reflect later, the first move he ever made at the Lahore court, and he had made it half by accident, and it had landed harder than anything he would deliberately engineer for years.

The lesson he filed away was a large one: in this room, the symbol is the substance. They do not run on arguments here. They run on omens, on gestures, on the story a thing can be made to tell. Learn to speak that, or you will lose every fight to a great-aunt with a loud voice.

---

They started his gatka before he could properly walk.

This appalled the part of him that had filled out a Canadian liability waiver for a child’s birthday-party bouncy castle, and it was, even by the standards of his own warrior household and century, unusually early. But the Sarkar had decreed it after the business with the tray, and what the Sarkar decreed, the haveli did. Each morning a lean old ustad with forearms like rope and a patience that never once frayed began to come, to fold the toddler’s hands around a soti, a little padded practice stick, and to move him, very gently, through the first shapes of the oldest fighting art the Punjab had.

He was, his teachers agreed, an intriguing student.

That was the word they always reached for, and Angrez worked very hard to make sure it stayed the word. Not uncanny. Not impossible. Just intriguing: a quick, oddly grave little boy who picked up a sequence faster than he should and then, just as you began to wonder, fumbled it like any other child, because Angrez had learned to fumble on purpose, to bank a mistake whenever he caught a teacher’s eyes narrowing, to give them back the toddler they expected before they could finish forming the thought that he was anything else.

It was exhausting. Every lesson was two lessons: the one his hands were learning, and the one his mind was running underneath it, the endless cold audit. Too fast, slow down. Too clever, fumble. He’s looking at you. Drool. There. Good. Nothing more.

The Mool Mantar he let himself learn fast, because piety was safe. A small kanwar who could recite the opening of the Guru Granth Sahib clean and early was a credit to the house, a thing to be shown off, not feared. When he recited it for the Sarkar once, at perhaps two and a half, the whole Mool Mantar through without a stumble, in a high clear baby voice, the Lion of the Punjab went quiet and then wet-eyed and put his scarred hand on the small turbaned head and said nothing at all for a while, and Angrez felt, under the performance, a stab of something that was not performance at all.

His tutor, Bhai Gurmukh Singh, an old munshi of enormous learning and no ambition, the best kind of teacher, the kind who is loyal to the subject and not the patron, told the court ladies, more than once, that in forty years of teaching he had never had a pupil quite like the Kanwar, and that he could not, for the life of him, say why.

He did not say there is a grown man behind that child’s eyes.

He did not think it. Why would he. No one would.

That was the whole game, and by his third year Angrez was beginning to believe he was going to win it, that he could grow up slow and hidden and beloved, inch by careful inch, into a man the kingdom would let save it, with no one ever the wiser.

About exactly one thing he was wrong.

He was about to meet the one man in the whole of the Punjab who could not be fumbled, drooled, or omen-managed, the one who would look at the strange grave child for the length of a single breath and see, not intriguing, but the truth. And that man was going to ride out of Angrez’s life and up a hill above the Kabul river within the fortnight, and take the truth with him into the ground.

Notes

1. Gatka: the Sikh martial art, taught with sticks and swords. Tuition customarily began for the sons of warrior families around the age of four or five; beginning a child of barely one is recorded as exceptional, and reflects, in this account, both the Sarkar’s particular favour and the boy’s reputation after the first-birthday rite.

2. Sant sipahi: “saint-soldier,” the foundational ideal of the Khalsa as shaped by Guru Hargobind and Guru Gobind Singh, spiritual devotion and martial readiness held in one person, the scripture and the sword inseparable. To “take both” at a first-birthday divination would be read as the most auspicious omen imaginable.

3. Mool Mantar: the foundational creed of the Sikh faith, the opening composition of the Guru Granth Sahib, beginning Ik Onkar (“There is one Reality”).