Chapter 5 of 6
Whose Grandson Am I? (4)
The news came up the river in the late winter of the boy’s second year.
It came the way all news came to the haveli. First as a servant’s rumour, then as bazaar certainty, then, last and most official, as a thing read aloud in the darbar by Faqir Aziz-ud-din in the carefully level voice in which the Faqir read everything that mattered.
The Yusafzai had risen. Across the Indus, beyond Peshawar, the Sayyids and the Mullahs had raised the trans-Indus tribes into a holy war, and Azim Khan was marching down from Kabul to make it his, and the whole of the Sikh frontier west of the Attock was suddenly a single declared jihad against the Khalsa.
The Sarkar was going to war.
And so, the household learned, was the Khalsa that fought beside him, every regiment of it, regular and irregular both, down to the wildest and least governable of all of them, the blue-cloaked Akali Nihangs, who were even now coming down to Amritsar under their Jathedar to be blessed for the campaign.
For three days the city poured soldiers out of its gates, and the boy watched what he could of it from the arms of whichever aunt would lift him to a jharokha.
The drilled battalions went first. They still drew a crowd, because nobody in the Punjab had been able to make men march like that until the Sarkar set himself to buy the trick of it, first off deserters from the Company’s army and now off the firangi generals lately come into his pay: rank behind rank, every musket canted at the same angle, every boot coming down in the same instant, a thousand men walking like one tired animal. Over the carved screen Angrez looked down at them and thought, behind the blank wet face of a child not yet two, ‘There it is. The new model. The leash the chiefs hate and are going to need, and never going to forgive.’
Then came the older army, and the older army was louder, and worse dressed, and he suspected in its own quarters a good deal harder to govern. The Ghorcharhas went through at a clatter, the irregular horse, the sardars’ men who held their land on the promise of riding when the Sarkar called, and they carried everything they owned about them as they rode: a sword at the hip, a round hide shield, and a long matchlock, the tufang. The gun-bearers. He had read the word for them and now here they were under his window, riding out to a holy war. Some of them, he knew, could load that matchlock at a gallop, which was a genuinely hard thing to do and a genuinely finished one, and as he watched them go with a weapon his own century had buried before he was born, he felt the first thin prickle of a worry he had no name for yet and no power on earth to act on.
‘You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,’ he thought at them, ‘and you are carrying the last war but one.’
Angrez sat on the durree at his tutor’s feet, his small hand resting on his takhti, and listened to the names come down the river. Naushahra. Tihri. Hari Singh Nalwa. Akali Phoola Singh. And the floor of the room tilted very slightly under him, with a sensation he was going to spend the rest of this second life learning to live with and never once getting used to.
It was the sensation of sitting inside a chapter he had already read.
He knew this campaign. He had taught this campaign.
He knew which of those names was about to die.
For most of his adult life he had read about Akali Phoola Singh Ji.
The Persian akhbarat, the British residency reports, the fat fifth volume of Hari Ram Gupta: he had read them all, and he had read the man flattened into a footnote in some books and inflated into pure legend in others. The wild Akali, the fanatic, the holy terror of the Sikh military fringe, who had defied Ranjit Singh and fought Ranjit Singh and then bent the whole of his ferocity to Ranjit Singh’s service. And in none of those years of reading had it ever once occurred to Angrez that he might be carried into a courtyard, on the hip of an aunt, and set down in front of him.
But the Sarkar had ordered it.
Before a dharam yudh, a war declared holy, the Maharaja wished his grandsons blessed by the Khalsa that would fight it. So the children of the house of Ranjit Singh were brought, one by one, to the Jathedar of the Akal Bunga, that he might lay his hand on their heads and make ardas for them before he rode north to do God’s violence on their behalf.
Angrez went last, because he was smallest.
He looked up.
And there, in a courtyard thick with the smell of horses and gun-oil and trampled marigold, stood a tall, ferociously bearded man in deep blue, his high dastar bunga stacked with steel chakkars, a khanda on one hip and a quiver at the other, with the calm and untroubled eyes of someone who had decided a very long time ago that death held no jurisdiction over him. The aunts brought the children to him the way you carry something toward a fire that has agreed, for the moment, to behave.
‘Okay,’ Angrez thought, with the small involuntary jolt of a man meeting, in the flesh, a figure he has only ever met in citations. ‘That’s him. That is actually him.’
Akali Phoola Singh Ji looked down at the child.
And the child made a mistake.
He met the Akali’s eyes the way one adult meets another’s.
It lasted perhaps a second and a half. A toddler’s gaze is supposed to skitter, to the beard, the steel, the bright cloth, the noise. Angrez’s did not skitter. For a second and a half, in a courtyard in Amritsar in the late winter of 1823, a two-hundred-year-old soul looked out of a two-year-old’s face and forgot, for once, to hide.
Akali Phoola Singh Ji went very still.
The household did not notice. The household saw a wild old saint of the Khalsa charmed by a wide-eyed little prince, and the aunts smiled, and somebody murmured Waheguru, and somebody else said how the Kanwar wasn’t even frightened, the brave little thing, look at him, what an intriguing child.
The Akali crouched down.
Slowly, the way a man lowers himself at a gurdwara, he brought his weathered face level with the child’s and looked, really looked, the way no one in two years had quite managed. When he spoke his voice was very low, low enough that only the boy caught the whole of it under the courtyard noise.
He said, in Punjabi:
“Oho. There you are.”
Angrez’s blood went to water.
“A long road behind those eyes,” the Akali said softly. “A very long road. You have come from much farther than Kabul, haven’t you, putt. Farther than the kala paani. Farther than they have a name for.”
‘He knows.’ The thought arrived with no panic attached, which was somehow worse than panic. ‘Hai Rabba. He knows. Two years, and the one who sees it is…’
“Don’t be afraid,” said Akali Phoola Singh Ji. And, astonishingly, he smiled, and the smile climbed all the way up into the terrible calm eyes and gentled them completely. “Whoever sent you here had a reason. Waheguru does not waste a soul. He does not put an old traveller in a new cradle for nothing.”
The hand he laid on the boy’s head was enormous and scarred and unexpectedly tender.
“Do the work you were sent to do,” the Jathedar said. “And when you are grown, and they ask you whose grandson you are,” the smile widened, fierce and kind at once, “you give them a good answer, putt. Give them an answer worth the road you walked to get here.”
Then he rose, and turned to the watching household, and laughed his great cracked laugh, and threw the jaikara up over the lot of them, “Bole So Nihal!” And the courtyard came back at him like a struck drum, “Sat Sri Akal!”, loud enough to startle the pigeons clean off the roof.
And the grown man folded up inside the child heard his own name ride up in the middle of the Khalsa’s oldest cry, Nihal, be blessed, be fulfilled, and felt it settle over him the way the Baba ji’s scarred hand had, heavy and warm and entirely unasked for. ‘That,’ thought Angrez, with about the only scrap of awe a lifelong cynic had left in him, ‘is going to take some living up to.’
Then the moment dissolved into noise and blessing and the ordinary clatter of an army getting ready to march.
The aunts carried the child away delighted. What a thing, they said. The great Akali himself, down on his knees in the dust to whisper to the baby. What did he say to you, jaan, what did the Baba Ji say. And they laughed when the baby only looked at them, and decided he had said something holy and obscure in the way of mystics, and they told the story for years, and never once came within a mile of the truth of it.
Bhai Gurmukh Singh, told the story afterward, nodded and said the Akali had always had an eye for a remarkable child.
‘You have no idea,’ Angrez thought, lying awake that night, his small heart still not steady. ‘You have no idea how close that was.’
And then the second thought came, the colder one, the one that kept him staring up at the carved rafters in the dark for a long time.
‘He saw me. The one man in this whole century who saw straight through me. And inside a fortnight he is going to be dead on a hill above the Kabul river, and I am going to be the only person who ever knows that he knew.’
Sleep, that night, did not come easily.
The army crossed the Indus on the thirteenth of March.
What followed, Angrez did not see. He was two years old and four hundred miles away. He reconstructed it later, the way he reconstructed everything: from the darbar runners, from the soldiers who came home, from Faqir Aziz-ud-din’s careful level voice reading the dispatches in the hall, and from the one enormous, useless advantage of having read the ending two centuries before it happened.
On the morning of the fourteenth, the Sikh army met the confederated Yusafzai and Khatak at Tihri, on the left bank of the Kabul river, a kos from Naushahra.
The enemy held the high ground, a long, well-chosen mound, and behind it the Sayyids and the Mullahs had raised the tribesmen into a fury, eight thousand here, ten thousand there, the whole hillside a single declared holy war. Across the river Azim Khan sat with the main Afghan army, waiting to cross and finish what the Ghazis began.
The Sarkar split his force. Sardar Hari Singh Nalwa, with General Ventura and the disciplined infantry, he threw across the river’s approaches to pin Azim Khan and keep him from joining the fight. The rest, the Maharaja himself, Misar Diwan Chand’s guns, General Balbhadra Singh Gorkha, and the Akali jatha under Akali Phoola Singh Ji, went at the hill.
The guns spoke first, and well. The bombardment drove the tribesmen down off the mound. And then the Khalsa Fauj went up after them, and the Khalsa Fauj, for the first time in years, stopped.
The fire coming off that hillside was past anything the men had ever had to stand in. Down into them came the Ghazis with drawn swords and a faith that did not flinch. The Sikh line made its ground and held it and could not take a single step more. Three times the Sarkar himself rode into the worst of it and turned the tribesmen back with his own hand, and still the line would not go forward.
By the middle of the day, a thing had happened to Ranjit Singh that had not happened to him on a battlefield in twenty years.
A shameful defeat had come into view.
Here the household account and the historians agree on what the Sarkar did next, and Angrez, who had known the man as a set of policies and a date of death and was only now, in this second life, beginning to know him as a grandfather, found it the most human thing in the whole grim story.
The Sarkar wanted to wait.
No coward, and no man ever called him one. But he was the shrewdest commander in Hindustan, and the shrewdest commander in Hindustan looked at that hillside, at the dead piling in the long grass, at Azim Khan’s untouched army across the water, and did the arithmetic that shrewd commanders do. Hold. Pull the men back out of the fire. Wait for Nalwa to settle Azim Khan. Wait for the guns to come up again. Wait for the morning if need be. Spend an hour, spend a day, but do not spend the Khalsa on this slope at this price.
He sent word down the line to hold, and draw back.
The word reached Akali Phoola Singh Ji at the foot of the hill, where the blue jatha sat their horses in the open, under fire, and waited.
The Jathedar of the Akal Bunga heard the Sarkar’s order to wait.
And the Jathedar of the Akal Bunga refused it.
The message he sent back up the line went into the records in a dozen forms, but the same iron runs through all of them, and the iron is this:
“Tell the Sarkar,” said Akali Phoola Singh Ji, “that the Khalsa has already said its ardas.”
For a moment he let that settle on the runner.
“The degh has been shared. The Guru has been asked. We have stood before Akal Purakh and prayed for the victory, and a man does not pray for victory in the morning and show the enemy his back in the afternoon. The Khalsa does not turn its back once the ardas is made. There is no waiting after the ardas. There is only forward.”
And then, by every account that survives, Akali Phoola Singh Ji did not wait for the Sarkar to answer.
He turned his horse to the hill.
Notes
1. Takhti: the wooden writing-board, washed with chalk-water and inscribed with a reed pen, on which children of the period learned their letters.
2. Akali Phoola Singh Ji: the most revered of the Akali Nihang leaders of the period, and Jathedar of the Akal Bunga at the Harmandir Sahib, Amritsar, a seat carrying the highest temporal authority within the Khalsa. The honorific Ji, and the titles Baba Ji, Akali Ji, and Jathedar Sahib, follow the reverence the historical and oral tradition accord him. He had clashed bitterly with Ranjit Singh in earlier years and then served him with total devotion; the Sarkar regarded him with a mixture of exasperation and awe.
3. Ardas: the formal Sikh supplicatory prayer, recited standing before the Guru Granth Sahib, in which the sangat lays its petition before Akal Purakh, the Timeless One; the degh (consecrated offering) is shared at its close. The principle dramatised here, that the Khalsa, having stood before the Guru and prayed for victory, does not then retreat, is the recorded sense of the Akali’s refusal to hold the line when the Maharaja wished to wait. The sources agree the Sikh advance had stalled and that “a shameful defeat was in sight” before the Akali jatha moved.
4. Kala paani: literally “the black water,” the open sea; to cross it was, in the orthodox thinking of the period, ritually defiling, and the phrase came to mean any land impossibly far across the ocean. Baba Phoola Singh Ji could not have known how exactly the phrase fit the small soul he was speaking to.