Chapter 6 of 6
Whose Grandson Am I? (5)
The household told this part over and over in the years that followed, until it stopped being a battle and became a hymn. Angrez had read four versions of it before he was born into the century that made it, and found, when the survivors told it in the haveli courtyard with the firelight on their faces, that the reading had not prepared him for the telling at all.
Akali Phoola Singh Ji led his Nihang contingent up the hill, into the fire.
He led from the front, on horseback, the black-and-blue flags of the Akal Bunga snapping over him, and the three hundred came up the slope behind him into a wall of musketry thrown down by thirty thousand men, and the wall of musketry did not turn them.
Not far up the slope, his horse was shot dead beneath him.
Coming off it, he got to his feet in the open, in the worst of the fire, and looked for a way to keep his men moving. A leader who cannot be seen cannot lead a charge, and Baba Phoola Singh Ji had no intention of leading from anywhere his men could not see him.
So he took the elephant.
There was a war-elephant in the line. He mounted it and climbed up into the howdah, where every Ghazi on the hill could see the blue dastar bunga and the steel chakkars and know precisely who was coming for them, and from up there, lifted clear above the smoke for the whole hillside to watch, he raised his khanda and roared the contingent forward.
It was the bravest thing on the field and the most certain to kill him, and he knew both, and he did it anyway. A saint on an elephant under thirty thousand guns is not a man making a tactical calculation. He is a man who has already settled, in his own heart, how the day is going to end for him, and has chosen to make the ending count for everything it possibly can.
The mahavat, the driver, broke first. Under that fire he would not take the elephant another step. So Akali Phoola Singh Ji drew the pistol from his belt and shot the man dead, then leaned forward over the great beast’s head, set the point of his khanda against the back of its skull, and drove it up the hill himself, alone in the howdah, into the very centre of the enemy line.
He shouted, as the elephant climbed, the cry that goes up before the dying starts, “Bole So Nihal!” And he did not shout it once and have done. He threw it again, and again, over the smoke and the screaming, the leader’s half of the oldest call the Khalsa owns, “Bole So Nihal,” hurled up the slope into the muzzles like a fist on a locked door.
And his three hundred gave him back the other half of it in one voice, “Sat Sri Akal!” He called, and the blue turbans answered; he called again, and they answered again; and the jaikara rolled up that hillside without a break, the call and the answer and the call again, while the fire tore holes in the men who were making it.
The hill answered him: “Ya Allah! Ya Ali!”
And the Afghan musketeers, who could now see exactly one target on that whole slope worth all their powder, gave it all their powder.
They marked the man on the elephant, and they fired on him, and they did not stop firing on him. He was hit, and held the howdah; and hit again, and held it; and hit again. The matchlock balls came into him from the whole crest of the hill at once, more than a man can take and stay standing, more than a man can take and keep breathing, and Akali Phoola Singh Ji, Jathedar of the Akal Bunga, riddled through with the fire of thirty thousand guns, gave up his body on the back of the elephant above the Kabul river, and was a martyr before it had carried him another length up the hill.
The elephant did not stop.
It walked on, with Baba Ji dead in the howdah and the khanda still resting against its skull from a hand that had gone slack, and behind it the three hundred came on screaming, and behind the three hundred the whole Khalsa Fauj came on, because the men who would not move for the Sarkar’s encouragement, and would not move for the Sarkar’s order, moved at last for the sight of the old Akali dying in front of them rather than wait.
His shaheedi did what no order could. And the cry he had raised did not die with him. The army took it up off the dead man’s lips and made it an army’s, ten thousand throats where there had been three hundred, the call and the answer rolling unbroken across the whole red slope, Bole So Nihal, Sat Sri Akal, and it did not stop, would not stop, would not once fall silent through the long afternoon, until there was no Ghazi left on the crest to cry Ya Ali against it, and the roar had outlasted the man who raised it.
By sundown the Sikh army held the hill. Two thousand of the Khalsa lay dead on the slope, General Balbhadra Singh Gorkha among them. Five thousand of the enemy lay above them. Azim Khan, across the river, having never struck a blow, broke camp and fled toward Kabul, where he sickened of the shame of it and died within two months. The Kabul river, that night, ran the colour of rust for half a kos below the field.
And the fleeing Pathans, the household runners swore, were heard saying to one another as they ran: “Tobah, tobah. Khuda ham Khalsa shudah.”
Alas. Even God has turned Sikh.
When the Sarkar reached the crest at sunset, by the account of the jamadar of his own bodyguard, he went first to the elephant.
He wept, and the sardars who had come up the crest behind him wept with him, and not one of them looked away from it.
For a long time he only stood in the trampled grass beside the great beast, his scarred hand against its flank, and looked up at the body in the howdah.
The elephant lowered its trunk.
Then the Sarkar turned to the jamadar, and the grief went out of his voice, and the king came back into it.
“Bring him down, and gently. Cover him with my shawl, this one, from my own shoulders. Then give him every rite and every gun the Khalsa has. Raise his samadh here where he fell, before we leave this hill, and set a jagir aside to keep it for as long as there is a Sarkar in Lahore to keep anything at all. He is not to become a name that fades.”
“Sarkar ji,” said the jamadar.
“And the mothers of the enemy.” The Sarkar looked out over the slope, at the long grass full of the Yusafzai dead. “Any woman of theirs who wishes to come and grieve a son on this hill is to be brought here under my own bodyguard. Tell the Khan of Naushahra. Tell the Mullahs. He fell on this hill. Anybody who loved anybody who fell on this hill is to be given safe passage to come and weep for them. Today. Tomorrow. As long as we are here.”
The Sarkar, who would in his later years be accused by his own children of many failures but never, not once, of forgetting a man who died well, walked away from the elephant, and sat down on the cold stones near the crest of the hill, and looked at the river, and stayed there until the samadh was built.
He did not eat that night.
The news of Tihri reached the haveli on the evening of the eighteenth of March, in three forms, in roughly the order Angrez had braced for.
The first was the darbar announcement, brought by a court runner: Victory. Yusafzai broken. Azim Khan fled. The Sarkar holds the field at Tihri.
The second was the list of the Sikh dead, read out separately in the hall by Faqir Aziz-ud-din in his carefully level voice. It was a long list, and most of the names on it were the names of foot-soldiers no one in the haveli had ever heard of. Near the middle was General Balbhadra Singh Gorkha, who had held the centre. And at the very end, on a line by itself, read without comment:
Akali Phoola Singh Ji.
The third form was Kharak Singh, walking home from the darbar in the dusk, pale and quiet, walking like a man who had been handed something that rearranged his understanding of his own life. Sitting down on the durree in the central courtyard, he did not speak for a long time.
Bibi Chand Kaur, who knew him better than the rest of them did, did not ask. She sat down beside him and waited.
After a while he said, very low: “Akali Ji is gone.”
She did not say I know, though she did. She said only: “The Jathedar.”
“The Jathedar.”
“The Sarkar will grieve,” she said.
“The Sarkar is grieving.” Kharak Singh turned his soft, tired eyes up to the darkening sky over the courtyard. “He built the samadh on the hill where the Akali fell. The same night. By torchlight. Every man who could carry a brick carried one. He has sent for Baba Ji’s wife to come and see it. And he has sent safe passage to the mothers of the enemy, any Yusafzai woman who wishes to grieve a son on that hill is to be brought there under the Sarkar’s own bodyguard. He told the Mullahs. He said: anyone who loved anyone who died on that hill is to be given safe passage to come and weep for them. As long as the army is there.”
Chand Kaur was quiet a moment.
Then she said: “That is the most like himself I have ever heard the Sarkar be.”
“Yes,” said Kharak Singh.
And the toddler at the edge of the durree, whom neither of them was watching, sat very still in the dark with his small hand on the cloth, and grieved a man he had met for the length of one breath, and understood that the grief was going to be his alone to carry, because he was the only one in that courtyard who knew what had actually passed between them.
The army came home to Lahore in the warm weather, and it came home with Hari Singh Nalwa.
Angrez had wanted to see this man almost as much as he had dreaded seeing the Akali, because if Akali Phoola Singh Ji was the conscience of the Khalsa, Hari Singh Nalwa was its sword-arm, the single most feared soldier the Punjab ever produced, the general whose name, the sources all swore, the mothers of the trans-Indus used to frighten their children quiet at night. Hush. Be still. Haria has come. A man so woven into the terror of the frontier that the Pathans were said to believe no ordinary musket-ball could find him.
Riding in at the Sarkar’s side he came, and Angrez, held up at a jharokha by an aunt to watch the victorious darbar procession wind up toward the Fort, got his first look at the legend, and found, for the second time that year, that the page had lied to him by being too small.
Hari Singh Nalwa, in person, was quiet. Not the brittle quiet of a violent man holding himself in, but a deep, economical stillness, the stillness of a blade that has no need to announce its edge. He did not strut. He did not perform. Through a city screaming his name he rode with the mild, attentive patience of a man doing a job he was extremely good at, and the patience was somehow more frightening than any swagger could have been, because you understood, looking at it, that this was the resting face of a man who had personally ended more lives than the plague, and that none of it sat heavily on him at all.
‘There’s the other half,’ Angrez thought, watching the quiet man ride under his window with a city roaring around him. ‘The Akali was the fire. This one is the temperature. The Sarkar built a furnace and these are the two halves of how it burns, and inside fifteen years one of them will be dead at Jamrud holding a fort with a corpse propped up to make the garrison think he’s still alive, and the kingdom will start coming apart at the seams the very week the news gets home.’
The face went away into the file with the rest of it. Even at two, he was building a private gallery of the men he was going to have to save this kingdom with, and the men he was going to have to save it from, and the hardest part, he was beginning to grasp the shape of it, was that several of them were going to be the same men.
The samadh on the hill at Tihri stood for the next century and a half, and it became, as the household would learn through the months that followed, a place of pilgrimage, and the pilgrims were not who anyone would have guessed.
The Sikh soldiers of the Khalsa Fauj came to it, on their way to and from the Indus campaigns, and left flowers and sweets and, on the days nearest the anniversary of the battle, small steel chakkars the trans-Indus smiths had fashioned in miniature.
The Hindu villagers of the surrounding country came to it, on their way to their own temples, and left the marigold petals customary to their dead.
And the Muslim mothers of the Yusafzai villages on the upper hill, whose sons had died, in their hundreds, charging the Akalis who had charged Baba Phoola Singh Ji’s elephant, came to it as well.
They came in twos and threes. They came on Thursday afternoons, which in their tradition was the day for prayer over the safety of children. At the base of the samadh they lit small earthen lamps. They were lighting them, by the time Angrez Singh’s second life was over, for the spirit of the hero of Tihri, so that their children, growing up in the long shadow of the man who had died charging up that hill, might be kept safe by him.
The man who had ridden up that hill to break their fathers had become the thing their mothers asked to guard their sons.
In his last act, Akali Phoola Singh Ji had crossed the line that divided him from his enemies, and had, by dying, made himself the shared property of both sides. And it remained, ever after, the one act of his ferocious and unaccountable life that none of the historians of his own community could ever fully explain.
Angrez Singh thought he could explain it.
He never told anyone. There was, after all, only ever going to be one person he could have told, and that person was on the hill.
The household told the manner of his death many times in the years that came after, and every time, the part that stayed with the boy was not the elephant, though the elephant was what the songs kept. It was the fire.
Thirty thousand guns on one man, because he had made himself the only target on that hill worth the powder, and the powder finding him, and finding him again, until there was more lead in him than a body can hold and still stand. Matchlocks, most of them. The long tufang, the same homely weapon the Sarkar’s own Ghorcharhas carried, the same the barrel-smiths of Kotli Loharan turned out by the score for anyone who could pay: a yard of welded iron, a charge of powder that was mostly the white salt boiled clean, a length of cord kept burning at both ends. Nothing his own century would have looked at twice.
And Angrez Singh, who had spent the whole of one life loving guns, who had wound copper around steel in a cold garage chasing the perfect throw of a slug and had been killed by the thing he built, heard the story out and understood the joke of it at last, and did not find it funny.
The Tenth Guru had saluted, in his own verse, the arrow and the gun. The weapon was holy to these people, sewn into the faith itself, the saint’s blade and the soldier’s barrel made one thing. And it was also the exact thing that had found the one man in the whole century who looked at the strange child and saw the truth and blessed it. The gun the Guru saluted and the gun that killed the saint were the same gun. They were always going to be the same gun. The boy who knew more about guns than anyone for two thousand miles around could not think his way past that, and in the end he stopped trying, and only carried it, the way he was learning to carry everything.
Long after the haveli had gone to sleep, the toddler lay awake on his charpai and looked up into the dark where the carved rafters were, and held, very carefully, the only conversation he was ever going to be able to have about the thing that had happened to him.
‘Baba Ji.’
Outside, somewhere across the sleeping city, a watch-drum marked the hour.
‘You were the only one. Two years I’ve been here, and a thousand of them have looked at me and seen an intriguing child, and exactly one of them looked at me and saw the truth, and then you got on an elephant and rode it into thirty thousand guns rather than wait an hour for the odds to turn. The one man who could have given me away. Gone, before you could so much as finish the sentence.’
It should have been relief. That first night he had reasoned it correctly, that the single soul in the whole century who knew what was in the cradle was about to take the knowing into a martyr’s grave, and that this made him safer than he had ever been or would ever be again.
The reasoning had been correct. He felt no relief at all.
What he felt, in the dark, was that he had been seen, once, completely, kindly, by the most frightening person he had ever met, and that the seeing had not been a threat in the end. Do the work you were sent to do. The Akali had not looked at the impossible thing behind the child’s eyes and recoiled. He had looked at it and welcomed it, with the easy certainty of a man who had stood his whole life in the presence of the Timeless and had simply concluded that an old traveller in a new body must have been sent for a reason, and that the only thing to do about it was to bless it and tell it to get on with the job.
Nobody else in this world was ever going to give him that.
Everybody else was only ever going to see the bright, forward, remarkable little flame, and never once the truth. The one man who had seen the truth had just gotten himself martyred on an elephant rather than keep the enemy waiting.
‘Give them a good answer,’ the Akali had said. ‘An answer worth the road you walked to get here.’
‘I will,’ Angrez thought, in the dark, with a fierceness that startled him out of his own grief. ‘Baba Ji. I will. I don’t know how yet, and I’ve got about thirty years to work it out, and I’m going to spend most of them pretending to be a clever boy in a court full of people who want each other dead. But I will. I promise you that, and you’re the only one I’m ever going to be able to promise it to.’
Across the city, the temple bell began to ring for the dead.
He was two years old.
Eighteen years lay ahead of him.
And he thought, even then, lying in the dark of a kingdom that did not know it was dying, the only one in it who did, that it would be enough.
End of Book One: “Whose Grandson Am I?”
To be continued.
Notes
1. The sources vary on the precise manner of the martyrdom. Hari Ram Gupta records a single matchlock ball through the forehead, taken as the elephant climbed; the tradition followed here, the saint cut down on the elephant under sustained, concentrated fire, riddled with the musketry of the whole hillside, preserves the same essential truth: that he made himself the most exposed target on the field and was killed for it, and that his death, not the Maharaja’s orders, carried the hill. Both Gupta and Khushwant Singh credit the victory at Tihri (Naushahra), 14 March 1823, directly to his sacrifice. A gurdwara and a tomb were raised at the site.
2. Hari Ram Gupta records that the samadh raised over Akali Phoola Singh Ji became a place of pilgrimage for Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims alike, and that Muslim women lit earthen lamps there on Thursdays praying for the safety of their children “from the spirit of the hero of Tihri.” It is not the author’s invention.
3. Sardar Hari Singh Nalwa (c. 1791-1837), the foremost general of the Khalsa Fauj and Ranjit Singh’s governor on the Afghan frontier, the most feared Sikh soldier of the age, whose name passed into trans-Indus legend. He fell at the battle of Jamrud in April 1837; the tradition that his death was concealed to hold the fort until relief arrived is recorded in several accounts. His loss removed the last man capable of holding the frontier, and stands, in Angrez Singh’s private reckoning, among the hinges on which the whole tragedy would later turn.
4. Tufang: the matchlock musket, and by extension any firearm; a tufangchi is the man who carries it. Guru Gobind Singh Ji honoured the weapons of war in his own compositions, among them the line rendered “Namaskaran mor tiran tufangan” (“I salute the arrow and the gun”), quoted in Hari Ram Gupta’s History of the Sikhs. The Punjab’s finest matchlock barrels were forged by the smiths of Kotli Loharan, in the Sialkot district, and were prized across the region for their strength and finish; the trans-Indus tribes were prolific gunsmiths in their own right. Hari Ram Gupta records that the shot which killed Akali Phoola Singh Ji entered his forehead from a Ghazi’s matchlock, the same plain weapon dramatised here.
5. The tradition records that when the field was won and word reached him, Maharaja Ranjit Singh came to the howdah in tears, with his sardars about him, and covered Akali Phoola Singh Ji’s body with his own shawl. The Jathedar was given his last rites with full military honours, and a samadh was raised in his memory by the battlefield, to which the Maharaja attached a jagir for its upkeep; Hari Ram Gupta records the gurdwara and tomb erected at the site. The earlier rupture between the two men is also historical: Akali Phoola Singh Ji had once had the Maharaja summoned before the Akal Takht and made to bare his back for a token lash, for a breach of Khalsa discipline, and Ranjit Singh submitted to it before the assembled Panth. It is the measure of the one authority in the kingdom that stood above the throne.