Now the days passed and I spent my time with the young men of my age-group; I learnt to use the weapons of the Vehi, and soon my forearms were covered with the curving white scars of the bow-string; at night, with the young of the tribe, I told stories, sang songs, and made love in the Gotul; at twelve years of age, the girls and boys of the Vehi began spending their nights at this school, under a thatched roof, where they learnt song, the telling of tales, and love, all the business of living; each chose one other, a sweetheart, a beloved, but often these pairs parted, and new ones formed, with little anger and jealousy. Outside, the older people married and saw to the governing of the settlement and the appeasement of the gods and spirits who lived in the trees, the streams, the sky; sometimes the monsoon arrived late, and when it came the rain was momentary and weak, not the furious drenching the parched and cracked ground seemed to call out for, and then there was drought, and hunger; the animals died quickly, pawing at the crumbling furrows on dry river-beds, and the Vehi grew thin and bright-eyed, eating leaves and fighting wild pigs and squirrels for pieces of roots; some of the older people sat in the shade staring into the distance while flies buzzed about their mouths, scuttling over corners of lips and settling near the nostrils; now, children died. But this passed, and it was easy and good to live with the Vehi, because their priests were merry and there was no money; I don’t know how long I stayed with them, maybe a few years, maybe two or three or four, but I know my age-group had left the Gotul and my friends and I hunted far from the settlement, in places where I had never been.
One afternoon, we came up to a huge cliff where a plateau dropped down onto a plain, and on the plain there were coloured tents with flags, elephants, horses; as I watched, a troop of cavalry wheeled out of the camp and disappeared in a cloud of dust; the sun glanced off cannon and lance-heads; we sat and watched, and as the afternoon passed my friends told a story I had heard before: the Vehis had once been kings, and they had ruled the plains, vast and rich; they had lived in palaces, commanded armies like the one below, but one day a neighbouring king had surprised them, coming over the borders in the night, by little-known routes, and soon the Vehi were fighting in the streets of their own towns and villages. They were defeated, and they retreated into the jungles, their ancestral home, where they took up again the old ways of life, as if the palaces had been merely a dream. I listened, watching the elephants move ant-like below me, and thought of how it must be, with the French to the south, the Marathas and Rajputs to the west, the Sikhs in the north, the British in the east, and the Moghuls in the middle (shattered and haunted by memories), and all the others, all those kingdoms, the kings and princes and generals and soldiers, maharajas and sultans, queens and commoners, all uncertain, frightened and rapacious, the centre gone; long into that night, I watched the camp-fires below, and the next morning, when my friends gathered up their bows, I stopped them, and said: Wait, the Vehi will be kings again.
The swing creaked, soft and low, and then sharp; some of the lamps had flickered out, the oil gone, and when Thomas looked up, he could hardly see the Begum’s face. He swallowed, tasting the bittersweet tang of the past, and went on.
I said, the Vehi will be kings again, and they all laughed at first, eager, caught up instantly in the thought, in the future, but when I explained what it would mean, spoke of the descent from the jungle, over the jagged sweeps of the cliff, and the striving that would follow, the struggle, the soldiering, they sat, sober, thoughtful. I saw it on each of their faces, as they pondered: the imaginings of palaces and power, and the smell of the cooking fires of the settlement in the evenings, and the distant singing from the Gotul at night, and even before they shook their heads I knew that I was the only madman who would take the plunge into the world below, into that chaos of ambition and greed we choose to call civilization.
So I said good-bye to the brothers of my age-group, holding each one close for a moment, and then began to work my way down; their voices soon faded away, and the steep slope hid the jungle above. By late afternoon I could see the leaves on the bushes below, and the camp’s picquets had seen me: as I scrambled over the loose shale at the bottom of the precipice, three horsemen waited, their eyes searching the rocks above me, and I could see that they were nervous, not knowing what to expect; I could see that this was a time of war. I knew how strange I must have looked, carrying a tribesman’s bow, with the blue eyes and pale skin of a firangi or a Pathan, so I smiled cheerfully and greeted them in my suddenly unfamiliar English and small French; they looked at each other, puzzled, not understanding the sense of it but clearly recognizing the rhythms, and then they herded me back into the camp, riding behind me, lances at rest.
They were well-built men, riding good horses, dressed, it seemed, each according to his whim, in a wild variety of colours; they were like no other horse soldiers I had ever seen: though each carried a lance, the length varied from six feet to about twelve feet, and only one lance had a pennant attached; all three carried tulwars, and each weapon had a different kind of hilt, one in particular being richly-chased in silver; two carried pistols, and all three had a number of dirks and daggers distributed about their belts; they were an altogether varied and dashing-looking trio, with their turbans and upturned moustaches and long locks, but decidedly, to my eyes, much too unsoldier-like in their accoutrements and demeanour, even for cavalrymen, who, as is well-known, make a fetish of dash and spirit.
By the time we reached the camp a crowd had gathered to drift behind us like a comet’s tail; amidst shoving and exclamation I walked between what seemed to be merchants’ booths, grocers, jewellers, cloth-sellers, sweetmeat-men, armourers, forming a regular bazaar, almost as well-stocked, from what I could see, as the crowded commercial streets of Calcutta, which, you will remember, I had seen briefly. Again, this was most curious: this army marched with a regular complement of traders and craftsmen and entertainers, a sort of moving city that allowed the soldier in the field the benefits and comforts of ordered life; I knew even at that moment, in that babel of foreign tongues, that this would bear some thinking upon, because although this system no doubt made for a more civilized mode of warfare than that practised where I came from, it would result in a loss of mobility, a fatal inability to move fast and strike first; already, you see, something had happened to me, already I was thinking, this I will do, these I will strike, that will be mine, I will be this, I will be that; I had told the Vehi that they would be kings again, but they had disappeared into their mansions of green, and I thought of them no more.
We walked up to a large red tent, and the horseman with the fancy sword hilt swung himself down and went in, nodding to the guards. The crowd arranged itself in a half-circle around the entrance, and as we waited some called out to me, and when I didn’t react others poked at me, none too gently, with sticks and sheathed tulwars; I stepped back quickly, turning, unslinging my bow, and for a moment there was a tense silence, and I could hear the flags flapping in the wind, but then footsteps came closer, behind me, and the crowd seemed to subside into itself, the raised sticks being lowered and twitchy hands moving away from hilts. A stout man, perhaps of about thirty years —dressed in white silks with pearls at his throat, diamonds on his fingers and an emerald-laden ornament on his turban —circled me slowly, keeping a good ten feet away at all times; another man, broad-chested, white-haired, stepped up to me, peering down at my bow; he looked around quickly, then pointed to a spear stuck into the ground some fifty feet away. I notched an arrow, breathed a prayer, thought inexplicably of Guha for a moment and let fly; the spear shook, and I could hear the quick dying buzz of the vibration. Confident now, I pulled out another arrow and put it below the last one, and then another one above. The crowd babbled approvingly, and the white-haired man grinned.
This was how I came to the service of the Raja of Balrampur, for that was who the silk-clad man was; in the early mornings, Uday —the one with the white hair —and I walked out beyond the lines and skimmed arrows at tre
es, twigs, and finally leaves that fluttered unpredictably through the air; I taught him what I knew of the use of the Vehi bow, and he showed me exercises to strengthen my wrists, and the art of wielding the tulwar, the curving sabre of Hindustan; I learnt, too, the language of the camps, of soldiers from Rajasthan to the Deccan, that startlingly beautiful patois called Urdu. In those first days and weeks, as I learnt the ways of these people, these morning sessions were the only contact I had with soldiers, because they would, according to the rules of caste, not let me near their cooking fires, and I was a weird, ragged firangi, so the only people who would let me sit with them were the lowest of the low, the foragers and the sweepers, who, I suppose, enjoyed the thrill of having a genuine foreign-sounding firangi at their fires.
I was lonely then, more alone than I had ever been, even more sunk in solitude than during the early frightening days of my first voyage, when the sea was flat and still, and the slops that we threw overboard vanished with hardly a splash; I lay at night, grinding my teeth, an oppressive soreness pressing up in my chest, at the bottom of my throat; thrashing about, I wondered why I had to go on, from one unfamiliar vista to another; I dreamt about the Vehi, about my lovers, my brothers, but already I knew there was no returning. For some of us there never is.
The Raja of Balrampur had succeeded to the throne a few months earlier, when his ageing father spit blood into his treasured rows of jasmine. When the old man died the nawab of the neighbouring principality of Amjan sent parties of raiders into the villages near the border, testing Balrampur’s nerve; negotiations had taken place, and Brahmins had gone back and forth bearing queries and threats, but finally armies had taken the field, and we marched in long arcs, feinting and probing, looking for that one opening, that one chance. The two masses of men drew close to each other and then drifted apart, caught in a slow centrifugal dance, reluctant to come together but unable to escape those converging orbits.
From the periphery, dressed in Uday’s cast-off clothing, I watched the everyday business of the camp: the mornings when men practised with their weapons, the haze of blue smoke in the air and the peppery smell from the cooking-fires, the elaborate etiquette of the durbars and the presentation of khilluts, the quick shouting matches over arrears in pay and the grand promises, the long jingling dances by famous courtesans on festival days and the ranks of abstracted eyes. I followed Uday as he strode about, growling orders, checking horses and guns, giving advice, and so on, fulfilling, it seemed to me, the duties and obligations of an officer of middle rank; soon, I was accepted as Uday’s body-guard or major-domo, a position which, I was to understand later, was traditionally held by foreigners of one type or another, by Arabs, Abyssinians, Pathans, Afghans, Mongols, Turks, Persians, all the quick-handed adventurers who had come in turn to Hindustan seeking fortune. I began to speak, first the words of greeting and good manners, then the convoluted soldiers’ curses of nature familial and anatomical that rang out of the dust in the chaos at the beginning of each march; so as we marched, I watched and learnt, and we seemed to march, as the saying goes, wherever the lizard runs and the tortoise crawls. Finally, the two armies confronted each other, next to a town, the name of which I have forgotten, and when the sun became a puddle of crimson and purple on the horizon, we could see their fires dotted about the plain to our north, like a nest of fire-flies, like cat-eyes in the dark.
I slept fitfully, and in the grey hours of morning, when only flat shadows exist, when it seems impossible that the clash of colours will follow, I sat on my haunches, shivering, listening to the beating of my heart; when the camp began to stir, I walked around, looking at the sleepy faces as they scrubbed their teeth with a dantun twig or performed their morning oblations for the sun, and I could see no fear, none of that frenzied scribbling of letters that I had witnessed on other mornings, before other battles, and so then I understood that I was amongst strangers, amidst soldiers who followed a foreign creed, born of an alien soil.
After a leisurely breakfast we formed up and took to the field, You may well imagine the scene: the flare of the sun off armour and weapons, the dust, the beating of drums, the shriek of conch-shells, the jingling and creaking of horse-furniture, the whinnying of the horses and the screams of the elephants, the rich stink of dung. Balrampur arranged his army thus: the front consisted of three regiments of infantry, interspersed with a motley collection of cannon from his gun-park; the left flank was covered by a rissalah of cavalry, mostly Afghans and Rajputs; our right flank was protected by the empty houses of that nameless town, where a brigade of infantry had dug in; behind the front line of infantry he positioned three rissalahs of cavalry and one of elephants, and finally, in the rear, at the centre, he sat, surrounded by his household cavalry, resplendent in white, on a richly caparisoned elephant, in a howdah with steel walls some three feet high, so only his eyes and head were exposed to attack.
Uday’s rissalah was positioned behind Balrampur, held in reserve; I had no horse, so I had run beside Uday’s black Arab, holding on grimly to my meagre Vehi weaponry, augmented by a tulwar given to me by him; he smiled at me, fingering the knob at the top of the hilt, and it rose away, turning on some sort of hinge, revealing a shallow compartment built into the hand-grip, full of little green balls. Uday lifted out one of these balls and put it into his mouth; seeing me watching, he flicked a ball at me, and I put up my hands to catch it, but lost it in the sun. I knelt and ran my fingers through the grass, looking for it, and when I brought it up to my lips my fingers were stained green with sap from the broken blades; I chewed, licking my fingers, watching Amjan’s army spread over the field opposite, and a calm lassitude, an accepting quietude flowed through my veins, into my finger-tips.
The two forces were about equally-matched, though perhaps we had a little more infantry; they were deployed in a formation approximately the mirror image of ours, with cavalry on the flanks, and infantry and guns at the centre, their line being a little shorter than ours, with their left flank angling towards the town on our right. A little before noon, judging by the sun, I saw smoke puff across the field, and then the thud of the pieces echoed over us, followed by the whoosh of shot. Our guns replied with a cannonade, and instantly the firing became general, but the men around us seemed unconcerned; the blood thrilled through my limbs, and I remember feeling only a mad excitement, and seeing, unexpectedly, the cannon balls (little black dots against the blue) suspended at the top of their arcs before they plummeted down to raise fountains of mud. The firing seemed to create more noise and smoke than casualties, and was punctuated by the hiss and roar of rockets, fired by men who ran out between the lines carrying sticks and fuses; all this was new to me, then, you see, so even when a ball of flame, spitting sparks, meandered crazily through the air and spent itself against the ground near us, causing the horses to shift from leg to leg uneasily and toss their heads, I stood straight, my neck rigid, my eyes darting about, drinking it all in, eager young fool.
With a shout, Amjan’s skirmishers at the centre started forward towards us, with little jets of flame springing out at our lines. Balrampur said something to one of his generals, and two horsemen raced away from us; moments later, one of the rissalahs in front of us galloped between our brigades of infantry and cut into the enemy, scattering them to and fro, but almost instantly they received a charge from Amjan’s cavalry, and then the horsemen wheeled around each other, dust eddying around the melee, and from where I was I could hear the shouts, the commands and the calls of recognition and the screams of pain, far away and brittle on the hot air; my head pounding, I thought then of what it must be like in there, in the whirlwind, and I cannot describe that feeling to you, pity and fear and eagerness and something else moving underneath, that obscene other thing, the moving of blood, and I was young, so I watched, lost in it, in the spectacle, and forgot to observe carefully, as I had planned in the calm of night, the tactics used by the generals, their feints and techniques and use of ground, so I cannot tell you exactly what
transpired on that field as the sun moved above us, as our shadows shifted about us, but I remember a sudden commotion nearby, a craning of necks and moving.
I looked up at Uday, who was shading his eyes to peer at the town to our right, where smoke was rising above the roofs. To our front, our whole line was engaged, shrouded in dust; the sun was a glowing yellow patch above us, dimmed, but the air was searing hot in my nostrils, and the metal on the hilt of my sword burnt my fingers. It was clear what Amjan had done: some troops had been concealed, perhaps during the night, near the town, in a copse of trees or a fold in the ground, a nullah or such-like, and when our line was engaged, they had hurled themselves at the point where we least expected attack, in an attempt to roll up our flank; orders were shouted, and the horsemen around me began to move; I ran beside Uday, and he looked at me, thoughtful, calculating, and they began to trot —now I could barely keep up with them —and I lifted up my bow and gestured at him, not knowing myself what I meant, but something changed in his eyes, and maybe it was a squint against the dust, maybe something else, but in any case he reached down to grasp my arm, lifting, and a moment later I was seated behind him, bouncing as we galloped hell-for-leather towards the white houses.
We leapt over overturned carts and twisted bodies in the main street, at the other end of which two groaning masses of men strained and twisted against each other, but even as we drew near a shower of missiles enveloped us, coming from the roof-tops, whizzing past our heads and making sudden thudding sounds as they hit flesh. I felt the horse beneath us stumble, twist to the side and then we had to scramble as it went down; I tried to fight my way to the side of the street, something hit me on the nape of my neck, a boot or somebody’s knee, and I tasted blood and my vision constricted, and when I came to myself I was on my knees, being dragged along by Uday, who had his sword out and was cursing, shouting about mothers and sisters, and I found myself wanting to laugh, and I could see thrashing horse limbs and a fine spray of blood, and I giggled a little and struggled to my feet.