So Kesri had no choice but to hold his tongue when military men stopped by to ask Ram Singh about his boys. He would chew on his gall in silence while his father explained that he’d be glad to talk about the prospects of his second son, Bhim — but where it concerned his oldest boy there was nothing to talk about: his future had already been decided. Kesri would be staying at home to till the land.
To add to Kesri’s misery, it was at about this time that offers of marriage began to pour in for the sister who was closest to him in age. It seemed that she too would soon be leaving home. It was as if new horizons of possibility were opening up for everyone but himself.
Since Deeti spent a good deal of time in the fields with Kesri she was the only person in the family who understood his state of mind. The other girls were kept indoors as much as possible, to protect their complexions, but Deeti’s chances of a good marriage were slight in any case because of her ill-aligned stars, so it was decided that she needed to know how to work the land. She was no taller than Kesri’s knee when he began to teach her how to handle a nukha — the eight-bladed instrument that was used to nick ripe poppy bulbs. They would walk along the rows of denuded flowers, each with a nukha in their hands, scoring the tumescent sacs to bleed them of their sap. When the heady odour of the oozing opium-gum made them drowsy they would sit together in the shade of a tree.
Even though Deeti was much younger than Kesri they were able to talk to each other as to no one else. Deeti’s capacities of empathy and understanding were so far in advance of her age that there were times when Kesri would wonder whether she had indeed been gifted with powers beyond the ordinary. Sometimes, when he despaired of leaving Nayanpur, it was she — a tiny putli of a girl — who reassured him. She knew that he brooded about the horizons that were opening up before his brother and sister, and she often said to him: Wu saare baat na socho. Don’t think of all that. Turn your mind to other things.
But to ignore what was happening was plainly impossible. Their home had never before attracted so many strangers; never had they experienced the excitement of being sought out and courted in this way. Often, at the end of the day’s work, when they headed back to their mud-walled home, they would find their father talking to recruiters, in the shade of the mango tree out front; or they would learn that their mother was in the inner courtyard, deep in discussion with marital go-betweens.
Ram Singh was as well-informed about military matters as their mother was about the marriage market. He had spent many years in the army of the kingdom of Berar and was acquainted with a good number of the professional recruiters who roamed the villages of their region looking for promising young men. This stretch of the Gangetic plain had always provided the armies of northern India with the bulk of their soldiery. Since many of these jawans were from families like their own, they had relatives in at least a dozen armies. Ram Singh had tended to these connections carefully and long before anyone came to inquire about his sons, he knew exactly the kind of recruiter he wanted to talk to. He also knew which recruiters he would ignore — and it made no difference whether they were relatives or not.
One of the first recruiters to seek them out was an agent of the Darbhanga Raj, a zamindari with which they had a family connection. Being a relative he was given a polite hearing but no sooner was he gone than his offer was summarily dismissed.
The Darbhanga Raj is just a petty zamindari nowadays, said Ram Singh. It’s not like it used to be in my father’s time. They are vassals of the white sahibs; to work for them would be even worse than joining the English Company’s army.
This was a matter on which Ram Singh had strong opinions. Their district had been seized by the East India Company a long time ago, but in the beginning the annexation had made little difference and things had gone on much as usual. But with the passage of time the Company had begun to interfere in matters that previous rulers had never meddled with — like crops and harvests for example. In recent years the Company’s opium factory in Ghazipur had started to send out hundreds of agents — arkatis and sadar mattus — to press loans on farmers, so that they would plant poppies in the autumn. They said these loans were meant to cover the costs of the crop and they always promised that there would be handsome profits after the harvest. But when the time came the opium factory often changed its prices, depending on how good the crop had been that year. Since growers were not allowed to sell to anyone but the factory, they often ended up making a loss and getting deeper into debt. Ram Singh knew of several men who had been ruined in this way.
Of late the Company had even tried to interfere in the job market, taking steps to discourage men from joining any army but their own. For Ram Singh, as for many others, this was even more objectionable than meddling with their crops. That anyone should assert an exclusive claim to their service was an astonishing idea: few things were as important to them as their right to work for whoever offered the best terms. It was not uncommon for brothers and cousins to take jobs in different armies: if they happened to meet in battle, it was assumed that each man would do his duty and fight loyally for his leader, having ‘eaten his salt’. This was how things had been in Ram Singh’s time and his father’s before him; and so far as he was concerned it was yet another reason why he did not want his sons to join the Company’s paltans.
Ram Singh was well-acquainted with the Company’s army, having fought against it at the Battle of Assaye. The Berar forces had entered that battlefield in alliance with the army of Gwalior, and they had come painfully close to giving the British the greatest defeat they had ever suffered. Ram Singh never ceased to relive that battle, and he often said that the British victory was due solely to the cunning of their general, Arthur Wellesley, who had succeeded in sowing treachery in the opposing ranks, through bribery and deceit.
If there was one thing that Ram Singh was sure of it was that the East India Company’s army was no place for any of his sons. In the English way of fighting, he liked to say, there was nothing to stir the blood, nothing heroic. No Company soldier ever stepped forward to offer single combat; none of their jawans sought glory by breaking from their ranks and taking the enemy unawares. Their way of fighting was like that of an army of ants, always lined up shoulder to shoulder, each man sheltering behind another, every soldier doing exactly the same thing at the same time, everyone making the same, drilled movements. There was something ant-like even about their appearance, with all of them in identical livery, no one daring to identify himself with his own insignia or his own unmistakable turban. As for the caravans that followed them, they were shabby and nondescript affairs, at least in comparison with the vast baggage-trains that accompanied the armies of Gwalior, Jaipur and Indore, with all their dancing girls and bazars.
What was the point of a soldiering life if it offered no pleasure or colour? Why would a man throw himself into a battle if he did not know that at the end of the fighting he would be able to take his ease amongst the camp-followers, seeking out his favourite girls, and being plied with rich food and heady drink? Better be a cowherd, pasturing livestock, than live like that. There was no honour in it, no izzat: it was contrary to the ways of their caste, and against the customs of Hindustan.