Kesri! Sunn!
It was Pagla-baba, the paltan’s mascot and mendicant: like others of his ilk, he had an uncanny knack for guessing what was on people’s minds.
Ka bhaiyil? What is it, Pagla-baba?
Hamaar baat sun; listen to my words, Kesri — I predict that you will receive news of your relatives today.
Bhagwaan banwale rahas! cried Kesri gratefully. God bless you! Pagla-baba’s prediction whetted Kesri’s eagerness to be back at the camp and he forgot about Gulabi. Spurring his horse ahead, he trotted past the part of the caravan that was reserved for the camp-following gentry — the Brahmin pundits, the munshi, the bazar-chaudhuri with his account books, the Kayasth dubash, who interpreted for the officers, and the baniya-modi, who was the paltan’s banker, arranging remittances to the sepoys’ families and doling out loans at exorbitant rates. These men were travelling in the same cart, chewing paan as they went.
It was the munshi who was in charge of letters: to him fell the task of distributing daak to the sepoys. As he was passing the cart, Kesri paused to tell the munshi that a delivery of post had arrived and he had reason to believe that he might at last have received a letter from his family.
Keep the chithi ready for me, munshiji, said Kesri. I’ll meet you at the camp as soon as I can.
The throng on the road had thinned a little now and Kesri was able to canter past the bylees that were carrying the paltan’s heavy weaponry — dismantled howitzers, mortars, field-pieces — and its squad of artillerymen, a detachment of golondauzes and gun-lascars. Next came the jail-party, with its contingent of captured Burmese soldiers, and then the mess-train, with its cartloads of supplies for the officers’ kitchen — crates of tinned and bottled food, barrels of beer, demijohns of wine and hogsheads of whisky. This was closely followed by the hospital establishment, with its long line of canvas-covered hackeries, carrying the sick and wounded.
After leaving these behind, Kesri ran straight into swarming herds of livestock — goats, sheep and bullocks for the officers’ table. The bheri-wallahs who tended the animals tried to clear a path for him, but with little success. Rather than sit idly in the saddle, waiting for the herds to pass, Kesri swerved off the path and rode into a stretch of overgrown wasteland.
This was fortunate for he soon spotted the battalion’s dozen or so English officers: they had broken away from the column and were riding towards the sandy ridge that separated the river from the road.
They too saw him coming and reined in their horses. One of them, the battalion’s adjutant, Captain Neville Mee, rode towards Kesri while the others waited in the shade of a tree.
‘Is that a dispatch bag, havildar?’
‘Yes, Mee-sah’b.’
‘You can hand it to me, havildar. Thank you.’
Taking possession of the dispatch bag, the adjutant said: ‘You’d better wait here, havildar — you may be needed again.’
Kesri watched from a distance as Captain Mee trotted off to deliver the bag to the commandant. Major Wilson opened it, took out some papers and then slapped Captain Mee on the back, as if to congratulate him. Within minutes the officers were all pumping the captain’s hand, crying out: ‘You’re a lucky dog, Mee …’
The sight piqued Kesri’s curiosity: had Captain Mee received a promotion perhaps? He had certainly waited for one long enough — almost ten years had passed since the last.
It so happened that Mr Mee was Kesri’s own ‘butcha’ — his child — at least in the sense in which the word was used in the Bengal Native Infantry, which was to say that Kesri had been Mr Mee’s first orderly when he joined the battalion as a seventeen-year-old ensign, fresh from the Company’s military academy at Addiscombe, in England. Kesri was not much older than him but he had been a sepoy for three years already and had seen enough combat to consider himself a veteran. From that time on Kesri had ‘raised’ Mr Mee, instructing him in the ways of the battalion, teaching him the tricks of Indian-style kushti wrestling, nursing him when he was ill, and cleaning him up after riotous nights of gambling and drinking at the officers’ club.
Many sepoys did as much and more for their butchas yet their services were often forgotten when those officers rose in the ranks. But that was not the case with Kesri and Mr Mee: over the years their bond had grown closer and stronger.
Mr Mee was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a square-jawed, swarthy face and a receding hairline: his hearty manner belied an unusually sharp tongue and a quick temper. As a young officer his pugnacity had often got him into trouble, earning him a reputation as a regular ‘Kaptân Marpeet’ — ‘Captain Brawler’. Nor had the passage of time smoothed his rough edges; from year to year his prickliness seemed only to grow more pronounced, his manner more abrasive.
Yet Captain Mee was in his way an excellent officer, fearless in battle and scrupulously fair in his dealings with the sepoys. Kesri in particular had good reason to be grateful to him: early in their association Captain Mee had discovered that Kesri secretly harboured the ambition of learning English and had encouraged and tutored him until Kesri surpassed every other member of the paltan in fluency, even the dubash. As a result Kesri and the captain had come to understand each other uncommonly well, developing a rapport that extended far beyond the battalion’s business. When Mr Mee needed a girl for the night, he depended on Kesri to tell him which members of Gulabi’s troupe were poxy and which were worth their daam; when he was short of money — which was often, because he was, by his own confession, always all aground, ever in need of the ready — it was Kesri he looked to for a loan, not the bankers of Palmer & Co. nor the baniya-modi.
It was not uncommon for officers to be in debt for many of them liked to gamble and drink. But Captain Mee’s debts were larger than most: to Kesri alone he owed a hundred and fifty sicca rupees. In his place many other officers would have paid off their debts by dipping their hands into the regimental till, or by seeking a post in which there was money to be made — but Mr Mee was not that kind of man. Wild and intemperate though he might be, he was a man of unimpeachable integrity.
Even though Kesri and Captain Mee knew each other very well, they both understood that their relationship was undergirded by a scaffolding of lines that could not be crossed. Kesri would never of his own accord have ventured to ask the adjutant why his fellow officers had congratulated him. But as it happened, Captain Mee broached the subject himself as he rode up to dismiss Kesri.
‘A word with you, havildar? It’s something rather chup-chup, so you’ll stow your clapper about it, won’t you?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘That dispatch you just brought? It was for me. I’ve been ordered to report to Fort William, in Calcutta. The high command’s putting together an expeditionary force, for an overseas mission — I’d got wind of it and sent in my name. I’ll be commanding a company of sepoy volunteers. They’ve asked me to bring an NCO of my choice which is why I’m telling you all this. The only man I can think of is you, havildar. What do you say? Do you think you might want to come along?’
Nothing could have been further from Kesri’s mind that day than to volunteer for an overseas expedition: after eight months of garrison duty in a remote outpost on the border between Assam and Burma he was exhausted and looking forward to some rest. But out of curiosity he asked: ‘To where will the force be going, sir?’
‘Don’t know yet,’ said the adjutant. ‘It’s still in the planning stages, but I hear the prize money will be good.’