Bakar Ali

Description

Khansama of the Magistrate’s house at Garden Reach, thirty years in it. He runs the evening — every evening — and vets every stranger’s servant at the gate with two questions and a cup of tea. The assessment runs both directions, and both parties know it.

Background

Thirty years in one house in Bengal makes a man the household’s memory. He knows which of the guests’ households are happy, which are frightened, and which pay late, because their servants have been drinking tea at his gate for three decades. His good opinion is the servants’ world’s passport, and it opens every compound in Chowringhee.

On the evening of 9 October 1814 he vetted Pratap Singh at the gate, and then, over tea while the dinner ran in dumb-show through the open colonnade, gave him a full assessment of the dinner guests and their households — politely, thoroughly, and first. The price of that assessment is questions answered about one’s own masters.

Connections

• Charles Ashworth — his master of thirty years
• Havildar Pratap Singh — vetted, then briefed him on the table
• Garden Reach — the house he runs
• Ratan — a visiting bearer at his fires, and the spoons that went missing under his roof

In Play

Chapter 4, Session 10 (9–10 October 1814) — he let it happen, and then he ended it. He stood apart with folded arms while his under-servants carried Ratan and the spoons to the havildar, and watched what the man did (Ratan and the Spoons). At the carriages, when Cartwright’s syce and the Wrights’ bearer went at each other by the palanquins, he waded in with a short thick stick and restored order while the Magistrate talked over the noise on the steps. His opinion of the havildar has formed: a man who acted, and kept it from the sahibs.

Appearances