Havildar Pratap Singh
Chapter 4, Session 8 — Landfall
He was on the Strand before their boat touched the steps, and he did not go down to meet it. That is the whole of the method. A havildar of the 67th does not scramble at the waterline with the coolies and the budgerow crews, he waits at the top where the steps meet the road, uniform immaculate in a downpour that has ruined everything else on that riverfront, and lets the chaos deliver them to him. When the gap came he stepped forward, saluted, and presented the compliments of the District Magistrate. Palanquins already arranged. The right number of them.
Nobody asked him a hard question, which was a small disappointment, because he had answers for all of them and the answers are true. Havildar, 67th Bengal Native Infantry, eight months in the regiment, assigned this morning out of Mr Ashworth’s office as a courtesy to visiting Britons of standing. Instead they let him take the luggage, and the ladies into the palanquins, and by the time they reached the Cavendish gate he had made himself the man you ask rather than the man you watch. Mr Cavendish gave him two commissions before the first evening was out. Find an engineer called Renwick. Find out about a merchant called Surlish. He said he would see what could be done, which is what he says, and he will do both, thoroughly and fast, because that is what a useful man does.
The interesting thing happened on the steps and nobody European noticed it. Mrs Ashby said her family lived in Blacktown, and said it plainly, to a group of people who heard a street name. He heard fifteen years, an English father, a Bengali mother, and a woman coming home to a house she was taken out of as a child. He said nothing at all about it, then or since. There are courtesies that consist entirely of not speaking.
They put him in a cabin by the stables. Inside the wall, outside the houses, near enough to the family to hear the compound wake up. He has no complaint about it. He is arranging horses and a ride out on The Maidan to show them the city properly, and he is patient, and he is never in a hurry, and he is never late.
Chapter 4, Session 9 — The Magistrate’s Table
The sahibs went into the church and he waited outside with the carriages and the other men who were not going in, and that is where the work is. Ratan found him there, a bearer off the Pelham palanquin, whining about his wages inside a minute of introducing himself and asking whether the Company might have something for him. Pratap gave him the truth, which is usually cheapest. The Company pays its soldiers three times what any prince’s army pays, and that is precisely how the Company came to own India. He meant it as a door closing. He is not certain how it sounded.
Later the same man had the Pelham palanquin sitting exactly where the party’s carriages needed to be, and would not move it, and Pratap swung at him. In the open. In front of the servants of half the households in Calcutta. He missed, which is its own small humiliation, and Ratan looked around for the fly that had gone past his ear, and then took rupees to do the thing he was always going to do for rupees. A man who is never in a hurry and never late put his hand up before he put his money down. That is not the method. He should have opened with the coin.
Fort William was easier. The fort is full of men staging for the Nepal fight and nobody stops a havildar of the 67th walking into the Engineers Park with his uniform right and his face bored, so he read what he came to read. Major Renwick is eight miles north at Baranagar, throwing an embankment at the Hooghly, not yet posted to the Gurkha campaign and certain to be the moment the works are done. He carried it back to Mr Cavendish exactly as commissioned, watched the party absorb that the engineer and the temple sit in the same village, and said nothing to help them along. A good servant answers the question he was asked, and this one has never once volunteered a thought he was not paid for.
At Garden Reach he did not go in. He briefed them on the order of precedence before they left the compound, because eight Britons shuffling on a magistrate’s steps in front of Calcutta is an avoidable embarrassment and avoiding it is what he is for. Then he stood at the gate and let Bakar Ali take his measure over two questions and a cup of tea. Thirty years that man has run the Magistrate’s house. He knows which of the guests’ families are happy, which are frightened, which pay late, and he gave the whole assessment over freely, politely, thoroughly, and first, because that is how a khansama tells you the price. The price is questions about your own masters. Pratap answered some of them. The compound has decided, wrongly and very conveniently, that the havildar reports to Mr Ashworth, and he let that stand, because a man who is assumed to belong to somebody important is asked far fewer questions than a man who has to explain himself.