The Game

by Laurie R. King

  “You’re going to wear them out,” I said.

  “When do I throw the mirror-balls? And when do I throw with you?”

  “The mirror-balls when you can keep these in the air for two hundred paces without dropping them. And as a partner when you can keep five up.” It would be far more expertise than he’d need to hold up his end of a two-person team, but it condemned the urchin to solitary labours for a few more days while I accustomed myself to the idea of a three-person partnership. “Bindra, can you read and write?”

  “Oah yes. I write my name,” he asserted, but he began to concentrate closely on the trio of coloured balls he was tossing and catching with smooth competence.

  “Why are you not in school?”

  “I told you, I learn things from you.”

  “You should be in school.”

  He did not bother to answer. I tried another tack. “How old are you, Bindra?”

  “Maybe twenty?” But before I could react, he changed it to “Or eleven? I think more than eight, I can remember eight.”

  “Where are you from? Where is your family?”

  “I have no family.”

  “You’re an orphan?”

  “I have an auntie in Calcutta. I was with her, oh, two or three years I think, before she sold me to the horse-dealer.”

  “Sold you?”

  “Oah yes,” he said nonchalantly. “I was happy to go. His hand was lighter than hers.”

  “There’s no slavery in India.”

  The brief look he shot me was eloquent. It occurred to me that I’d just given myself away definitively: He’d long overlooked my chronic oddities of speech and habit, but only a foreigner could assert that slavery did not exist in a place where clearly it did. I tried to regain my standing.

  “Truly, Bindra, under the white man’s law, slavery is not allowed. Your aunt could not sell you, although she told you she could.”

  “Oah, I know that. But I am a child. If I stand up and say, ‘I am not to be sold,’ what then? I am turned out to live on the street and go hungry. I did not mind. And ho! It has meant that I found you and the magician. I eat good food and breathe clean air. And now I am going to ride a train.”

  Every boy’s dream, in this country as in others: to run away and join the circus. “Yes, well. We must talk more about a school for you. Because one day you will be a man, and need the skills you can only learn in school. Unless you wish to be a farmer in a village,” I added, knowing his disdain for the man with the hoe.

  “I shall be a magician,” he said, adding slyly, “when you have taught me to pick the coin out of the air.”

  I laughed and reached out to clap him on the back, and stopped with my hand an inch from his shoulder. To most Hindus, I as a Moslem was horribly unclean, and making contact with them would be deeply offensive, requiring lengthy purification. “What is your caste, Bindra?”

  “Oah, I have no caste.”

  “No caste? What do you mean, all India has some kind of caste.”

  “No. I am a Kee-ristian.” It took a moment for my ears to translate the word from Hindi. The boy was a Christian? Good Lord, I thought; were we dealing with another Kim here, an abandoned European? The boy went on, oblivious. “Some Kee-ristians came into our village when I was quite small—this was before I went to Calcutta to live with my auntie. They wore long dresses, the women always, the men on some days, and one such day they made a great ceremony under the trees and dipped water on our heads and told us that in Jesu there was neither Brahmin nor Kshatriya, no Sudra or foreigner. Some of the village were angry, and in the end they drove those Kee-ristian men away with sticks and paid the priests great sums to return them to their proper place. I had no money to pay the priests, but although I did not ask to have my caste taken from me, truly, I have found that to have no caste is altogether a good thing, for now I can eat what I like, sleep where I please. I will have to pay a priest to restore me when I wish to marry, of course—who but the lowest Sudra would take a casteless man into his house? But that is a long time away.”

  I could only gaze at him, open-mouthed, and follow him into the little carriage when the train pulled in a few minutes later.

  Holmes had told me that the narrow-gauge train would climb six thousand feet, in sixty miles, taking six hours or more to do so. We should need our heavy coats at the end of it. The sites of my chilblains tingled in anticipation, as I found that our third-class car was heated only by the body warmth of its occupants. Bindra seemed not to notice, so rapt was he with wonder at the passing scenery. Then the train entered a tunnel, and he scrambled away from the window in surprise.

  “Have you ever been on a train before?” I asked him.

  “Oah yes, many times,” he said, although his unconcealed excitement declared that he was lying through his teeth. Still, he had plenty of practise on that run to become used to passing hills and the darkness of tunnels: Holmes thought there were a hundred or more, although I would have believed it if he’d said a thousand.

  Simla was the year-round headquarters of the British Indian Army and with it the Survey of India, both its open and its hidden faces. The government as a whole moved up here, bag and baggage, as soon as the temperature climbed in the plains. From March to November this small Olympus ruled all the land from the Red Sea to the hills of Burma—what Gandhi a few years earlier had scornfully called “government from the five hundredth floor”—and it bustled with life, bursting with political and social intrigue, ringing with the voices of English children and their ayahs, vibrating with the conversations of their mothers about the latest scandal or shortage or piece of amateur dramatics. Today, however, was the last day of January, and we found the hill-town bitter cold, largely shuttered, and nearly bereft of an English presence.

  Hotel rooms for our kind, however, were plentiful, and we had our choice of locations, sizes, and services. We hiked into the native bazaar that lay below the town’s European centre, a tumbling hotch-potch of buildings that climbed onto one another’s backs and looked over one another’s shoulders, with the street entrance of one shop giving out onto a rooftop exit at the rear. We took a suite of rooms in a native-style hotel that did not look too poisonous, with a mat near the kitchen for Bindra. I indulged in my first true bath since the night of the hotel fire, eleven days before, although I had to renew my skin and hair dye at the end of it. And if the meal we were served was a bastard imitation of English-style mutton curry, the beds we were given were soft, the sheets thin with wear but fairly clean.

  I settled under the thick cotton coverlets with a sigh of contentment. My hair was still damp, but I was warm, and the solid walls were a reassurance after canvas. Holmes shed his shoes and crawled into the shelter beside me.

  “I found myself looking for the shop of Lurgan Sahib, as we came through the bazaar,” I told him. The mysterious Lurgan, who introduced young Kim to the Jewel Game and taught him many arcane arts, had disappeared from Simla some years before.

  “The building itself is still there, though much changed.”

  “What its walls could tell.” I lay looking at the play of firelight on the ceiling for a minute. “Holmes, do you think Bindra could be one of Nesbit’s? An agent of sorts?”

  “An Irregular? One does have to wonder, but somehow I doubt it. The boy does not seem interested enough in us. I’ve never caught him trying to overhear a conversation, have you?”

  “No. Or go through our things. He’s pretty much a force unto himself.”

  “Of course, he could simply be remarkably subtle with it.”

  “At his age?”

  “True. Even a prodigy such as young O’Hara concealed his interest by pretending to an alternative preoccupation, not by showing no interest at all.”

  This was rather too complex for my drowsy state; after a minute, I let it go, and murmured instead, “Do you think we’ll find him?”

  “O’Hara? If he’s there, and if he wishes to be found, yes.”

  “And what
shall we do then?”

  I felt Holmes’ fingers on my hair, following the shape of my long night-time plait, before he answered. “We will bring him back. And if he does not wish to come, I shall look him in the eye and ask him why.”

  It snowed during the night, two inches of dry flakes that rose up around our boots and blew like spring blossoms. Bindra took one look at it and dug in his heels like a startled mule.

  “Oah, that does not look at all good.”

  “It’s just snow,” I told him. “Frozen rain.”

  “I know snow, thank you,” he retorted with some force. “I will be staying inside today. When you return, I shall be able to keep the blue ball in the air.”

  I rather doubted he’d convince the cook to allow him to juggle in her warm kitchen, but I wasn’t about to argue. I buttoned my heavy skin-lined coat and scurried to catch Holmes up.

  The boots of the plains people were not adequate for walking on the cobbles of a hill-side town covered in snow, and I was glad when we stopped at the corner of two roads that fed into the Mall. I stared up at the town, astonished. With the snow, it looked more like Switzerland than sub-continent, all peaked chalet roofs and carved frontispieces.

  “Holmes, this place is extraordinary.”

  “No English!” he chided, then added, “You ought to see it in the summer. It looks as if you’d plucked up the inhabitants of a Tibetan town and set them down in Surrey.”

  Holmes pulled the mirrored balls from about his person and set to juggling them; I left my hands deep in my coat pockets.

  “What are we doing here, Holmes?”

  “Waiting to attract attention. Even in the busy summer we could not risk going openly into the Survey offices. We must wait until someone comes to see what we are about.”

  “Shouldn’t we go a little closer?” I asked. We were still among the ramshackle buildings of the native bazaar, before the road widened into the sloping plaza.

  “If we did, we’d risk being thrown out, even in the winter season. No native is permitted there except on business.”

  I sighed, drew my hands from their warm nests, and prepared to catch whatever he might throw me.

  There is a nearly hypnotic rhythm to a session of juggling, where the world narrows down to the other’s hands, when sight and sound merge into an almost psychic anticipation of one’s partner’s moves. It would have been a pleasurable interlude, had the temperature been on the melting side of freezing, since we had no audience to speak of. The occasional passer-by paused for thirty seconds before the cold urged him on, and two infants of five or six squatted in the drifted snow for far too long, their teeth chattering and their brown skin going an alarming shade of blue before an older sister appeared to chase them inside. My own fingers were turning white, rather than blue, and I did not know how much longer they would respond to their brain’s instructions to open and close.

  We had been working the corner for nearly forty minutes before Holmes straightened marginally; when I shot a glance up the Mall, I saw a man, strolling unconcernedly, glancing into shop windows. He went inside one, coming out a few minutes later with a rolled newspaper under his arm. He greeted a man walking briskly up the hill, tipped his hat at a pair of well-wrapped ladies getting into a two-horse tonga, and took a very long time to descend the length of Simla’s social centre. Finally he paused to watch our increasingly clumsy game of catch.

  It was none other than Geoffrey Nesbit. He ran his eyes over Holmes, identifying him, before studying me. I thought there was a little smile resting along the corner of his mouth, although I kept my eyes on Holmes’ hands.

  “That is quite clever,” he said in Hindi. Somehow, I didn’t think he was talking entirely about the juggling.

  “Thank you, sahib,” Holmes replied, in the same tongue.

  “In fact, I think I might be able to steer you towards a bit of work. Children’s parties and the like.”

  “Oh, sir, we can do many tricks.”

  The smaller man stifled a laugh, and said merely, “I don’t doubt that.”

  “And we go where we are told,” I added. The fluency of my phrase snapped his attention back onto me. He opened his mouth, but I was not to hear his words, for behind his shoulder, coming from the warren of side-streets that lay beneath the Mall, three figures were approaching. One brief glance, and I caught and placed the balls, one-two-three-four-five, on the trampled snow between my feet before turning my back on Holmes and saying in a low voice, “I’ll see you later.” I took three rapid steps and ducked into the next alleyway.

  I trusted that Holmes was safely concealed under dye and clothing, but my spectacles, which I tended to leave off only when comparative blindness was preferable to the needs of disguise, would be a dead giveaway when it came to the Goodhearts. What the hell were they doing in Simla? I paused just around the building with my ear bent to listen.

  Mrs Goodheart’s distinctive voice rang stridently through the streets, bouncing off the brick and stone buildings. “… not get me into one of those jampani machines again, I thought we’d end up at the bottom of the hill. And here I thought we were coming to the tropics! If I’d wanted snow I’d have stayed in Chicago. Really, Thomas, couldn’t we have gone to your maharaja directly? There’s nothing at all to see in this town.”

  “Mother, I thought the Teacher’s message said that hard experiences took one on the road to enlightenment.” The young man sounded a bit snappish.

  “And what would you know about that? Sunny, watch you don’t get too close to that beggar.”

  Holmes obligingly started up the whine for bakshish, although he was hardly dressed for the part, and beggars rarely juggled mirrored balls. I could only hope the Goodhearts did not find it peculiar for a white man to be carrying on a conversation with a beggar. However, Mrs Goodheart’s next words reassured me, for they were spoken in a politer tone than she had used for her son.

  “Pardon me, sir, but I wonder if you can recommend a place to get a cup of tea that won’t poison us?”

  “Poison you?” Nesbit asked, his voice nicely puzzled.

  “You know what I mean. My son informs me that at this altitude it is necessary to boil water for considerably longer than in the lowlands, and I can’t get the waiter at the hotel to understand it. That may be fine for local constitutions, but I fear that ours won’t survive. My daughter is too delicate to risk it.”

  I smiled at Mrs Goodheart’s unsubtle nudge of her daughter in the direction of this apparently eligible male. Sunny’s constitution was about as delicate as a tornado.

  “Certainly, I’d be more than happy to show you a dependable tea shop. Perhaps you would be my guests?”

  Pressed back into a doorway, I peered cautiously at their retreating backs, Mrs Goodheart’s arm through her son’s, which more or less forced Nesbit to offer Sunny his. At the place where the road opened out, young Goodheart turned to look back. I was in shadow and therefore invisible, but I could only hope that Holmes had continued with his act in their absence. One sharp glance over his shoulder, and then Nesbit was ushering them through a gaily painted doorway, a cloud of lovely warm steamy air billowing into the frigid outside world at their passage.

  I went back to Holmes, and was glad to find him still seated and juggling, turned slightly downhill now. I hunkered onto my heels at his side.

  “Thomas Goodheart looked back at you before they went into the tea shop,” I told him.

  “Did he now?”

  “What do you suppose they’re doing up here?”

  “They must have diverted on the way to Khanpur. I can’t see them going the land route through Simla, even if the pass is still open.”

  “Mrs Goodheart doesn’t seem too pleased to be here.”

  “Perhaps Nesbit will find out why they’ve come here rather than visit Jaipur or any of the usual places. Thanks to your quick eyes, I had just enough time to tell him who it was.”

  “I do wish there were some way to disguise spectacles,” I
grumbled. It was a complaint I had made before.

  “We shall have to see about getting you a pair of those on-the-eye lenses the Germans are working on,” he said thoughtfully, and I shuddered; the very thought of wearing paper-thin slivers of curved glass pressed up against my corneas made me queasy.

  “Thanks, but I prefer to walk into things,” I said. “How will we get back into touch with Nesbit?”

  “Look in the cup.”

  Among the small coins in the tin mug Holmes had set out lay a twist of fine paper. I reached for it, then paused. If I tried to pick it up, it might well be lost to my clumsiness.

  “Perhaps we might go back to the hotel for a while?” I pleaded. “My fingers are numb to the elbow.”

  We were greeted at the hostelry door by young Bindra, who crowed “Look! Look!” and set four balls into the air. Holmes patted his head by way of approval, I told him “Good job” around my chattering teeth, and we requested much hot tea and made for the nearest fireplace.

  The note Nesbit had dropped into Holmes’ cup bore the words “Viceregal Lodge, 10:00 P.M.” I hoped the formal venue did not indicate that we were to dress, but decided that the hour was not that of a dinner invitation. It scarcely mattered: I had nothing suitable to wear anyway.

  Chapter Thirteen

  At nine-thirty of a winter’s evening in the Himalayan foothills, few pedestrians picked their way over the ice-slick roads. Those who did were so thoroughly bundled that only the breathy clouds rising from their swathed heads showed that they were animate. The thin air here smelled of wood smoke instead of dung fires, and the sharp green aroma of deodar was intoxicating.

  I had decided, given time to think over the matter, that considering the time of year, the Viceroy himself was not likely to be in residence, and so it proved. The ornate stone fortress two miles from the Mall, which even in the moonless black resembled a Scottish castle, had lights in few of its windows, and those behind drawn curtains. We were not even required to decide which door to approach, since as we drew near, a shadow detached itself from a tree and intercepted us, speaking the single English word “Come.”