Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  Jang Bahadur failed, however, in his mission to obtain a pledge that Britain would respect Nepalese sovereignty. At the insistence of the East India Company, he was refused direct negotiations. Despite increasing dissatisfaction in Parliament with the Company’s management of India, the sovereign powers granted by its charter remained in force. If Jang Bahadur was to treat with anyone, maintained the Court of Directors, it must be the governor general in Calcutta.

  Though the maharaja was left to wonder why, then, he was encouraged to set out for England in the first place, the rebuff was precisely what Government House had counted upon in granting his wish to travel. No one in Calcutta expected him to make diplomatic headway on British soil. They endorsed his sojourn there in the belief that it would shatter any illusions he might cherish about opposing British ambitions, including the annexation of his country if it ever came to that. Once Jang Bahadur saw for himself the full extent of British wealth and power, went the thinking, he would realize the futility of resistance.

  Of wealth and power he duly received an eyeful. He spent his days reviewing troops, inspecting armories, and touring factories. Accompanied by Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, he visited the gargantuan framework of iron rising in Hyde Park, 1,851 feet long and sheathed with a million square feet of glass—a “Great Shalimar” to some, and to others a “Crystal Palace.” Upon completion, it would enclose full-grown trees and thirteen thousand exhibits devoted to modern technology and design: steam engines and carriages, surgical instruments and “philosophical instruments,” the electric telegraph and the illuminated microscope. Organized by Albert himself, the upcoming Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations made much of its attention to the achievements of countries around the world, and would serve as the prototype for a succession of world’s fairs that continues to the present day. But it was conceived above all as a showcase for the supremacy and superiority of the people who were just then beginning to know themselves as Victorians.

  Over there: cotton cloth made by the slaves of the king of Dahomey.

  Over here: the first working version of a fax machine, made by a physicist in Hampstead.

  England had the world at her feet. It was impossible for Jang Bahadur to come away with a contrary impression. But what Henry Lawrence and James Login had wanted him to see for himself about the British was not their material preeminence but, as Lady Login put it, “what sort of people they were.”

  They wanted to expose him to the masters of India’s masters. And these, by and large, did not share the bloody-mindedness of those who ruled on their behalf in India. Staunch opponents of conquest for its own sake, the governing classes supported not the subjugation of native peoples but rather their elevation. Their lofty conception of empire was rooted in the conviction, as Jan Morris put it, that “British skill and science was ready to usher mankind into a golden age.” And, thanks to science itself, it was a mind-set that could now be imposed from afar. The telegraph wires first raised in Britain in 1846 already extended to Egypt and the Levant. Calcutta still clung to its remoteness from oversight, but its grip would not last long. Unauthorized wars and injudicious proclamations would soon go the way of suttee and Thuggee and the sacrifice of infants on the shore of Sagar Island.

  It was up to Jang Bahadur to make of these English what he would. Events proved his judgment astute, for his dynasty’s rule of Nepal outlasted the British Raj in India. In the meantime, he succeeded at ingratiating himself with all the right people, just as Henry Lawrence imagined he would after experiencing firsthand the queen’s keen interest in the East and its natives during his stay at Windsor Castle two years before. All society took its cues from the royal couple, and their attentiveness to Jang Bahadur opened every splendid door in London at the maharaja’s convenience. He was feted so tirelessly that during his three-month stay he graced only one other English city with his presence: Nigel’s hometown of Coventry, in the West Midlands.

  What Nigel’s family thought of Jang Bahadur was lost in the German raid that destroyed more than four thousand homes and made its own contribution to the English lexicon: “coventrate.” Nor do firsthand accounts survive of their reaction to Nigel himself. Judging from the stories told and retold for decades afterwards, he was anything but reticent about his life of luxury in Kathmandu, which he seems to have hinted was somehow connected with the conveyance of precious gems. Another story out of India that vied with the visit of Jang Bahadur for prominence in the news during Nigel’s leave was the arrival of the Koh-i-noor diamond, which reached London on July 2. That he returned East just as doubts about the diamond’s provenance surfaced publicly evidently gave rise to the legend that Nigel “owed everything” to that gemstone in particular.

  What clinched it for his family was that he stayed there. He stayed there and maintained sporadic contact for a few years, and then there was none. They could only conceive of a nefarious explanation.

  Whether it could stand up to scrutiny probably seemed less consequential to the Hallecks of the mid-nineteenth century than it would to a distant relative in the latter part of the twentieth. He was concerned with the vagaries of history. What mattered to Nigel’s immediate family in Coventry was incontrovertible contemporary fact.

  He was gone. They said their goodbyes and wished him bon voyage in April 1851. They never saw him again.

  27

  * * *

  Tipling

  1976

  “YOU WILL NOT like Tipling,” said the constable. “It is necessary to bear the presence of the Christian communities.”

  There were seven churches thereabouts, he added.

  Seven churches and no trekking.

  No one trekked there.

  No one.

  “The trekking you will find in Langtang.”

  He was a thin, nervous man in a moth-eaten navy tunic with powder blue epaulets. His sidearm clattered loosely in its holster. The police check-post was made of corrugated steel. It stood where the pine forest abruptly ended, at the outermost edge of the terraced fields of wheat, rye, millet, and oats surrounding the village.

  He faced me from the doorway. I fixed my eyes above his shoulder, on the rotogravure portrait of King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya pasted to the wall behind him.

  Langtang was undoubtedly well worth seeing, I said. Unfortunately, my time was limited—I was leaving Nepal in a few short weeks.

  I nodded at the portrait, and lied.

  It was Her Majesty’s uncle General Rana, I said, who suggested that I visit Tipling.

  “General Rana knows Tipling?” he said doubtfully.

  “We were talking of jewels. He said that if I wished to learn about gemstones in Nepal, I must go to Tipling, in the Ganesh Himal.”

  Actually, the General had volunteered a hint only when I pressed him for details after he told me that precious gems could be found in Nepal if one knew where to look. I should find a rhyme, he said, for “Kipling.”

  The constable stepped down from the threshold onto the packed-dirt path.

  “My home is Lalitpur,” he said, sweeping his urban eyes disdainfully across the green, lush fields, moist with rain.

  “I know nothing of these things.”

  In the steaming rhododendron forest that cloaked a hillside a thousand feet above us, a tin roof glinted in the afternoon sun. There, he said, lived a man who might help me.

  A pensioned Gurkha, then. The roof gave the game away. In up-country Nepal, no one else could afford the luxury of roofing that held its own against the elements. His monthly remittances from London would have brought a species of prosperity to his neighbors, too. A village that counted a tin roof among its housetops was a village where Nebico biscuits might be purchased, and bottled Star beer from the brewery in Baneswor, and perfumed basmati rice.

  As I neared the house, a long hour later, the rhododendrons gave way to solemn deodars that overhung the steep track. Stone steps led from the path to a terrace planted with fenugreek, where a
dozen plump hens scrabbled and squawked. A copse of birches screened the house on the terrace above. A large dog barked.

  “Identify yourself!” called a stern voice. “Friend or foe?”

  “Saathi!” I replied automatically, even as his clipped English consonants hung crisply in the earth-smelling air.

  I was a friend.

  “Angrezi saathi!”

  An English friend.

  “Come then, welcome! Do not worry, the dog is chained. Well chained, I tell you! Links of steel!”

  He laughed.

  “The British steel, you may be sure. Not the Indian. Oh, no.”

  Corporal Rajendraman Tamang, 1st Battalion, 2nd King Edward VII’s Own Gurkha Rifles (retired) had a bit of a belly, but plenty of parade ground still in his posture. His face was burnished bronze and he wore khaki shorts. He led me up to a pair of spindly wooden chairs on the edge of a wide veranda of rough-sawn cedar boards.

  The chairs, he said, converted from walking sticks. He demonstrated how the legs opened and closed automatically when the leather seats were folded. They came from England.

  He had a folding table, too. He erected it between the chairs, then excused himself and went inside.

  Far below, Tipling lay deep in shadow. A long, round-shouldered bank of mist floated lazily over terraced fields and shrouded the pine forest beyond. I could see the green tops looking like a bed of moss when wind eddies thinned the cloud.

  He returned with two glasses, sparkling clean, and a bottle of Khukri rum. He permitted himself a daily peg and was pleased to have company in taking it.

  “It ages a man, the drinking alone.”

  He had married late, and survived his wife. He feared he might survive his sons, settled in Kathmandu and addicted to their motorbikes. They had gone to the boarding school in Pokhara—he did not think highly of the local Christian establishment. His daughter had wished to do the same, to the dismay of her grandparents.

  But who was he to deny her?

  He who knew the world!

  London and Hong Kong, of course. But also Brunei, Iran, Malaysia. Nowadays even the Muslim girls were allowed to think for themselves.

  She had promised to return.

  But she would not.

  For a visit, yes. To stay, no. There was nothing for the young people there. Only the beauty, and they were used to that. They did not see it. They saw only the lack of opportunity.

  While he spoke, the sun was driving saffron shafts through the down-drooping branches of the deodar beside the house, and its light turned crimson as it dropped behind the peaks above. Then the night fell, drawing a veil of blue haze across the face of the country.

  I said I had heard that there were mineral deposits in the district, with precious gems. There were no opportunities of that sort?

  Indeed there were such gems, he replied, and of the best quality.

  But mines?

  No.

  Mining of the gems posed three great difficulties. The first was the difficulty of access. There was much danger in reaching the deposits, high in the mountains. The second was the difficulty of ownership. It had lately been decreed that His Majesty owned the mountains. On that principle had been created the national park, in Langtang. On it, too, were charged many lakh rupees to foreign expeditions, for their climbing permits. These funds went directly into the royal coffers. It would be no different with proceeds from the gem deposits.

  “A king’s jewels, a Gurkha’s rifle, peas in a pod. Such things are taken by fighting only.”

  The third was the difficulty of belief. They were most of them Tamangs in those parts, who followed the Buddha’s teachings. For the Buddhist, the sinful occupations were the butcher, the blacksmith, and the miner. For that reason there could be no mining of the precious gems. Of course there would always be men who had some knowledge of them, and a need for money for one reason or another, or a greedy nature. And they would take the risk of obtaining such as they could, in secret, then making some kind of arrangement. So it might be that now and again a helicopter would make a flight from India to land at an unknown place, and be met there.

  “Then very quickly an exchange takes place, or so the rumors tell.”

  He stood.

  “A moment.”

  A match lit up the darkness inside the house. I caught the purr and fizzle of grains of incense. In attending to me, he had neglected the household shrine. He reappeared with a spirit lamp of heavy glass and placed it on the table. Then he laid out four pouches of soft patterned cloth.

  He opened the pouches one by one, carefully turning them inside out and handling the stones through the cloth. They were lumps of white marble the size of darning eggs, coursed with veins of red corundum.

  The test of a ruby, he said, was that it lost none of its beauty in artificial light.

  That was not the case with other red gemstones. Stationed in Teheran, guarding the British embassy, he had visited the National Museum, which housed the storied Peacock Throne of the Persian emperors.

  He made a wry face.

  “Garnets, I am sure.”

  The rubies in matrix blazed in the mellow lamplight, their fire acid pink instead of carmine or crimson.

  It was a hue “characteristical” of the Nepalese ruby, he said.

  A hue most valuable.

  A hue most unusual, found nowhere else in the world save a single deposit in Afghanistan.

  A deposit that I later learned was called Jagdalak.

  A deposit visited by Nigel with Sa’adat ul-Mulk a few months before he returned to England on home leave, bearing gifts.

  A hue that I had seen once before, as a child, in the dim electric light of my aunt’s dressing closet in Coventry, on a heavy old brooch inscribed YOUR LOVING NIGEL.

  There was no mistaking that hue. When I asked my aunt about the brooch after I returned home from Nepal, she remembered it. She doubted anyone had ever worn the thing, cheap as it looked. What sort of son would wish it on his mother?

  He never told her it was a ruby. If he had, it would have been passed down with all the other fabulous stories. Nigel kept his own counsel, and I think I know why. His mother was a clergyman’s daughter. She might have asked how he had come to afford such a bauble, and might not have accepted it.

  When my aunt told me it had long since gone to a jumble sale, I took my cue from Nigel. I kept my mouth shut, too.

  28

  * * *

  A Lark

  NIGEL WAS NO LONGER bound by the terms of his ten-year covenant with the East India Company when he returned to Kathmandu in October 1851. He easily could have renewed it. His superiors recorded no complaints about his performance as a revenue officer. He had been singled out for recognition for his fluency in Urdu. More than once, he had demonstrated the sort of mettle that the Company not only valued in its civil servants but prized all the more because none of them could count on material reward for it.

  Volunteering for Dacca, one of the unhealthiest postings in India. Serving in the newly British territory of the Jullundur Doab. Training native revenue clerks in what had lately been a war zone. He had shown himself a trooper. John Lawrence would have wanted him back. John, a billiard player and cigar smoker who was neither as refined nor as sensitive as his older brother Henry, had a horror of what he called “cakey men.” He steadfastly refused his officers permission to decamp for the hills in the Hot Weather and preferred that they remain unmarried. His ideal subordinate, according to one of them, was a man who “worked all day and nearly all night, ate and drank when and where he could, had no family ties, no wife or children to hamper him, and whose whole establishment consisted of a camp bed, an odd table and chair or so, and a small box of clothes such as could be slung on a camel.”

  But Nigel demurred. When he said his farewells in England, he left no one with the impression that he might leave the Company’s service. That might have been pragmatism. The Company strictly controlled the admittance of Europeans to India, li
miting it to those it employed and those it invited to serve its commercial, scientific, and religious interests. Visits by relatives were tolerated, but not tourism for its own sake. Nigel would have known that if he ended his affiliation with the Company in England, he would have a devil of a time getting permission to return to India as a free agent.

  He also would have known that those who separated in-country were under no particular compulsion to hasten back to Blighty. India had a way of absorbing outsiders. As far as the Company was concerned, going native meant a lapse of discipline and a descent into chaos. But if it was chaos that Englishmen wanted once they were off the Company books, far be it from Calcutta to stand in their way. No one traveled very far in the subcontinent without running into one of the innumerable models for Kipling’s retired color sergeant Kimball O’Hara, who took up with a half-caste opium addict after his wife succumbed to cholera, acquired a taste for the pipe himself, and died “as poor whites die in India.”

  Nigel had already spent three months with Sa’adat enjoying the sumptuous hospitality of the sovereign kingdom of Nepal. It is hard to imagine a more luxurious retirement destination for a man who had gone beyond the English notion of propriety—particularly in the company of a jewel trader.

  A jewel trader, it has to be said, with his own personal connection to the storied diamond that featured in the Halleck family legends about Nigel. Sa’adat’s grandfather had owned the Koh-i-noor, which subsequently ended up in the hands of his uncle Shah Shuja until it was extorted from him by Ranjit Singh as the price of his protection when Shuja was forced into exile. After the diamond’s presentation to Queen Victoria in 1850, her husband Prince Albert arranged an inquest into its perceived deficiencies, which revealed two cleavage planes in the gemstone. It was a mutilation that lapidarist James Tennant attributed to the Sadozais of Afghanistan, “whose necessities may have caused one of them to have pieces removed to furnish him with money.”