Amitav Ghosh - The Circle of Reason

There is a moral in this: an eye in a courtyard is worth a hundred guns.

Inevitably, Jeevanbhai Patel was the first man to see what Nury was worth. Patel was already a well-to-do man then, and he gave Nury some pointless job to do in the evenings, when he wasn’t doing anything else. The job was unimportant. What Patel wanted was his knowledge, for he saw power in knowledge, and for him power meant money. In barely a month Patel’s investment paid off.

At that time the Malik — this very same Malik who lives shut away in the Old Fort now — was a young man, recently returned from a school for princes in India, where the British had sent him. He had become Malik after his father’s death, only a year before, but already people knew that here was a man very different from the senile and foolish old Malik, his father. This new Malik was a storm of energy. No one met him who did not come away reeling. People said that it was impossible even to look at the Malik for more than a minute at a time — his whole face was blood red like the setting sun. They said he had secret ways of making the blood rush to his face to terrify people. He never laughed, never smiled, and such was his temper that much of the time people were grateful to leave the Fort alive.

At that time something happened which made his temper worse than ever. A few years ago the British had found oil in some of the kingdoms around al-Ghazira, and already there were rumours that al-Ghazira was just a speck of sand floating on a sea of oil. So the British, for the first time, sent a resident to al-Ghazira, to make the Malik sign a treaty which would let the British dig for oil.

With great fanfare the Resident arrived, in a battleship. People liked him: he was a fat, round little man who laughed a lot and slept a lot. He liked fancy clothes and pomp and ceremony and parading soldiers. Everywhere he went in al-Ghazira hundreds of people followed him, because whenever he spoke he made his lips into a circle of such perfection that everyone who saw him held their breath waiting for a black, wonderfully rounded goat’s turd to fall out. And so it was that he came to be known as Goat’s Arse.

Once every week Goat’s Arse would go to the Old Fort and plead and argue, trying to persuade the Malik to sign the treaty, but the Malik wouldn’t hear of it. He had seen what had happened to the princes of India and he had sworn he would never let himself be reduced to their state. So, inevitably, the day came when — much against his will, for he was a peaceable man — Goat’s Arse began to talk of calling for battleships and the Malik began to despair.

The Malik used to read a lot, and at that time, in his worry, he began to spend whole days reading until it became a kind of madness — histories of the great Baghdadi and Cairene dynasties, lives of the caliphs and the kings and so on. From one of these he got an idea. In his madness he decided he would teach the British a lesson.

He decided to fry Goat’s Arse.

Carefully the Malik made his plans. He invited Goat’s Arse to a private dinner to celebrate, he said, his birthday. Goat’s Arse was delighted; he thought the Malik had finally decided to sign the treaty. It was a special occasion, he thought, and ought to be treated with proper ceremony. When the day came he dressed himself in his best uniform, all scarlet and black, and mounted his great white charger. Before him, with their lances and flags and raised pennants, rode his small squadron of Indian cavalry, and ahead of them marched four Sikhs, immense men in turbans, playing bagpipes and kettledrums. It was something to see: plump little Goat’s Arse on his white horse, with all those troops, turbaned and bearded, sashed and sabred, parading through the town, past the harbour, into the Maidan al-Jami‘i, straight through towards the Fort on the hill. The whole town came running out of their houses to follow them. At the foot of the hill the crowd was stopped by the Malik’s Bedouin guards, for the Malik had given them strict orders that nobody was to be allowed near the Fort but Goat’s Arse and his entourage. So the crowd stopped at the foot of the hill and watched Goat’s Arse and his troops till they disappeared.

Outside the Fort, Goat’s Arse’s troops presented arms and blew their bugles and did many other things of that kind, until the great old gates swung slowly open. Then Goat’s Arse rode majestically to the head of his squadron, stately and erect on his white charger, and led them towards the gate …

How was Goat’s Arse to know that right above that gate the Malik had stationed the man he most trusted — a eunuch, ebony-black and so enormously fat he had come to be known universally as Jabal the Mountainous Eunuch — with a vat of boiling oil, or that in seven kingdoms Jabal was renowned for his cowardice, and at that very moment, waiting for the Malik to fire the flare which was to be his signal to tip the oil over, he was a quaking heap of flesh almost ready to jump into the oil himself?

Goat’s Arse rode serenely on, the plumes in his helmet nodding in the wind, his squadron trotting behind him, on and on; and at the right moment, just when the charger’s head entered the shadow of the gate, the Malik fired his flare and Jabal the Eunuch, in one shivering rush, heaved at the vat of boiling oil.

The trouble was, something went wrong with the flaregun. The flare looped into the courtyard and burst into light about a foot from the horse’s nose. The horse reared, whinnying, throwing Goat’s Arse wide of the gate, and charged straight into the Fort. There was a waterfall of oil, but all that was fried was the end of the horse’s tail, only a few hairs, which were of no use to anyone.

In a flash Goat’s Arse’s soldiers had him off the ground — bruised but very alive — and galloping through the city. What they were going to do was no mystery: they were going to radio their warships to bombard al-Ghazira. The streets emptied behind them until in moments the city was midnight-still, every door locked and every last grain of gold hidden away under secret bricks. At the Fort the Bedouin were trying to hurry the Malik into the desert. Even there they could hear the wails of the women rising above the town, already lamenting the sack of al-Ghazira.

But there was one thing no one knew; only one townsman had been in the Fort at the time of the Bloody Fry-day as it came to be called — only one who had seen precisely what had happened — and naturally that was Nury the sharp-eyed Damanhouri, who had heard of the feast and raced to the Fort with a donkey-load of eggs. He was coming out of the kitchen when the flare exploded, and no sooner had the first drop of oil sizzled on to the horse’s tail than Nury was on his donkey, heading straight for the Souq, for he knew that here at last was something Jeevanbhai would value.

Till then Jeevanbhai had had a few dealings with the Malik. The Malik spoke to him in Urdu, which he had learnt in India, and they dealt well together, but not as well as Jeevanbhai would have wished. On the Fry-day, Jeevanbhai saw his chance. He raced to the Fort on Nury’s donkey and set about persuading the Malik that to escape would be to admit guilt. No, he argued, the only wise thing to do was to counter Goat’s Arse’s moves before he made them.

At once Jeevanbhai drew up a message for the British Viceroy in India, Goat’s Arse’s boss, a man famous for his enthusiasm for local customs and suchlike (so Jeevanbhai said). Goat’s Arse, the message said, had broken into and disrupted the most ancient of Ghaziri ceremonies, one that took place only once every seven years, on the reigning Malik’s birthday. This was the ceremony of the Ant-Frying, when the Ants under the Fort’s south gate, a most ancient line of ants, were cooked in a shower of boiling oil. The desecration of the Ant-Frying had placed the timeless traditions of the Ghaziri monarchy, and thus the prestige of the whole British Empire, in, yes, in jeopardy. If Goat’s Arse were taxed with this, the message warned, he would probably deny everything. In all likelihood he didn’t even know of the ceremony; such was his contempt for the customs of al-Ghazira, he had not made even the smallest effort to acquaint himself with them … And so on and so on.