The Age of Ice: A Novel (51 page)

• • •

Ah, I had wanted tables and chairs—I got those all right, in a room where I spent long hours with very serious British gentlemen, detailing my activities in Tabriz and Tehran while a
punkahwallah
pulled his rope so that a paddlelike fan flipped and flapped over our heads. There were civil liberties too—after they concluded that my knowledge of Russian and Farsi was more important than my Persian past. They gave me a passport that limited my lawful travel to a fifty-mile radius beyond Calcutta. They attached me, under close supervision, to the correspondence desk in the Foreign Department, and housed me in the fort, the hottest lodging on earth. I went to work every morning—across the Esplanade (whose name barely covered the fact that it was as yet a bare expanse of earth)—to translate documents from Russian and Farsi to English and back—and back I went every evening across the Esplanade.

In 1840, at the office, I ran into Mr. Pottinger. “Mr. Velitzyn,” the Angleesh said, after an expression of pained surprise cleared his face, “you look . . . different in European dress.”

“Quiet and civilized life,” I said, “tooth powder and soap. They do marvels.”

I expected he’d end our conversation right there. We were in the corridor, exposed to the foot traffic. But he seemed in no haste to leave. So I said, “I see you are out of Herat at last.”

“Indeed. Mr. Todd is holding the fort now.”

“I’m sure it needs a great deal of holding,” I jibed.

“I am told you have been very cooperative,” he replied drily.

“I left no piece of ancient correspondence unturned. And you’ve been created a major, I see—”

“Seems I’d done something right, after all.”

“Why, I wouldn’t doubt—”

He chuckled. “How do you like India, Mr. Velitzyn? Not a disappointment, I hope?”

“Not at all,” I said. “It is delectable.”

He rocked on the heels of his boots. “The authorities consulted me on a plan to attach you to a small mission, to be dispatched to Bokhara via Kabul. I recommended against it.”

This caught me off-guard. A mission meant change. It meant trust. “Why? No one told me—”

“I don’t believe they will. The matter is decided. Good day, Mr. Velitzyn.”

“
Wait,
for Christ’s sake!”

He put his hands in his pockets. “Remember Khalo? I thought you might ask about him. He left. Ran away.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I didn’t have a chance—”

“Well, I’m sorry too,” Pottinger said. “Good day,” and he took his leave.

“Mr. Pottinger, just what are you trying to tell me? That it’s
my
fault?”

He kept walking.

• • •

In 1841 Pottinger went back into Afghanistan. I remained behind. My supervisor, Mr. Ponsonby, refused to discuss anything about my deployment outside India.
No and no
—
especially
if I volunteered.
Triple no
since it involved transactions with the Russians.

That day I went to the Brightman’s ghat and watched a ship unload a cargo of ice. She came all the way from North America, they said. She belonged to the Tudor Ice Company.
Coolies
—porters—carried slabs of ice up the stairs, and shrieked and squirmed at its scalding touch on their bare shoulders. I watched.

 . . . Then back to Fort William, pensively.

The year crept on. I learned my news from whatever secretaries and clerks, my social peers, had gleaned, what let’s say Mr. Tosh had copied or Mr. Cosh written from dictation, or Mr. Bosh filed in the archives. According to Tosh, two British agents had been held prisoner by the insane king of Bokhara. Now they were released—now, not. False news. But wait—a Russian mission was there to intervene. I went to Mr. Ponsonby again. No, he ruled, the matter of Messrs. Conolly and Stoddard did not require my expertise in Russian. Later, both were confirmed beheaded.

Correspondence kept strutting back and forth, always late, always helpless to convey reality.
Contemplating a forward movement as a demonstration to overawe the turbulent tribes,
reports said,
was prevented by the defective arrangements of the Commissariat in the hiring of camels
. Indeed.

In late December 1841 I received an invitation to the Government House, for Christmas. Did it not mean that the establishment began to accept me? I showed in my best. It was a brief, charitable function for the bottom rank, out on the lawn. We were presented with tiny sachets of Twining’s Choice Blended Tea, straight from Britain.

I heard small talk about insurrections in Afghanistan.

In January 1842, Tosh, a pint of Allsopp’s in hand, confessed to seeing a report that our envoy in Kabul, Sir Macnaghten, had been murdered by the Afghans. His opinion was that the murder news was false.

For the record, the tragedy was already over. Not only was Macnaghten dead and his torso hung displayed in the Kabul bazaar. By the time Calcutta’s officialdom was wondering about the accuracy of the Macnaghten news, the rest of the 16,000-strong British contingent that had been occupying Kabul—the military, their families, domestics, and camp followers—were massacred, imprisoned, or had frozen to death as they tried to retreat to Jalalabad over mountain passes, in the dead of winter. I, meanwhile, was composing a note to Mr. Ponsonby to sponsor my membership in the Royal Calcutta Golf Club. I was such an exemplary employee that they let me move out of the fort and settle next to it, where many of the fort’s noncommissioned officers dwelt. I even could afford a valet, or
boy,
as they called them here.

• • •

In hindsight I know that Pottinger had been assigned to go north of Kabul, and arrived there right in time for an uprising. He was shot in the leg and barely made it back to the city, where he was charged with the
responsibility to negotiate a safe retreat for the whole garrison. It was a losing hand.

No one, not even the notorious Akbar Khan, whose father, the deposed Dost Mohammed, was held in the British India—no one had means to guarantee the safety of the British by then. The swell of uprising against the feringhee “infidel dogs” had acquired the inhuman autonomy of a natural disaster.

After the retreating British bled through the first of the mountain passes on their way, Akbar Khan, who’d observed the chase from the sidelines, offered—or demanded?—to possess himself of officer hostages in addition to women and children as an act of kindness—or cunning?—or both. Pottinger volunteered.

For the next nine months of captivity, Pottinger, ever a diplomat, tried to negotiate for freedom and strove to engage in his endeavor the command of the British army in Jalalabad. But Jalalabad largely ignored Pottinger’s missives. Jalalabad deferred to Calcutta, and Calcutta, a month behind as always, was just now reeling at the news of the Kabul disaster and urged Jalalabad not to concede to talks, and instead to leave Afghanistan altogether. “What is this Pottinger?” Tosh the copier rhetorically asked Bosh the archivist. “A prisoner trading with his jailer for release. Why should the governor general acquiesce to their terms?”

Fortunately, the army in Jalalabad was slow to move in either direction: the fateful deficit of camels.

The ending was a happy one by coincidence. By September 1842, the hostages subverted, befriended, and corrupted a jailer or two and pledged their own estates to secure the jailers’ aid. When a cavalry detachment (sent out, to be fair, to look for them) came across the hostages, they were traveling more or less in the direction of their choosing.

• • •

When next I met Pottinger, we were at a court-martial hearing of his role in the Kabul disaster. They summoned me to testify about Pottinger’s conduct in Herat. The irony, I thought smugly.

At the time I did not know half of what I know now.
Of course
the inquiry was looking for a scapegoat. Pottinger had volunteered as a hostage, after all, while the army had perished. Now some people were interested to establish a record of Pottinger’s overreach: acting in the name of the British government when not authorized to do so, and even—God forbid!—negotiating with too much regard for the Afghan side. Shroffs
from Herat and Kabul had been filing in with drafts on the dear old country’s treasury. Not all—but a lot of these bore Pottinger’s signature—and compensated the recipients for the property lost, the services rendered. The Angleesh had been
upholding the balance.
At a greater and greater cost.

I was not privy to any of it at the time. But when I saw the Angleesh as I took the witness stand . . .

He was emaciated. The expression of pained surprise seemed to have become a permanent fixture on his face, itself a sorry contrast of tan and pale: almost as dark as the stained oak of the pew he sat on, except where a beard had been freshly shaved off. He looked small and fragile in his brand-new artillery uniform, hunched like an old man.

I turned cold with pity.

And so when Mr. Maddock (let’s call him the lead inquisitor) asked me, “Did Major Pottinger give you the impression that he officially represented Britain in Herat?” and the Angleesh glanced up hauntedly from his pew—I knew I had to help him.
That
was my mission.

I said, “I have not heard such a statement from him. I made this assumption entirely on my own, judging from the competence and success with which Mr. Pottinger handled the Herat situation and the respect he elicited among all parties.”

A surprise on Pottinger’s face was the least pained I’d ever seen.

I enjoyed upsetting Mr. Maddock. He was to get a glimpse of what Mr. Velitzyn used to be in his old life—an imposing and authoritative gentleman who would not be cornered and confused into saying anything that would make the Angleesh look bad. Alas, Mr. Maddock was an experienced snarer of souls: “Says here Mr. Pottinger did not establish the fact of your connections to Russians and Persians. Have you been dishonest with him? Or did he not investigate?”

“Neither,” said I after a pause, and, “My
past
connections did come up and were to be revisited in depth when Mr. Todd arrived.”

More of that sort followed, until I chilled with a realization that Mr. Maddock did not want
Pottinger
to look like he had been overreaching, but
me
—like I had aided and abetted him. By God, to some of these pencil pushers, the very association with a character like me, a
foreign
man branded with a half-missing ear, was unsavory enough!
This
may have been the true reason why they’d dragged me onto the stand. So I made a choice. It was a speech. I thrust it into the first opening available. I spoke
about horrors of Herat, famine and mutilation and slavery; and a precarious balance that held on
just one man,
the Angleesh. I broke open my secret—the truth and nothing but the truth so help me God—that the Russian then Afghan side paid then tried to force me to assassinate him. I finished with, “But I surrendered my arms before this man in awe of his dedication and courage. This gallant officer has done his very best at every station of the way, oft in isolation and abandonment. For all intents and purposes he has single-handedly delivered Herat to Britain; and to dissect his performance with an air of suspicion is to dishonor the dedication of servicemen like him, fallen and living; it weakens the very fiber that makes your nation great!”

There is nothing like a voice of a former foe that rings with fervor of admiration and gives a legend its birth. Had I helped Pottinger? By the look on his face, I did well. At the very least I derailed Mr. Maddock’s inquiry, what with all the uproar that followed.

Pottinger came out of the courts-martial a hero. I—had my pay reduced, promotion reversed, travel outside Calcutta forbidden, the hard-earned companionship of Messrs. Tosh, Bosh, and Cosh refused, the Royal Calcutta Golf Club membership denied. But the “Hero of Herat” died of typhus just a few months later, aged thirty-two. He left no family, only a perfect service record; and the boy he’d hoped to teach mathematics,
our
boy, Khalo, went on to become a ruthless warlord, Sirdar Khalil Khan, who launched his career by assassinating both Kamran Shah and Dr. Euler—for Yar Mohammed.

While I live still.

• • •

Everything passes. In a year or two after the hearings, no British newcomer to Calcutta would believe that anyone in his right mind could have entrusted an assassination to this “quiet and queer Mr. Velitzyn.” Eventually, even Mr. Velitzyn would disbelieve it, as he would learn to like his metered, dead-end existence: his desk job, his route to and from, his tiny bungalow. He would like buying his milk from a
doodwallah,
and his trousers and shirts from a
readee-made-cloeswallah
; he would even like his
boy,
an inscrutable Hindu who probably reported on Mr. Velitzyn but redeemed himself in Mr. Velitzyn’s eyes by dancing in the first thunderstorm of the monsoon. Only once a month or so on a Saturday, that queer Mr. Velitzyn would finish up with a particularly solemn precision and stack and lock all the papers as if it was his last day on the job. At
home he would pour himself a hot bath under a mosquito net canopy and arrange nearby the things he might be needing in the next few hours.

Sometimes he’d have a hookah by his side, and then he’d smoke hashish. Or he’d take it in sweetmeats: spread the sticky paste over his gums or suck it like toffee. Hot water took care of the inevitable side effect, and he knew just how much and how hot the water to pour so that he’d emerge from his dreamworld just when the water would start to freeze around him. He did not want to glaciate, not like this.

Year after year Mr. Velitzyn waited (feared, hoped) that—now that he lived in a climate where temperatures rarely dipped below 60 degrees Fahrenheit—he’d finally expire like a normal human being. This didn’t happen. In ten years, in lieu of a proper demise, Mr. Velitzyn retired. He applied for and received permission to go to Madras. Then he went to his hashish wallah and made final inquiries about a destination they’d talked about more than once. Closer yet to the equator was a paradise called Singapore in the Malayan archipelago, a wild place of quick fortunes and exotic drugs, a seaport town where rule of law had not yet taken hold, where one could be anything at all, even a hundred-and-ten-year-old piece of ice. There the quiet Mr. Velitzyn who’d served his time, who’d earned his place, who’d done his penance, would go and let his tracks be lost—once again.