A Malê abroad
Northern India
October 1865
“There!” the scout called. “In there!”
Usman Abacar looked where the scout was pointing. The valley looked like any other, here in the Aravalli hill country, but the soldier was sure that this was where bandits had trapped a British patrol.
Seeing no obvious danger, Usman turned in the saddle, signaled to his thirty Sikh sowars, and rode toward the valley at the canter. Behind, his brother-lieutenant William Carlisle did the same with his own thirty. Carlisle was six months junior to Usman and, unlike many of the other juniors, didn’t seem to resent it; he was brave enough but indecisive, and he was happy to let someone else take charge. And Carlisle had been happy to follow Usman when, after chancing on the scout who’d escaped the siege, he’d decided to ride to the patrol’s rescue rather than reporting up the line.
It was only a few minutes later that Usman heard the sound of scattered gunshots. They were in the right place and had arrived in time; he hoped the scout was also right about the bandits’ numbers, or he might regret coming with only two cavalry troops. He was fairly sure his men could outrun the dacoits if it came to that, but if not, he might find himself praying that
his scout had got through.
And then they came into view around a bend in the valley: a motley collection of bandits gathered around the box canyon that the patrol had chosen to defend. It looked like about a hundred of them: more than the scout had estimated, but not many more. Between his men, Carlisle’s and the patrol, the odds would be only slightly worse than even.
One of them pointed at Usman’s troops and gave a cry: there was nothing for it now except to charge while they were still scattered. Usman urged his horse into a gallop, drew his sabre with a rasp, and flourished it over his head. “Khalsa-ji!” he shouted. “Bole so nihal!”
He let the shout fill him as his sowars answered "Sat sri akal!", and for a moment, he felt the sheer physical joy of being twenty-four years old on a crisp fall day, riding a fast horse with thirty picked men at his back. This was the part of a cavalry charge which gave him the same sense of youth and strength as when he practiced the
capoeira. The part after this was the one that gave him nightmares.
He looked back at the soldiers following him, and signaled them to close. They’d be outnumbered if they fought all the dacoits at once, but if they could overwhelm the nearer ones before the others could aid them, they might be able to get the advantage.
Both sides were firing now, and he saw one of the bandits fall. “The horses!” he ordered in fluent Punjabi. “Shoot at the horses!” A few of the Sikhs started to correct their aim, but there was hardly time to do so before the charge struck home.
Usman found himself trading strokes with a rough-looking man about ten years his senior. He had a brief time to wonder whether the bandit was evil or a decent man gone wrong – someone, maybe, who’d lost home and family during the mutiny, or in the famine four years past. But he’d never know, and right now it didn’t matter. He saw an opening and stabbed forward with the sabre as he’d been taught when he was eight; the movement of his horse made him miss the dacoit’s gut, but the point took the bandit in the ribs and he dropped his own sword.
The momentum of the battle had carried them past each other now, and there was no chance to finish the bandit, but that didn’t matter either; dead or wounded, he was out of the fight. It was like that, most of the time. Usman had been in six other battles, all back-country skirmishes like this one, and he still wasn’t sure if he’d killed anyone. When he thought about it, he preferred it that way.
He had a few seconds to look around him and see how the fight was going. The nearer of the bandits had been routed, and a few of his and Carlisle’s men were chasing them. “Back to me!” he called, making his voice carry. “To me!” This was no time for his force to break up, not when they still hadn’t done much better than even the odds.
The sowars closed on Usman to confront the bandits still in the field, but for the third time that day, it didn’t matter. He looked ahead of him and saw the patrol sortieing from the canyon, and the dacoits, who had already been wavering, decided to give the battle up as a bad job. Whatever they’d sought to get from the patrol – guns, ammunition, rations – would cost them too dear now, and though they were brave men, they saw no point in fighting for its own sake. First one, then a few, then all of them fled up the valley.
Usman heard a voice at his shoulder: Anil Singh, one of his
daffadars. “Should we chase them, sir?”
He thought about it for a moment. “No, let them go. We don’t know if they’ve got friends waiting up the road. We’ll report them at Nasirabad, and let the brass decide what to do about them.” The sergeant nodded and went to see to the wounded.
The officer in charge of the patrol – a lieutenant Usman didn’t recognize – rode over, but whatever he’d planned to say was cut off by the double take he did when he saw who’d rescued him. Usman was used to that. Surprise wasn’t so bad; the problem was the people who couldn’t get
beyond the surprise.
This one could. “Well and timely done,” he said, his accent reminding Usman of some of the aristocrats he’d known at school. “You have my thanks.”
“My pleasure,” Usman answered, and took the offered hand; then he too had injured men to attend.
The clamor began as soon as Usman entered the market. “Grilled lamb, Sidi, slaughtered this morning!” “Silver and gold, Sidi, to make your wife look like a rani!” “Sidi, in here! Girls who’ll make you forget all other women!” “For you, Sidi!” “Sidi, sidi...”
Usman smiled inwardly. Anyone else in his uniform would be called “sahib,” but he was a black man, so the merchants and touts called him by the name Africans bore in India. Most of the Sidis lived to the south or west, in Gujarat or Sindh, but he’d met two or three who’d come far to serve in the Rajput princes’ armies. Their blood was African, that was plain to see, but they’d been here so long that there was little of Africa in them except for their songs, their faith, and a few words with hints of Arabic and something else Usman didn’t recognize. They’d been here long enough, that they’d forgotten what “sidi” really meant – forgotten, in fact, that “sidi” and “sahib” meant exactly the same thing.
The thought was an amusing one:
does it matter that they call me “lord,” if they don’t know that they’re doing it? At least the Sidis were thought to be loyal soldiers; Usman wasn’t a lord, but he
was that, and being looked upon as a Sidi gave him some trust that a sahib might not have.
He bought a couple of rolled
chapatis stuffed with spiced dhal, and wandered through the market looking for presents: for his mother and Nana Asma’u, for Sarah, for Mrs. Alexander, for a couple of the women he knew outside Nasirabad cantonment. He was in no hurry; he’d given the men two days’ liberty in Udaipur on the way home, which meant that once he’d seen to their lodgings,
he had two days’ liberty as well.
Usman found something for his mother, a patterned red head-covering and a necklace of silver beads dotted with colored stones, and made his way through winding streets to the Lake Pichola quayside. He ate his
chapatis on the steps leading down to the lakeshore, looking out at the Lake Palace and the Jag Mandir, and then took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and began to sketch. He was an indifferent artist, but Sarah loved his drawings of India, and he tried to include one in every letter.
And besides, Udaipur, city of lakes and palaces, was a place well worth drawing. Udaipur, and Jaipur with its boulevards and pink tiled gates, were beautiful cities in a way that London was not; they’d been designed, almost as works of art, rather than growing with no plan. They were what the new city of Ilorin might look like had it been older and built by a succession of kings rather than industrialists.
But for all that, the people were poorer than in London or even Ilorin, both in the provinces where the Indian princes were still nominal rulers and those where the district officers had taken their place, and there were no mills like the rich men of Ilorin and Sokoto had built. Anand, the innkeeper at Nasirabad, had told him once: “We had our workshops a hundred years ago, but now the British buy our produce cheap and sell us their goods dear, and we pay the price when famine comes.”
Usman had felt driven to defend his second homeland, arguing that Britain had sent food to relieve the famine when the princes had not, and that it had built the railroads by which the food had been delivered. “The rajas are worth nothing,” Anand had said, conceding the point. “But if so many farms hadn’t been made into plantations, and if the taxes hadn’t been set so high, the famine wouldn’t have been nearly as hard. It was a money-famine. A cotton-famine.”
All that seemed very distant here at the Udaipur quays, gazing out at the Jag Mandir and listening to the bird-calls. But the market and the serai where he’d lodged his sowars weren’t distant at all, and places like that reminded him of how the people who’d built cities like this bowed and scraped to anyone in a British uniform. And when they did that to
Usman’s uniform, it suddenly didn’t seem to matter that half the other officers didn’t think he should be wearing one; it made him feel like all the things his father had told him not to be.
He might write about that, in his next letter to his mother. He’d write something different to Sarah, along with the sketch; maybe something about the Sidis. He’d wondered lately about how there seemed to be Africans in every part of the world. They’d been taken there against their will, but when they returned, as Usman’s father had done, they brought all that was good from the nations where they had traveled. Maybe some of India should return to Africa as well – and maybe the countries where the Africans had gone should take what was good about Africa and make it their own. Customs could be shared as easily as blood; more so, in fact. What would a race that contained the best of all races look like? How could he join that race, as his father surely had?
He finished his sketch and looked at it with an appraising eye; it would do. He’d make a copy that evening for Mrs. Alexander, but for now, he refolded it and sat watching the boats on the lake. A few minutes later, when his mind was clear, he got up and started for the serai.
*******
It was morning in Nasirabad, and Usman fixed himself some tea in the wardroom. A few of the other officers were getting an early start on their drinking and invited him to join them; he went to sit at their table, but declined the offer of beer. That, at least, had never been a problem; enough of the officers were teetotal that refusing a drink wasn’t seen as strange. “Hadn’t realized that Mahometans were bloody Methodists,” one of the captains had said, but that had been all.
Before he could do more than exchange greetings, Carlisle was in the door, waving a document and scarcely able to conceal his excitement. “Abacar!” he called. “Come look at this. Both of us mentioned in despatches! This is bloody famous!” He crossed to the table and laid the paper down with a flourish, accepting the congratulations of his fellow officers.
“That’s very good,” Usman said, warmed by his friend’s pleasure. “But I also got a paper today.” He drew a folded letter from his pocket and handed it to Carlisle; it was from his agent in Bombay, notifying him that his commission had been sold and he was authorized passage to Lagos.
Disbelief came over Carlisle’s face as the import of the letter sank in. “Are you mad? Selling up now, when we’ll both be captains?”
You might get a captaincy for this, but I very much doubt I would. “Remember the old major that I stayed with in England, who bought me my commission? The one who died last year?” He waited for Carlisle’s nod; the news of Robert Alexander’s death had hit him hard, even though the major had been ninety. “He told me to serve two or three years and go home before I forgot what home was. It’s been three years now, and I’m in danger of forgetting.”
The other lieutenant scanned his face, and evidently realized that the decision was made. “When are you leaving, then?”
“When my replacement gets here. Two or three weeks, I’d guess.”
“Good luck to you. Maybe I’ll see you again.”
“I hope so,” Usman said, and he did. But at that moment, he was thinking of Africa, and wondering how it would look to a traveler’s eyes.
