Empire Made

by Kief Hillsbery

  Opposition to amnesty ran deep among the British in India. But it gained support at home once remorse set in about the reduction of officers and gentlemen to the same brutish level as “heathens.” The British, after all, were a superior people.

  “I protest against meeting atrocities with atrocities,” Benjamin Disraeli told the House of Commons, and on November 1 a general amnesty was proclaimed in the name of Queen Victoria. It followed by two months the effective date of the Act for the Better Government of India, which transferred to the British Crown all territories possessed by the East India Company, and all powers exercised by the Company over them.

  On that day, meeting for the last time at their headquarters in Leadenhall Street, the directors of the Honourable East India Company issued a statement of farewell to all their many servants. “The Company has the great privilege,” it began, “of transferring to the service of Her Majesty such a body of civil and military officers as the world has never seen before.”

  It was only the truth. But it surely seemed anticlimactic to one civil officer who had already said farewell to the service and everything it stood for. Nigel Halleck’s privilege, for the next twenty years, was to continue to enjoy the life he had made for himself apart from the Company, in all its splendid isolation.

  PART III

  30

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  Rosi Bagh

  1976

  WHEN I RETURNED to Kathmandu from my trek to Tipling, I called on Boris at the Yak and Yeti. He listened with interest to the tale of helicopters touching down to spirit away gemstones that rightly belonged to His Majesty King Birendra. His own relations with the royal family had cooled since the halcyon days of the Shah restoration. In 1970, he had lost the catering contract for state functions to the new Soaltee Hotel, owned by Prince Gyanendra. He naturally made his displeasure known, and the next thing he knew he had been detained during an investigation into the theft and illegal export of ancient art objects.

  Jailed!

  He himself!

  Boris!

  He was cleared, of course, but the message was plain: one crossed the Shahs at one’s peril. He hoped that was understood fully up in Tipling.

  The first thing he said when I told him that my visa was up and I would be returning to the States was that if I wanted to stay in Nepal, he would be happy to give me a part-time job teaching English to his employees. That would take care of the visa extension. The second thing he said, after I demurred because I had another year of college to complete, was that since I was traveling across Afghanistan again, I ought to look up a fellow he knew in Herat.

  An Englishman, one of those archaeologists who couldn’t sit still. Digging, digging, always digging. Not one to bother with papers and permits. He’d show me a proper ruin or two, my eyes only. That I could depend upon. He would write him straightaway.

  Relying on the post between Nepal and Afghanistan, though—that would be foolish. One didn’t place wagers on a horse gone lame in two legs. I had better take a copy of his letter with me.

  The Englishman, whom I’ll call Hendricks, turned out to be a donnish loner in his forties. He insisted that Boris had over-egged the pudding in calling him an archaeologist. He was nothing of the sort. Bog-standard amateur was more like it. (Later, after the Islamic revolution in nearby Iran and the invasion of Afghanistan by the equally nearby USSR, he would strike me as a likely professional in a more clandestine line—one that would have accounted for his fluency in Farsi, Dari, Pashto, and Russian as well as the vagueness of his explanation for his presence in Herat.) As promised, he chauffeured me by Land Rover to wild, unknown ruins on the outskirts of the ancient city, termed “the breadbasket of Central Asia” by Herodotus and captured by Alexander in 330 B.C. But he also showed me the spires and domes clad in luminous mosaics that brought Herat its greatest fame as the capital of the Timurid Empire, whose rulers bestowed lavish commissions on artists, architects, and men of letters.

  Here were the towering minarets of the Musalla, tiled with blue lozenges filled with flowers. There was the azure mausoleum of Empress Gohar Shad, described by Robert Byron after his visit in 1934 as “the most beautiful example in color in architecture ever devised by man to the glory of God and himself.”

  At the zenith of Herat’s magnificence, in the fifteenth century, it was one of the most cultured cities in the world, larger than Paris or London. It was a place where it was said that if you stretched out your feet, you were sure to hit a poet.

  The greatest was the beloved Persian Jami. On a bright, clear morning, we drove out a dusty road lined with pines to his simple tomb, sheltered by a spreading pistachio tree in the garden of a mosque. The poet had written his own epitaph, and I copied Hendricks’ translation into my notebook:

  When your face is hidden from me,

  Like the moon hidden on a dark night,

  I shed stars of tears and yet my night remains dark

  In spite of all those shining stars.

  Later we wandered through the ruins of an old royal hunting lodge at Rosi Bagh, a few miles south of the city. The sand-blown grounds of the adjacent necropolis were littered with shards of the exquisite glazed tiles that had given the monuments of Herat their celestial luminescence. The two largest tombs contained the remains of father and son. Hendricks called them Sadozais. The father’s name was Mahmud Shah. He was once the king of Afghanistan, once held the Koh-i-noor diamond. He was thought to have been poisoned by his son Kamran, whose name was on the other tomb.

  After the bloodline ran out, Hendricks said, most of the lesser royal tombs had been stripped of their mosaics by grave robbers. Only a few forlorn tiles with inscriptions remained. He drew my attention to one, shaped as a twelve-pointed star and decorated with fine faience mosaic—small pieces of turquoise, saffron, and green ceramics fitted together to form designs of flowers, leaves, and calligraphy.

  The curious thing about it was the calligraphy. It quoted from Jami’s epitaph, which was well-known in the Islamic world. But the inscription concluded abruptly with “I shed stars,” as if the artisan’s thoughts had turned elsewhere and, upon resuming his work, he’d forgotten there was more to the poem.

  It was the sort of lapse, grumbled Hendricks, that never would have happened in the glorious reign of Gohar Shad.

  He pointed out the pattern of arabesques on another tile. It consisted entirely of repetitions of the word for “mercy.”

  That, he said drily, was the rarest of qualities among the rulers interred there. Then he told me a story about “Kamran the Cruel,” who maintained a pride of lions to which he fed his enemies alive.

  YEARS WOULD PASS before the story signified. I had not yet connected Sa’adat to the Afghan ruling family and the vivid pink-hued rubies of his birthright. There was no way of knowing then that the truncated stanza from Jami on the star-shaped tile in that bleak dusty boneyard outside of Herat was the crucial missing piece of the puzzle that was Nigel.

  31

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  Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

  1982

  WHEN I RETURNED to the United States, I regaled my mother with stories of the Ranas and their palaces. She had always been an ardent monarchist, of the sort found these days mostly among expatriates like herself, who revel in the glory without paying for the privilege, and I wondered at first how she would receive the news that Nigel had so long enjoyed the hospitality of the usurper Jang Bahadur. But it pleased her immensely that he had moved in such exalted circles. And she was relieved that Boris had dismissed the family legend that Nigel met his end in the mouth of a man-eater. She resisted the idea of Nigel’s cremation, though, however much sense it might seem to make with benefit of hindsight.

  No, she said—he had been buried. He must have been, because she remembered hearing there was some kind of marker, emplaced by the same friend who sent word of Nigel’s death to his family in England. She was sure its location had been known, if left unvisited, until the letter describing it went up in f
lames in 1940. All anyone remembered was that the place had something to do with a tiger. Perhaps the idea that he’d been killed by one arose out of that. Was there a town in Nepal that was famous for tigers, or named after them in the native tongue?

  All I could think of was Tiger Tops, where guests took in the wildlife of the Terai from a rustic lodge perched on stilts. But it had been in business only since 1965, and no town or village names came to mind that incorporated the word bagha. None came up later, either, when I consulted a gazetteer at my college library.

  I had better luck researching Nigel’s friend John Nicholson. I learned, in the first place, that his name is immortalized in English usage. When we say “in the nick of time,” we pay homage to the hero of the Indian Mutiny, who had the habit of turning up just when his help was needed most. Then I read about the cult of the Nikal Seynis and discovered that the sect has survived to the present day in remote parts of northwest Pakistan. Finally, I learned that the man behind the myth had lately been cut down to size by revisionist historians.

  That they accused him of racism and religious bigotry was only to be expected. In applying the standards of the late twentieth century to the attitudes of those who lived in the mid-nineteenth, the same would have to be said about virtually all of his contemporaries, including the benevolent Henry Lawrence. There was more to it than that, though. Nicholson, they asserted, was a guilt-ridden homosexual bully, so disgusted by his orientation that he sought release in manic violence. One called him a sadomasochist.

  Though Nicholson never married—instead of heeding Henry Lawrence’s advice to find a wife on his home leave, he spent much of it inquiring into weaponry and military training in Prussia and Russia—there is no hard evidence that he found solace in men or boys. Some of the smoke that has led to the presumption of fire may be traced to his closeness with the son of Hassan Karam Khan, a tribal chieftain who rode with the force he led in the ill-fated attempt to reclaim the watchtower at Margalla Pass. Accounts differ on Khan’s fate. One holds that he was among those who died at the base of the Margalla watchtower. According to another, he was murdered afterwards by a rival chief, in revenge for siding with the British. What is certain, wrote Nicholson’s fellow “political” James Abbott, is that he left a young son named Muhammad Hayat Khan, “upon whom Nicholson lavished much care and attention.”

  Abbott reported the boy’s age as “about seven,” but it was probably closer to ten or eleven; nine years later the lad was fighting at Nicholson’s side as a leader of irregular troops himself. On the face of the surviving evidence, at least to a casual reader, there is nothing to suggest that Nicholson’s interest in Muhammad Hayat Khan was anything but paternal. But such a reading, in the minds of modern historians, fails to account for the cultural context of such a connection.

  Then as now, the practice of sodomy was endemic among Pashtun men. (A study conducted by an American military research unit in 2010 would conclude that the entire Pashtun ethnic group was experiencing a “sexual identity crisis” after finding that Pashtun men commonly had sex with other men, admired other men physically, had sexual relationships with boys, and shunned women both socially and sexually—yet completely rejected the label “homosexual.”) When adults “lavished” their “care and attention” on adolescent boys, there was only one possible interpretation of its nature. It wasn’t just Nicholson’s fearlessness that natives admired. Time and again, the grizzled warriors of the North-West Frontier voiced their conviction that in the core of his being, “Nikal Seyn” was one of them.

  There was also the matter of Nicholson’s friendship with Herbert Edwardes. During the several years Nicholson served at Bannu as deputy district commissioner, he had given over his leave days to riding nine hard hours each way to spend one night a week at Edwardes’ bungalow in Peshawar. When he was transferred to Peshawar himself, he moved in with Edwardes rather than occupy the house assigned to him. Though the two officers had known each other since the Battle of Sobraon, in 1846, by all accounts their mutual fondness dated to their voyage down the Sutlej and the Indus after they set out for England from Ferozepore at the end of 1849. It was a long way to Karachi—almost seven hundred miles—and the enforced intimacy of a rustic Indian houseboat might easily have become what Nicholson’s Victorian biographer called “one of those ordeals which test the strength of human friendship.” Instead, wrote Lionel Trotter, “the days flowed by in the easy intercourse of two fine noble spirits bound together by common aims, sympathies, experiences, and by a certain lack in each of that which the other could best supply.”

  Instead, they bonded into soul mates.

  “In the sunshine of the elder man’s cheery nature and bright, trenchant, easyflowing talk, Nicholson’s heart grew lighter, his countenance less stern, and his tongue found readier utterance for the thoughts that filled his brain. Edwardes, too, knew how to hold his tongue on fit occasion, and to serve his friend by the silence that is often more eloquent than any words.”

  Twentieth-century authors would imagine the outing as a homosexual idyll. Trotter’s rather abrupt insistence that “other incidents of this voyage remain matters for guess-work” may or may not suggest that there was gossip at the time. Whether Nicholson ever wrote about the river trip is unknown. A great many of his letters were destroyed in an “accidental” fire in the study of Sir John William Kaye, author of Lives of Indian Officers; coincidentally or not, similar fires flared up in the studies of Victorian biographers of Lord Byron and Sir Richard Burton, other heroic public figures whose private lives flouted the conventions of the day.

  Edwardes, for his part, told Emma Sidney, whom he married in England in 1850—with Nicholson standing as best man—that they spent their time “beguiling their way with books and talk.” We owe the assurance that afterwards the two men were “welded together” in “strong, true love and friendship” to Lady Edwardes herself, who had accompanied her husband on his return to India but found the climate unbearable and returned to England:

  “Knowing each other most intimately, they were more than brothers in the tenderness of their whole lives henceforth, and the fame and interests of each other were dearer to them both than their own.”

  I learned of Nicholson’s voyage down the Indus with Herbert Edwardes from Rasheed, the Pashtun admirer of John Nicholson whom I first met at Margalla Pass. After we re-boarded the segregated bus there, he had given me his address, and we exchanged letters while I lived in Kathmandu. On my way back to Afghanistan, he put me up for a few days at his place in Peshawar. I kept his account of the houseboat journey—minus the modern interpretation—in the back of my mind until 1982, when I decided to pitch the idea of emulating Nicholson and Edwardes’ journey to my editor at the outdoor sports magazine that had been publishing my stories since I graduated from college.

  By then Rasheed had graduated, too; he was practicing dentistry up in the Hazara country at Abbottabad, the hill station named after James Abbott. He wrote to me that the construction of barrages—diversion dams for irrigation—on the lower Indus had made it impossible to float the river as far as Nicholson and Edwardes had, all the way to the Arabian Sea. But there was a significant stretch of free-flowing water downstream from Attock, passing through roadless country that was little changed from the days of Henry Lawrence’s Young Men.

  And there we were, a few months later, perched on a low drystone wall beneath a mulberry tree that canopied out from the corner of a teahouse on the riverbank, somewhere nameless in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Fine pink sand spilled down the bank to the shore. It showed no tracks. Behind the teahouse rose a ridge of shattered rock. The boatman leaned over the gunwale of a fishing boat tied to a piling on the shore. The water was smooth pink glass that mirrored the patched hull of the boat and the bald black tires nailed to the piling. A teenaged boy slouched in the shade of the arched doorway of the teahouse. It was very hot.

  “Did you hear that?” asked Rasheed. “What the boatman said?”

  Rashe
ed called out in Urdu to the boatman. The boatman looked up and smiled. Then he turned back toward the boy in the doorway.

  “Te zan ta Nikal Seyn wayat?” he repeated.

  It was a catchphrase, Rasheed told me, for exasperation.

  The boatman wanted the boy to bring him a glass of tea.

  The boy told him he was a doorkeeper, not a waiter.

  The boatman impugned his upbringing; the boy replied in kind.

  The boatman said:

  “Who do you think you are, Nicholson?”

  After all these years, said Rasheed, the common people still remembered him.

  “How lovely is that?” he asked.

  That night, sitting beside me at our campsite on a sandbar, Rasheed told me that he hoped the modern historians were right—that the two Englishmen had been lovers, that life without tenderness was possible but miserable, that the frontier was a lonely and dangerous place that either drew men together or tore them apart.

  England was another planet.

  These men lived for years among the Pashtuns, he said, whose ways were not the English ways. Nor were Pashtuns ashamed of their attachments. They spoke of their loves and conquests. They teased and joked. They showed their affection.