Free Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh Page B

girl – who reassured him. She knew that he brooded about the horizons that were opening up before his brother and sister, and she often said to him: Wu saare baat na socho . Don’t think of all that. Turn your mind to other things.
    But to ignore what was happening was plainly impossible. Their home had never before attracted so many strangers; never had they experienced the excitement of being sought out and courted in this way. Often, at the end of the day’s work, when they headed back to their mud-walled home, they would find their father talking to recruiters, in the shade of the mango tree out front; or they would learn that their mother was in the inner courtyard, deep in discussion with marital go-betweens.
    Ram Singh was as well-informed about military matters as their mother was about the marriage market. He had spent many years in the army of the kingdom of Berar and was acquainted with a good number of the professional recruiters who roamed the villages of their region looking for promising young men. This stretch ofthe Gangetic plain had always provided the armies of northern India with the bulk of their soldiery. Since many of these jawans were from families like their own, they had relatives in at least a dozen armies. Ram Singh had tended to these connections carefully and long before anyone came to inquire about his sons, he knew exactly the kind of recruiter he wanted to talk to. He also knew which recruiters he would ignore – and it made no difference whether they were relatives or not.
    One of the first recruiters to seek them out was an agent of the Darbhanga Raj, a zamindari with which they had a family connection. Being a relative he was given a polite hearing but no sooner was he gone than his offer was summarily dismissed.
    The Darbhanga Raj is just a petty zamindari nowadays, said Ram Singh. It’s not like it used to be in my father’s time. They are vassals of the white sahibs; to work for them would be even worse than joining the English Company’s army.
    This was a matter on which Ram Singh had strong opinions. Their district had been seized by the East India Company a long time ago, but in the beginning the annexation had made little difference and things had gone on much as usual. But with the passage of time the Company had begun to interfere in matters that previous rulers had never meddled with – like crops and harvests for example. In recent years the Company’s opium factory in Ghazipur had started to send out hundreds of agents – arkatis and sadar mattus – to press loans on farmers, so that they would plant poppies in the autumn. They said these loans were meant to cover the costs of the crop and they always promised that there would be handsome profits after the harvest. But when the time came the opium factory often changed its prices, depending on how good the crop had been that year. Since growers were not allowed to sell to anyone but the factory, they often ended up making a loss and getting deeper into debt. Ram Singh knew of several men who had been ruined in this way.
    Of late the Company had even tried to interfere in the job market, taking steps to discourage men from joining any army but their own. For Ram Singh, as for many others, this was even more objectionable than meddling with their crops. That anyone should assert an exclusive claim to their service was an astonishing idea:few things were as important to them as their right to work for whoever offered the best terms. It was not uncommon for brothers and cousins to take jobs in different armies: if they happened to meet in battle, it was assumed that each man would do his duty and fight loyally for his leader, having ‘eaten his salt’. This was how things had been in Ram Singh’s time and his father’s before him; and so far as he was concerned it was yet another reason why he did not want his sons to join the Company’s paltans.
    Ram Singh was