The Game

into the other, dropping any stray pebbles to the ground. I looked at him, looked back at his hands, and couldn’t believe the mechanical speed and precision of his motions: Watching closely, I could see no rice grains join the lentils, no pulses among the rice. The boy pretended to ignore me, but if anything, his hands speeded up.

I took a handful from the bag, to try it myself. With fierce concentration, I could tell one tiny grain from the other after rubbing them for some seconds between finger and thumb. Without benefit of vision, it would take me hours, days to work my way through the two or three pounds his sack contained. He was halfway through it already.

I went to sit next to Holmes, and whispered in English what I had seen. He raised his voice and asked the boy, “Bindra, tell us why you have bought these sweepings from the market?”

“Not sweepings! I do not eat unclean food from off the ground. This is merely the work of a clumsy seller of grain, who allowed one to spill into the other. And he is lazy as well, for rather than going to the labour of sorting, he would rather sell it for next to nothing.”

“And have I paid the full cost of the dhal and the rice, or next to nothing?” Holmes asked drily.

“Not full, no!” the boy declared, filled with righteous indignation. But under Holmes’ gaze, he faltered, and made a show of checking the water to see if it was boiling yet. “I divide the cost of the two, that you may thus pay me for my labours of sorting. Since,” he pointed out darkly, “you have not agreed on a wage for my other hours.”

Holmes chuckled. “You speak fairly, Bindraji. Next time buy the lentils and the rice already separated, and spend your hours at some other work. I shall grant you one rupee each week. And more, when you prove your worth.”

The boy nodded, satisfied for the moment. When the sack was empty he tipped the bowl of lentils into the fried onion and the rice into the water. He scooped up half a dozen round chapatis that he had bought in the market and laid them on top of the pot lids to warm.

“We seem to have found a most capable servant,” Holmes murmured.

“That dinner does smell good.”

“It is, however, provocative to reflect that the trick with the rice and lentils is commonly used to teach sensitivity to the fingertips of apprentice pick-pockets.”

As our meal cooked the caravanserai had been filling up, so that when we looked up from our empty bowls, we found ourselves between a group of Rajputs on their way to the races in Calcutta and a family of Sikhs going home to the Punjab. The Sikhs were four men and a boy of about twelve, all of them handsome and proud.

The men settled their livestock and sent one of their number off to buy a meal. Bindra swilled out our pots beneath the pump, then squatted next to the donkey and smoked one of the noxious Indian cigarettes called bidis before getting out the purloined horse-brush and applying it to the sides of the appreciative donkey. Holmes took out a shiny coin and began to fiddle with it until he caught the Sikh boy’s eyes; he then sharply stretched out his right hand, palm down and fingers outstretched, but the coin, instead of dropping to the ground, vanished. More slowly, he extended his other hand, turned the hand palm up, and there sat the coin. Simple tricks, playing on the shininess of the silver in the firelight, and ignoring the sensation he was causing when the boy tugged at the sleeve of his uncle and pointed at the flicker and dash of silver in the stranger’s hands.

When Holmes appeared to lose the coin, patting all over his garments for it and searching the ground around his feet in alarm, the Sikh family began to do the same—until Holmes looked up, seeming to notice them for the first time. He rose upright, marched across the four paces that separated our two encampments, and shot his hand out to snatch the coin from the brief head-covering of the startled boy.

Holmes held the coin out to the lad, pinched between finger and thumb, but when the boy reached out for it, the coin was gone.

The older men laughed, appreciating the trick, and the boy ducked his head in confusion. But when Holmes moved into his marginally more advanced routines, the adults’ superior smiles faltered, and soon gave way to expressions of frank amazement very like that worn by the boy. And when the magician pulled from his cap a distinctive bridle decoration, which none of them had noticed him steal from their mare a full hour before, there was a general “Oah” of astonishment and much fondling of beards as they discussed the magician’s authority.

Holmes threw me a half-wink, and turned to his bedding roll.

I lay long and listened to the sounds of the Indian night, the murmur of voices and the bullfrog groans of hookahs slowly dying away, leaving only snores, coughs, the bubbling grumble of the camels, the coo of doves, and the distant yammer of jackals to break the great stillness.

I had anticipated enormous problems, living in such public circumstances as a male. It is one thing to adopt the guise in a desert place such as Palestine, when one may see a handful of others in the course of an entire morning, but here, there would be no such privacy. Very fortunately, I have been blessed with a strong bladder, and found that by timing my visits to the fields to the dusk hours, and by making use of the privacy afforded by the tent, my uncharacteristic physiognomy went unnoted. Either that, or my neighbours were too polite to comment.

At first light, with the coughs and throat-clearing rising around us like the sounds of a hospital mustard-gas ward, we beat the frost from our tent and continued on our way. The dawn turned the sky to a yellow-pink at the east, a deep rose to the west, with all the world between made up of insubstantial pink-grey silhouettes, treetops and temples and distant buildings called into being from the drifts of rosy mist, disconnected from any objects that might have roots and foundations, mere islands of dark solidity in a glowing pink sea.

And then the light grew stronger, and the silhouettes took on depth, and soon the sun lumbered huge and orange over the horizon, pulling free of the obscuring mist and dust and smoke. India’s great age and crowdedness and solidity re-established itself, sucking the frost and freshness and youth from the air. The land grew colour and dimension, the spectacular mountains on the horizon retreated into the haze, and a small troupe of wandering magicians left the hurly-burly of the Grand Trunk Road to set off across the Indian countryside.

Of all the possible disguises an English spy might choose, doctor or antiquarian or big-game hunter, ours was one of the more idiosyncratic. For one thing, we were on foot, our pace confined to what our legs would permit, our possessions in a cart so small it looked more a joke than a useful form of transport. To have it pulled by a donkey rather than a bullock, or even a mule, added to the disarming unlikeliness of the entourage, and with Bindra to cook our decidedly non-English meals and barter for staples and fuel added the final touch of verisimilitude. We were foreign, certainly, but nothing about us said “British.” That was, after all, the point of the exercise.

It is something over one hundred and fifty miles between Delhi and Simla. We could have made it there in a forced march—indeed, we might have saved ourselves a great deal of trouble and taken the train, or even hired a motorcar—but at this point in our expedition, the need was greatest to perfect our act, that when we got into the hills, we might be word-perfect. Moving at donkey rate, pausing each day to set up camp and do our performance, we covered at most twenty miles a day.

But in that time I learned to levitate under Holmes’ hand and to swallow a sword without gagging, and we even began to juggle flaming brands between ourselves. When he first saw our conjuring and magic, Bindra was apprehensive, but once he had witnessed the similar reaction of the rustics, he immediately took on the garments of sophistication and scorned to gape, other than secretly. I think he understood that what we did were tricks, not actual necromancy; on the other hand, I do not know that to his mind, there would be much difference between cleverness and supernatural powers.

By the third day on the road, however, he clearly decided to throw himself into the act. On the morning of that day, we passed through a small town, too large for our purposes but convenient for the purchase of supplies. So when the boy turned to Holmes and demanded some money, I figured it was because he’d spotted some brinjal or eggs that he thought we needed, or some of his horrid little bidis. Holmes fished out a rupee, but Bindra left his hand out and said, “Five.”

“Five rupees?” Holmes asked. “But why?”

“You will see.”

Holmes thought about it, and after a moment the remaining coins fell out of the sky, bouncing off the boy’s head. Bindra gathered them from the dust without remark and trotted back the way we had come. Holmes and I continued on our way, for by this time the donkey was nearly as willing to go with us as it was with the boy.

Outside of town, we joined a flock of goats for a time, then found ourselves following a veritable mountain of rustling greenery down the road. When it turned off into a field, we paused to watch a group of men scramble up to