The days after the incident by the fish pond settled into a new pattern. Arif-ud-Din, the infant prodigy, became a occasional visitor to the inner courtyards of the main palace complex, invited by a beguiled and lonely Siraj ud-Daulah. For Arif, these visits were reconnaissance missions. Each toddling step through the labyrinthine corridors of power was a lesson in the geography of influence.
He observed everything. The way the Persian-speaking nobility held themselves apart from the Bengali-speaking clerks and soldiers. The palpable anxiety in the air whenever word came of Maratha Bargi raids in the west—raids that stripped the countryside bare and made a mockery of Alivardi Khan's claimed authority. The obsequious deference shown to the pale-faced European factors from the English, French, and Dutch "factories," who were always present at court, watching with eyes like calculating scales.
Today, he was in a sunny verandah overlooking a training ground. Siraj, now six, was practicing with a small, blunted talwar under the bored eye of an elderly Pathan arms-master. Arif sat on a carpet nearby, ostensibly playing with a set of carved wooden elephants, but his attention was fixed on a conversation happening just inside the shaded doorway.
Two men, one in the fine muslin and shawl of a diwan, the other in the practical, dust-stained attire of a zamindar, were speaking in hushed, urgent tones.
"…the revenue from the Nadia district is down by thirty percent this season," the zamindar said, worry etching his face. "The Bargi raids destroyed the granaries. The peasants are eating their seed stock. Next season will be worse."
The diwan, a man with a carefully oiled beard and the hard eyes of a tax collector, waved a dismissive hand. "Alivardi Khan demands his share regardless. Increase the levy on the potters and weavers. Squeeze the oil-pressers. The money must flow to the treasury. The Nawab's new cavalry regiment must be paid, or we are all prey."
"But if I squeeze them further, they will flee! Or rebel!"
"Then hang a few as an example. Scare the rest into paying. It is simple arithmetic, my friend."
Arif's stomach turned. This was the rot at the core. An extractive, short-sighted system that bled the land dry to feed a parasitic military and a decadent court. It killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. He had read the economic theories in his past life—Mughal decline was a textbook case of diminishing fiscal returns. But hearing it here, in the casual cruelty of a corridor conversation, was different. These weren't abstract figures in a history book. They were men deciding the starvation of thousands.
His mind, the part that was Arif Hossain, civil servant, began to work. The revenue is based on a fixed estimate, not actual yield. The tax farmer, the zamindar, has to make up the shortfall himself, so he extorts the peasants. The peasant has no incentive to improve his land, as any surplus will be taken. Result: stagnant agriculture, periodic famine, rural discontent. The solution was obvious in theory: a land survey, a tax based on actual productivity, collected by salaried state officials, with a portion reinvested in canals and seeds. Implementing it would be a political war.
A shadow fell over his wooden elephants. He looked up to see Siraj, sweating and grinning, his practice sword held triumphantly. "I beat Ustad! I parried his tenth cut!"
"Very strong," Arif lisped, forcing a childlike smile. "One day you will lead armies." He planted the seed without emphasis, a statement of fact.
Siraj's chest puffed out. "Of course I will! I will chase the Bargi back to Pune and the Franks into the sea!" He plopped down beside Arif. "Playing with toys is boring. Come, I'll show you the stables."
Arif went, but his mind was elsewhere. He needed a source of information independent of court gossip. He needed to understand the city, the real Murshidabad that existed beyond the marble and sandstone. And he needed capital. His family was comfortable but not wealthy. His father's income was a fixed stipend from his minor jagir and court sinecure, all of it spent on maintaining appearances.
The answer, as it often did, came from observing the overlooked.
A few days later, accompanying his mother on a visit to a charitable imambara she patronized, he saw them. In a narrow, stinking alley behind the bustling cloth market, a group of children—five or six of them, aged from perhaps eight to twelve—were huddled around a small fire, cooking what looked like a stolen potato. Their clothes were rags. Their faces were sharp with hunger, but their eyes were watchful, intelligent, and hard. Street rats. Invisible to the nobility, but they saw everything. They were the perfect raw material.
That evening, after his meal, he made a request of his mother. "Ammi, I am hungry again."
Begum Farzana frowned. "But you just ate, jaan."
"For sweets," Arif said, deploying a calculated wheedle. "The honey-soaked balushahi from the bazaar."
His mother laughed. "Your appetite is as sharp as your mind! Very well." She called a servant, an elderly, taciturn man named Kallu. "Take Mirza Arif-ud-Din to the confectioner's in the main bazaar. Two guards. Bring him back directly."
This was the first step. Kallu, holding Arif's hand, led him out of the quiet residential lane and into the roaring chaos of Murshidabad's central bazaar. It was a sensory avalanche. The shouts of vendors selling everything from Persian carpets to Burmese teak, the smell of spices, frying food, dung, and humanity, the brilliant colors of dyed silks hung like banners. Arif stared, not with childish wonder, but with analytical intensity. He noted the prevalence of European broadcloth, the piles of raw cotton from the hinterlands, the boxes of Chinese porcelain.
At the confectioner's, he insisted on choosing the sweets himself, taking far longer than a normal child would. While Kallu and the guards waited impatiently, Arif's eyes scanned the street. He saw his target. One of the boys from the alley was darting through the crowd, his fingers slipping in and out of pockets and stalls with practiced ease.
Arif finished his purchase, taking a large packet of balushahi and also, with some of his own saved allowance from Eid, a bag of sturdy, cheap laddoos. As Kallu led him back, Arif deliberately stumbled, tearing the corner of the laddoo bag. A few of the round sweets spilled into the gutter.
"Oh! My sweets!" Arif wailed, a perfect performance of childish distress.
Kallu sighed, bending to pick them up. "They are dirty now, chhote nawab. Leave them."
"No! I want them!" Arif insisted, tears welling up. In the commotion, he made eye contact with the street boy who had been lingering nearby, drawn by the scene. Arif gave an almost imperceptible nod towards the spilled laddoos in the gutter, then turned away, letting Kallu usher him home.
The next day, he returned to the same area with his mother, this time to a fabric shop. While she bargained over silks, Arif lingered near the entrance. The street boy appeared like a ghost from behind a cart. His face was cleaner today.
"You left the sweets," the boy said, his voice low and wary. "On purpose."
Arif nodded, speaking in simple, clear Bengali. "They were for you."
"Why?"
"Because you are hungry. And I need help."
The boy's eyes narrowed. "What kind of help? I am no one's servant."
"Not a servant," Arif said. He used a word from his future: "A partner. I have food. I will have coins soon. You have eyes. I need to know things that happen in the city. Things the big people in the palace do not hear."
The boy—whose name, Arif learned, was Feroz—was suspicious but desperate. The offer of regular food was a siren song. Arif's first pact was sealed with a sticky balushahi and three copper dam. His instructions were simple: listen. Listen to the talk in the tea stalls, the grumbling of porters at the river ghats, the gossip of servants' quarters. Report anything about shortages, about troop movements, about strangers, about complaints against officials.
He started with Feroz. Within a week, Feroz brought two others, a wiry girl named Champa who worked selling flowers and heard everything from the courtesans' quarters, and a silent, fierce boy named Mangal who slept near the artillery foundry and knew the comings and goings of the European engineers.
Arif met them in a disused, partially collapsed godown by the river that Feroz had claimed as a den. He sat on a broken crate, facing them. He was a child of barely two, holding court with street-hardened adolescents. The absurdity was not lost on him, but his utter seriousness and the tangible rewards he offered—food, small coins, promises of more—commanded a fragile authority.
"You are my eyes and ears," he told them, his childish lisp gone, replaced by a quiet, deliberate tone that sounded eerie in the gloom. "You see what the palace walls hide. That is power. Tell me: what is the biggest fear in the bazaar right now?"
Champa spoke first. "The price of rice. It goes up every week. The grain merchants from Hooghly are holding back stocks, waiting for it to rise more. People whisper that Diwan Rajballabh's men are behind it."
Mangal added, "At the foundry, the Farangi, the Frenchman, fights with the head smith. The Farangi wants to make the cannon barrels thinner, lighter. The smith says they will burst. The Farangi calls him a donkey. The work has stopped for three days."
Arif absorbed this. The first was classic profiteering, a weakness in the supply chain he could potentially exploit later. The second was a golden nugget: technological friction. The Europeans had superior metallurgical knowledge. This Frenchman was trying to introduce advanced techniques, meeting traditional resistance.
"Good," Arif said. He handed out more coins and a packet of nuts and dried fruit. "Feroz, I want to know which families are being most squeezed by the grain merchants. Champa, find out which courtiers are in debt to the Jagat Seths. Mangal, listen to the Frenchman. What does he drink? What does he complain about? Learn his name."
This was the birth of his network. He called them, in his mind, The Silent Children. They were his first intelligence apparatus. The information was crude, but it was real, unfiltered by courtly agendas.
Weeks turned into months. Arif turned three. His physical growth remained a frustrating prison, but his influence grew in the shadows. Through The Silent Children, he learned that Diwan Rajballabh was skimming a fortune from the river tolls. He learned that the English factor, a man named Watts, was secretly buying up promises of loyalty from disgruntled army officers. He learned the location of a small, high-quality iron ore deposit near Birbhum, known only to local tribals.
He also cultivated Siraj. Their friendship was genuine on Siraj's part—Arif was a clever, admiring younger cousin who listened to his boasts and offered seemingly innocent, insightful questions. "If the Bargi are so fast on horseback, why do we only build big forts? Could we not have smaller, faster forts on carts?" he once asked, planting the seed of mobile artillery. Siraj had just laughed and ruffled his hair, but the idea, Arif saw, had lodged.
The need for capital became urgent. His pocket money was insufficient. He needed a venture. His modern knowledge presented options, but most required technology or scale he couldn't muster. Then he remembered a simple thing: soap.
The nobility used expensive, imported rose-scented soap from Persia or sandalwood soap from the south. The common people used ash and rough, foul-smelling cakes of animal fat and lye. The process was simple: fat (oil), alkali (lye), and water. The key was a better, more consistent alkali.
He knew from chemistry that potassium carbonate (potash) could be leached from wood ashes, but sodium carbonate (soda ash) was better. And one source of sodium carbonate was the saltwort plant, which grew in saline soils. Bengal had miles of saline coastal land in the Sundarbans.
He couldn't go there. But he could direct. He used Feroz to find an itinerant herbalist who knew the Sundarbans. Through a series of intermediaries, he arranged for a load of saltwort plants to be brought to a discreet potter he had contacted on the city's outskirts. He paid with a combination of coins and a promise of future profit. In the potter's kiln, they burned the plants to produce a crude, impure soda ash.
The first batches of soap were terrible—gritty, caustic. But Arif, guiding the confused potter with careful, childlike-sounding "suggestions" ("What if we boil it longer? What if we strain it through fine cloth?"), oversaw the iterations. After two months, they had a hard, white cake of soap that lathered well and had no terrible odor. It was plain, but it was clean.
He didn't sell it in the bazaar. That would draw attention. Instead, he gave cakes to his mother and her circle in the zenana as a "gift from a new workshop I heard about." The women, impressed by its quality, wanted more. Begum Farzana, proud of her son's "interest in trade," allowed him to manage the small enterprise. The potter became the front man. The soap, sold discreetly to noble households, began to bring in a small but steady stream of silver rupees. It was his first income stream, wholly separate from his family's finances.
He stood one evening on a balcony of his house, the metallic taste of the river air on his tongue, the same taste from his first breath in this world. In his hand, he held a newly minted rupee, cold and heavy. In the distance, the lights of the Hazarduari Palace glittered, a constellation of power he intended to conquer not by storm, but by slow, patient strangulation.
He had taken the first concrete steps. He had an intelligence network. He had a source of independent capital. He had the tentative loyalty of the future Nawab. He was three years old.
The foundation, invisible to the world, was laid. The next phase would require entering the game more directly. He would need a formal education, a public persona, and a way to turn his whispered information and soap-money into tangible influence. He looked at the palace lights, his eyes reflecting their cold gleam.
The silent seedling had put down roots. Now, it would begin to grow toward the light, ready to choke out any other plant in its garden.