The Rag Paper

The strong room lay at the back of the High Court record room, behind a second door of grey riveted steel.

To reach it, Ira Sahni had walked down a long aisle of old civil suits. They were stacked to the ceiling in cloth bundles. Each was tied with red tape that had faded to the pink of chewing gum. The air smelled of dust, camphor and damp cardboard. A ceiling fan turned overhead and moved none of it.

Ramnath Bhatt, the court clerk, opened the inner door with two keys on a brass ring. He was a small, tidy man with oiled hair and a ballpoint pen behind each ear. He stood aside to let her in, then followed and locked the door behind them all.

"Nobody touches the box until the register is signed," he said. "Nobody. That includes lawyers."

"Especially lawyers," said Arvind Joshi. He laughed, and then looked round to see who else had laughed. Nobody had.

Arvind was the lawyer for the state. He was fifty-five and broad in the middle. His black coat had lost its shape years ago, and his voice never seemed to run down. He had met Ira at the court gate at nine. By a quarter past, she knew the names of his two daughters, the cost of his last knee operation, and his views on the new flyover.

The strong room was small and windowless. Steel shelves lined three walls. In the middle stood a steel table under a hanging lamp. On the table sat a steel box the size of a school atlas, with a numbered paper seal pasted across its lid.

Mr Pillai, the court photographer, was already setting up his tripod in the corner. He had a grey moustache and a camera bag patched with tape. He nodded to Ira and went on screwing a lens into place with great tenderness.

In a plastic chair by the wall sat a fourth man. He rose when she came in.

"Deepak Bansal," he said, and gave a small bow. "I am here for the Sonraj family. Only to observe. The court has allowed it. Please forget I am here."

He was in his late forties, clean-shaven, in a pale blue shirt with a gold pen clipped to the pocket. He had the easy manner of a man who spent his days welcoming guests. He sat down again, crossed his legs, and rested his phone on his knee, face down.

Ira returned the bow, briefly. She did not forget he was there.

Ramnath turned a thick register round on the table and offered his pen. She used her own. Name, date, time in, purpose: examination of Exhibit A under the order of the court. She signed. Arvind signed. Bansal signed, in a quick, looping scrawl. Ramnath broke the paper seal with a thumbnail and raised the lid.

The deed lay inside, between two sheets of plain archive board.

*

She knew the story as well as anyone in Rajasthan.

Last March, heritage workers had been repairing the east wing of Kanakmer Fort, three hours west of Jodhpur in the Thar. Behind a patch of crumbling plaster in the outer wall, they came upon a doorway filled with old bricks. Beyond it lay a cellar. In the cellar stood thirty wooden chests, and in the chests lay 59,812 gold sovereigns.

The gold now sat in a treasury strongroom in Jodhpur, under an order of this court. On the twenty-first of March, Vikram Sonraj, grandson of the old Raja's brother, had filed a deed. It said the gold was his family's private property. The state said the gold had belonged to the State Treasury of Kanakmer. In the state's view, it had passed to the Union of India in 1949, along with everything else. The Collector had declared the find treasure under the old Act. Vikram Sonraj had gone to the High Court against that order, and filed his deed.

The state had asked for an independent examiner. The court had appointed Ira. The hearing was in a little over two weeks.

*

She pulled on thin cotton gloves and, at first, did nothing else. She simply looked.

A single sheet, folded twice, now opened flat. About thirteen inches by sixteen. Cream laid paper, the good kind made from rags. The writing was a formal copperplate, even and sloping, every capital swelling and thinning like a ribbon. The ink was brown-black. At the foot sat a red wax seal. Up in the top left corner sat a small docket, written by the same pen.

The docket read: No. 7. 14.8.48.

Mr Pillai took his first photograph. The flash made them all blink.

"Would you read the text, madam?" said Ramnath. "For my register. The judge likes it read."

Ira bent over the sheet and read aloud, following the lines with a finger held well above the paper.

"On this fourteenth day of August, nineteen forty-eight, I, Pratap Sonraj, Raja of Kanakmer, declare that the thirty chests of gold coin now kept in the east vault of Kanakmer Fort are the private property of my family, and not of the State Treasury. I place them in the care of my brother, Raghav Sonraj, to hold for my family and its heirs for all time."

Under the text ran a signature: Pratap Sonraj, Raja of Kanakmer. Lower down, smaller: Witness: Raghav Sonraj.

Ramnath copied it all in a round, patient hand. Bansal watched the paper, not her.

"Very clear," said Arvind. "Beautifully written, you have to give them that. They wrote properly in those days. My grandfather wrote like that. Not so well, of course. He was a tax collector in Bikaner. But the loops, you know. The loops were the same."

Ira took out her glass.

She began with the seal, because it was the easiest thing to describe. Red wax, slightly glossy, about an inch and a half across. A sun rising over two rounded hills. The impression was deep and fairly crisp. She counted the rays twice, got fourteen both times, and noted the number.

After that, the paper.

She lifted one corner with a flat bone folder and let it fall. It came down with a light, dry tick. The sheet was fine and firm, with a good rattle to it. Rag paper aged well. Cotton and linen fibres held together for centuries if nobody left them out in the monsoon. That, by itself, meant nothing.

"Lights, please," she said.

Ramnath switched off the hanging lamp. Mr Pillai muttered and fitted a hood to his lens. Ira set a small lamp on its side so that its beam skimmed the surface from the left, almost flat.

Raking light turned the page into a landscape. Every fibre threw a shadow. The laid lines showed as faint ridges, close together, while the chain lines crossed them at intervals of about an inch. The pen strokes became shallow grooves where the nib had pressed on each downstroke.

She worked along the text with her glass, a word at a time.

Iron-gall ink was brewed from oak galls and iron salts. It went onto a page pale and darkened in the air. Over the years it did something else as well. It was acid, and it bit. On a sheet seventy or eighty years old, the ink usually sat in the paper, not on it. It had eaten a little way into the fibres. Round each stroke there was a faint brown halo where the acid had crept outwards.

Here the halo was thin. In places she could barely find it. The strokes seemed to lie on the fibres, only just beginning to sink.

That did not prove anything. Paper kept in a cool, dark, dry cupboard aged slowly. Ink varied from batch to batch. A writer who used less iron left less damage behind. She had handled genuine hundred-year-old letters as clean as this. Not many, but some.