Far Pavilions (101 page)

‘Of course. You don't think I'd part with him, do you? If I couldn't take him any other way, I'd ride him back. But if I'm to be left here to rot for another year, I mean to take him down to Bombay for the races, and the entire Regiment are planning to put their shirts on him.’

‘
Shirts
?’

‘Money. They are going to bet every rupee they can lay hands on.’

‘Ah! I too. I shall go to Bombay with you and I shall back you with a
lakh
of rupees for your first race, and make a fortune!’

‘We all will. You and I and your great-uncle the Risaldar-Sahib, and every man in the Regiment. And afterwards Dagobaz will have a silver cup as big as a bucket to drink out of.’

Ash's opinion of the black horse was shared by many; though not by Mahdoo, who refused to see anything admirable in the animal and openly regretted its purchase.

‘I believe that you care more for that Child of the Pit than for anyone else,’ complained Mahdoo crossly as Ash, returning at dusk after an evening ride, fed Dagobaz with sugar before sending him back to the stables. ‘It is not fitting to give one's heart to an animal, who has no soul.’

‘Yet Allah made horses for our use,’ retorted Ash, laughing. ‘Is it not written in the Koran, in the Sura of the War-Steeds… “
By the snorting of

war-steeds which strike fire with their hooves as they gallop to the raid at dawn, and with a trail of dust split the foe in two: man is ungrateful to his Lord! To this he himself shall bear witness.”
Would you have me ungrateful for such gifts as these, Cha-cha?’

‘I would have you spend less time talking to a brute-beast, and more on those who have your welfare at heart. Such as Hamilton-Sahib, to whom, as I know well, you have sent only one short letter since the day that you acquired that son of perdition.’

Ash started and had the grace to look guilty: ‘Have I not? I did not realize… I will write to him now, tonight.’

‘First read what he has to say. This came by the morning's dâk, but it seems that you were in too great a hurry to glance at your letters before you went off to that creature's stable. This thick one is, I think, from Hamilton-Sahib; and we also, Gul Baz and I, would like news of him and of our friends in Mardan.’

He proffered a brass salver bearing half-a-dozen letters, and Ash snatched up the bulkiest, and tearing open the envelope, carried it into the lamp-lit bungalow to read it:

‘The cavalry have been having a damned dull time of it lately,’ wrote Wally, ‘but the infantry, lucky devils, have been having no end of larks. I can't remember if I told you about that trouble with the Jowaki Afridis over the Government suddenly deciding to stop bribing them (sorry, I believe I should have said “paying them an allowance”.
Wah illah
!) in return for keeping open the road through the Kohat Pass, and offering them an equivalent sum for safeguarding the Khushalgarh road and telegraph line.

‘They didn't take to the idea at all, and after a bit they began to make their displeasure felt by plundering and burning villages and attacking escorts and police stations. Then they burned down a bridge on the Khushalgarh road and that seems to have got the Powers-that-Be on the raw – a sort of last straw on their august shoulders. They decided that the Jowaki jokers must be given a sharp rap over the knuckles, and, I regret to say, that was just about all it was. A quick dash into Jowaki territory by three columns, one of them ours – 201 bayonets with Campbell in command and Stuart, Hammond, Wigram and Fred in support – burn a village or two and nip back again.
Bus
! (enough). The columns were under arms in vile heat for twenty hours, marched nearly thirty miles and had eleven casualties – our fellows had two men wounded. Short and sweet, and apparently a complete waste of everyone's time, for the Jowakis remain noticeably unimpressed and are still cutting-up with unabated vigour.

‘I suppose this means that we shall be having another go at them before long. If so, I hope the Big-Wigs let the cavalry get into the act. I'd like to see a bit of action for a change. Zarin sends his salaams and asks me to tell you that he is afraid his father was right. He says that you will know what he means, and I hope you do because I don't. Let us have some news of you. You haven't answered my last letter yet and it's months since I heard from you. But as no news is good news, I presume you are alive and enjoying yourself. My salaams to Mahdoo and Gul Baz…’

‘When you write, send ours to him,’ said Mahdoo, and added sourly: ‘And ask him if he has need of another servant: an old man who was once a good cook.’

The other servants had settled down contentedly enough, for as there was no shortage of accommodation in the Ahmadabad cantonment, Ash had a whole bungalow to himself with a large compound and plenty of servants' quarters: a luxury seldom enjoyed by a junior officer in any military station. Kulu Ram had been pleased to approve of the stables, and Gul Baz, who had left his wife and family in Hoti Mardan, had made himself comfortable by installing a local woman in the hut behind his quarters – a silent and retiring creature who kept herself to herself, cooked and washed and generally attended to the wants of her temporary protector.

Mahdoo, however, was too old for such arrangements; and he hated everything about Gujerat with the possible exception of Ahmadabad's great mosque, where the founder of the city, Sultan Ahmad Shah, lies buried. For the rest, he detested the heat and the humidity, the lush, dripping greenery in the compound, and the rain clouds that during the monsoon had driven in on a wind that smelled of the sea, to empty their contents on the roofs and roads and parade ground of the cantonment until the whole area was awash and it seemed, at times, as though the bungalows were islands floating in a waste of water. The food did not agree with him, and he distrusted the local people, whose language he did not understand and whose ways were not his.

‘He is too old to change,’ said Gul Baz, excusing Mahdoo's crotchetiness. ‘He misses the scents and sounds of the north, and the food and talk and customs of his own people.’

‘As you do,’ said Ash, and added under his breath: ‘and I also.’

‘True, Sahib. But then if God is merciful you and I will have many more years to live, and therefore if we spend one or two in this place, what matter? But with Mahdoo-ji it is different, for he knows that for him the years are few.’

‘I should not have brought him here,’ said Ash remorsefully. ‘Yet how could I help it, when he refused to be left behind? I would send him on leave at once if I thought he would stay in his own home until we go north again, but I know he would not, so if we are to spend another hot season in this place it would be better for him to stay here now while it is cool, and leave for the north in the first half of February. That way he will miss the months of greatest heat and the worst of the monsoon; and if we are still here when it is over, I may even be able to send to tell him that he need wait only a little longer and meet us in Mardan. Because by that time I must surely know my fate.’

In this last respect, Ash was to be proved right: though in a way that he had not foreseen.

Throughout that cold-weather season, whenever the Regiment was not in camp or engaged in manoeuvres, Ash would rise with the dawn in order to take Dagobaz out for an early-morning gallop. And on most evenings he would ride out alone or with Sarji to explore the countryside, returning to his bungalow only after dusk had fallen.

There was much to be seen, for Gujerat is not only drenched in history, but is the legendary scene of the chief exploits and death of the god Khrishna, the Indian Apollo. Every hill and stream has its link with some mythological happening, and the land is strewn with the ruins of tombs and temples so ancient that the names of those who built them have long been forgotten. Among the memorials to the dead – the magnificient, pillared domes of the great and the sculptured slabs of humbler men – one curious motif attracted Ash's attention, for it appeared over and over again. A woman's arm, ornamented with intricately carved bracelets and armbands.

‘That?’ said Sarji in answer to a question. ‘Oh, it commemorates a suttee. A widow who burned herself on her husband's funeral pyre. It is a very old custom, one that your Government has forbidden – and rightly, I think. Though there are still those who would not agree with me. Yet I remember my grandfather, who was a learned and enlightened man, telling me that many thinkers, himself among them, believe that this practice arose through the error of a scribe when the laws were first put down in writing, many centuries ago. The original law, they say, laid down that when a man dies his body must be given to the fire and his widow must afterwards ‘go within the house’ – in other words, live in seclusion for the remainder of her life – but that a scribe, writing this down long after, left out the last two words by mistake, so that it came to be believed that ‘go within’ meant to go within the fire. Perhaps that is true; and if so it is as well that the Raj has given orders that the practice must cease, for to be burned alive is a cruel death, though many thousands upon thousands of our women have not flinched from it, but considered it an honour.’

‘And many more have been forced to endure it against their will, if even half the tales one hears are true,’ said Ash grimly.

Sarji shrugged. ‘Maybe. But then their lives would have been a burden to them had they lived, so perhaps they were better off dead; and you must not forget that she who becomes suttee becomes holy. Her name is honoured and her very ashes are venerated – look there.’ He pointed with his riding whip to where a vivid splash of colour glowed bright against the dark stone and the tangle of greenery.

Someone had draped a garland of fresh marigolds over one of the carved weather-worn arms that bore silent witness to the hideous death of a wife who had dutifully ‘completed a life of uninterrupted conjugal devotedness by the act of
saha-gamana
’, and accompanied her husband's corpse into the flames. The stone was half hidden by grass and creepers, but someone – another woman, surely? – had decked it with flowers, and though the afternoon was windless and very warm, Ash shivered, and said violently: ‘Well if we have done nothing else, at least we can mark up one thing to our credit – that we put a stop to
that
particular horror.’

Sarji shrugged again; which might have meant anything – or nothing – and he began to talk of other matters as they turned their horses and made for the open country.

The two went riding together at least once or twice a week, and often at weekends or holidays they would go on longer trips together, staying away for a night or two, and choosing a route at random. Sometimes to Patri and the shallow waters of the Rann of Kutch, where the air smells of salt and seaweed and the rotting fish-heads that the boatmen fling out on the shore for the gulls to dispose of. Sometimes east towards Baroda, the capital city of His Highness Siraji Rao, the Gaekwar, or south, to the Gulf of Cambay where the great rollers drive in from the Arabian Sea between those two outposts of the Portuguese Empire, Diu Island and Damman – and where, on several occasions, they found the cargo-boat
Morala
at anchor, and went on board to collogue with her owner, Captain Red Stiggins. But only when he was alone did Ash ride northward in the direction of the distant blue ranges that lay between Gujerat and Rajputana.

Sarji was a cheerful and entertaining companion, but when Ash chose to ride towards the hills he did not want companionship, for on these occasions he would make for a lonely, ruin-crowned knoll overlooking the river below Bijapur from where he would gaze at the jagged outline of those ancient hills, and know that Juli had only to look out of a window of the Rung Mahal to see them too…

They looked so easy to cross: a low and insubstantial barrier, dusty-gold in the evening light or aquamarine in the shimmering heat-haze of the early afternoon. Yet he had learned that there were few paths through them; and even fewer passes where it was possible for a man to cross on foot, let alone on horseback. The hazards of those mountain passes, and the trackless miles of tiger-jungle that clothed the lower slopes, discouraged would-be travellers to Rajputana from attempting short cuts, and led the majority to turn westward and make a detour by way of Palanpur, or else go south to Bombay, and travel by rail or road through the
ghats
. But as Ash could see no prospect of his ever being able to enter Rajputana again, the difficulty or otherwise of finding a way through those hills was unimportant. Even if there had been a paved highway between Ahmadabad and Bhithor, it would have made no difference, because the Country of the Kings was forbidden territory, and like Moses, he could gaze at the promised land but he must not enter it.

Ash would sit on the knoll for hours, absorbed and motionless – so still that the birds and squirrels and even the shy lizards would often stray within reach of his hand, or a butterfly come to rest on his head. Only when Dagobaz – turned loose to crop among the ruins – became impatient and thrust an anxious nose into his breast, would he awake as though from a deep sleep, and coming stiffly to his feet, mount and ride back across the flat lands to Ahmadabad and the bungalow in cantonments.

On these days he would invariably find Mahdoo waiting for him, squatting unobtrusively in a corner of the verandah from where he could see the front gate while at the same time keeping a watchful eye upon the kitchen and the servants' quarters in case his assistant, young Kadera, should neglect his duties.

Mahdoo was not happy. He was feeling the weight of his years and he was also deeply uneasy on Ash's account. It was not that he had any idea where Ash went, or what he had been doing on these particular occasions. But though his knowledge of geography was slight, his knowledge of Ash was extensive, and once having learned that the borders of Rajputana lay less than a day's ride to the north, his intuition had supplied an answer that alarmed him. Bhithor was not so far beyond that border.

Their proximity to the Rana's kingdom worried Mahdoo a great deal, for though he had never heard so much as a whisper involving Anjuli-Bai, he had realized long ago that something far more serious than the Rana's attempts at blackmail and treachery had occurred there. Something deeply personal to Ash-Sahib that had struck at his happiness and peace of mind, and destroyed both.