Far Pavilions (27 page)

The tree-clad gorges and lush greenness of the south gave place to the parched emptiness of rock and sand: to jungle and cropland, little lost villages and the ruins of dead and gone cities, and wide, winding rivers where crocodiles and mud-turtles basked on the sand bars and white egrets fished in the shallows. At night-fall the thickets and the elephant grass shimmered with fire-flies, and at dawn peacocks cried from every cane-brake and the yellow sky mirrored itself in ponds and ditches that were starred with water-lilies. But Ash lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, rehearsing speeches to soften Belinda's heart, or replying to the conversational efforts of his travelling companions – an enthusiastic young man in the Political Department and a middle-aged Forest-Officer – very much at random.

Mrs Harlowe was also not enjoying the journey, which was only to be expected. Experience had taught her that travelling in India by whatever means was bound to be hot, dusty and excessively uncomfortable; but on the present occasion it was neither the tediousness or the discomfort that was upsetting her, but Ashton and Belinda, whose behaviour had plainly demonstrated that both were still little more than children. A great many girls married at seventeen – she herself had done so; but they married grown men who could be relied upon to take care of them, not thoughtless and irresponsible boys in their teens, which Ashton had shown himself to be when he ran off and left Belinda alone and unprotected on a crowded quayside while he gossiped for over an hour with a parcel of natives.

His excuse for this behaviour had merely made matters worse. To explain that one of them (and a mere daffadar at that – not even an Indian officer) was an old friend who had travelled from the Khyber to Bombay to meet him, and that he had been so pleased to see him that he had ‘lost all count of time’, might reflect credit onhis honesty, but it certainly proved him to be lacking in wisdom and tact, and Mrs Harlowe fully sympathized with her daughter's rejection of such a clumsily phrased apology. Ashton really should have known better. And know better, too, than to be on such exceedingly friendly terms with sepoys and servants. Such behaviour was not at all the thing, and only went to prove that he did not yet know how to conduct himself – and also that she herself knew far too little about him. She had, in fact, allowed his eligibility in the matter of birth and fortune, and her anxiety to see her daughter swiftly and safely bestowed, to override good sense and caution. And now Belinda was flirting shamelessly with another, and quite ineligible young man, and really she felt distracted with worry. It was all most upsetting, and she did not know what Archie was going to say when he heard…

Poor, foolish, conscience-stricken Mrs Harlowe took refuge in tears and an attack of vapours, and three days of this atmosphere proved more than enough for Belinda, who began to discover that a sense of outrage was not equal to sustaining her through the boredom of endless hours penned up in a hot and dusty railway carriage, with nothing to do but listen to Mama's tearful observations on the subject of Ashton, early engagements and what Papa was likely to say about it all. Of course Ashton had behaved abominably, but he had been punished enough. Besides, she was beginning to tire of George Garforth's increasing bumptiousness and the protective and proprietary airs he had begun to adopt towards her, and thought that it was really time she put him in his place.

When the train next stopped at a station and Ash as usual knocked humbly at the door, he was admitted, and the unhappy George found himself suddenly relegated to the position of odd-man-out and left to hang about the platform, or make laborious conversation with his divinity's mother. But for Ash and Belinda the rest of the journey passed pleasantly enough apart from a tiff in Delhi, where the railway stopped and anyone wishing to travel further northward must proceed in the manner of an older day by dâk-
ghari
*
palanquin, bullock cart or on foot. The travellers had put up at Delhi dâk-bungalow, and Ash, after two afternoons devoted to sightseeing, had absented himself for an entire day.

He had, in fact, been absent for a full twenty-four hours, but fortunately neither Mrs nor Miss Harlowe was aware of this, for Ash was learning wisdom, and this time he had accounted for his absence by producing a very pretty pearl and diamond ring, explaining that he had had to visit at least twenty or thirty shops in the old city and along the Chandi Chowk, Delhi's famous ‘Silver Street’, before finding something good enough to give Belinda. Both ladies had been charmed with the ring; though it could not of course be worn until Ash had spoken to Belinda's Papa. And as George Garforth had taken advantage of Ash's absence to take them for a picnic to the Kutab Minar, they had passed the day very pleasantly. Ash was forgiven, and neither Belinda nor her mother had thought to ask him any further questions, which was just as well, for he had, in point of fact, spent less than half an hour over the purchase of the ring and the rest of the time in quite another fashion.

Mahdoo had relations in Delhi, and on the previous night Ash had donned the dress of a Pathan (borrowed for the occasion from Gul Baz) and roistered in the city until dawn, eating and drinking and merry-making with Mahdoo's relatives, and later sampling the night-life of the crowded bazaars with Zarin. He was filled with an exhilarating sense of freedom, as though he had broken out of gaol. The Western veneer so painfully acquired during the cold years at school and Pelham Abbas fell away from him as easily as though it had been no more than a winter overcoat, discarded on the first warm day of spring, and he slipped back effortlessly into the ways and speech of his childhood. The rich, spicy food tasted ambrosial after a diet of boiled beef and carrots, watery cabbage and suet puddings, while the heat and smell and noise of the city was an intoxication and a deep delight. England, Sahib-hood, the Guides, Belinda – all were forgotten, and he was once more Sita's son Ashok, who had come home and inherited a kingdom.

Having no idea which temple Sita had taken him to (even if he had, he would not have been able to enter it in his present guise) he gave alms to several ash-smeared
sadhus
and a dozen Hindu beggars in her name, and the following morning, in company with Zarin, Ala Yar, Mahdoo and Gul Baz, he joined a vast congregation in the great courtyard of the Juma Masjid and said a prayer for her and for Uncle Akbar – the one an orthodox Hindu and the other a devout Mussulman – in the belief that the One God, to whom all creeds are one, would hear and not be offended.

There had been a group of tourists in the gallery above the great gate, European men and women who had looked down at the worshipping throng below, laughing and talking the while as though they were watching the antics of animals in a zoo. Their plangent voices cut through the murmured prayers, and Ash was wondering angrily what they would think if a group of Indians behaved in a similar manner during a service in Westminster Abbey, when he was disconcerted to see that one of them was Mrs Harlowe and another his betrothed. ‘It's only ignorance… they don't mean any harm; they don't understand,’ he excused them to himself.

The red-walled city of the Moguls was as intriguing by day as it was exciting by night, but towards evening his conscience belatedly reminded him of the enormity of his behaviour and its probable consequences, and he reluctantly changed back into his own clothing and spent half an hour in a jeweller's shop in the Chandi Chowk before presenting himself at the dâk-bungalow.

Only a handful of passengers who had travelled on the mail-train from Bombay were going further north into the Punjab, and the remainder of the journey had been undertaken in dâk-
gharis
, rickety horse-drawn vehicles that resembled closed boxes on wheels. This time Ash had only one companion to share his carriage with him, but as it turned out to be George Garforth he would have been happier on his own or with a full complement of passengers.

George had no intention of relinquishing the hopes that Belinda had encouraged by her treatment of him during the first three days out from Bombay. The fact that she considered herself engaged to Ashton Pelham-Martyn made no difference to his feelings for her (beyond adding jealousy and despair to the other emotions he was suffering on her behalf) and as he saw no reason why he should not discuss the subject of his wounded heart with her betrothed, Ash found himself listening to a good deal of talk from his love-sick rival, and was often hard put to it to keep his temper.

It was sad that Belinda, by encouraging George to talk about himself, should have released such an uninhibited torrent of speech, for once having got the bit between his teeth, George showed every sign of bolting. But as Ash could see no way of stopping him that did not involve unpleasantness, he merely took the easier way of spending a large part of each day in the company of Zarin, Ala Yar and Mahdoo; not only because he found their society infinitely preferable to Mr Garforth's, but because it was no longer possible for him to get Belinda to himself – her Mama having invited an old acquaintance, a Mrs Viccary, to share their dâk-
ghari
.

The presence of a third, and middle-aged lady, effectively put an end to any hope of his being invited to pass an occasional hour or so in the Harlowes' carriage, or of spending much time alone with them at the various stopping places where rooms and meals were available and the horses were changed. Yet in spite of this disappointment he did not, as might have been expected, take a strong dislike to the interloper, for Mrs Viccary turned out to be a delightful person, wise, tolerant and understanding, with a talent for making friends and a genuine interest in other people that made her very easy to talk to. As she was also an excellent and sympathetic listener, it was not long before Ash found himself telling her more of his history than he was ever to tell Belinda; which surprised him though it did not surprise her.

Edith Viccary was used to receiving confidences (and had never been known to betray one, which probably accounted for the fact that she received so many). Moreover in the present instance, having listened to a voluble account of young Mr Pelham-Martyn's prospects, relatives and background from his prospective mother-in-law, she had exerted herself to draw him out, as she not only fully understood but shared his passion for his adopted country, which was, in a sense, her own, because she too had been born in it. She had also by now spent the greater part of her life there, for having been sent home to England at the age of eight, she had come back as a young lady of sixteen to rejoin her parents who were at that time stationed at Delhi; and it was there in the capital city of the Moguls that a year later she met and married a young engineer, Charles Viccary.

That had been in the winter of 1849, and since then her husband's work had taken her to most parts of the vast sub-continent in which men of both their families, Carrolls and Viccarys, had served for three successive generations – initially in the East India Company and later under the Crown. And the more she saw of it, the more she came to love the land, and to appreciate its peoples, among whom she was proud to number many close friends, for unlike Mrs Harlowe, she had set herself to master at least four of India's main languages and learned to speak them with enviable fluency. When cholera deprived her of her only child, and the great Sepoy Rising of '57 took the lives of her parents, and of her sister Sarah and Sarah's three small children who died in the terrible
Bibi-gurh
at Cawnpore, she did not give way to despair or lose her sense of proportion and justice; and even during the bitter aftermath of the Mutiny she did not allow herself to hate.

In this, as in all else, she was by no means unique. But as she happened to be the first of her kind whom Ash had met, it was Edith Viccary who was responsible for erasing for ever an uneasy suspicion that he had lately begun to entertain – that Mrs Harlowe and those of her fellow-sightseers who had laughed and talked so loudly during the prayers at the Juma-Masjid were typical of all the British-born ‘memsahibs’ in India. For this alone he would have been willing to forgive her almost anything – even for being the unwitting cause of preventing him from seeing as much of Belinda as he had hoped to do on the journey north.

Apart from that deprivation, the days passed pleasantly. It was good to be with Zarin again and listen to familiar talk while the remembered scenes unrolled beyond the windows; to eat the food that Gul Baz bought from the stalls of vendors in the villages – curries and dais, rice, chuppattis and sticky sweetmeats shimmering with beaten silver – served as often as not on green leaves, and washed down with draughts of buffalo milk or water from the wells that were to be found at every hamlet. The names of towns and rivers and the aspect of every little village was suddenly familiar to him, for this was the country across which he and Sita had wandered in the months that followed their escape from Gulkote.

Karnal, Ambala, Ludhiana, Jullundar, Amritsar and Lahore, the Sutlej and the Ravi Rivers. He knew them all… The temperature at mid-morning and for the best part of the afternoon remained uncomfortably high, and the sun still blistered the paintwork on the roofs and sides of the
gharies
. But as the teams of starveling ponies rattled them forward across the rich crop-lands of the Punjab, the air became noticeably cooler, and there came a day when Ash, descending in the early dawn to stretch his legs on the quiet roadside, saw above the far horizon to the north a long, jagged line of pale rose glowing bright against the cool green of the sky: and knew that he was looking at the snow peaks of the Himalayas.

His heart seemed to turn over as he looked, and his eyes filled with tears. And all at once he wanted to laugh and cry and to shout aloud – or to pray, as Zarin and Ala Yar and a dozen of their co-religionists were doing. Only it was not towards Mecca that he would face, but to the mountains. His own mountains, in whose shadow he had been born – to the Dur Khaima to which he had prayed as a child. Somewhere over there lay the Far Pavilions, with
Tarakalas
, the ‘Star Tower’, catching the first rays of the sunrise. And somewhere, too, the valley that Sita had so longed to reach before she died, and that he himself would reach one day.