The Far Pavilions (113 page)

Ash had not thought to buy a ring in Ahmadabad, and as he did not wear a signet ring, he had removed part of his watch-chain and joined it into a slender circle of gold links. It was this that he now put on Anjuli's finger:
'With this ring, I thee wed…’
The brief ceremony that made her his wife had taken less than ten minutes, and when it was over she had returned to her cabin, leaving him to drink the wine that Red had provided, and accept congratulations and good wishes.

The day had been uncomfortably hot, and even with the sea wind blowing, the temperature in the saloon was over ninety degrees; but it would drop towards evening, and when darkness fell the poop deck would be a cool and pleasant place to spend the first night of the honeymoon – always provided that Juli would consent to leave her cabin.

Ash hoped that it would not be too difficult to persuade her, for he had no intention of sweltering in it himself. It was high time that Juli stopped brooding over the death of Shushila and began to look forward instead of back, and to realize that there was nothing to be gained by continuing to mourn. Mourning could not bring the dead back to life, and it was not as though she had anything to reproach herself for. She had done everything she could for Shu-shu, and she should take comfort from that and have the courage to put the black years and the beloved ghost of her little sister behind her.

As a first step, he had asked Red to give them the use of the poop deck above his cabin, and that good-natured man had not only agreed to do this, but had also arranged for the deck to be screened off with canvas for greater privacy, and provided with a small awning that would afford shade by day and protection from the dew by night.

Ash had expected the bride to put up a certain amount of opposition to his plans for her emancipation, and been prepared to coax and persuade her into acceptance. But that had not been necessary. Anjuli had agreed to spend the greater part of her days on deck rather than in the cabin. But with a listlessness that conveyed such a total lack of interest that he had had the sudden and startled impression that her thoughts were elsewhere, and that the coming night – their first as man and wife – held no special significance for her, but was merely another night; so what did it matter whether she spent it on deck with him or by herself in the cabin? For a terrible moment he had actually been afraid that she would, if given the choice, prefer the latter, and he had not dared ask her for fear of what she might say.

His confidence in his ability to make her forget the past and be happy again evaporated, and he found himself wondering if she still had any love for him at all, or if the events of the past few years had worn it away as the wind and water will wear away an apparently solid rock. All at once he did not know, and terrified by the doubt he turned from her and stumbled out of the cabin, to spend the remainder of the afternoon alone on the poop deck, watching the slow-moving shadows of the sails and dreading the coming night because of the possibility that Juli might reject him – or submit to him without love, which would be far worse.

Towards sundown the breeze had freshened a little, tempering the salty heat of the day. And as the sea darkened and the sky turned from green to amethyst and then to indigo, the foam under the cut-water began to glimmer with phosphorus, and the stretched canvas showed iron-grey against a brilliant expanse of stars. Gul Baz, wooden-faced, brought a tray of food to the poop deck and later spread a wide, padded
resai
on the planks below the awning, added a few pillows, and observed in a voice devoid of all expression that the Rani-Sahiba – the Memsahib, he should have said – had already eaten, and had the Sahib any further orders?

The Sahib had none; and Gul Baz, having served coffee in a brass cup, went away taking the almost untouched tray with him. The ship's bell sounded the watch, and from somewhere below and amidships Red, who had been celebrating with the Mate and old Ephraim, bellowed up a convivial good-night to which McNulty added something that Ash did not catch, but that appeared to amuse his companions. The sound of their laughter faded and not long afterwards the murmur of voices from the after-deck where the lascars gathered of an evening also ceased, and the night was silent except for the swish of the sea and the monotonous creak and croon of timber and hemp and taut canvas.

Ash sat listening to those sounds for a long time, reluctant to move because he still did not know how his wife would greet him, and he dreaded a rebuff. Today had seen the fulfilment of a dream, and this night should have been the crowning moment of his life. Yet here he sat, racked with doubts and tormented by indecision – and afraid as he had never been afraid before, because if Juli were to turn from him it meant the end of everything. The final and permanent triumph of Shushila.

As he hesitated, putting off the moment of decision, he suddenly remembered Wally declaiming lines written two centuries earlier by one of his many heroes, James Graham, Marquis of Montrose – ‘
He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, That puts it not unto the touch, To win or lose it all
…’

Ash smiled wryly, and lifting a hand in a gesture of acknowledgement said aloud, as though his friend were actually present: ‘All right. I'll go down. But I'm afraid my deserts are minimal.’

The little cabin was brightly lit, and after the cool freshness of the night air unbearably hot and strongly tainted with the smell of lamp oil. Anjuli was standing by the open port-hole looking out across the shimmering beauty of the phosphorescent sea, and she had not heard the latch lift. Something in her pose – in the tilt of her head and the line of the long black plait of hair – reminded him so strongly of the child Kairi-Bai that almost without knowing it, he spoke to her by that name, whispering it very softly: ‘Kairi –’

Anjuli whipped round to face the door, and for the flash of a second there was a look in her eyes that could not be mistaken. It was gone immediately: but not before Ash had seen it and recognized it for what it was – stark terror. The same look that he had once seen in the eyes of Dilasah Khan, thief, traitor and sometime trooper of the Guides, when they had cornered him at last in a cleft of the hills above Spin Khab. And in Biju Ram's on a moonlight night three years ago, and more recently in the terrified gaze of five bound and gagged wretches in the
chattri
at Bhithor.

To see it now in Anjuli's was like receiving a sudden and savage attack from a totally unexpected quarter, and the impact of it made his heart miss a beat and drained the blood from his face.

Anjuli's own face was grey with shock and she said with stiff lips: ‘Why did you call me that! You have never…’ Her voice failed her and she put her hands to her throat as though there was a constriction there that prevented her breathing.

‘I suppose – because you reminded me of her,’ said Ash slowly. ‘I'm sorry. I should have remembered that you did not like me calling you by that name. I didn't think.’

Anjuli shook her head, and said disjointedly: ‘No. No, it was not that… I don't mind… It was only… You spoke so softly, and I thought… I thought it was…’

She faltered to a stop, and Ash said: ‘Who did you think it was?’

‘Shushila,’ whispered Anjuli.

The rustling, swishing water beyond the port-hole seemed to take up the lilting syllables of that name and repeat it over and over again,
Shushila, Shushila, Shushila
– And without warning, rage exploded in Ash, and he slammed the door shut behind him and crossing the cabin in two strides, gripped his wife's shoulders and shook her with a violence that forced the breath from her lungs.

‘You will not’, said Ash, speaking between clenched teeth, ‘say that name to me again. Now or ever! Do you understand? I'm sick and tired of it. While she was alive I had to stand aside and see you sacrifice yourself and our whole future for her sake, and now that she's dead it seems that you are just as determined to wreck the rest of our lives by brooding and moping and moaning over her memory. She's dead, but you still refuse to face that. You won't let her go, will you?’

He pushed Anjuli away with a savage thrust that sent her reeling against the wall for support, and said gratingly: ‘Well, from now on you're going to let the poor girl rest in peace, instead of encouraging her to haunt you. You're my wife now, and I'm damned if I'm going to share you with Shu-shu. I'm not having two women in my bed, even if one of them is a ghost, so you can make up your mind here and now; myself or Shushila. You can't have us both. And if Shu-shu is still so much more important to you than I am, or you blame me for killing her, then you had better go back to your brother Jhoti and forget that you ever knew me, let alone married me.’

Anjuli was staring at him as though she could not believe what she had heard, and when she could command her voice she said with a gasp: ‘So that is what you thought!’ – and began to laugh: high-pitched and hysterical laughter that shook her emaciated body as violently as Ash's hands had done, and that went on and on… until Ash became frightened by it and slapped her across the face with an open palm, and she stopped, shuddering and gasping for breath.

‘I'm sorry,’ said Ash curtly. ‘I shouldn't have done that. But I won't have you behaving in the way she did, as well as making her into a sainted idol.’

‘You fool,’ breathed Anjuli. ‘You
fool
!’

She leaned towards him and her eyes were no longer blank and frozen, but bright with scorn. ‘Did you speak to no one in Bhithor? You should have done so, and learned the truth; for I cannot believe that it was not common talk in the bazaars. Even if it were not, then the Hakim-Sahib should have known – or at least suspected. And yet
you
– you thought I was grieving for her!’

‘For whom, then?’ asked Ash harshly.

‘For myself, if anyone. For my blindness and folly in not seeing what I should have seen many years ago; and my conceit in thinking that I was indispensable to her. You do not know what it has been like… no one can know. When Geeta died there was no one left whom I could trust… no one. There were times when I thought that should go mad from fear, and others when I tried to kill myself and was prevented – because she did not want me to die – that would have been too easy. You warned me once that she was the
Nautch
-girl's daughter and that I must never forget it. But I would not listen to you. I would not believe…’

Her voice failed her and Ash took her hands and drew her towards the nearest chair and pushing her down in it, fetched a cup of water. He stood over her while she drank it, and then sat down opposite her on the edge of the bunk and said quietly: ‘I never thought of that. It looks as though we have been at cross-purposes. You had better tell me about it, Larla.’

47

It was a long and ugly story, and listening to it Ash was no longer surprised that the widow whom he had snatched from Bhithor bore so little resemblance to the bride he had escorted there barely two years previously.

For he had been right about Shushila. She had indeed proved herself to be a true daughter of Janoo-Rani – the one-time
Nautch
-girl who had never let anything stand in the way of her own desires, or had the least compunction in eliminating anyone she considered to be a stumbling block in her path.

Anjuli told it as though she had known Shushila's mind from the beginning, though that was not so. ‘You must understand,’ she said, ‘that I did not discover this until almost the end. And even then there were many things that only became clear to me after we had escaped from Bhithor and I was lying hidden in the hut behind your bungalow, where I had nothing to do but sit alone and think – and remember. I believe that I know it all now, so if I tell the tale as though I knew Shushila's thoughts and words as well as those of other people with whom I had little or no contact, I am not pretending to a knowledge that I cannot have had. And I did in some sort know them, for few things can be kept secret in the Women's Quarters where there are always a score of watching eyes and listening ears, and too many wagging tongues.

‘Geeta and my two serving-women, and a Bhithori servant-girl who also wished me well, told me all that they heard. And so also did that evil creature whom you left bound and gagged in the chattri, for she delighted in tale-bearing and would repeat to me anything that she hoped would hurt me. But I could not bring myself to think ill of Shushila… I could not. I believed that she was ignorant of the things that were done in her name, and was sure that they were done by order of the Rana, without her knowledge or consent. I believed that those who wished me well and tried to warn me were mistaken, and that those who wished me ill only told me these things in the hope of wounding me; so I closed my eyes and ears against both. But in the end… in the end I had to believe. Because it was Shushila herself – my own sister – who told me.

‘Concerning the Rana, there too I should have known what might happen, for I had seen it happen before: only then it had been our brother, Nandu. I told you about that, I think. Nandu treated her harshly, and everyone thought she would hate him for it. Instead she became devoted to him, so much so that sometimes I felt a little hurt by her devotion, and was ashamed of myself for feeling so. Yet it taught me nothing. When she fell in love with that evil, perverted and disease-ridden man who was her husband, I could not understand it, though for her sake I was more than happy that it should be so, and being blind to what might follow, I was truly grateful to the gods for permitting her to find happiness in a marriage that she had fought to avoid and dreaded so greatly.’

Ash said: ‘I can believe anything of your half-sister, but not that she loved the Rana. She was probably only play-acting.’

‘No. You do not understand. Shushila knew nothing of men and therefore was no judge of one. How could she be, when except for her father and her brothers Nandu and Jhoti, and her uncle, whom she saw only rarely, the only ones to frequent the Women's Quarters were the eunuchs, both of them old and fat? She knew only that it is the sacred duty of a woman to submit herself in all things to her husband, to worship him as a-god and to obey his commands, to bear him many children and, lest he should turn to light women, to please him in his bed. In this last, as I know, Janoo-Rani arranged for her to receive instruction by a famous courtesan, so that she should not disappoint her husband when the time came for her to marry. It may be that this aroused in her a hunger that I did not suspect, or else she had been born with that hunger, and kept it hidden from me. Whichever way, it was there…

‘I would not have believed that such a man as the Rana, who preferred young men and boys to women, could have satisfied it. Yet he must have done so, for from the night that he first lay with her she was his – heart and mind and body. And though I did not know it, from that same night she hated me, because I too was his wife, and the eunuchs who wished to make trouble between us had whispered to her that the Rana admired tall women because they were more like men, and had spoken favourably of me. There was no truth in this, but it aroused her jealousy; and even though he treated me like an outcaste whose touch is defilement, and would neither speak to me nor see me, she became afraid (as I too was afraid) that one day he might come to think differently and have me brought to his bed – if only to wound her, or because he had drunk too much, or was crazed with
bhang
(hashish).’

That first year had been the worst, for though Anjuli had expected little happiness for herself in her new life, it had never occurred to her that Shushila would turn against her. She tried to convince herself that this was only a passing phase that would end when Shu-shu's first passionate adoration of her husband waned and she discovered, as she must, that the god of her idolatry was a middle-aged libertine, rotted by vice and capable of behaviour that in a less exalted personage would be regarded as unacceptable even by criminals.

But then Anjuli had never really understood Shushila. She was not analytical, and she had quite simply loved Shu-shu from the day that she first took the waling little girl into her arms and was given charge of the child because its mother was disgusted with it for being a daughter and did not wish to be troubled with it. And to Anjuli love was not something to be loaned and taken back again, or proffered in the hope of reward. It was a gift – a part of one's heart, freely bestowed, and with it as a matter of course went loyalty; the two were indivisible.

She had never been blind to Shushila's faults. But she put the larger part of these down to the spoiling and silliness of the Zenana women, and the remainder to the little girl's nervous temperament and unstable health, and therefore did not hold Shu-shu to blame for them; or realize that in them lay the seeds of darker things that could one day come to flower.

The unbalanced passion that the Rana had so unexpectedly aroused in his youthful bride had set those seeds sprouting, and now they grew at a frightening pace, turning almost overnight into monstrous growths, as certain weeds and toadstools will do in the first downpour of the monsoon rains. In the face of this new and absorbing passion, all the love and care and sympathy that Anjuli had lavished upon her little half-sister for years went for nothing, swept away on an ugly tide of jealousy.

The Rana, and all those who had supported him in his endeavours to avoid taking ‘the half-caste’ to wife, and who now – together with the Zenana women, the eunuchs and the palace servants – resented her elevation to the rank of Rani and were jealous of her influence over the senior wife, combined to humiliate her, until between them Anjuli's life became a misery.

An order was given that in future ‘Kair-Bai’ must keep to her rooms and not be permitted to enter those of the Senior Rani unless expressly summoned; the rooms in question being two small, dark and windowless cells, with doors opening out onto an inner courtyard less than ten foot square and surrounded by high walls. Her jewels had been taken from her, together with the greater part of her trousseau, the shimmering saris of silk and gauze being replaced by cheap stuff such as only poor women wear.

It seemed that no weapon was too petty to use against the girl whom Shushila had insisted on bringing with her to Bhithor – and whose only crime was that she too was a wife of the Rana. Anjuli must also be hidden from his gaze, and such looks as she possessed (little enough in the general opinion, but then there was no accounting for men's tastes) must be spoiled by near starvation to a point where she would appear to be a gaunt and elderly woman. Her title was never to be used, and for fear that faithful old Geeta and her own two serving-women from Karidkote might show her too much consideration and loyalty, they were taken from her and she was given instead one Promila Devi, that same hard-faced creature whom Ash had seen bound and gagged in the
chattri.

Promila's role had resembled that of gaoler and spy rather than servant, and it was she who had reported that the two serving-women and the dai Geeta were still paying surreptitious visits to ‘the half-caste’ and smuggling extra food to her. All three had been soundly whipped, and after that even loyal old Geeta had not dared approach Anjuli's apartments again. Then Shushila had become pregnant, and for a time her joy and triumph were so great that she became again the Shu-shu of the old days, demanding her half-sister's attendance whenever she felt tired or out of sorts, and behaving as if there had never been any break in their relationship. But it did not last…

A few weeks later her pregnancy ended, following a violent attack of colic brought on by eating too many mangoes. ‘She was always greedy over mangoes,’ explained Anjuli. ‘My father had them sent up from the plains each year, picked while still green and packed in great
kiltas
among straw, and Shu-shu could never wait until they ripened properly; afterwards she would have terrible pains in her stomach and cry and scream and blame something else – bad
ghee
, or under-cooked rice. Never the mangoes.’

Now once again Shushila had gorged on her favourite fruit, and by doing so lost her longed-for child. She must have known that the fault was her own, but she could not bear to face it, and because this time the results of greed had been far worse than any passing stomach-ache, she did not put the blame on bad or poorly cooked food, but persuaded herself that some jealous person had tried to poison her. And who else, whispered her Bhithori women – fearful that suspicion might alight on one of them – than the co-wife, Kairi-Bai?

‘But by good fortune, I had had no chance to touch her food or drink at that time,’ said Anjuli, ‘as Shu-shu and her ladies had gone to spend three days at the Pearl Palace on the lake-side, and I had not been asked to go with her. Nor had Geeta, so it was not possible to accuse us. But the two who had been my serving-maids were not so fortunate, for they had been of the party and had helped to pick and wash the mangoes, which came from a grove in the palace grounds. Also both of them were from Karidkote, having come to Bhithor in my service, wherefore the Bhithori women, perhaps fearing that the Rana would blame them for allowing his wife to eat unripe mangoes at such a time, and hoping to deflect his anger, banded together to accuse the foreigners.’

Shushila had been frantic with pain and grief and disappointment, and in her frenzy she had listened to the traducers and had the two women poisoned. ‘This, Promila told me,’ said Anjuli. ‘Though it was given out that they had died of a fever, and I strove to believe it was true; I
made
myself believe it. It was so much easier for me to believe that Promila was lying than that Shu-shu could do such a terrible thing.’

Anjuli herself had been banished to one of the smaller houses in the royal park where she had lived in virtual imprisonment, deprived of all comforts and compelled to cook her own scanty food, while the story had been spread about that she had insisted on remaining there for fear of contracting the fever from which her women had died.

By the late autumn, Shushila was again pregnant. But this time her triumph was marred by her fear of losing a second child, for the early stages of this second pregnancy were accompanied by headaches and morning-sickness, and she felt queasy and frightened – and much in need of comfort, which her husband was incapable of supplying. The Rana's strange penchant for his beautiful wife had still not burned out, but he had never had any patience with ill-health in others, and preferred to keep away when Shushila was not feeling well, and this had added another terror to her fear of losing the child: the terror that she might also lose his favour. Tormented by sickness and anxiety, she turned as she had always done to her half-sister, and Anjuli was brought back to the city palace and once again expected to take up her role of comforter and protector as though nothing had happened.

She had done her best, for she still believed that it was the Rana who was responsible for everything that had happened to her, and that even if Shushila was not entirely ignorant of it, she would not dare to take her older sister's part too openly for fear that it might enrage him and merely drive him into acting even more harshly in future. Geeta too was back in favour once more, her recent disgrace apparently forgotten. But the old lady had not appreciated the favour shown her; she had not forgotten the accusations of attempted poisoning that had followed the disastrous outcome of the mango-colic, and as her long experience as a
dai
warned her that Shushila-Bai's new pregnancy was likely to be a short one, she was in deadly terror of being commanded to prescribe a remedy to cure the Rani's headaches or relieve the racking bouts of sickness. When, inevitably, the command came, she took what precautions she could to protect both herself and Anjuli.