The Far Pavilions (116 page)

He drew a long slow breath, and reaching out, took Anjuli's hands in his and said gently: ‘Why didn't you tell me all this before, Larla?’

‘I could not. It was… it was as though my heart and mind had been so bruised that I could not endure any more emotion. I only wanted to be quiet; and not to have to answer questions and to put it all into words. I had loved her for so long, and I had thought that she – that she was fond of me. Even when I thought that I hated her, I found that I could not forget what she had once meant to me… how sweet she had been as a child. And then – then when I saw her walk to the pyre, and knew what would happen when she realized what she had done and that there was no escape, I – I could not bear to have her suffer so terrible a death.
I could not
! Yet if I had only gone when you wished, perhaps all those others would not have died. Their blood was on my head and I could not bear it – or bear to hear my own voice relating things that – that even now I can hardly believe can really have happened. I wanted to hide it all away… to bury it and pretend that it could not be true. But it would not stay buried.’

‘It will now, my Heart,’ said Ash, and pulled her up into his arms. ‘Oh, my love, I have been so afraid. So terribly afraid. You do not know! All this time I have thought that you were grieving for her, and that you had found out that I could not replace her because she had taken all your love and there was none left for me. I thought I had lost you –’

His voice broke, and suddenly Anjuli's arms were tight about his neck and she was crying, ‘ No, no, no – it was not so: I have always loved you – always, always. More than anyone in the world –’ And then the tears came.

But this time Ash knew that they were healing tears, washing away some of the horror and bitterness and guilt from her bruised heart, and easing the terrible tension that had held her in a vice-like grip for so long. When at last they were spent, he lifted her head and kissed her, and presently they went out together into the cool, star-spangled darkness, and for that night at least, forgot the past and the future and everything and everyone but each other.

48

Ten days later, on a still and pearly morning before sunrise, the
Morala
dropped anchor off Keti on the delta of the Indus, and landed three passengers: a burly Pathan, a slim, clean-shaven man whose dress and bearing proclaimed him to be a citizen of Afghanistan, and a woman in a bourka who was presumably the wife of one or other of them.

The Afghan dress had been acquired on the previous day by Gul Baz, in the course of a brief stop at Karachi where the
Morala
had unloaded a small consignment of dressed hides and dried fruit, taken on, with the grain, a week earlier at Chahbar. It was Red who had suggested its purchase, for Sind was a harsh land, much of it sparsely inhabited, and its people were not noted for hospitality towards strangers: ‘But they're leary of Afghans, an' as from wot you've tole me, you can pass yoreself orf as one any day of the week, I'd advise you to do it now. It'll be a sight safer.’

So Ash had gone over the side wearing Afghan dress, and whether it was due to this, or merely a matter of luck, the long journey from the coast of Sind to Attock had been accomplished in safety, if not in comfort.

A
dundhi,
a flat-bottomed river boat normally used for carrying cargo, hired on their behalf through the agency of one of Red's many friends in the coastal-trading business, had taken them up the Indus, initially under sail (during those hours when the tide was in their favour) and later, if the wind failed, by means of a tow rope. Teams of coolies had pulled the clumsy craft forward from village to village, a fresh team taking over each evening while the previous one turned homeward, each man clutching the few small coins that were doled out for his day's labour by the owner of the boat, the
manji,
who with his two sons formed the permanent crew.

In this wise they travelled slowly up the enormous mile-wide river. Past Jerak and Naidarabad and Rohri, to Mithankote where the waters of four of the five great rivers of the Punjab, the Sutlej, Ravi, Chenab and Jhelum, channelled by the Chenab, join the Indus on their way to the sea – and on northward past Dera Ghazi Khan, with the mountains of Baluchistan and Zohb rising up along the western horizon and the flat, burning plains of the Sind Sagar Doab stretching away eastward, to the junction of the Luni River below Dera Ismail Khan. From where, on a night of brilliant moonlight, they saw the crest of the Takht-i-Suliman, a far point of silver, high above the foothills of Baluchistan, and Anjuli had wept tears of joy at seeing snow again.

At first, irked by inactivity, Ash and his bride would leave the boat and walk for part of the way. But by now the hot weather was upon them, and even in the cool of the morning, or towards sunset, the heat turned the bourka into a stifling tent. Then Ash had managed to buy two horses, and after that they rode each day, ranging far afield so that the bourka could be thrown back, and returning to the boat at mid-day to rest in the shade of the small shelter constructed out of planks and matting that did duty for a cabin.

Ash had wished to buy a third horse for Gul Baz. But Gul Baz had no desire to go riding around the countryside. He thoroughly approved of this leisurely method of travelling and enjoyed spending his days sitting in lordly ease under an awning in the bows, though he would ride one of the horses and take the other on a leading rein whenever the Sahib and the Rani-Sahiba decided to travel on the boat.

Time moved slowly on the river, but for Ash and Anjuli it could not move slowly enough, and if they could have had their way the journey would never have ended. The discomforts (and there were many) counted for nothing compared to the delight of being together and free to talk and laugh and make love without fear.

The food might be plain and ill-cooked, but Anjuli, who had known starvation, found no fault with it. And after sleeping for more than a year on the dank stone floor of an underground cellar, what did it matter that the single string bed provided by the
manji
should prove to be so densely populated by bugs that Ashok had thrown it overboard, and thereafter they had slept on the floor with only a thin
resai
(quilt) between them and the rough planks?

As for their tiny, ramshackle cabin with its Noah's Ark roof and matting walls, it might be exceedingly hot and far from comfortable; but then her room in the Women's Quarters of the Rung Mahal had been far hotter, for no breeze ever reached it, while here the matting could be rolled up at will – and there outside lay the river and the white sandbanks, with beyond them the wide, sun-scorched, empty spaces that stretched away and away until they were lost in the heat-haze or made magical by moonlight. To one who had lived penned up in a small windowless room in the Rung Mahal and endured months of solitary confinement in a dark cellar, this alone was a never-failing source of wonder.

For Ash it was enough to see his wife lose her skeletal thinness and regain much of the beauty and health and serenity that the years in Bhithor had taken from her. Though this had not happened overnight: that would have been too much to expect. The road back to normality had been a slow one; almost as slow as their present progress up the ‘Father of Rivers’. But the telling of the true story of those years had been the first step, and those long, peaceful days on the
Morala
– the hours of talk and the hours of companionable silence, the shared laughter and the wonderful star-splashed nights when they made love and fell asleep to the music of the waves and sea winds – had all helped to heal the cruel wounds that Shushila and Bhithor had inflicted. Ash watched his wife come alive again and was happier and more deeply content than he would have believed possible.

The Father of Rivers ran deep and wide: so wide that it often seemed more like an inland sea than a river, and there were days when the heat-haze or blowing sand made it impossible to see the far bank – or either bank, if the boat was under sail. Much of the countryside was barren and desolate, but palm trees, oleanders, tamarind and tamarisk grew by the river, and even where there were no towns or villages, there was always life to be seen.

Myriads of birds preyed on the swarms of
chilwa
and other small fish who teemed in the shallows. Mud-turtles and
ghariyal
– the long-snouted, fish-eating alligators of the Indian river – basked on the sandbanks, and some-times a porpoise could be seen leaping and turning in deep water, or a great salmon-like
mahseer,
its silver-pink sides flashing in the sun. In the late evening, when the river ran gold and the hills of Baluchistan seemed to move nearer across the shadowed plains, flight after flight of wild duck, geese, pelicans and paddy-birds would pass overhead, while parties of nomads with their goats and camels would straggle past on their way to new camping grounds. And at dusk the deer and antelope, and creatures such as pig and jackal and porcupine, would come down to drink.

Sometimes they saw bands of horsemen far out across the plain, galloping furiously towards a horizon that was hidden by dust. And on the river itself there were always other boats: country-boats laden with fodder or grain, wood, sugar-cane or vegetables, and others crammed with woolly, bleating cargoes of sheep or goats; ferry-boats plying their trade and fishermen paying out their nets or setting fish-traps; and during the earlier days, an occasional river steamer huffing and puffing its way upstream under a cloud of black smoke, or sweeping past with the current on its way to the coast.

Lessons in English and Pushtu, begun on the
Morala
, became part of the daily routine, and Anjuli proved to be an apt pupil. She made rapid progress, astonishing Ash by the quickness and accuracy with which she assimilated words and phrases and mastered the complicated rules of grammar, and he realized that she must always have had a good brain but until now had lacked the opportunity to use it – women in purdah not being expected to interest themselves in anything but domestic matters. But now that she had escaped from the almost exclusively feminine world of the Zenana, her intelligence leapt to meet the challenge, and by the time the Kurram hills and the Salt Ranges of Kundian came into sight, she could express herself in her husband's language with a fluency that did credit to her instructor: and even more to her own powers of concentration.

Realizing that they would reach Kala Bagh almost a month before his leave was up, Ash had planned to tie up the boat at some pleasant spot and spend the time exploring the countryside on horseback rather than returning to Mardan before he need do so. But with the Salt Range closing in to hem the river between high banks and shut out the breeze, even the nights were no longer cool, while the days had become so hot that the cliffs of rock salt and the blinding white sand by the water's edge, the ground underfoot and even the planks of the boat felt as though they had come fresh-baked from a furnace.

In these conditions, the sooner he got Juli under a proper roof and into a house where there were solid walls and wide verandahs to shut out the cruel heat, and
punkahs
and
kus-kus
tatties to cool the air, the better. And it was then that he remembered Zarin's aunt, Fatima Begum, and the quiet house that stood back from the Attock road, protected by high walls and a garden full of fruit trees. He could leave Juli there in safety, and though it meant that he would have to take the Begum into his confidence, he felt sure that the old lady could be relied upon to keep the matter secret, and also to think of some story that would satisfy the curiosity of her household and prevent her servants from talking.

He would get Zarin to arrange it; and that same evening Gul Baz set off on Ash's horse to ride with all speed to Mardan, charged with delivering a verbal message to Zarin and a letter to Hamilton-Sahib, after which he would rejoin the party at Attock. The distance across country was probably no more than seventy
koss,
so two days should be enough to bring him to Mardan, and a night's ride would cover the rest. But it had taken the best part of a week for Ash and Juli to complete the last part of the journey to Attock, for above Kala Bagh the Indus, that for hundreds of miles divides its waters into two, three and sometimes four separate streams – each one larger than an English river – narrows into a single one where a boat must fight its way up against the full force of the current. So that even though the wind had favoured them it was not until six days later, and well after midnight, that they came within reach of Attock. And once again, as on his last visit there, Ash came to Fatima Begum's house by moonlight: only this time he did not come alone.

The path that led up to it was inches deep in dust, but either the horse's bridle chinked or else a nail in Ash's
chuppli
clicked against a pebble, for before he reached the gate it creaked open, and a man moved forward to greet him: ‘
Stare-mah-sheh
!’ said Zarin. ‘I told Gul Baz that you would not face that last mile through the gorges.’

‘
Khwah-mah-sheh
?’ replied Ash, returning the conventional greeting. ‘You were right. My courage failed at the sound of the water and the sight of those whirlpools, and I preferred to come dry-shod across the hills.’

He dropped the reins and turned to help Anjuli down from the saddle, and though he knew that she was exhausted by the heat and the hours of riding at a walk along precipitous ways after a long day in the stifling shelter on the boat, he did not attempt to support her, since in the East a respectable woman, when visiting abroad, is an anonymous figure to whom no attention should be paid, and Ash knew that in a country where most people sleep out of doors in the hot weather, the night is apt to be full of eyes. For the same reason he made no introductions, but turned away to take the horse's bridle and follow Zarin through the gate, leaving Anjuli to bring up the rear in the time-honoured fashion that prevails throughout Islam.

The household had evidently retired to bed, but a faint light gleamed in the inner courtyard where Fatima Begum's most trusted attendant, an elderly close-mouthed woman, had been waiting, lantern in hand, to whisk Anjuli away to an upper room. When they had gone, the two men turned to take stock of each other by the light of an oil lamp that had been left burning in a niche by the door; and both thought sharply, and with a curious feeling of loss, how greatly the other had changed since their last meeting in that same house…

It was barely two years, yet there were grey hairs in Zarin's beard that had not been there before. And new lines too – one a long, puckered scar that ran from his temple to the corner of his mouth, barely missing his right eye: the mark of a slashing stroke from a tulwar, received, among other wounds, during the attack on Sipri. He had been promoted to Risaldar after that action, and bore in addition to the scar the indefinable stamp that authority and responsibility give to those upon whom they fall.

In Ash the change was less obvious, and possibly someone less well acquainted with him would have missed it, but to Zarin it was striking. His face no longer wore the strained, restless, reckless look that Zarin had found so disturbing at their last meeting, and though it was thinner than ever, the eyes under the black brows were quiet and contented. ‘He has found happiness,’ thought Zarin with foreboding. ‘This alters everything.’