The Far Pavilions (35 page)

Accompanied by Gul Baz and Mahdoo, who was very shrivelled now and beginning to feel his years, Ash arrived in Rawalpindi to find that he had been allotted a half share in part of a small, dilapidated bungalow largely given over to offices and the storing of files. The quarters were cramped and dark, but compared with the places he had slept in during the past two years they seemed palatial; and having lived cheek-by-jowl with his fellow men for months on end, he had no objection at all to sharing them. The cantonment suffered from a chronic shortage of accommodation, and he was, in fact, lucky not to be sharing a tent. And even luckier, as it turned out, in his stable-companion; though a gangling young ensign almost four years his junior, newly arrived from Home and addicted to writing bad verse, was probably the last person whom Ash himself would have selected for a roommate. Yet surprisingly, it proved to be a great success. The two had taken to each other from the outset and were soon to find that they had a great deal in common.

Ensign Walter Richard Pollock Hamilton of the 70th Foot was at that time only a year younger than Ash had been when he landed at Bombay. And like Ash, he saw India as a wonderful and mysterious country, full of endless possibilities for excitement and adventure. He was a pleasant youth, good-tempered, high-spirited and intensely romantic – and he too had fallen desperately in love with a yellow-haired chit of sixteen during the voyage from England. The girl had had no objection to flirting with the tall handsome boy, but his suit had been rejected out of hand on the score of his youth, and two days out of Bombay she had become engaged to an elderly gentleman who must have been at least twice her age: ‘Thirty, if he was a day,’ declared Walter disgustedly. ‘And a civilian too. Some dreary fellow in the Political Department. Would you believe it, now?’

‘Only too easily,’ said Ash. ‘Belinda, let me tell you –’

But that story, as he told it now, was no longer a tragic one, and any bitterness that remained was solely on George Garforth's account. For this was something else that had altered during the past two years; and looking back on his abortive romance, Ash could not only recognize it for the foolish and ephemeral thing it had been, but also see the comic side of it. Retold to Walter, the chronicle of his misfortune lost all trace of tragedy, and eventually became so hilarious that the ghost of Belinda was exorcized for ever, swept away on a gale of laughter into the limbo that is reserved for forgotten love-affairs. Walter's flirtatious sixteen-year-old had followed her there, and he celebrated the fact by writing a ribald poem entitled ‘Ode to Forsaken Subalterns’, that would have surprised and pained his fond relatives – who were used to more elevated out-pourings from ‘dear Wally’.

Wally rather fancied himself as a writer of verse. It was the only thing in which his sense of humour failed him, and his letters home were apt to contain deplorably amateur poems that were passed round the family circle and greatly admired by doting aunts and similar biased and unqualified critics, who considered them to be quite as good as ‘dear Mr Tennyson's’. And wrote to say so. The ‘Ode’, however, was in a very different style from any of his previous effusions, and Ash translated it into Urdu and had it set to music by a Kashmiri singer of his acquaintance. It subsequently achieved quite a success in the ‘Pindi bazaar, and versions of it (the more colourful ones) were sung for many years throughout the Punjab.

Wally himself was no mean singer, though the songs he sang were less secular. He had been a member of his school choir for several years, and nowadays, when he felt the urge to sing (which was often, for he sang whenever he was happy or exhilarated), he would launch into one of the more militant hymns of his youth: ‘Fight the good fight’, ‘Onward Christian Soldiers!’, ‘Forward be our watchword!’ or ‘For all the Saints’ – the last being a special favourite. There was no irreverence in this: Wally approved the sentiments and genuinely liked the familiar melodies (he said they were ‘corking tunes’) and could see no reason why hymns should only be sung in church; particularly the ones that conjured up for him visions of banners and trumpets and legions of armed men charging into battle to smite the troops of Midian. His fondness for these stirring anthems meant that the day in the bungalow invariably began with the sound of a baritone voice, accompanied by much splashing of bath water, announcing melodiously that ‘Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away’, or, alternatively, demanding ‘Oh, let thy soldiers, faithful true and bold, fight as the Saints who nobly fought of old, and win with them the Victor's crown of gold – Alle – luia!
Al – le – lu – ia
!’ Similar hymns frequently enlivened the evening rides, and once Wally had raced down the polo ground and scored the winning goal in the last two seconds of a hard-fought match, chanting ‘Forward into battle see our banners go!’

These and other ‘Wally-isms’, such as his occasional use of brogue, were an endless source of amusement to Ash. Though it is probable that in anyone else he would have found them tiresome or dismissed them, scornfully, as affectation. But then Wally was… Wally –
fidus Achates
.

Apart from Zarin, who had been more like an elder brother to him, Ash had never had a really close friend. He seemed to have no talent for friendship with those of his own blood. At school and the Military Academy, and later in the Regiment, he had always been something of a loner; an observer rather than a participant; and even at the height of his popularity as an athlete, no one had been able to claim that they knew him well or were on particularly friendly terms with him, though many would have liked to do so. But then he had never cared whether he was liked or not, and though, on the whole, he had been, it had been a luke-warm emotion, which was largely his own fault. Yet now, and entirely unexpectedly, he had found the friend that he had missed in those earlier years.

From the moment of their, meeting he had felt at ease with Walter; so much so, that he had told him what he had told no one else, not even Zarin – the full tale of the grim tracking-down of Dilasah Khan and the death of Ala Yar and Malik. The savage revenge that the hunters had taken on the thief and killer, the long, terrible journey back through territory held by hostile tribes who had hunted the hunters, and the ambush that had been laid for them on the very fringe of the Border by several men of the Utman Khel who had seen and coveted the carbines, and from which they had barely escaped with their lives after Ash and Lal Mast had been wounded…

It was a story that the Commandant of the Guides had heard, in part, from the four men of Dilasah's tribe, though not from Ash, who had initially been too ill to be interrogated, and had later confined himself to answering questions in the fewest possible words. Ash's official account of those two years had been colourless in the extreme. But the full story was anything but colourless, and Walter – himself the stuff of which heroes are made – had listened enthralled and become a hero-worshipper in his turn. There was no one like Ash! And, naturally, no regiment like the Guides.

Walter had always meant to be a soldier. The heroes of his childhood had been Joshua and David, Alexander the Great and Rupert of the Rhine, and all his dreams were of military glory. They were very private dreams and he had never imagined himself being able to talk of them to anyone. Yet he had talked of them to Ash, and without embarrassment, and taken a good deal of ribbing on the subject with unimpaired good temper.

‘The trouble with you, Wally,’ said Ash. ‘is that you've been born too late. You ought to have been a cavalier. Or one of Henry's knights at Agincourt. But there are no worlds left to conquer now – and precious little glamour or chivalry about modern warfare.’

‘Perhaps not in Europe,’ agreed Wally, ‘but that's why I wanted to come out here. It's different in India.’

‘Don't you believe it.’

‘But it
is
! It must be, in a country where guns are still dragged by elephants and the rank and file of a Regiment like yours have competed for the honour of serving in it. Your sowars and sepoys are not pressed men, or riff-raff from the slums of big cities like Lahore and Peshawar. They're yeomen – gentlemen adventurers who have enlisted for honour. It's magnificent.’

‘I can see that you are a hopeless idealist,’ said Ash drily.

‘And it's a misbegotten cynic you are,’ retorted Wally. ‘Haven't you ever wanted to storm an impregnable position or defend an impossible one? I have. I'd like to lead a cavalry charge, or a forlorn hope. And I'd like my countrymen to remember me as they remember men like Philip Sidney and Sir John Moore. And him over there:
“Nikalseyne”
–’

They had been riding across the open country west of ‘Pindi, and Wally flung out an arm to point at a rocky hillock on the horizon, crowned by a granite obelisk that commemorated the name of John Nicholson, killed while leading an assault during the battle for Delhi, seventeen years ago. ‘That's the way I'd like to die. Gloriously – with a sword in my hand and at the head of my men.’

Ash observed dampingly that Nicholson's men had failed to follow him, and that he had in fact lingered on in agony for at least three days after being shot.

‘What if he did? That's not the way he'll be remembered. Alexander said it all more than two thousand years ago' – there was a glow in the boy's eyes and his face had flushed like a girl's – ‘
“It is a lovely thing to live with courage, and to die leaving behind an everlasting renown.”
I read that when I was ten, and I've never forgotten it. That's exactly –’

He broke off as a sudden shiver made his teeth chatter, and Ash said: ‘Goose walking over your grave – and serve you right. Speaking for myself, I'd rather play safe and live to a ripe and undistinguished old age.’

‘Oh, rats!’ retorted Wally scornfully, firm in the conviction that his friend was a hero. ‘It's getting damned chilly out here. Race you to the road.’

Ash was no stranger to hero-worship. He had received a good deal of it from his juniors in the days when he had been a member of the first eleven at his school, and later when he had played for the Military Academy; and once, long ago, from a little girl; ‘a small sour-looking little thing like an unripe mango’. He had never taken it very seriously and had in general found it either irritating or embarrassing; and on occasions, both. But Wally's admiration was different, and it warmed his heart because it was a tribute from a friend, and not slavish adulation for mere physical prowess and skill at games, regardless of whether the possessor of it was, in himself, an admirable or a despicable character; or a dull one.

The two became known in Rawalpindi as ‘The Inseparables’ and if one were seen without the other there was always someone to call out: ‘Hullo David – what have you done with Jonathan?’ or ‘Blowed if it ain't Wally! I didn't recognize you without Pandy – you look improperly dressed.’ These and other equally foolish pleasantries had at first attracted the disapproving attention of several senior officers, none of whom would have objected very much to their juniors keeping half-caste mistresses or visiting the harlots' quarter of the bazaar (always provided they were discreet about it) but who had a horror of what they termed ‘unnatural vice’.

To these grey-beards any close friendship between young men was suspect, and they feared the worst; but careful inquiry revealed nothing that could be termed ‘unnatural’ about the vices of either young officer. In that respect at least, both were unquestionably ‘normal’ – as Lalun, for one (the most alluring and expensive courtesan in the city), could have testified. Not that their visits to such establishments were very frequent; their tastes lay in other directions, and Lalun and her kind merely represented experience: one of many. Together they rode, raced and played polo, shot partridge on the plains and
chikor
among the hills, fished or went swimming in the rivers, and spent far more than they could afford on buying horses.

They read voraciously – military history, memoirs, poetry, essays, novels: De Quincey, Dickens, Thackeray and Walter Scott; Shakespeare, Euripides and Marlowe; Gibbon's
Decline and Fall
, Balzac's
La Comédie Humaine
and Darwin's
Descent of Man
… Tacitus and the Koran, and as much of the literature of the country as they could get their hands on – their tastes were catholic and all was grist to their mill. Wally was working for his Lieutenancy and Ash coached him in Pushtu and Hindustani, and talked to him by the hour of India and its peoples; not the British India of cantonments and Clubs, or the artificial world of hill stations and horse shows, but that other India: that mixture of glamour and tawdriness, viciousness and nobility. A land full of gods and gold and famine. Ugly as a rotting corpse and beautiful beyond belief…

‘I still think of it as my own country, and that I belong here,’ confessed Ash, ‘even though I've learned that feeling one belongs doesn't mean much, unless one is accepted as belonging; which I am not – except by Koda Dad, and sometimes by strangers who don't know my history. To those who do, it seems I am and always will be a “Sahib”. Though when I was young I was, or thought I was, a Hindu for almost seven years – a life-time, to a child. In those days it never occurred to me or to anyone else that I was not one, yet now no high-caste Hindu would care to sit at the same table with me, and many would have to throw away their food if my shadow fell on it, and wash themselves if I so much as touched them. Even the humblest would break any dish or cup that I had eaten or drunk from, so that no one else would be defiled by using it. That sort of thing isn't so with Mohammedans, of course; but when we were hunting Dilasah Khan and I lived and fought and thought as one of them, I don't think that any of the men who knew who I was ever really forgot it. And as I can't seem to learn to think of myself as a Sahib or an Englishman, I presume that I am what the Foreign Office would call “A stateless person”. A citizen of no-man's-land.’

‘ “
That Paradise of Fools, to few unknown
”,’ quoted Wally.