The Far Pavilions (6 page)

Towards nightfall they were well off the beaten track, and she judged it safe enough to stop at a village whose twinkling lights promised a bazaar and the prospect of hot food and fresh milk. Ash-Baba was tired and sleepy and therefore less likely to talk, while the donkey too needed food and water, and she herself was very weary. They slept that night in a lean-to shed belonging to a hospitable cultivator, which they shared with the donkey and the cultivator's cow, Sita representing herself as the wife of a blacksmith from Jullunder way, returning from Agra with an orphaned nephew, the son of her husband's brother. She bought hot food and buffalo-milk in the bazaar, where she heard a variety of frightening rumours – each one worse than the last – and later, when Ash was asleep, she joined a group of gossiping villagers on the edge of the threshing-ground.

Sitting well back among the shadows, she listened to stories of the rising, the tale having reached here that morning, brought by a party of Gujars and confirmed in the late afternoon by five sepoys of the 54th Native Infantry, who had joined the mutineers at the Kashmir Gate on the previous day, and were now on their way to Sirdana and Mazafnagar to carry the news that the Company's power was broken at last, and that once again a Mogul ruled as King in Delhi. The tale had lost nothing in the telling; and hearing it re-told by the elders of the village, after all she herself had seen since the men of the 3rd Cavalry galloped past her on the Meerut road, Sita believed it.

All the English in Meerut had been put to the sword, said the elders, confirming the words of the sowars on the bridge of boats, and in Delhi too all had been slain – both in the city and the cantonments. And not only in Delhi and Meerut, either, for the regiments had risen throughout Hind, and soon there would be no
feringhis
left alive in all the land – not so much as a single child. Those who had tried to save themselves by flight were being hunted down and killed, while any who thought to hide themselves in the jungles would be slain by wild beasts – if they did not first perish from hunger and thirst and exposure. Their day was done. They were gone like dust before the wind, and not one would be left to carry the tale of their going. The shame of Plassey
*
was avenged and the hundred years of subjection at an end – and now there was no need to pay the taxes.

‘Is Esh-mitt Sahib also dead, then?’ asked an awestruck voice, presumably referring to a local District Officer who was, in all probability, the only white man whom the villagers had ever seen.

‘Assuredly. For on Friday – so Durga Dass says – he rode to Delhi to see the Commissioner-Sahib, and did not the sepoy with the pock-marked face say that all the
Angrezi-log
in Delhi were slain? It is certain that he is dead. He and all others of his accursed race.’

Sita listened and believed, and stealing away into the darkness she returned hastily to the bazaar, where she bought a small earthenware bowl and the ingredients for making a brown dye that was equally effective and hardwearing on the human skin as on cotton cloth. Soaked overnight it had been ready by morning, and long before the village was awake she roused Ash, and leading him out into the dim light of dawn, crouched behind a cactus hedge where she stripped him and applied the dye with a cotton rag, working by touch as much as sight and whispering urgently that he was to tell no one, and to remember that from now on his name was Ashok: ‘You will not forget, Heart-of-my-heart? Ashok – promise me you will not forget?’

‘Is it a game?’ asked Ash, intrigued.

‘Yes, yes, a game. We will play that your name is Ashok and that you are my son. My true son: your father being dead – which the gods know is true. What is your name, son?’

‘Ashok.’

Sita kissed him passionately, and adjuring him again not to answer questions, took him back to the shed. After eating a frugal meal and paying for their night's lodging, they set out across the fields, and by mid-day the village was far behind them and Delhi and the Meerut road only an ugly memory. ‘We will go north. Perhaps to Mardan,’ said Sita. ‘We shall be safe in the north.’

‘In the valley?’ asked Ash. ‘Are we going to our valley?’

‘Not yet, my King. One day surely. But that too lies in the north, so we will go northward.’

It was as well for them that they did so, for behind them the land was ablaze with violence and terror. In Agra and Alipore, Neemuch, Nusserabad and Lucknow, throughout Rohilkhand, Central India and Bundelkhand, in cities and cantonments up and down the country, men rose against the British.

At Cawnpore the Nana, the adopted son of the late Peshwa, whom the authorities had refused to recognize, turned on his oppressors and besieged them in their tragically inadequate entrenchments; and when after twenty days the survivors accepted his offer of safe conduct, and were herded onto river boats that they were told would take them to Allahabad, the boats were set alight and fired upon from the bank. Those who managed to struggle to shore were taken prisoner, the men shot, while some two hundred women and children – all who remained of a garrison that at the beginning of the siege had numbered a thousand – were penned up in a small building, the
Bibi-gurh
(women's house), where they were later hacked to death on the orders of the Nana, and their bodies thrown into a near-by well, the dying with the dead.

In Jhansi that same royal widow whose wrongs Hilary had written of in his last report Lakshmi-Bai, the beautiful childless Rani who had been refused the right to adopt a son and disinherited by the East India Company – venged herself for those wrongs by massacring another British garrison unwise enough to surrender to her on her promise of safe conduct.

‘Why do the people put up with it?’ Hilary had asked Akbar Khan. ‘Why don't they do something?’ Lakshmi-Bai, the unforgiving, had done something. She had repaid the bitter injustice dealt her by the Governor-General and Council of the Honourable The East India Company with a deed no less unjust. For not only the men, but the wives and children of those who had accepted her offer of safe conduct had been roped together and publicly butchered: children, women and men, in that order…

‘John Company’ had sown the wind. But many who must reap the whirlwind were as blameless and bewildered as Sita and Ash-Baba, blown helplessly before the gale like two small and insignificant sparrows on a wild day of storm.

3

It was October and the leaves were turning gold when they came to Gulkote, a tiny principality near the northern borders of the Punjab, where the plains lose themselves in the foothills that fringe the Pir Panjal.

They had come slowly, and for the most part on foot, for the donkey had been commandeered by a party of sepoys in the last days of May, and the hot weather had made travelling impossible except in the cool of the morning before the sun rose, or after it had set.

The sepoys had been men of the 38th Native Infantry, a regiment that had disintegrated on the day that the sowars of the 3rd Cavalry rode in from Meerut. They had been returning to their homes laden with loot, and were full of tales of the rising, among them the story of how the last of the
feringhis
in Delhi, the two men and fifty women and children who had been imprisoned in the King's palace, had met their end:

‘It is necessary to rid the land of all foreigners,’ explained the speaker, ‘but we of the army refused to turn butcher and slaughter women and babes who were half dead already from fear and hunger and many days of confinement in the dark. Some of the King's household also spoke out against it, saying that it was contrary to the tenets of the Muslim faith to slay women and children or other prisoners of war; but when Miza Majhli tried to save them, the mob cried for his blood, and in the end the King's servants took swords and slew them all.’

‘
All?’
faltered Sita. ‘But – but what harm would children have done? Could they not at least have spared the little ones?’

‘Bah! It is foolish to spare the young of a serpent,’ scoffed the sepoy; and Sita quaked anew for Ash-Baba, that embryo serpent playing happily in the dust only a yard or two away.

‘That is true,’ agreed one of his comrades, ‘for they grow up and breed more of their kind. It was well done to rid ourselves of so many who would in their turn have become thieves and oppressors.’ Whereupon he commandeered the donkey, and when Sita protested, struck her down with the butt of his musket while a second man picked up Ash, who had rushed to her defence like a small tiger-cat, and flung him into a patch of thorn-scrub. Ash had been severely scratched, and when he crawled out at last bruised, torn and sobbing, it was to find Sita lying unconscious by the roadside and sepoys and donkey already small in the distance.

That had been a black day. But at least the men had not taken Sita's bundle, and there was some consolation in that. Possibly it never occurred to them that the humble possessions of a ragged child and a lone woman could include anything worth taking, and they were not to know that at least half of the coins that Hilary had kept in a tin box under his bed were in a wash-leather bag at the bottom of the bundle. Sita had removed it as soon as she recovered consciousness and could think clearly again, and added it to the other half that she kept in a fold of cloth tied about her waist under her sari. It made a heavy and uncomfortable belt, but was probably safer there than in the bundle; and now that the donkey had been taken, she would in any case have to carry both.

The theft of the donkey had been a grievous blow; as much on sentimental grounds as practical ones, for Ash had grown fond of the little animal and mourned its loss long after even the worst of the scratches had healed and been forgotten. But that incident, and the sepoy's stories, served to underline the dangers of using the roadways that ran between towns and the larger villages, and the wisdom of keeping instead to the cattle tracks of the Mofussil and the little lost villages where life pursued a slow, centuries-old course, and news from the outside world seldom penetrated.

Now and again a ripple from the far-off storm would lap against even such remote fastnesses as these, and they would hear stories of wounded and starving Sahib-log hiding in the jungle or among the rocks, and creeping out to beg food from the meanest passer-by. Once, following a rumour of successful risings throughout Oude and Rohilkund, there had been a tale of mutiny and massacre in Ferozepore and far-off Sialkot, and it was this last that made Sita finally abandon a nebulous plan that she had briefly entertained, of taking Ash-Baba to Mardan where his mother's brother would be stationed with the Guides. For if the regiments in Ferozepore and Sialkot had also mutinied, then what hope would there be for the British in any cantonment town anywhere? If there were still any left alive (which seemed doubtful) they would all soon be dead: all except Ash-Baba, who was now her son Ashok.

Sita never again referred to him as anything but ‘my son’, and Ash accepted the relationship without question. Within a week he had forgotten that it had begun as a game, or that he had ever called her anything but ‘mother’.

As they journeyed further north, skirting the folds of the Sawaliks, the rumours of rising and unrest became fewer, and the talk was only of crops and the harvest and the local problems and gossip of small rural communities whose horizons are bounded by their own fields. The blazing days of June ended in a torrential downpour of rain as the monsoon swept across the parched plains of India, turning the fields to bogs and every ditch and nullah into a river, and reducing each day's journey to a minimum. It was no longer possible to sleep out in the open and shelter had to be found – and paid for.

Sita begrudged the money, for it was a sacred charge and not to be expended lightly. It belonged to Ash-Baba and must be kept for him until he was grown. There was also the danger of appearing too affluent and thereby inviting attack and robbery, so it must be spent in the smallest coins only and to the accompaniment of hard bargaining. She bought, too, a yard of coarse, country-made
puttoo
(tweed) to keep the rain from Ash, though she was well aware that he would have preferred to dispense with this protection and go bare-headed as well as unshod. Ash's paternal grandmother had been a Scotswoman from the west coast of Argyll, and possibly it was her blood in his veins that made him take a particular pleasure in the feel of rain on his face, though it may well have been no more than any child's partiality for splashing through mud and puddles.

Constant exposure to the monsoon had succeeded in washing away most of the dye from his skin, and he was once again a colour that would have been familiar to Hilary and Akbar Khan. But though Sita was aware of this she did not renew the dye, since by now they were close to the foothills of the Himalayas, and hill-folk being fairer-skinned than the men of the south (many of them having light-coloured eyes, blue, grey or hazel, and hair that is as often red or brown as black), her son Ashok aroused no comment and was, indeed, somewhat swarthier than many of the pale-skinned Hindu children with whom he played in the villages by the way. Her fears for his safety were gradually diminishing and she no longer lived in terror that he might betray himself by some unguarded mention of the ‘Burra-Sahib’ and the old days, because he appeared to have forgotten them.

But Ash had not forgotten: it was just that he did not wish to think or speak of the past. He was, in many ways, a precocious child, for children ripen early in the East, being reckoned men and women at an age when their brothers and sisters in the West are still in the junior forms at school. No one had ever treated him as anything but an equal or kept him immured in a nursery atmosphere. He had had the run of his father's camp from the moment he could crawl, and lived his short life among adults who had, by and large, treated him as an adult – though a privileged one, because they loved him. Had it not been for Hilary and Akbar Khan, he would probably have been spoiled. But though their methods had differed, they had both taken pains to prevent his becoming a pampered brat, Hilary because he could not have endured whining or tantrums and preferred his son to behave from the first as an intelligent human being, and Akbar Khan because he intended the boy to be a commander of armies, a man whom men would one day follow to the death, and such are not the products of a spoilt and over-indulged childhood.

Sita had been the only one who ever spoke to him in baby-talk or sang him childish songs, for Akbar Khan had early impressed it upon him that he was a man and must not allow himself to be molly-coddled. So the songs and the baby-talk had been a secret between Ash and his foster-mother, and it was partly because they shared that secret that he accepted the necessity of keeping other things secret, and had not betrayed them both at the start of their ill-fated journey to Delhi. Sita had told him that he must not talk of the ‘Burra-Sahib’ and Uncle Akbar, or the camp and all the things they were leaving behind them, and he had obeyed her, but as much from shock and bewilderment as obedience to her wishes. The swiftness with which his world had dissolved, and the incomprehensible manner of its going, was a black pool of shadow into which he would not look for fear of seeing things he did not want to remember: dreadful things, like Uncle Akbar being thrust into a hole in the ground and the earth piled over him; and the almost worse shock of seeing the ‘Burra-Sahib’ weeping over that rough mound, when how many times had both he and Uncle Akbar said that tears were only for women?

It was better to turn one's back on such things and refuse to recall them; and Ash had done just that. Sita's urgings had been unnecessary, for even had she wished him to speak of the past it is unlikely that she could, under any circumstances, have persuaded him to do so. As it was, she imagined that he had forgotten it, and was grateful for the shortness of a child's memory.

Her chief anxiety now was the quest for some peaceful backwater, sufficiently remote from the bustling cities and the highroads of Hind to remain ignorant of such matters as the rise or fall of the Company. A place small enough to escape the eyes of those who would now be in authority, yet large enough to absorb a woman and a child without their arrival attracting attention or arousing curiosity. Somewhere where she could find work and they could settle down and begin life again, and find peace and contentment and freedom from fear. Her own home village did not fall into this category, because there she would be known and her return lead to endless speculation and questioning by her own and her husband's family; and inevitably, the truth would leak out. For the boy's sake she could not risk that: and for her own also. She could hardly conceal Daya Ram's death from his parents, and once that was known, she would be forced to conduct herself as a widow, a childless widow, should; and there were few worse fates in India, for such women were considered to be responsible for their husbands' death, it being believed that some misconduct in a previous life had brought misfortune on their men.

A widow must never wear colours or jewellery, but shave her head and dress only in white. She could not marry again, but must end her days as an unpaid drudge in her husband's family, despised on account of her sex and resented as the bringer of bad luck. It was not surprising that in the days before the law of the Company had forbidden it, many widows had preferred to become suttees and burn themselves alive on their husband's funeral pyres rather than face the bitterness of long years of servitude and humiliation. But a stranger in a strange town could adopt any identity she chose, and who was to know that Sita was a widow – or care? She could pretend that her husband had taken work in the south, or run off and left her. What did it matter? She could hold up her head as the mother of a son, and wear gay colours and glass bangles and her few modest pieces of jewellery. And when she found work she would be working for the boy and herself, and not as an unpaid slave for Daya Ram's family.

Several times during the months that followed their escape from Delhi, Sita thought she had discovered the right place: the haven where they could end their wanderings and find work and safety. But each time there had been something that drove her on: the arrival of an armed band of sepoys from some regiment that had risen against its officers, and who were roaming the country in search of English fugitives; the sight of a family of starving
feringhis
, who had been given shelter by a kindly villager, being dragged out of hiding and put to death by a jeering mob; a passing traveller flaunting a murdered officer's uniform, or half a dozen sowars galloping through the crops…

‘Aren't we ever going to stop
anywhere?
’ inquired Ash wistfully.

June gave place to July, and July to August. And now the crop-lands were behind them and there was only jungle ahead. But Sita and Ash were both used to jungles. The silence and the hot, wet thickets held fewer terrors for them than the villages, and the jungle provided them with edible roots and berries, water and fuel, and shade from the heat as well as shelter from the rain.

Once, walking down a game-track through high grass, they had come face to face with a tiger. But the great beast was full fed and peaceably disposed, and after exchanging a long, surprised stare with the intruders, it had turned aside without haste and vanished into the grass. Sita had not moved for five long minutes, until the scolding chatter of a jungle-cock some thirty yards to their right told her the direction in which the tiger had gone; and then she had turned back and made a detour that took them away from the grass. It was astonishing that they had not lost themselves in those trackless miles of trees and thickets, elephant grass, bamboos, rocks and creepers. But here Sita's unerring sense of direction helped them, and as they were heading for no particular goal, but merely moving hopefully northward, it did not matter very much which path they chose.