The Far Pavilions (86 page)

Rapport having been established, the rest had been comparatively easy: though Ash had suffered a few reverses and had on one occasion found himself faced with a five-mile walk back to the cantonments. Yet in the end even Sarji had to admit that ‘The Trickster’ had been wrongly named and should now be re-titled ‘The Saint’. But Ash had retained the old name, for in some ways it was still applicable. Dagobaz had accepted him as a friend and his master, but showed plainly that he was a ‘one-man’ horse and that his affection and obedience were reserved for Ash alone. No one else could ride him with impunity, not even his syce, Kulu Ram; though he would grudgingly permit that individual to exercise him on the rare occasions when Ash was unable to do so – giving as much trouble as possible in the process, so that Kulu Ram was driven to declare that he was no horse but a devil in disguise. But with Ash on his back, be behaved like an angel.

He was a big horse by Arab standards, and the length of his stride was phenomenal. Ash discovered that he could, when pressed, out-distance anything else on four legs, including Sarji's pet hunting cheetahs – though the cheetah is reputed to be the swiftest of all animals and can easily run down a buck. He had, in addition, a mouth of velvet, the manners of a prince, and a truly royal temper that discouraged strangers – and syces – from taking liberties with him. But as Sarji had truly said, there was no vice in him, and once Ash had succeeded in winning his heart, he proved to be as docile and affectionate as a kitten and as intelligent as a well-trained gun-dog. So much so, that within two months of his purchase, and notwithstanding his known foibles, Ash had received at least half-a-dozen offers for him, all of them greatly in excess of the sum that he himself had paid – and all of them refused.

There was not, Ash asserted, enough gold in all India to buy Dagobaz. In proof of which he trained the stallion to jump, entered him in a local cross-country race and won it by over fifteen lengths (to the dismay of the bookmakers, who knowing that the horse had never raced before had rashly offered long odds), and for the best part of a month rode him on parade in place of the more experienced charger that he had acquired on his arrival in the station. Dagobaz, though unfamiliar with the drill, had taken it in his stride, and apart from one attempt to keep ahead of the line, had behaved as if he had been trained to it from the beginning.

‘There's nothing he can't do!’ declared Ash, boasting of his performance to Sarji. ‘That horse is human. And a damn' sight cleverer than most humans, at that. I swear he understands every word I say. He uses his head, too. He'd make a wonderful polo-pony, except that I don't need another, so I'd rather keep him just to ride and… Did you see the way he took that irrigation channel with the well on the near side of it? Flew it like a bird. By God, he should have been caled Pegasus. The Colonel says I can race him in Bombay next cold weather – that is if I'm still here.’

‘You expect to go before then?’ asked Sarji.

‘Not expect,’ corrected Ash wryly. ‘Only hope. Didn't they tell you I was serving a sentence? I'm on attachment; and as I shall have been here a year in March, there's just a chance that the powers in Rawalpindi may relent and send word that I may go back to my own
rissala
.’

‘What powers are those?’ inquired Sarji, interested.

‘Gods,’ said Ash flippantly. ‘Tin gods that say unto one “go” and he goeth, and to another “come” and he cometh. I received the first order and perforce obeyed: now I hope for the second.’

‘So?’ Sarji was puzzled but polite. ‘And what of Dagobaz? Will you take him with you when you go?’

‘Of course. You don't think I'd part with him, do you? If I couldn't take him any other way, I'd ride him back. But if I'm to be left here to rot for another year, I mean to take him down to Bombay for the races, and the entire Regiment are planning to put their shirts on him.’

‘
Shirts
?’

‘Money. They are going to bet every rupee they can lay hands on.’

‘Ah! I too. I shall go to Bombay with you and I shall back you with a
lakh
of rupees for your first race, and make a fortune!’

‘We all will. You and I and your great-uncle the Risaldar-Sahib, and every man in the Regiment. And afterwards Dagobaz will have a silver cup as big as a bucket to drink out of.’

Ash's opinion of the black horse was shared by many; though not by Mahdoo, who refused to see anything admirable in the animal and openly regretted its purchase.

‘I believe that you care more for that Child of the Pit than for anyone else,’ complained Mahdoo crossly as Ash, returning at dusk after an evening ride, fed Dagobaz with sugar before sending him back to the stables. ‘It is not fitting to give one's heart to an animal, who has no soul.’

‘Yet Allah made horses for our use,’ retorted Ash, laughing. ‘Is it not written in the Koran, in the Sura of the War-Steeds… “
By the snorting of

war-steeds which strike fire with their hooves as they gallop to the raid at dawn, and with a trail of dust split the foe in two: man is ungrateful to his Lord! To this he himself shall bear witness.”
Would you have me ungrateful for such gifts as these, Cha-cha?’

‘I would have you spend less time talking to a brute-beast, and more on those who have your welfare at heart. Such as Hamilton-Sahib, to whom, as I know well, you have sent only one short letter since the day that you acquired that son of perdition.’

Ash started and had the grace to look guilty: ‘Have I not? I did not realize… I will write to him now, tonight.’

‘First read what he has to say. This came by the morning's dâk, but it seems that you were in too great a hurry to glance at your letters before you went off to that creature's stable. This thick one is, I think, from Hamilton-Sahib; and we also, Gul Baz and I, would like news of him and of our friends in Mardan.’

He proffered a brass salver bearing half-a-dozen letters, and Ash snatched up the bulkiest, and tearing open the envelope, carried it into the lamp-lit bungalow to read it:

‘The cavalry have been having a damned dull time of it lately,’ wrote Wally, ‘but the infantry, lucky devils, have been having no end of larks. I can't remember if I told you about that trouble with the Jowaki Afridis over the Government suddenly deciding to stop bribing them (sorry, I believe I should have said “paying them an allowance”.
Wah illah
!) in return for keeping open the road through the Kohat Pass, and offering them an equivalent sum for safeguarding the Khushalgarh road and telegraph line.

‘They didn't take to the idea at all, and after a bit they began to make their displeasure felt by plundering and burning villages and attacking escorts and police stations. Then they burned down a bridge on the Khushalgarh road and that seems to have got the Powers-that-Be on the raw – a sort of last straw on their august shoulders. They decided that the Jowaki jokers must be given a sharp rap over the knuckles, and, I regret to say, that was just about all it was. A quick dash into Jowaki territory by three columns, one of them ours – 201 bayonets with Campbell in command and Stuart, Hammond, Wigram and Fred in support – burn a village or two and nip back again.
Bus
! (enough). The columns were under arms in vile heat for twenty hours, marched nearly thirty miles and had eleven casualties – our fellows had two men wounded. Short and sweet, and apparently a complete waste of everyone's time, for the Jowakis remain noticeably unimpressed and are still cutting-up with unabated vigour.

‘I suppose this means that we shall be having another go at them before long. If so, I hope the Big-Wigs let the cavalry get into the act. I'd like to see a bit of action for a change. Zarin sends his salaams and asks me to tell you that he is afraid his father was right. He says that you will know what he means, and I hope you do because I don't. Let us have some news of you. You haven't answered my last letter yet and it's months since I heard from you. But as no news is good news, I presume you are alive and enjoying yourself. My salaams to Mahdoo and Gul Baz…’

‘When you write, send ours to him,’ said Mahdoo, and added sourly: ‘And ask him if he has need of another servant: an old man who was once a good cook.’

The other servants had settled down contentedly enough, for as there was no shortage of accommodation in the Ahmadabad cantonment, Ash had a whole bungalow to himself with a large compound and plenty of servants' quarters: a luxury seldom enjoyed by a junior officer in any military station. Kulu Ram had been pleased to approve of the stables, and Gul Baz, who had left his wife and family in Hoti Mardan, had made himself comfortable by installing a local woman in the hut behind his quarters – a silent and retiring creature who kept herself to herself, cooked and washed and generally attended to the wants of her temporary protector.

Mahdoo, however, was too old for such arrangements; and he hated everything about Gujerat with the possible exception of Ahmadabad's great mosque, where the founder of the city, Sultan Ahmad Shah, lies buried. For the rest, he detested the heat and the humidity, the lush, dripping greenery in the compound, and the rain clouds that during the monsoon had driven in on a wind that smelled of the sea, to empty their contents on the roofs and roads and parade ground of the cantonment until the whole area was awash and it seemed, at times, as though the bungalows were islands floating in a waste of water. The food did not agree with him, and he distrusted the local people, whose language he did not understand and whose ways were not his.

‘He is too old to change,’ said Gul Baz, excusing Mahdoo's crotchetiness. ‘He misses the scents and sounds of the north, and the food and talk and customs of his own people.’

‘As you do,’ said Ash, and added under his breath: ‘and I also.’

‘True, Sahib. But then if God is merciful you and I will have many more years to live, and therefore if we spend one or two in this place, what matter? But with Mahdoo-ji it is different, for he knows that for him the years are few.’

‘I should not have brought him here,’ said Ash remorsefully. ‘Yet how could I help it, when he refused to be left behind? I would send him on leave at once if I thought he would stay in his own home until we go north again, but I know he would not, so if we are to spend another hot season in this place it would be better for him to stay here now while it is cool, and leave for the north in the first half of February. That way he will miss the months of greatest heat and the worst of the monsoon; and if we are still here when it is over, I may even be able to send to tell him that he need wait only a little longer and meet us in Mardan. Because by that time I must surely know my fate.’

In this last respect, Ash was to be proved right: though in a way that he had not foreseen.

Throughout that cold-weather season, whenever the Regiment was not in camp or engaged in manoeuvres, Ash would rise with the dawn in order to take Dagobaz out for an early-morning gallop. And on most evenings he would ride out alone or with Sarji to explore the countryside, returning to his bungalow only after dusk had fallen.

There was much to be seen, for Gujerat is not only drenched in history, but is the legendary scene of the chief exploits and death of the god Khrishna, the Indian Apollo. Every hill and stream has its link with some mythological happening, and the land is strewn with the ruins of tombs and temples so ancient that the names of those who built them have long been forgotten. Among the memorials to the dead – the magnificient, pillared domes of the great and the sculptured slabs of humbler men – one curious motif attracted Ash's attention, for it appeared over and over again. A woman's arm, ornamented with intricately carved bracelets and armbands.

‘That?’ said Sarji in answer to a question. ‘Oh, it commemorates a suttee. A widow who burned herself on her husband's funeral pyre. It is a very old custom, one that your Government has forbidden – and rightly, I think. Though there are still those who would not agree with me. Yet I remember my grandfather, who was a learned and enlightened man, telling me that many thinkers, himself among them, believe that this practice arose through the error of a scribe when the laws were first put down in writing, many centuries ago. The original law, they say, laid down that when a man dies his body must be given to the fire and his widow must afterwards ‘go within the house’ – in other words, live in seclusion for the remainder of her life – but that a scribe, writing this down long after, left out the last two words by mistake, so that it came to be believed that ‘go within’ meant to go within the fire. Perhaps that is true; and if so it is as well that the Raj has given orders that the practice must cease, for to be burned alive is a cruel death, though many thousands upon thousands of our women have not flinched from it, but considered it an honour.’

‘And many more have been forced to endure it against their will, if even half the tales one hears are true,’ said Ash grimly.

Sarji shrugged. ‘Maybe. But then their lives would have been a burden to them had they lived, so perhaps they were better off dead; and you must not forget that she who becomes suttee becomes holy. Her name is honoured and her very ashes are venerated – look there.’ He pointed with his riding whip to where a vivid splash of colour glowed bright against the dark stone and the tangle of greenery.

Someone had draped a garland of fresh marigolds over one of the carved weather-worn arms that bore silent witness to the hideous death of a wife who had dutifully ‘completed a life of uninterrupted conjugal devotedness by the act of
saha-gamana
’, and accompanied her husband's corpse into the flames. The stone was half hidden by grass and creepers, but someone – another woman, surely? – had decked it with flowers, and though the afternoon was windless and very warm, Ash shivered, and said violently: ‘Well if we have done nothing else, at least we can mark up one thing to our credit – that we put a stop to
that
particular horror.’

Sarji shrugged again; which might have meant anything – or nothing – and he began to talk of other matters as they turned their horses and made for the open country.