by M. M. Kaye
‘You have been a better father to him than I,’ said Hilary, holding his friend's hand.
Akbar Khan smiled. ‘That I know, for he has my heart, and I would have taught him – I would have taught him… It is too late. Leave quickly.’
‘There is nowhere to go,’ said Hilary. ‘How can one out-distance the black cholera? If we go it will go with us, and I have heard that more than a thousand are dying daily at Hardwar. We are better off here than in the towns, and soon you will be well – you are strong and will recover.’
But Akbar Khan had died.
Hilary wept for his friend as he had not wept for his wife. And when he had buried him he went to his tent where he wrote a letter to his brother in England and another to his lawyer, and enclosing both with certain other papers and daguerreotypes in his possession, made a small packet of the whole and wrapped it carefully in a square of oiled silk. That done and the packet sealed with wax, he picked up his pen again and began a third letter – that long-overdue letter to Isobel's brother, William Ashton, that he had meant to write years ago and somehow never written. But he had left it too late. The cholera that had killed his friend reached out a bony hand and touched him on the shoulder, and his pen faltered and fell to the floor.
An hour later, rousing himself from a bout of agony, Hilary folded the unfinished page and having slowly and painfully traced an address on it, called for his bearer, Karim Bux. But Karim Bux too was dying, and it was, at long last, Daya Ram's wife, Sita, who came hastening nervously through the dusk of the stricken camp, bringing a hurricane lamp and food for the ‘Burra-Sahib’. For the cook and his assistants had run away hours before.
The child had come with her, but when she saw how it was with his father she pushed him outside the reeking tent and would not let him enter.
‘That's right,’ gasped Hilary, approving the action. ‘You're a sensible woman – always said so. Look after him, Sita. Take him to his own people. Don't let him –’ He found that he could not finish the sentence and groping weakly for the single sheet of paper and the sealed packet, thrust it at her. ‘Money in that tin box – take it. That's right. Should be enough to get you to…’
Another convulsion shook him, and Sita, hiding money and papers in the folds of her sari, backed away, and grasping the child's hand hurried him to his own tent and put him to bed – for once, and to his indignation, without the songs and fairy tales that were the normal accompaniments of bedtime.
Hilary died that night, and by mid-afternoon on the following day the cholera had claimed four more lives. Among them, Daya Ram's. Those who remained – by now a mere handful – looted the empty tents of anything of value, and taking the horses and camels, fled southward into the Terai, leaving behind them the newly widowed Sita, for fear that she might have taken the infection from her dead husband, and with her the four-year-old orphan, Ash-Baba.
Years afterwards, when he had forgotten much else, Ash could still remember that night. The heat and the moonlight, the ugly sound of jackals and hyenas quarrelling and snarling within a stone's throw of the little tent where Sita crouched beside him, listening and trembling and patting his shoulder in a vain attempt to soothe his fears and send him to sleep. The flap and croak of gorged vultures roosting in the sal trees, the sickening stench of corruption and the dreadful, dragging sense of bewildered desolation at a situation that he could not understand and that no one had explained to him.
He had not been frightened, because he had never yet had cause to be afraid of anything, and Uncle Akbar had taught him that a man must never show fear. Also he was, by temperament, an abnormally courageous child, and life in a camp that moved through jungles, deserts and unexplored mountain ranges had accustomed him to the ways of the wild animals. But he did not know why Sita wept and shivered and why she had not let him approach the ‘Burra-Sahib’, or understand what had happened to Uncle Akbar and the others. He knew that they were dead, for he had seen death before: tigers that he had been allowed to sit up for in a machan with Uncle Akbar and had seen shot. Kills that they had waited above; goats or young buffaloes that a tiger had struck down and partially eaten on the previous day. Black-buck and duck and partridge shot for the pot. These creatures had been dead. But surely Uncle Akbar could not be dead as they were dead? There must be something indestructible – something that remained of men who had walked and talked with one and told one stories, men whom one had loved and looked up to. But where had it gone? It was all very puzzling, and he did not understand.
Sita had dragged thorn branches from the boma that had once protected the camp, and piled them in a circle about his tent, heaping them high. And it was as well that she had, for towards midnight a pair of leopards had driven off the jackals and the hyenas to lay claim to the feast, and before dawn a tiger roared in the jungle beyond the sal trees, and daylight showed the print of his pugs within a yard of their flimsy barrier of thorn.
There had been no milk that morning, and little food. But Sita had given the child the remains of a chuppatti – the unleavened bread of India – and afterwards she made a bundle of their few belongings, and taking him by the hand led him away from the horror and desolation of the camp.
2
Sita could not have been more than twenty-five years old. But she looked twice that age, for hard work and yearly pregnancies, the bearing of five children and the bitter grief and disappointment of their loss, had combined to age her prematurely. She could neither read nor write and she was not clever, but she possessed courage, loyalty and a loving heart, and it never occurred to her to keep for herself the money Hilary had given her, or to disobey his orders. She had loved Hilary's son from the hour of his birth, and now Hilary had given the boy into her keeping and told her to take him back to his own people. There was no one else to care for Ash-Baba now but herself: he was her responsibility and she would not fail him.
She had no idea who his own people were, or how to find them, but this did not worry her over-much, for she remembered the number of the house in Delhi cantonment where Ash-Baba's father had left the greater part of his luggage, and also the name of the Colonel-Sahib who lived there. She would take the child to Delhi, to Abuthnot Sahib and his Memsahib, who would arrange everything, and as they would certainly need an ayah for the boy she, Sita, need not be parted from him. Delhi lay far to the southward but she never doubted that they would reach it in safety, though because the money she had taken from the tin box was more than she had ever seen in her life, she became afraid of attracting undue attention on the road, and dressed Ash in the oldest garments he possessed, warning him that he must on no account talk to strangers.
It was May before they came within sight of the city of the Moguls, for Ash was too heavy for her to carry except for short distances, and though he was a sturdy child he could not cover more than a few miles in one day. The weather too, though usually cool for that season of the year, was getting hotter, and the long, burning days made for slow travel. Ash had accepted their journey without question, for he had never known anything else and a constant change of scene was nothing new. The only stability his life had possessed had been the presence of the same people: Sita, Uncle Akbar and the ‘Burra-Sahib’; Daya Ram and Kartar Singh, Swab Gul, Tara Chand, Dunno and a score of others; and though all of them had now gone except Sita, she at least was still here – together with all India and the familiar Indian scene.
They travelled slowly, buying their food in villages by the way and sleeping for preference in the open in order to avoid questions, and they were both very tired by the time the walls and domes and minarets of Delhi showed on the horizon, wraithlike in a dusty, golden evening. Sita had hoped to reach the city before dark, having planned to spend the night with a distant connection of Daya Ram's who kept a grain shop in a side street of the Chandi Chowk, where she could clean and press the English clothes that she had secreted in her bundle, and dress Ash-Baba correctly before taking him to the cantonment. But they had covered nearly six mi
les that day, and though the walls of Delhi seemed no great distance away, the sun went down while they were still a quarter of a mile short of the bridge of boats by which they must cross the Jumna.
A further half mile separated them from the shop in the city, and soon it would be too dark to see. But they had sufficient food and drink for an evening meal, and as the child was too tired and too sleepy to go further, Sita led him a little way off the road to where a peepul tree leaned above a clutter of fallen masonry, and having fed him, spread a blanket among the tree roots and sang him to sleep with an old, old nursery-rhyme of the Punjab, ‘Arré Ko-ko, Jarré Ko-ko’, and that best-beloved of lullabies that says –
‘Nini baba, nini,
Muckan, roti, cheeni,
Roti muckan hogya,
Hamara baba sogya!’*
The night was warm and windless and full of stars, and from where she lay with her arm about the child's small body, Sita could see the lights of Delhi twinkling across the plain, a spangle of gold on the velvet darkness. Jackals howled among the scattered ruins of other and older Delhis, bats and harsh-voiced night birds swooped and called among the branches overhead, and once a hyena laughed hideously from a patch of elephant grass a few yards away, and a mongoose chittered angrily among the shadows. But these were all familiar sounds, as familiar as the tom-toms that beat in the distant city and the shrill hum of the cicadas; and presently Sita drew the end of her chuddah over her face and slept.
She awoke in the first flush of dawn, aroused abruptly from sleep by a less familiar sound: a sharp urgent clatter of galloping hooves, the crack of fire-arms and men's voices, shouting. There were horsemen on the road, approaching from the direction of Meerut and riding like men possessed, or pursued, the dust of their headlong progress streaming out behind them like a trail of white smoke across the dawn-lit plain. They thundered past within a stone's throw of the peepul tree, firing wildly into the air and shouting as men shout in a race, and Sita could see their staring eyes and frenzied faces, and the clotted foam that flew from the straining necks and flanks of the galloping horses. They were sowars (troopers) wearing the uniform of one of the Bengal Army's cavalry regiments. Sowars from Meerut. But their uniforms were torn and dusty and disfigured by the dark, unmistakable stains of blood.
A stray bullet ripped through the boughs of the peepul tree and Sita cowered down, clutching Ash, who had been woken by the noise. The next moment the riders were past and the dust that whirled up behind them blotted them out in a choking cloud that filled her lungs, making her cough and gasp and cover her face in the folds of her sari. By the time it had blown clear and she could see again, they had reached the river and she heard, faint but clear in the quiet dawn, the hollow thunder of hooves crossing the bridge of boats.
The impression of desperate men who fled in fear of pursuit had been so vivid that Sita snatched up the child, and running with him to the shelter of the elephant grass, crouched there, listening for the hue and cry that must surely follow.
She stayed there for the best part of an hour, hushing the bewildered boy and begging him in whispers to stay still and make no noise; but though she heard no more hoof-beats on the Meerut road, the stillness of the morning lent clarity to a distant crackle of firing and the voices of men shouting under the walls of Delhi. Presently these too ceased or were absorbed into the work-a-day sounds of the awaking city and the normal noises of an Indian morning: the creak of a well-wheel, partridges calling out on the plains and sarus cranes by the river; the harsh cry of a peacock from the standing crops, and the chatter and chirrup of tree-rats, saht-bai and weaver-birds. A troop of brown monkeys settled in the branches of the peepul tree, and a faint breeze off the river stirred the tall elephant grass and made a dry monotonous rustling that blotted out all other sounds.
‘Is it a tiger?’ whispered Ash, who had sat up over more than one kill with Uncle Akbar and knew about tigers.
‘No – but we must not talk. We must be quiet,’ urged Sita. She could not have explained the panic that the yelling horsemen had aroused in her, or what exactly she was afraid of. But her heart was still beating at twice its normal speed and she knew that not even the cholera, or the terrible hours of their last night in camp, had frightened her as the sight of those men had done. Cholera, after all, she knew; and sickness and death and the ways of wild animals. But this was something else. Something inexplicable and terrifying…
A country cart drawn by a pair of lethargic bullocks jolted slowly down the road, and the homely, unhurried sound of its passing reassured her. The sun lipped the rim of the far horizon and suddenly it was day, and Sita's breathing slowed and steadied. She stood up cautiously, and peering through the parched grasses saw that the road lay empty in the bright sunlight. Nothing moved upon it – which was in itself unusual, for the Meerut road was normally a busy one and carried the main traffic from Rohilkund and Oude to Delhi. But Sita was unaware of this, and the silence encouraged her, though she was not anxious to follow too closely on the heels of those wild-eyed horsemen, and it seemed wiser to wait awhile. There was still a little food left, but they had finished the milk on the previous night and were both becoming increasingly thirsty.
‘Wait here,’ she told Ash. ‘I will go to the river to fetch water, and I shall not be long. Do not move from here, my heart. Stay still and you will be safe.’
Ash had obeyed her, for he had caught the infection of her panic and for the first time in his life had been frightened. Though he, like Sita, could not have told what he was afraid of.
It had been a long wait, for Sita made a detour and reached the river bank some way above the spot where the road ran on to the bridge of boats, which would have been the shortest way to the water. From here she could see across the sand bars and the wandering channels of the Jumna to the Calcutta Gate and the long line of the wall that stretched away past the Arsenal to the Water Bastion; and also hear, more clearly now, the noise of the city, which sounded from that distance like the hum of an overturned hive of angry bees, magnified a thousand times.
Mixed with that sound were the sharper ones of shots, now a lone one, now a staccato crackle of firing; and the sky above the roof tops was alive with birds – hawks, cawing flocks of crows, and startled pigeons, wheeling and swooping and rising sharply again as though disturbed by something in the streets below. Yes, there was something gravely wrong with Delhi that morning, and it would be better to keep away and not attempt to enter the city until she had some knowledge of what was happening there. It was a pity that there was so little food left, but there would be enough for the child. And at least they would have water.
Sita filled her brass lotah in the shallows and stole back to the safety of the elephant grass by the Meerut road, keeping as far as possible to the sparse shelter of kikar trees, rocks and clumps of pampas in order to avoid being seen. They would remain here until the evening, she decided, and then cross the bridge after dark, and by-passing the city, make straight for the cantonments. It would be a long walk for Ash-Baba, but if he rested all day… She trod out a more comfortable space for him in the heart of the grass patch, and though it had been dusty, airless and intolerably hot, and Ash, having forgotten his fear, had become bored and restless, the heat and the enforced idleness had eventually made him drowsy, and shortly after midday he had fallen asleep.
Sita too had dozed fitfully, soothed by the slow creak of bullock-drawn country carts plodding along the dusty road and the occasional jingle of a passing ekka.* Both sounds seemed to betoken the resumption of normal traffic on the Meerut road, so perhaps the danger – if there had been danger – had passed, and what she had witnessed had been no more than messengers hastening to Bahadur Shah, the Mogul, with news of some great event that had aroused the city to excitement and celebration; the news, perhaps, of a victory won by the Company's Bengal Army on some faraway battle field; or the birth of a son to some fellow monarch – perchance to the Padishah Victoria in Belait (England) ?
These and other comforting conjectures served to blunt the sharp edge of panic, and she could no longer hear the tumult of the city, for though the faint current of air that blew off the wet sand and the winding reaches of the Jumna River was not strong enough to raise the dust that lay thick on the highroad, it was still sufficient to stir the tops of the elephant grass and fill her ears with a soft, murmurous rustling. ‘We shall leave when the child awakes,’ thought Sita. But even as she thought it the illusion of peace was shattered. A savage tremor swept across the plain like an invisible wave, shuddering through the grass and rocking the very earth beneath her, and on its heels came an appalling crash of sound that split the murmurous silence of the hot afternoon as a thunderbolt will split a pine tree.
The violence of that sound jerked Ash from sleep and brought Sita to her feet, rigid with shock, and peering through the shivering grasses they saw a vast column of smoke rising up above the distant walls of Delhi: an awesome, writhing pillar, mushroom-topped and terrifying in the blaze of the afternoon sunlight. They had no idea what it meant, and never knew that what they had seen was the explosion of the Delhi magazine, blown up by a handful of defenders to prevent it falling into the hands of a rioting mob.
Hours later the smoke still hung there, rose-coloured now in the golden sunset; and when at last Sita and the child ventured out of their hiding place the first rays of the low moon had touched its fading outline with silver.
To turn back now, when they were almost within reach of their goal, was out of the question; though had there been any other way of reaching the cantonments, Sita would have taken it. But she did not dare attempt to ford the Jumna, and there was no other bridge for many miles. They would have to cross by the bridge of boats, and they had done so, hurrying across it in the grey starlight in the wake of a wedding party, to be challenged and halted by armed men on the far side. A lone woman and child being of little account, they had been allowed to pass while the sentries interrogated the wedding guests; and it was from the babble of questions and answers that Sita gained her first information as to the events of the day.