by M. M. Kaye
Ash did not understand why she had taken all the trouble to dress him in it only to take it off again, but he was thankful to be out of it, and relieved to see that he would not have to wear it again, for Sita left it lying under the pepper tree. He ate his way solidly through a lump of cold rice pudding while Sita filled her brass lotah from a little well among the trampled oleander bushes and drew water in a leather bucket for the donkey, and when that was done they mounted again and set off in the pearl-grey light of a new day towards the Grand Trunk Road that stretches northward towards Kurnal and the Punjab.
The donkey would have kept to the level roads of the cantonment, but now that the sky was brighter Sita could see that most of the bungalows had been gutted by fire, and that smoke from a score of smouldering ruins still rose in ghostly columns above the scorched trees. It was a sight that increased her fears, and rather than cross the cantonment area she turned towards the Ridge and the dark bulk of the Flagstaff Tower, where the Delhi road ran northward to join the Grand Trunk.
Looking back from the crest of the Ridge it was difficult to believe that the once busy cantonment that lay below them was now a desolate shell, for the trees provided a kindly screen and the lazy smoke that drifted up to form a haze above it might have been the smoke of kitchen fires, cooking breakfast for the vanished garrison. On the far side of the Ridge the ground sloped down to merge into the level plain through which the silver ribbon of the Jumna wandered between white sandbanks and a wide belt of croplands, while a mile and a half away – a shadow on the shadowy plain – lay the domes and walls of Delhi, afloat on the morning mists that were rising off the river. A long white road, straight as a sword blade, led from the Flagstaff Tower to the Kashmir Gate, but at that hour nothing moved on it, not even the wind. The air was still and the world so quiet that Sita could hear, from far, far away, the crowing of a cock in some village beyond the Najafgarh canal.
The Ridge too was deserted, though even here the mute evidence of panic littered the ground: a child's shoe, a doll, a woman's rose-trimmed and beribboned bonnet hanging on a thorn bush, toys, books, bundles and boxes lost in the darkness or discarded in the frenzy of flight, and a dog-cart lying on its side in the ditch with a broken wheel and smashed shafts. The night dew lay thick on everything, bejewelling the wreckage and dipping the grasses in a film of silver; but the first hot breath of the coming day was already drying the dew, and birds had begun to chirp and twitter among the thorn-scrub.
There was no one in the Flagstaff Tower, but here the debris lay thicker, and around it the trampled ground bore signs that a small army of women and children, officers, servants and horse-drawn vehicles had camped there for hours and left only recently; for there were carriage-lamps on the dog-cart, and one of them was still burning. The marks of wheels, hoof-prints and footmarks showed that those who had been there had fled northwards towards Kurnal, and Sita would have followed them, but for one thing…
Fifty yards beyond the tower, on the road that led north past the Sudder Bazaar to the cut where it turns right-handed onto the Grand Trunk Road, stood an abandoned cart loaded with what at first sight appeared to be women's clothes. And once again, as on the previous night, the donkey jibbed and would not pass it. It was this that made Sita look closer, and now she saw that there were bodies in the cart: the dead bodies of four Sahibs dressed in scarlet uniforms and hideously mutilated, over which someone had hurriedly thrown a woman's flowered muslin dress and a frilled petticoat in a vain attempt at concealment. The flowers on the dress were forget-me-nots and rosebuds and the petticoat had once been white; but both were now blotched with dark brown stains, for the gay scarlet uniforms had been slashed with sword cuts and were stiff with dried blood.
A single hand, lacking a thumb but still wearing a signet ring that no one had thought to remove, protruded stiffly from among the muslin folds, and staring at it, flinching away, like the animal she rode, from the smell of death, Sita abandoned any idea of following in the wake of the British.
The stories of the men on the bridge, the sight of the dead memsahib in the Kudsia Bagh and even the desolation of the cantonments, had not succeeded in bringing home to her the reality of the situation. It was a rising; riot, arson and gurrh-burrh.* She had heard of such outbreaks often enough, though she had never been involved in them. But the Sahib-log had always put them down, and once they were over those who had caused them were hanged or transported, and the Sahib-log were still there, with their power and their numbers greater than before. But the dead men in the cart had been Sahibs – officers of the Company's army – and their fellow Sahibs had been in such fear and haste that they had not even paused to bury their comrades before they fled. They had merely flung some memsahib's clothes onto the cart to hide the faces of the dead and then run away, leaving the bodies to the mercy of crows and vultures and any passing ruffian who might choose to strip them of their uniforms. There could be no safety any longer with the Sahib-log, and she must take Ash-Baba away, somewhere far away from both Delhi and the British…
They turned and went back down the road they had just come by and crossed the ruined cantonments, past blackened roofless bungalows, trampled gardens, the gutted barracks and bells of arms, and the quiet cemetery where the British dead lay in neat rows under the alien soil. The donkey's small hooves sounded a hollow, tripping tattoo on the bridge over the Najafgarh canal, and a flight of parrots that had been drinking from a puddle in the dry cut flew up in a green, screaming explosion of sound. But they were clear of the cantonment now and out in the open country; and suddenly the world was no longer grey and still, but yellow with dawn and noisy with birdsong and the chatter of squirrels.
Beyond the canal the path narrowed to a track between sugar cane and tall grass, and presently it met the broad level of the Grand Trunk Road. But instead of turning down it, they crossed over it and followed a field path towards the little village of Dahipur. Without the donkey they could not have gone far, but once out of sight of the highroad, Sita dismounted and walked, and in this way they put several miles between themselves and Delhi before the sun became too hot. Their progress had been slower than it might have been, for Sita was still actively aware of danger and made constant detours in order to avoid villages and casual wayfarers. It was true that Ash-Baba had inherited his mother's black hair and that the open-air life of the camp had burned his already brown skin as dark as any Indian's, but his eyes were agate-grey, and who was to say that some suspicious passer-by would not recognize him as a white child and kill him for the sake of blood-money? One could also never be certain what a child would say or do, and she would not feel safe until Delhi and the mutineers from Meerut were many days' march behind her.
The crops as yet provided little cover, but the plain was seamed and scored with dry gullies, and there were thickets of thorn and elephant grass that offered adequate hiding-places even for the donkey. Yet here too the English had passed, for a buzzing cloud of flies betrayed the body of an elderly Eurasian, probably a clerk from one of the Government offices, hidden in a patch of grass by the side of the path. He too, like the fat woman in the Kudsia Bagh, had crawled into the grass and died there; but unlike her he had been so sorely wounded that it was astonishing that he should have been able to drag himself so far.
It disturbed Sita to find that others too had attempted to escape across country instead of taking the road to Kurnal. The sight of such wretched fugitives would only serve to bring news of the rising to previously peaceful villages, and kindle scorn of the feringhis (foreigners) and support for the rebellious sepoys, and she had hoped by taking this route to out-distance the news from Delhi. Now it seemed as though she had set herself an impossible task, for the man who had died in the grass had quite obviously been there since the previous day, and it looked as though someone must have helped him to get that far – the same person who had carefully spread a handkerchief over his face before leaving him to the flies and the eaters of carrion. Sita dragged the reluctant
donkey past, and distracted Ash's attention and her own anguished thoughts by embarking on his favourite story of the secret valley, and of how they would find it someday and live happily ever after.
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 embry
o 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.