by M. M. Kaye
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 sigh
t 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.
By the end of August they had won free of the jungle and were in open country once more, and with September the monsoon slackened. The sun was once again cruelly hot and clouds of mosquitoes rose each evening from the flooded jheels and brimming ponds and ditches. But at the edge of the plain and beyond the foothills the high ridges of the Himalayas rose clear and blue above the heat-haze, and the night air held a hint of coolness. Here, in the scattered hamlets, they heard no rumours of strife and insurrection, for now there were few footpaths and no roads, and the land was sparsely populated; the villages consisting of no more than a huddle of huts and a few acres of cultivation, surrounded by miles of rock-strewn grazing ground that was bounded on the one side by jungles and on the other by foothills.
Always, on clear days, they could see the snow peaks, and the sight of them was a constant reminder to Sita that time was running out and that the winter was coming, and that it was necessary for them to find a roof to live under before the cold weather set in. But there was little chance of employment for herself or a hopeful future for Ashok in such country as this, and though she was tired and footsore and desperately weary of travelling she was not tempted to linger in it. They had come a long way since the April morning when they had turned their backs on Hilary's silent camp and set out for Delhi, and they were both sorely in need of rest. And then, in October, when the leaves were turning gold, they came to Gulkote, and Sita realized that here at last was the spot she had been looking for. A place where they could hide and be safe.
The independent State of Gulkote had been too small, too difficult of access and above all too poor to interest the Governor-General and the officials of the East India Company. And as its standing army consisted of less than a hundred soldiers – the majority elderly grey-beards equipped with tulwars and rusty jezails – and its ruler appeared to be popular with his subjects and displayed no disposition to be hostile, the Company had left him in peace.
The capital city, from which the state took its name, stood some five thousand feet above sea-level, at the apex of a great triangular plateau among the foothills. It had once been a fortified town and it was still surrounded by a massive wall that enclosed a rabbit warren of houses, a single main street that bisected these from the Lahori Gate on the south to the Lal Dawaza, the ‘Red Gate’, on the north, three temples, a mosque and a maze of narrow alleyways. The whole was overlooked by the Rajah's rambling fortress-palace, the Hawa Mahal – the ‘Palace of the Winds’ that crowned a towering outcrop of rock some thousand yards beyond the city wall.
The ruling house traced its descent from a Rajput chieftain who had come north in the reign of Sikander Lodi, and stayed to carve out a kingdom for himself and his followers. The kingdom had shrunk with the centuries, until by the time the Punjab fell to the Sikhs under Ranjit Singh, it had been reduced to no more than a handful of villages in a territory that a man on horse-back could traverse in a single day. That it had survived at all was probably due to the fact that its present frontiers were bounded on one side by an unbridged river, on another by a dense track of forest and on the third by a waste of rock-strewn country scored by deep ravines, whose ruler was related to the Rajah; while at its back the wrinkled, wooded foothills swept upwards to meet the white peaks of the Dur Khaima and the great snow-capped range that protects Gulkote from the north. It would have been difficult to move an army against such a strategically placed spot, and as there had never been a sufficiently urgent reason to do so, it had escaped the attentions of the Moguls, Mahrattas, Sikhs and the East India Company, and lived serenely remote from the changing world of the nineteenth century.
The ramshackle town had been in a festive mood on the day that Ash and Sita reached it, there having been a distribution of largess from the palace in the form of food and sweetmeats for the poor, in celebration of the birth of a child to the Senior Rani. It had been a modest celebration, for the child was a daughter, but the citizens were disposed to use it as an excuse for a holiday: feasting, making merry and decorating their houses with garlands and paper flags. Little boys threw patarkars – home-made squibs – among the feet of the passers-by in the crowded bazaars, and after dark the thin fire of rockets soared into the night sky to blossom above the rooftops where the women-folk clustered like flocks of chattering birds.
To Sita and Ash, accustomed through long months to silence and solitude – or at best the humble society of small villages – the colour and noise of the jostling, lighthearted crowds were exhilarating beyond words, and they ate of the Rajah's bounty and admired the fireworks, and found lodgings for themselves in the house of a fruit-seller in an alley off the Chandi Bazaar.
‘Can we stay here?’ asked Ash sleepily, surfeited with sweetmeats and excitement. ‘I like it here.’
‘I too, little son. Yes, we shall stay here. I will find work and we shall stay and be happy. Yet I wish…’ Sita stopped on a sigh and did not finish the sentence. Her conscience troubled her, because she had not obeyed the Burra-Sahib's order to return his son to his own people. But she did not know what else she could have done. Perhaps one day, when her boy was a man… But for the present they were both weary of wandering, and here they would at least be among the mountains – and safe. An hour or so in the town had convinced her of that last, for in all the talk in the bazaars and the gossip of the loitering, chattering crowds, there had been no word of the troubles that were shaking India, or any mention of mutineers or Sahib-log.
Gulkote was only interested in its own affairs and the latest scandals of the palace. It paid little or no attention to the doings of the world beyond its borders, and at the moment its main topic of conversation (apart from the perennial one of crops and taxes) was the eclipse of the Senior Rani by the concubine, Janoo, a Nautch-girl (dancer) from Kashmir, who had acquired such a hold over the jaded monarch that she had recently succeeded in persuading him to marry her.
Janoo-Bai was suspected of practising magic and the black arts. How else could a common dancing-girl have raised herself to the rank of Rani, and ousted from favour the mother of the baby princess, who had reigned undisputed for at least three years? She was known to be both beautiful and ruthless, and the sex of the new baby at the palace was taken as further proof of her malignant powers. ‘She is a witch,’ said Gulkote. ‘Assuredly she is a witch. They at the palace say that it was by her orders that food and sweetmeats were distributed to the hungry to mark the birth of this child, for she rejoices that it is not a son, and would have her rival know it. Now if she herself were to bear
a son…!’
Sita listened to the talk and was reassured by it; there was nothing here that spelt danger to Ashok, son of Daya Ram, syce, who (so she informed the fruit-seller's wife) had run off with a shameless gipsy woman, leaving her to fend for herself and the child.
Her story had not been questioned, and later she had found work in a shop in Khanna Lal's Gully behind the temple of Ganesh, helping to fashion the gaudy paper and tinsel flowers that are used in garlands and for decorations at weddings and festivals. The work was ill paid, but it sufficed for their needs; and as she had always been quick with her fingers, it was not uncongenial. She was also able to earn a little extra by weaving baskets for the fruit-seller and occasionally helping in the shop.
As soon as they had settled in, Sita dug a hole in the mud floor of their little room and buried the money that Hilary had given her, stamping down the earth and smoothing cow-dung over the whole surface so that no one could tell where it had been disturbed. There remained only the small packet of letters and papers in its oiled-silk wrapping, and this she would have liked to burn. For though she could not read them, she was aware that they must constitute proof of Ash's parentage, and both fear and jealousy urged her to destroy them. If they were found they might lead to his being killed, as the children of the Sahib-log had been killed at Delhi and Jhansi and Cawnpore and a score of other cities, and her own life might well be forfeit for having tried to save him. Even if he escaped that penalty, they still proved that he was not her son; and by now she could not bear the thought of this. Yet she could not bring herself to destroy them, for they too were a sacred trust: the ‘Burra-Sahib’ had given them into her hand, and were she to burn them his ghost or his God might be angry with her and take revenge for the act. It was better to keep them; but they must never be seen by any other eyes, and if the white ants destroyed them it would not be her fault.