by M. M. Kaye
Shushila, who had recovered very quickly from her ordeal, flatly refused to believe that her husband's illness could not be cured. Her faith in her uncle's Hakim remained unshaken and she insisted that the relapse was no more than a temporary set-back, and that another month would see the Rana on his feet again and completely recovered: it was unthinkable that this should not be so. In the meantime she turned her attention to repairing the ravages of pregnancy and parturition, and regaining the slenderness that had previously delighted him, so that when he was well again he would think her as beautiful as ever – and have no eyes and no thoughts for anyone else.
Not until the very end could she be brought to believe that he was dying, and when finally she was forced to believe it, she tried to go to him so that she might hold him in her arms and shield him with her own body from this enemy that threatened him. She would fight Death itself for his sake – and she had fought with teeth and nails against those who had prevented her from running to his bedside. Her fury and despair had been so terrible to see that her women had fled from her and hidden themselves in the furthest and darkest rooms of the Zenana, while the eunuchs listening outside her door shook their heads and muttered that she was deranged and should be put under restraint. But when the first frenzy of grief had spent itself she shut herself away in her apartment to pray, refusing to eat or drink or to allow anyone to approach her.
It must have been during this time that she made up her mind to die a suttee, and also what she intended to do about her half-sister. For when the news was brought to her that her husband was dead, her plans had been made. She had apparently sent at once for the Diwan, and speaking to him in the presence of the chief eunuch and the woman Promila Devi (who had been at pains to describe that interview to Anjuli) had informed him that she intended to die on her husband's pyre.
She would follow the bier on foot, but she would go alone. ‘The half-caste’ could not be permitted to defile the Rana's ashes by burning with him, for being no true wife it was not fitting that she should share the honour of becoming suttee. Other arrangements would be made for her…
Even the Diwan must have shuddered as he listened to those arrangements, but he had not opposed them, possibly because his failure to have ‘the half-caste's’ marriage contract repudiated and the woman herself sent back dowerless to her home still rankled, and that if he thought of her at all it was with enmity and resentment, and anger at his own defeat. At all events he had agreed to everything that the Senior Rani had decreed, before hurrying away to consult with the priests and his fellow councillors as to the funeral arrangements. When he had gone, Shushila sent for her half-sister.
Anjuli had not seen her sister since the night of the child's birth, or had any message from her. And when the summons came she imagined that she had been called because Shu-shu was frantic with grief and terror, and desperately in need of support. She did not believe that there would be any talk of suttee, for Ashok had told her that the Raj did not permit the burning of widows and that there was now a law forbidding it. So there was no need for Shushila to fear that she would be forced to die on her husband's pyre. ‘But this time I did not go to her willingly,’ said Anjuli.
Until recently she had been able to believe, or had made herself believe, that Shushila was innocent of much that had been imputed to her; but now she knew better – not only with her head but in her heart. Yet she could not refuse the summons. She had expected to find the new-made widow weeping and distraught, her hair and clothing torn and her women wailing about her. But there had been no sound from the Senior Rani's apartments, and when she entered there was only one person there: a small erect figure that for a moment she did not even recognize…
‘I would not have believed that she could look like that. Ugly, and evil – and cruel. Cruel beyond words. Even Janoo-Rani had never looked like that, for Janoo had been beautiful and this woman was not. Nor did it seem possible that she could ever have been beautiful – or young. She looked at me with a face of stone and asked me how I dared come into her presence showing no signs of grief. For in this too I had sinned: it was intolerable to her that I should escape the agony of grief that was tearing at her own heart…
‘She said… she told me… she told me everything: how she had hated me from the moment she fell in love with her husband, because I too was his wife and she could not endure the thought of it; that she had had me starved and imprisoned to make me pay for that crime, and also in order that I might look old and ugly so that if by chance the Rana should remember my existence, he would turn from me in disgust: that she had ordered the killing of my two serving-maids, and of old Geeta… She threw it all in my face as though each word was a blow, and as though it eased her own pain to see me suffer – and how could I not suffer? When – when she had finished she told me that she had resolved to become suttee, and that the last thing I would ever see would be the flames uniting her body with her husband's, because she had given orders that when I had seen it my eyes were to be put out with hot irons, and afterwards – afterwards I would be taken back to the Zenana to spend the rest of my life in darkness – as a drudge.
‘I – I tried to reason with her. To plead with her. I went on my knees to her and begged her in the name of all that lay between us – the years… the tie of blood and the affection we had had for each other in the past, the love – but at that she laughed, and summoning the eunuchs, had me dragged away…’
Her voice failed on the last word, and in the silence that followed Ash became aware once more of the sound of the sea and all the many small ship noises; and that the cabin smelled strongly of hot lamp oil and the fried puris that had been served with the evening meal and that there was still a lingering odour of stale cigar-smoke to remind him that this had been Red's cabin for many years. But up on the deck it would be cool and the stars were once again familiar ones, for the skies of the south had been left behind – and with them Bhithor and its harsh stony hills, and all that had happened there.
It was over – finished. Khutam hogia! Shushila was dead, and all that remained to show that she had ever lived was the print of her small hand on the Suttee Gate of the Rung Mahal. Sarji, Gobind and Manilal had gone; and Dagobaz too… They were all part of the past, and though he would not forget them, it would be best not to think of them too often until enough time had passed to allow him to do so calmly, and without pain.
He drew a long slow breath, and reaching out, took Anjuli's hands in his and said gently: ‘Why didn't you tell me all this before, Larla?’
‘I could not. It was… it was as though my heart and mind had been so bruised that I could not endure any more emotion. I only wanted to be quiet; and not to have to answer questions and to put it all into words. I had loved her for so long, and I had thought that she – that she was fond of me. Even when I thought that I hated her, I found that I could not forget what she had once meant to me… how sweet she had been as a child. And then – then when I saw her walk to the pyre, and knew what would happen when she realized what she had done and that there was no escape, I – I could not bear to have her suffer so terrible a death. I could not! Yet if I had only gone when you wished, perhaps all those others would not have died. Their blood was on my head and I could not bear it – or bear to hear my own voice relating things that – that even now I can hardly believe can really have happened. I wanted to hide it all away… to bury it and pretend that it could not be true. But it would not stay buried.’
‘It will now, my Heart,’ said Ash, and pulled her up into his arms. ‘Oh, my love, I have been so afraid. So terribly afraid. You do not know! All this time I have thought that you were grieving for her, and that you had found out that I could not replace her because she had taken all your love and there was none left for me. I thought I had lost you –’
His voice broke, and suddenly Anjuli's arms were tight about his neck and she was crying, ‘ No, no, no – it was not so: I have always loved you – always, always. More than anyone in th
e world –’ And then the tears came.
But this time Ash knew that they were healing tears, washing away some of the horror and bitterness and guilt from her bruised heart, and easing the terrible tension that had held her in a vice-like grip for so long. When at last they were spent, he lifted her head and kissed her, and presently they went out together into the cool, star-spangled darkness, and for that night at least, forgot the past and the future and everything and everyone but each other.
48
Ten days later, on a still and pearly morning before sunrise, the Morala dropped anchor off Keti on the delta of the Indus, and landed three passengers: a burly Pathan, a slim, clean-shaven man whose dress and bearing proclaimed him to be a citizen of Afghanistan, and a woman in a bourka who was presumably the wife of one or other of them.
The Afghan dress had been acquired on the previous day by Gul Baz, in the course of a brief stop at Karachi where the Morala had unloaded a small consignment of dressed hides and dried fruit, taken on, with the grain, a week earlier at Chahbar. It was Red who had suggested its purchase, for Sind was a harsh land, much of it sparsely inhabited, and its people were not noted for hospitality towards strangers: ‘But they're leary of Afghans, an' as from wot you've tole me, you can pass yoreself orf as one any day of the week, I'd advise you to do it now. It'll be a sight safer.’
So Ash had gone over the side wearing Afghan dress, and whether it was due to this, or merely a matter of luck, the long journey from the coast of Sind to Attock had been accomplished in safety, if not in comfort.
A dundhi, a flat-bottomed river boat normally used for carrying cargo, hired on their behalf through the agency of one of Red's many friends in the coastal-trading business, had taken them up the Indus, initially under sail (during those hours when the tide was in their favour) and later, if the wind failed, by means of a tow rope. Teams of coolies had pulled the clumsy craft forward from village to village, a fresh team taking over each evening while the previous one turned homeward, each man clutching the few small coins that were doled out for his day's labour by the owner of the boat, the manji, who with his two sons formed the permanent crew.
In this wise they travelled slowly up the enormous mile-wide river. Past Jerak and Naidarabad and Rohri, to Mithankote where the waters of four of the five great rivers of the Punjab, the Sutlej, Ravi, Chenab and Jhelum, channelled by the Chenab, join the Indus on their way to the sea – and on northward past Dera Ghazi Khan, with the mountains of Baluchistan and Zohb rising up along the western horizon and the flat, burning plains of the Sind Sagar Doab stretching away eastward, to the junction of the Luni River below Dera Ismail Khan. From where, on a night of brilliant moonlight, they saw the crest of the Takht-i-Suliman, a far point of silver, high above the foothills of Baluchistan, and Anjuli had wept tears of joy at seeing snow again.
At first, irked by inactivity, Ash and his bride would leave the boat and walk for part of the way. But by now the hot weather was upon them, and even in the cool of the morning, or towards sunset, the heat turned the bourka into a stifling tent. Then Ash had managed to buy two horses, and after that they rode each day, ranging far afield so that the bourka could be thrown back, and returning to the boat at mid-day to rest in the shade of the small shelter constructed out of planks and matting that did duty for a cabin.
Ash had wished to buy a third horse for Gul Baz. But Gul Baz had no desire to go riding around the countryside. He thoroughly approved of this leisurely method of travelling and enjoyed spending his days sitting in lordly ease under an awning in the bows, though he would ride one of the horses and take the other on a leading rein whenever the Sahib and the Rani-Sahiba decided to travel on the boat.
Time moved slowly on the river, but for Ash and Anjuli it could not move slowly enough, and if they could have had their way the journey would never have ended. The discomforts (and there were many) counted for nothing compared to the delight of being together and free to talk and laugh and make love without fear.
The food might be plain and ill-cooked, but Anjuli, who had known starvation, found no fault with it. And after sleeping for more than a year on the dank stone floor of an underground cellar, what did it matter that the single string bed provided by the manji should prove to be so densely populated by bugs that Ashok had thrown it overboard, and thereafter they had slept on the floor with only a thin resai (quilt) between them and the rough planks?
As for their tiny, ramshackle cabin with its Noah's Ark roof and matting walls, it might be exceedingly hot and far from comfortable; but then her room in the Women's Quarters of the Rung Mahal had been far hotter, for no breeze ever reached it, while here the matting could be rolled up at will – and there outside lay the river and the white sandbanks, with beyond them the wide, sun-scorched, empty spaces that stretched away and away until they were lost in the heat-haze or made magical by moonlight. To one who had lived penned up in a small windowless room in the Rung Mahal and endured months of solitary confinement in a dark cellar, this alone was a never-failing source of wonder.
For Ash it was enough to see his wife lose her skeletal thinness and regain much of the beauty and health and serenity that the years in Bhithor had taken from her. Though this had not happened overnight: that would have been too much to expect. The road back to normality had been a slow one; almost as slow as their present progress up the ‘Father of Rivers’. But the telling of the true story of those years had been the first step, and those long, peaceful days on the Morala – the hours of talk and the hours of companionable silence, the shared laughter and the wonderful star-splashed nights when they made love and fell asleep to the music of the waves and sea winds – had all helped to heal the cruel wounds that Shushila and Bhithor had inflicted. Ash watched his wife come alive again and was happier and more deeply content than he would have believed possible.
The Father of Rivers ran deep and wide: so wide that it often seemed more like an inland sea than a river, and there were days when the heat-haze or blowing sand made it impossible to see the far bank – or either bank, if the boat was under sail. Much of the countryside was barren and desolate, but palm trees, oleanders, tamarind and tamarisk grew by the river, and even where there were no towns or villages, there was always life to be seen.
Myriads of birds preyed on the swarms of chilwa and other small fish who teemed in the shallows. Mud-turtles and ghariyal – the long-snouted, fish-eating alligators of the Indian river – basked on the sandbanks, and some-times a porpoise could be seen leaping and turning in deep water, or a great salmon-like mahseer, its silver-pink sides flashing in the sun. In the late evening, when the river ran gold and the hills of Baluchistan seemed to move nearer across the shadowed plains, flight after flight of wild duck, geese, pelicans and paddy-birds would pass overhead, while parties of nomads with their goats and camels would straggle past on their way to new camping grounds. And at dusk the deer and antelope, and creatures such as pig and jackal and porcupine, would come down to drink.
Sometimes they saw bands of horsemen far out across the plain, galloping furiously towards a horizon that was hidden by dust. And on the river itself there were always other boats: country-boats laden with fodder or grain, wood, sugar-cane or vegetables, and others crammed with woolly, bleating cargoes of sheep or goats; ferry-boats plying their trade and fishermen paying out their nets or setting fish-traps; and during the earlier days, an occasional river steamer huffing and puffing its way upstream under a cloud of black smoke, or sweeping past with the current on its way to the coast.
Lessons in English and Pushtu, begun on the Morala, became part of the daily routine, and Anjuli proved to be an apt pupil. She made rapid progress, astonishing Ash by the quickness and accuracy with which she assimilated words and phrases and mastered the complicated rules of grammar, and he realized that she must always have had a good brain but until now had lacked the opportunity to use it – women in purdah not being expected to interest themselves in anything but domestic matters. But now that
she had escaped from the almost exclusively feminine world of the Zenana, her intelligence leapt to meet the challenge, and by the time the Kurram hills and the Salt Ranges of Kundian came into sight, she could express herself in her husband's language with a fluency that did credit to her instructor: and even more to her own powers of concentration.
Realizing that they would reach Kala Bagh almost a month before his leave was up, Ash had planned to tie up the boat at some pleasant spot and spend the time exploring the countryside on horseback rather than returning to Mardan before he need do so. But with the Salt Range closing in to hem the river between high banks and shut out the breeze, even the nights were no longer cool, while the days had become so hot that the cliffs of rock salt and the blinding white sand by the water's edge, the ground underfoot and even the planks of the boat felt as though they had come fresh-baked from a furnace.
In these conditions, the sooner he got Juli under a proper roof and into a house where there were solid walls and wide verandahs to shut out the cruel heat, and punkahs and kus-kus tatties to cool the air, the better. And it was then that he remembered Zarin's aunt, Fatima Begum, and the quiet house that stood back from the Attock road, protected by high walls and a garden full of fruit trees. He could leave Juli there in safety, and though it meant that he would have to take the Begum into his confidence, he felt sure that the old lady could be relied upon to keep the matter secret, and also to think of some story that would satisfy the curiosity of her household and prevent her servants from talking.