“Do you know where he has gone?” Holmes asked, his arm still raised.
“But of course I know; how else would I have agreed to await your coming?” the boy retorted, the scorn in his voice perfectly modulated to place us a step below him. He spat a shell on the ground by way of punctuation.
Holmes lowered his hand, his head tipped to one side as he, too, re-evaluated the urchin. “Are we to take delivery of the donkey and cart from you, Young Prince?”
The boy slid down from the wall and sauntered around towards the pens. “Not the same animal you had agreed upon, oah no,” he answered, the last two words an English interjection before returning to the vernacular. “That creature was good only for feeding the vultures, and moreover had the trick of breaking its hobbles on the first or second night out and trotting home to its stable. I succeeded in loosing its rope during the night and exchanging it for its sister, who is an ‘altogether more satisfactory beast.’ ” Again, the final phrase was in ornately accented English, which might have been disquieting except that I had the clear idea that it was merely his way of demonstrating what a man of the world he was.
We followed our unlikely guide past some stinking pens that were full to bursting with horseflesh, to one that was deserted but for one lone donkey, dozing in a corner. The boy climbed up on the gate and gave a little chirrup sound with his teeth, and the creature’s ears flapped, its head coming up and all four feet planting themselves on the ground. It then hesitated, seeing three of us, before sidling around to greet the boy, who reached out and scratched its skull; even in the dim light, I clearly saw the cloud of scurf and dust the motion raised. However, I could also see that the animal appeared well fed and alert.
“And the cart?” Holmes asked.
The boy swung his legs over the gate and dropped into the pen, splashing through the half-liquid and entirely noxious ground to the far corner of the pen, where he stuck his toes into invisible niches and clambered over the wall like a monkey. A minute later he reappeared around the outside of the pen, heaving at a miniature cart that contained a child-sized armload of hay. He stopped in front of us, let the traces drop, and gestured proudly at the light little vehicle. It had probably started life as a cart for the entertainment of small English children, and although its paint was long gone and the high sides had seen rough use, the solid craftsmanship held, and the repairs to its two big wheels and leather straps were neat. The boy stood looking up at Holmes, taking no notice of the muck to his knees; I wondered again about his mental acuity.
Holmes surveyed the object solemnly, and nodded.
Instantly, the child shot back over the gate to leap onto the animal’s scrofulous back, nudging it forward with heels and knees. I opened the gate to let it out, and in a moment the beast was standing amiably between the cart shafts while the boy strapped it in. After some adjustments to the girth, the boy slapped the animal’s shoulder in satisfaction and stood away. “You are to pay me what is owed,” he said.
“Oho,” Holmes retorted, “and when it comes to light that the horse-seller merely sleeps, and you have delivered to my hands a stolen donkey and cart, what then do I tell the police who come to arrest me?”
The boy’s indignation was profound, and well polished. “Sir, never would I do such a thing! You came to buy a donkey, here is your donkey, and I am here to collect for the horse-seller. You have paid him one-half, and all the cost of the cart, and one day’s food. You may pay me the remainder.”
“That much at least he knows correctly,” Holmes said to me, then to the boy, “But you will have to tell me exactly what is owed, before I believe you.”
The child hesitated, caught on dilemma’s horns. If he quoted the amount Holmes clearly had in mind, then we might believe his veracity; if, however, he followed his gut instincts and demanded more—which is the only way to do business in India—then he risked losing all. He sighed, and rolled his eyes to express his disgust for the whole affair.
“Twenty-three rupees,” he admitted. Holmes raised his eyebrows and inclined his head slightly in a nod before turning his attention at last to the beast herself, looking to see if the trick lay with the substitution. But she looked sound beneath the filth, and if she was willing to respond to the blandishments of an urchin, no doubt her affections, or at least her attention, could be bought by owners willing to ply her with plentiful food and the occasional application of a brush to her sides. Holmes reached for his money-pouch, and thumbed the coins into the child’s hand.
The boy accepted the coins with the gravity of a bank manager, bound them up into a rag, and then scampered over the shed and pulled himself up its outside wall, diving headfirst through a small, high window. A minute later he re-emerged, the coin-rag replaced in his hand by a horse-brush and a small sack of grain. His grin told us without words that these were not part of Holmes’ original bargain, but a baksheesh he had appropriated from the horse-dealer’s store. He tossed both sack and brush into the cart beside the armload of hay, gathered up the donkey’s lead, and looked between us expectantly. “Where do we go?”
“Oh no,” Holmes said firmly. “I required a donkey, not a donkeymaster. We travel alone.”
“But if you do not take me, I shall be beaten and starve,” the child whined, pitifully. Holmes merely laughed.
“I cannot imagine one such as you starving,” he said. “Give me the lead.”
“Then I shall follow you on the road,” the boy declared. He sounded determined, alarmingly so; Holmes eyed him curiously.
“Why would you do so?”
“Because I had my horoscope cast two days past, and I was told that my path lay with two strangers dressed as Mussalmani.”
I was not certain that I had caught the subtle oddity in his phrasing—not “two Moslems” but “two men dressed as Moslems”—but Holmes’ reaction made it clear that I had heard it correctly. He went very still, his grey eyes probing the child like a pair of scalpels. The boy squirmed, and changed his words.
“I cannot help it, that is what I was told. That there would be two Mussalmani come to buy a donkey, unlike any men I knew from the bazaar. That is all, oah yes.”
Holmes did not believe in the retraction any more than I did. He raised his eyes to mine, consulting; I could only shrug. I did not doubt that the child would follow us, and keeping him close at hand made controlling him, and finding out what he was up to, more likely.
Besides, I was more than happy to have someone else in charge of pack animals and drudgery.
Holmes cast his gaze down at the servant we had just acquired. “And how much will it cost me to have you look after this beast and serve our needs?”
“Oah, next to nothing,” the boy chirped in English, elaborating somewhat more believably, “Five rupees every week.”
Holmes burst into laughter at the effrontery, causing the donkey to snort and tug at the rope. The boy controlled her without a struggle, and said, “Very well then, you will give me my food and drink and whatever small money you think I am worthy of. You see, I am trusting you gentlemen, not to torment and tease a homeless orphan.”
Boy and man gazed at each other for a time. Then Holmes said, “What is your name?”
The urchin wriggled with satisfaction, taking this as it was clearly meant, an acceptance of his proposal. “I am Bindra.”
“Well, Bindraji,” Holmes said, adding a mock honorific, “we are in your hands.”
The deed settled, we dropped our bags into the cart; the boy, after enquiring again as to which road we wished to be on, tugged the donkey into motion and led his small caravan out onto the road.
“Why do I get the idea that the child is going to take us wherever he thinks we should go?” I asked Holmes in a low voice.
“A most determined infant,” he agreed.
“It’s going to be very difficult, not to give ourselves away in front of him.”
“Hm,” Holmes commented, unconvinced. “I should say that his wits tend more towards th
e cunning than the analytical.”
I thought privately that the child would have to be remarkably obtuse to spend much time in our company without noticing that one of the “gentlemen” had some very odd habits when it came to private matters, but I said nothing. If the boy’s presence became difficult, we could always drive him away.
Or, we could try.
We turned north, the sun rising on our faces as we walked the road with a million other inhabitants. We were making for Simla, the government’s summer capital and year-round home of the Ethnological Survey of India. Holmes had debated heading south first in order to shake off any possible enemies from our tail, but he had decided that disguise and the sheer number of people on the road ought to be enough, so north it was, with the sun to our right.
Five miles outside of the city we paused to take tea at a roadside café that seemed to double as a motorcar repair shop, hung about with rubber belts and tyre tubes. Holmes wandered away to talk with the mechanics, and when we had finished with our refreshment I was not surprised to find him directing our steps around the back of the garage. There we received the rest of our possessions for the road, left there by Nesbit: a tent of some light but tightly woven fabric with a silken sheen, a pair of sleeping rolls, pots, pans, and paraffin lamp.
Everything a travelling magic show might require.
We kept close eyes on our new assistant, but although he darted to the side from time to time, picking up the odd twig or discarded object, he made no attempt to flee with our possessions. He appeared to have a jackdaw’s love of shiny objects, nearly coming to grief under the feet of a gaily caparisoned elephant when he spotted a silver button about to be trampled into the dust. He darted forward, under the animal’s very belly, and out the other side with his fist raised in triumph; the button he polished on his shirt-front, and hung on a piece of twine from the donkey’s harness.
Being caught up in his own affairs, the boy spent most of his time well ahead of us, which meant that I could continue my language lessons without attracting his questions. In another day or two, I thought, I might even venture the odd phrase in the boy’s direction.
Or perhaps three. I was already beginning to suspect that young Bindra was neither as innocent nor as feeble-minded as he appeared.
Chapter Ten
I had been in India for nearly a week, but only that morning, on foot and beneath the hot blue sky, did I begin to see the country. From the train I had witnessed a dream-like sequence: canals and hamlets; elephants bearing massive loads and camels hitched to wagons; a dead cow in a field, decorated with vultures; a man in homespun dhoti and purple socks wobbling on a shiny new bicycle; an Englishman in khaki shorts solemnly jumping rope on his verandah; a peacock atop a crumbling wall, feathers spread wide in a blaze of shimmering iridescence before his dull and disinterested lady; train stations without number, each packed like sardine-tins with veiled women hugging bundles and kohl-eyed babies, men draped with a thousand goods for sale, cows stealing from the food-sellers, policemen pontificating, and scabby dogs picking up the edges. Just before dusk I had seen a red-eyed sadhu seated cross-legged at a roadside shrine, his forehead smeared with the three white lines of the holy man, his thin body clad only in beads and the scrap of cloth around his loins. At first light the following morning I had seen a group of men in a river, brushing their teeth and washing their heads, while farther out from the bank three elephants were being bathed. From behind the dirty windows I had watched the passing of a dusty and unreal landscape, as if I were being transported through an art gallery.
Now, I had stepped into the painting, which mixed Breughel’s activity with Persia’s colours, with just a touch of Bosch horrors.
Women dressed in crimson and apple-green and yellow ochre swayed with loads balanced on their heads, one hand steadying the brass pot or the straw basket, the other holding one end of their scarf up, lest strange eyes see what they shouldn’t. Men in cheap suits and men in filthy lunghis scurried or lounged, chewing betel or smoking thin brown bidis. Naked children tumbled in the gutters while pale hump-backed cows roamed freely through the markets, snatching greens where they might.
And when we were finally clear of the city, when the tree-lined road stretched out before us through fields of cauliflower and onions, sugar cane and chilis, the air began to smell of something other than dust and diesel. The acrid odour from a brilliant field of flowering mustard blended with the soft sweet incense wafting from the doors of a small whitewashed temple. The stink of putrefaction slunk over from a heap of scrap-draped bones, too leathery even for vultures, then the next moment the nostrils tingled with pepper and turmeric from a spice-seller’s, and rejoiced with the rich rosewater smells from the sweetmeat stand. Wet dust around a well; drying clothing from a long hedge; the ripe dung of an elephant; hot-burning coal and overheated metal from a blacksmith’s; urine and feces; opium from an upstairs window; sweet-cooking wheat chapatis from below.
We were on the Grand Trunk Road, that river of humanity flowing fifteen hundred miles across northern India from the swampy heat of Calcutta to the thin, dry air of the Khyber Pass, linking the Bay of Bengal with Afghanistan, passing the lands of conquest: Darius and Alexander, Timur and Babur, slaughtering and conquering and looting; the plains of Kurukshestra where the Aryans first took root; the battlefields of The Mahabharata and of the Indian Mutiny three millennia later; the place where Babur killed fifteen thousand and brought the Moghul empire to Delhi, where Afghans killed Mahrattas, and where Persians killed Moghuls (twenty thousand in two hours, the historians say) then walked on to strip Delhi of its gold, its Peacock Throne, and its Koh-i-noor diamond. Holy places and bloodshed lay all around me, while in the fore, Bindra gnawed on a length of sugar cane and skipped beside the placid donkey.
To begin with, all was dust and turmoil, even at an hour when the dew was still damp on the canvas. With the distinct sensation of becoming a twig tossed into a fast-moving stream, I gave myself over to the current, needing only to keep the boy’s head in sight, and to keep from stepping under the feet of an ill-tempered camel along the slower edges or the wheels of a hurtling lorry in the swift-flowing centre. It was exhilarating, it was exhausting, and it served as nothing else to set me firmly into this foreign land. We paused for lunch at a roadside tea shop, an open-fronted shack with a roof half thatch, half waving tile, beside a spreading mango tree under which the café owner had arrayed his ranks of the ubiquitous wood-framed charpoy beds, the piece of furniture that is dining table, chaise longue, and business centre in one. As I took up my position on the sagging ropes, I felt almost at home in my foreign raiment, as if my skin had changed.
Certainly my tongue had. Without much pause for thought, I told the boy to bring us some samosas, pointing with my chin at the seller across the way. We ate our greasy snack from the clean leaf-plates as the road swept past, watching the traffic as if we were a Thames-side picnic party on a summer’s Saturday afternoon. At the end, we tossed our earthenware cups onto the pile of such, and continued on our way.
We came that night to a caravanserai that Holmes said had been there since the days of the emperor Akbar, where men and animals from all the reaches of the land came together for the night to shelter behind the crumbling Moghul walls. Bindra took some annas from Holmes and came back with an armload of feed for the donkey, then requested a greater sum and went off again. I eased myself down onto my pack, feeling all the muscles that I had not worked for months. My skin, toughened though it was from the sea journey, tingled with sunburn, and my feet had rubbed raw in three or four spots. I was very happy to sit quietly. I would have been happier to lie down and sleep, but it was still broad daylight, so I compromised by closing my tired eyes and paying attention to my other senses.
The cooking fires here smelt like nowhere else. Not coal or wood, nor Irish peat, nor even the varied substances used in Palestine. Here, cow dung mixed with straw was slapped onto the walls in dinner-plate–sized mounds to dry, then peele
d off, heaped into baskets, and hawked to travellers in the caravanserai. The musky smoke rose around me, blended with the odours of fresher droppings, horse sweat, unwashed clothing, and the spices that went into the evening meals. Someone was cooking chapatis, the delicious smell of wheat flour waking my salivary glands and making me aware of a sharp interest in dinner.
I was just stirring to ask Holmes if he thought we had seen the last of Bindra and our rupees when the boy sauntered up, laden with sacks and twine-wrapped scraps of paper, onions and carrots sticking out of his pockets. He caught up one of the pots and filled it at the communal pump, then dropped to his heels before the fire that we had made (he had gathered a surprising quantity of sticks in his apparently aimless scrounging during the day) and set about constructing dinner. A generous pinch of mustard seed popped and spattered into melted ghee, followed by a sliced onion, half of a somewhat tired cauliflower, and pinches of turmeric, pepper, cumin. And as that mixture was cooking, he took a pair of bowls and placed them between his feet, then pulled over the heavy little canvas sack he’d come back with, rolled down the top, and plunged in a grubby hand. Without taking his eyes off the bustle and activity of our various neighbours, Bindra began to sort the contents. I watched his quick little fingers for a few minutes, then curiosity got the better of me and I went over to see what he had in the sack.
It held a mixture of rice and pulses—an inadvertent mixture, it would seem, because Bindra was separating it back into its component parts. And he did so at an amazing speed, flicking the rice into one bowl and the pulses into the other, dropping any stray pebbles to the ground. I looked at him, looked back at his hands, and couldn’t believe the mechanical speed and precision of his motions: Watching closely, I could see no rice grains join the lentils, no pulses among the rice. The boy pretended to ignore me, but if anything, his hands speeded up.
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