by M. M. Kaye
Sita scraped a shallow cavity low down in the wall in the darkest corner of the room, and thrusting the packet into it, covered its hiding place, as she had covered the money, with clay and cow-dung; and having done so, felt that a crushing weight had been lifted off her shoulders and that Ashok was now truly hers.
The boy's grey eyes and ruddy complexion caused no comment in Gulkote, for many of the Rajah's subjects had come from Kashmir, Kulu and the Hindu Kush, and Sita herself was a hill-woman. Ash fraternized with their sons and grandsons and was soon indistinguishable, except to the eye of love, from a hundred other bad little bazaar boys who shouted, frolicked and fought in the streets of Gulkote; and Sita was content. She still believed what the sepoys had told her: that all the English were dead and the rule of the Company broken for ever. Delhi was far away, and beyond the borders of Gulkote lay the Punjab, which had remained relatively quiet; and though an occasional rumour of troubles would drift through the bazaars, these were always vague, garbled and months out of date, and mostly concerned with disasters to the British…
None told of the army that had been hurriedly assembled at Ambala. Of the long march of the Guides – five hundred and eighty miles in twenty-two days of high summer from Mardan to Delhi – to take part in the siege of that city, of the death of Nicholson, or the surrender of the last Mogul and the slaying of his sons by William Hodson of Hodson's Horse; or that Lucknow was still besieged, and that the great rising that had begun with the revolt of the 3rd Cavalry in Meerut was by no means over.
The Shaitan-ke-Hawa – the ‘Devil's Wind’ – was still blowing strongly through India, but while thousands died, here in sheltered Gulkote the days were slow and peaceful.
Ash had been five years old that October, and it was not until the autumn of the following year of 1858 that Sita learned, through a wandering sadhu,* something of what had been happening in the outside world. Delhi and Lucknow re-captured, the Nana Sahib a fugitive, and the valiant Rani of Jhansi killed in battle, dressed as a man and fighting to the last. The Company's rule had been broken, but the feringhis, said the sadhu, were back in power, stronger than ever and engaged in brutal reprisals against those who had fought them in the great rising. And though the Company was no more, its rule had been replaced by that of the white Rani – Victoria – and all Hind was now a possession of the British Crown, with a British Viceroy and British troops governing the land.
Sita had tried to persuade herself that the man was mistaken, or lying. For if his story was true, she would have to take Ashok back to his people, which by now was a prospect she could no longer face. It could not be true… or it might not be. She would wait, and do nothing until she was sure. There was no need to do anything yet…
She had waited all winter, and in spring there had been news that confirmed everything the sadhu had said; but still Sita took no action. Ashok was hers, and she would not, could not, give him up. There had been a time when she could have done so, but that was before she had begun to look on him as her son by right, and see him accepted as such. Besides, it was not as though she were depriving a mother or father of their right: he had lost both, and if anyone had a right to him, surely it was herself? Had she not loved him and cared for him from his birth? Taken him from his mother's womb and fed him at her own breast? He knew no other mother and believed himself to be her child, and she would be robbing no one – no one. He was no longer Ash-Baba, but her son, Ashok, and she would burn the papers that lay hidden in the wall and say nothing, and no one would ever know.
So they remained in Gulkote and were happy. But Sita did not burn Hilary's papers, for when it came to the point her fear of what the ‘Burra-Sahib's’ ghost might do was greater than her fear of what the papers could prove.
Once again there had been feasting and fireworks in the city. But this time it had been in celebration of the birth of a boy to Janoo-Bai the Rani – some-time dancing-girl, and now virtual ruler of Gulkote, in that she ruled the Rajah to the point where her smallest wish must be gratified.
The Rajah's subjects had been commanded to celebrate and they had done so, though without much enthusiasm; the Nautch-girl was not popular with the citizens, and the prospect of a prince of her breeding was displeasing to them. Not that he was the heir, for the Rajah's first wife, who had died in child-birth, had left her lord a son: Lalji, ‘the beloved’ – the eight-year-old Yuveraj, apple of his father's eye and pride of all Gulkote. But life was uncertain in India and who could say if the boy would live to be a man? His mother, in fifteen years of marriage, had given birth to no less than nine children, all of whom, with the exception of Lalji (and the last – a still-born daughter), had died in infancy. She herself had not survived that last confinement, and her husband had soon married again, taking as his wife the daughter of a foreign mercenary, a young and lovely girl who became known in Gulkote as the ‘Feringhi-Rani' – the foreign queen.
The Feringhi-Rani's father had been a Russian adventurer who had taken service in the armies of various warring Indian princes. Under the last of these, Ranjit Singh, the ‘Lion of the Punjab’, he had risen to considerable heights; and on the ‘Lion's’ death, had prudently retired to end his days in the remote and sovereign state of Gulkote. It was rumoured that he had once been an officer of the Cossacks who had been sentenced to life imprisonment for some misdemeanour, but had escaped from his gaolers and found his way to India through the passes of the north. He had certainly shown no desire to return to his native land when Ranjit's death had put an end to his employment in the Punjab, but had lived in comfortable retirement on the accumulated riches of ten years of power, together with a bevy of concubines and his Indian wife, Kumaridevi, the daughter of a Rajput prince whom he had defeated in battle, and whom he had demanded of her father as part of a conqueror's loot – they having seen each other in the sack of the city, and straightway fallen in love.
The Feringhi-Rani was this lady's last and only surviving child; born at the cost of her mother's life, since by then the once beautiful princess had been middle-aged and worn out by miscarriages and still-births that were due, in a large part, to the rigours of following her husband on many campaigns. Her daughter had been brought up with a brood of illegitimate half-brothers and sisters, all of whom had considered it a triumph when reports of her beauty had reached the ears of the Rajah of Gulkote, and he had asked for her hand in marriage, knowing that no lesser alliance would have been considered, as on her mother's side her lineage was more royal than his own.
For a time the Feringhi-Rani had been happy; none of her half-brothers and sisters or their various mothers had been particularly kind to her, and she had been glad to leave her home for the raffish splendours of the ‘Palace of the Winds’. The enmity of the women in the Hawa Mahal had not troubled her over-much, for she was used to the intrigues in Zenanas, and the Rajah was infatuated with her and could refuse her nothing. Nor was she unduly grieved when her father died a year after her marriage, for he had never paid much attention to his numerous offspring. If she had any regrets they were solely on account of her childlessness, though she did not desire children with the single-minded fervour of purely Eastern women, and was in any case sure that it was only a matter of time before they appeared. But the avid interest, jealousy and triumph of the other women over this sore subject (together with their gloating hints that she – ‘the half-caste’ – was barren) piqued her, and she began to worry over it and be impatient for the day when she too should bear a child – a son. Because of course it must be a son.
So far, of all the Rajah's women, only his first wife had borne him sons, and of these only one had lived. But one son was no good to a man; he should have many, so that whatever happened, the succession was secure. It was therefore her duty as chief lady of the palace, and his heart, to produce those sons for him, and she was delighted when she at last became pregnant. But perhaps it was her foreign blood that made her react to pregnancy less happily than other women appeared to do, for instead of bl
ooming into further beauty, as they did, she became subject to incessant attacks of vomiting, with the result that she became sallow and haggard, and in a matter of weeks had lost both her beauty and spirits.
The Rajah was genuinely fond of her, but like most men, he did not feel comfortable in the presence of illness and invalids, and preferred to keep out of her way and hope that she would soon recover. It was doubly unfortunate for her that at this juncture, one of his ministers should have given a banquet in his honour at which a troupe of dancing-girls entertained the guests: for among the dancers was the Kashmiri girl, Janoo. An alluring, golden-skinned, dark-eyed witch, as beautiful, and as predatory, as a black panther.
The top of Janoo's head reached no higher than a man's heart, for she was a little woman, and would probably, one day, be a dumpy one. But now she was young, and to the men who watched her swaying to the music of drums and sitars she seemed a living, breathing replica of those voluptuous goddesses who smile from the frescoes of Ajanta or posture in stone on the Black Temple at Konarak. She possessed in abundance that indefinable quality that a generation as yet unborn was to call ‘sex-appeal’, and she had brains as well as beauty: three invaluable assets that she now used to such good purpose that twenty-four hours later she was installed in the palace, and within a week it was plain to all that the star of the ‘Feringhi-Rani’ was setting, and that there was a new favourite to be flattered and propitiated by those who desired favours.
Even then it had never occurred to anyone that this was more than a passing infatuation that would burn itself out as quickly as others had done, for they had not taken the measure of the Nautch-girl. But Janoo was ambitious, and she had been instructed from childhood in the art of pleasing and amusing men. She was no longer content with a handful of coins and an occasional trinket; she saw the chance of a throne, played her cards skilfully, and won. The Rajah had married her.
Two weeks later the Feringhi-Rani had been brought to bed, but instead of the son who might have restored to her some of her lost prestige, she had borne a small, plain, pallid daughter.
‘It is all she is fit for,’ said Janoo-Bai scornfully. ‘One has only to look at her to see that such a milk-blooded weakling will never be the mother of sons. Now when my son is born…’
Janoo never doubted for a moment that her first child would be a son. And a son it had been: a strong and lusty boy of whom any father could be proud. Rockets streamed up into the night sky to shower the city with stars while conches blared and gongs boomed in the temples, and the poor fed sumptuously in honour of the new prince; among them young Ashok and his mother Sita, whose clever fingers had fashioned many of the tinselled garlands that decorated the streets that day.
The six-year son of Hilary and Isobel had stuffed himself with halwa and jellabies, shouted and thrown patarkars with his friends, and wished that a son could be born to the Rajah every day. He had no complaints against life, but there was no denying that the fare provided by Sita was plain and not overabundant, and the few sweetmeats that came his way were more often than not filched from some stall in the bazaar at the risk of capture and a beating by the incensed owner. He was a strong and well-grown child, tall for his age and as agile as a monkey. The spartan diet of the poor had kept him lean, and the games of tag that he and his friends played in the streets and across the rooftops of the city – not to mention the snatching of sweets and fruit and the headlong flights from pursuit – had hardened his muscles and helped to develop a natural fleetness of foot.
On the other side of the world, in the comfortable upper and middle-class nurseries of Victorian England, children of five and six were still regarded as too young to do more than learn their alphabet with the aid of coloured bricks, and bowl hoops under the careful eye of nursemaids: but in mines and factories and on farms, the children of the poor toiled beside their parents, and in far-off Gulkote, Ash too became a wage-earner.
He was barely six-and-a-half when he went to work as a horse-boy in the stables of Duni Chand, a rich landowner who had a house near the temple of Vishnu and several farms in the country beyond the city limits.
Duni Chand kept a string of horses on which he visited his fields and rode out hawking on the bad-lands by the river, and it was Ash's duty to carry grain and draw water, attend to the harness and lend a hand with anything from cutting grass to curry-combing. The work was arduous and the wages light, but having spent his infancy among horses – his supposed father, Daya Ram, had introduced him to them at an early age – he had never had the least fear of them. It not only pleased him to work with them, but the few annas thus earned gave him an enormous sense of importance. He was a man and a wage-earner and could now, if he so wished, afford to buy halwa from the sweetmeat-seller instead of stealing it. This was a step up in the world, and he informed Sita that he had decided to become a syce and earn enough money for the day when they would set out to find their valley. Mohammed Sherif, the head-syce, was reported to earn as much as twelve rupees a month, a vast sum that did not include dustori – the one anna on each rupee that he levied on every item of food or equipment purchased for use in the stables, and which more than doubled his salary.
‘When I am head-syce,’ said Ash grandly, ‘we will move to a big house and have a servant to do the cooking, and you will never have to do any more work, Mata-ji.’
It is just possible that he might have carried out his plan and spent his days attached to the stable of some petty nobleman. For as soon as it became apparent that he could ride anything on four legs, Mohammed Sherif, recognizing a born horseman, had permitted him to exercise his charges and taught him many valuable secrets of horsemanship, so that the year he spent in Duni Chand's stables had been a very happy one. But fate, with a certain amount of human assistance, had other plans for Ash; and the fall of a weather-worn slab of sandstone was to change the whole course of his life.
It happened on an April morning, almost three years to the day from the morning when Sita had led him away from the terrible vulture-filled camp in the Terai, and started out on the long road to Delhi. The young crown-prince, Lalji, Yuveraj of Gulkote, rode through the city to make offerings at the Temple of Vishnu. And as he passed under the arch of the ancient Charbagh Gate that stands at the junction of the Chandni Bazaar and the Street of the Coppersmiths, a slab of coping-stone slid from its place and fell into the roadway.
Ash had been standing in the forefront of the crowd, having wriggled his way, eel-like, between the close-packed legs of his elders, and his eye had been caught by a movement overhead. He had seen the slab shift and slip just as the head of the Yuveraj's horse emerged from the shadow of the arch, and almost without thinking (for there had not been time for conscious thought) he leapt at the bridle, and clutching it, checked the startled animal as the heavy slab of sandstone crashed into the street and exploded into a hundred sharp-edged fragments under the prancing hooves. Ash and the horse, together with several spectators, had been gashed by the flying splinters, and there was blood everywhere: on the hot white dust, the gay garments of the crowd and the ceremonial trappings of the horse.
The spectators had screamed and swayed and struggled, and the horse, maddened by pain and noise, would have bolted had not Ash held its head and talked to it and soothed it until the stunned escort, spurring forward, caught the reins from him, and closing up around their prince, shouldered him aside. There followed an interval of surging chaos filled with a clamour of questions and answers while the escort beat back the crowd and stared at the broken coping overhead, and a white-bearded horseman flung Ash a coin – a gold mohur, no less – and said ‘ Shabash (Bravo), little one! That was well done indeed.’
The crowd, seeing that no one had suffered any serious hurt, yelled their approval, and the procession continued on its way to the accompaniment of frenzied cheers, the Yuveraj sitting straight-backed in the saddle and clutching the reins with hands that were noticeably unsteady. He had kept his seat on the plunging animal with creditable skil
l, and his future subjects were proud of him. But the small face under the jewelled turban was strained and colourless as he looked back over his shoulder, searching the sea of faces for the boy who had leapt so providentially at his horse's head.
A stranger in the crowd had hoisted Ash up on his shoulder so that he might see the procession depart, and for a brief moment the two children stared at each other, the black frightened eyes of the little prince meeting the interested grey ones of Duni Chand's stable-boy. Then the crowd surged between them, and half a minute later the procession reached the end of the Street of the Coppersmiths and turning it, was lost to sight.
Sita had been gratifyingly impressed by the gold piece, and even more by the tale of the morning's doings. After much discussion, they had decided to take the coin to Burgwan Lal, the jeweller, who was known to be an honest man, and exchange it for a suitable quantity of silver ornaments which Sita could wear until such time as they were in need of ready money. They had neither of them expected to hear any more of the affair – apart from the inevitable comments and congratulations of interested neighbours – but the following morning a stout and supercilious palace official, accompanied by two elderly retainers, knocked on the door of Duni Chand's house. His Highness the Yuveraj, explained the official loftily, desired the immediate attendance of this insignificant brat at the palace, where he would be given living quarters and some minor post in His Highness's household.
‘But I can't do that,’ protested Ash, dismayed. ‘My mother would not like to live alone, and I could not leave her. She would not want – He was brusquely interrupted:
‘What she wants is of no consequence. It is the order of His Highness that you work for him, and you had best make haste and clean yourself. You cannot come in those rags.’
There had been nothing for it but to obey, and Ash had been escorted back to the fruit-seller's shop, where he hurriedly changed into the only other garment he possessed, and comforted the distracted Sita, urging her not to worry for he would be back soon. Very soon –
