The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [11]
They travelled slowly, buying their food in villages by the way and sleeping for preference in the open in order to avoid questions, and they were both very tired by the time the walls and domes and minarets of Delhi showed on the horizon, wraithlike in a dusty, golden evening. Sita had hoped to reach the city before dark, having planned to spend the night with a distant connection of Daya Ram's who kept a grain shop in a side street of the Chandi Chowk, where she could clean and press the English clothes that she had secreted in her bundle, and dress Ash-Baba correctly before taking him to the cantonment. But they had covered nearly six miles that day, and though the walls of Delhi seemed no great distance away, the sun went down while they were still a quarter of a mile short of the bridge of boats by which they must cross the Jumna.
A further half mile separated them from the shop in the city, and soon it would be too dark to see. But they had sufficient food and drink for an evening meal, and as the child was too tired and too sleepy to go further, Sita led him a little way off the road to where a peepul tree leaned above a clutter of fallen masonry, and having fed him, spread a blanket among the tree roots and sang him to sleep with an old, old nursery-rhyme of the Punjab, ‘Arré Ko-ko, Jarré Ko-ko’, and that best-beloved of lullabies that says –
‘Nini baba, nini,
Muckan, roti, cheeni,
Roti muckan hogya,
Hamara baba sogya!’*
The night was warm and windless and full of stars, and from where she lay with her arm about the child's small body, Sita could see the lights of Delhi twinkling across the plain, a spangle of gold on the velvet darkness. Jackals howled among the scattered ruins of other and older Delhis, bats and harsh-voiced night birds swooped and called among the branches overhead, and once a hyena laughed hideously from a patch of elephant grass a few yards away, and a mongoose chittered angrily among the shadows. But these were all familiar sounds, as familiar as the tom-toms that beat in the distant city and the shrill hum of the cicadas; and presently Sita drew the end of her chuddah over her face and slept.
She awoke in the first flush of dawn, aroused abruptly from sleep by a less familiar sound: a sharp urgent clatter of galloping hooves, the crack of fire-arms and men's voices, shouting. There were horsemen on the road, approaching from the direction of Meerut and riding like men possessed, or pursued, the dust of their headlong progress streaming out behind them like a trail of white smoke across the dawn-lit plain. They thundered past within a stone's throw of the peepul tree, firing wildly into the air and shouting as men shout in a race, and Sita could see their staring eyes and frenzied faces, and the clotted foam that flew from the straining necks and flanks of the galloping horses. They were sowars (troopers) wearing the uniform of one of the Bengal Army's cavalry regiments. Sowars from Meerut. But their uniforms were torn and dusty and disfigured by the dark, unmistakable stains of blood.
A stray bullet ripped through the boughs of the peepul tree and Sita cowered down, clutching Ash, who had been woken by the noise. The next moment the riders were past and the dust that whirled up behind them blotted them out in a choking cloud that filled her lungs, making her cough and gasp and cover her face in the folds of her sari. By the time it had blown clear and she could see again, they had reached the river and she heard, faint but clear in the quiet dawn, the hollow thunder of hooves crossing the bridge of boats.
The impression of desperate men who