The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [110]
Her mother too had been unexpectedly kind and had actually said that she hoped he would call on them when next he was in Peshawar, though she was sorry that prior engagements would prevent them from seeing him on the following day. But this had not depressed him, for as their carriage drove away down the dark cantonment road, Ash looked down at the thing that Belinda had pressed into his palm under cover of the conventional farewell, and was comforted and uplifted to find that he held a much crushed and faded yellow rose-bud.
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Mardan looked friendly and familiar in the evening light, and Ash was surprised to find himself glad to get back to it. The sounds and smells of the cavalry lines, the little star-shaped fort and the long line of the Yusafzai hills, rose-red in the sunset, already seemed like home to him; and though he had not expected to be back until late, Ala Yar was waiting on the verandah, ready to talk or be silent as the mood took him.
In the months that followed there had been little time in which to brood over Belinda and the unsatisfactory state of their love-affair, and there were even days sometimes several in succession when he did not think of her at all; and if he dreamed of her at night he did not remember it by morning. For Ash was discovering, as others had done before him, that the ways of the Indian Army (and in particular the ways of the Corps of Guides) differed a great deal from the pattern laid down by the Military Academy at Sandhurst. That difference was very much to his taste, and had it not been for Belinda, he would have had nothing to complain of and much to commend.
As a junior officer of the Guides he was expected to devote a part of each day to the study of Pushtu and Hindustani, the former being the language of the Border and the latter the lingua-franca of India and the Indian Army. But though he needed no instruction in either, he had still not learned to read or write them with the same facility with which he used the spoken word, and now he studied hard under an elderly munshi (teacher) and being Hilary's son made rapid progress. Which, it may here be noted, availed him little, for when he subsequently sat for the written examination in the Higher Standard, he failed to pass, to his own bewilderment and the fury of his munshi who took the matter up with the Commandant, asserting angrily that it was impossible for Pelham-Sahib to have failed; never before had he taught such a pupil and there must be some fault on the part of the examiners – a misprint perhaps? The papers were not returnable, but the Commandant had a friend in Calcutta who on the promise that no action would be taken, borrowed them from the files, only to discover, scrawled across them in red ink, the terse comment: Flawless. This officer has obviously used a crib.
‘Tell the boy to make a few errors next time,’ advised the Commandant's friend. But Ash never sat for an examination again.
November saw the beginning of squadron training, and he exchanged his hot, high room in the fort for a tent on the plains beyond the river. Camp life, with its long hours in the saddle and frosty nights under canvas or the open sky, was far more to his taste than the routine of the cantonment; and after sundown when the tired squadron had finished their evening meal and his fellow officers, sated with, fresh air and hard exercise, had fallen asleep, Ash would join a group around one of the fires and listen to