The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [115]
She therefore continued to see a great deal of him even after the regiments returned to Peshawar, for her father not only had no objection to her being squired about by a young man whom she would never consider marrying, but hoped that it might help her to forget that ridiculous engagement. As for George's feelings, he did not give that a moment's thought; according to Major Harlowe, every young man at one time or another fell in love and had his heart broken, and the majority of them did it half-a-dozen times over. Nor was he disposed to waste any concern over Ash's feelings either: marriage, indeed – at nineteen – the boy must be half-witted. Either that or his early up-bringing had warped his thinking, for had he indeed been a native of this country he could have married at fifteen without causing any comment. But then Ashton was British and should behave as such.
Ash was trying his best to do so, but he found it hard going. The very qualities that nine years ago Awal Shah and the then Commandant of the Guides, and later Colonel Anderson, had regarded as valuable future assets were proving to have their drawbacks, and Ash often envied his fellow officers, who could make decisions with such cheerful confidence. To them so many matters were either right or wrong, necessary or unnecessary, the obvious, or the sensible, or the just course to pursue: it was as simple as that. But it was not always so to Ash, who was apt to look at a question as much from the viewpoint of Lance-Naik Chaudri Ram or Sowar Malik Shah as from that of a product of the British public-school system and a cadet of the Royal Military Academy; which tended to complicate matters rather than simplify them, for to know what was going on in the mind of a sowar up for judgement, and to understand only too well the mental processes that had led the culprit to commit whatever crime he was accused of did not always help towards giving a quick and clear-cut verdict.
Too often, Ash's sympathies lay with a man for no better reason than he himself could and frequently did think as a native of the country. And there is a wide and fundamental difference between the reasoning of East and West – a fact that has before now confounded many a well-meaning missionary and zealous administrator, and led them to condemn whole nations as immoral and corrupt because their laws and standards, habits and customs, differ from those evolved by the Christian West.
‘A Sahib, for instance,’ explained the Munshi, attempting to illustrate that difference to his pupils, ‘will always give a truthful answer in reply to a question, without considering first whether or not a lie might have served better. Now with us it is the reverse; which in the end causes less trouble. We of this country recognize that truth can often be most dangerous and therefore should on no account be scattered carelessly abroad, like husks for the chickens, but used only with great caution.’
His pupils, junior officers who had been brought up by parents and tutors to consider lying a deadly sin, were shocked by this open admission on the part of an elderly teacher that in India a lie was regarded as entirely permissible (and for reasons that seemed to an Englishman both sly and cynical). They would learn better in time, as other British officers, officials and businessmen had learned before them. And as their understanding increased, their usefulness to their country and to the Empire that their country governed would increase proportionately. But the chances were that with the best will in the world they would never fully understand more than a little of the motives and processes of thought that dictated Asiatic reasoning: the tip of the iceberg only. Some few would learn to see further, and many would imagine that they could, though there would be many more who were unwilling or incapable of making the effort to do so. But blood and environment, custom, culture and religion divided them, and the bridges between those gulfs