The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [150]
Halfway through the following day he belatedly recalled that the Maharajah's young brother had arrived, but on inquiring if he might pay his respects to the little prince, he was told that His Highness was unwell (the result, it was reported, of eating too many sweetmeats) and that it would be better to wait a day or two. The Sahib would be informed as soon as the child was feeling fully recovered. In the meantime, as a special mark of favour, he had been asked to meet the prince's sisters.
The brides' tent was the largest in the camp, and as it was always the first to be pitched, the remainder formed a series of circles about it, those in the inner ring being occupied by ladies-in-waiting, serving women and eunuchs, and the next by high officials, palace guards, and the little prince and his personal servants. By rights, Ash's tent should have been included in the latter circle, but he preferred a quieter and less central position, and had arranged for it to be pitched on the outskirts of the camp, which on this particular evening was some considerable distance from the brides' pavilion. He had been escorted to the meeting by two officers of the guard and an elderly gentleman who had been introduced to him on the previous evening as the Rao Sahib, a brother of the late Maharajah and uncle to the two princesses.
The custom of purdah – the veiling and seclusion of women – was adopted by Hindu India from Mohammedan conquerors and does not go far back into the roots of the country, so the fact that Ash was permitted to meet his two charges was not really surprising. As a Sahib and a foreigner, and more particularly as the representative of the Raj whose duty it was to see to their safety and comfort on the journey, he merited special treatment and was therefore accorded the honour of speaking with them; a privilege that would not have been accorded to any other man who was not a near relative. The interview, however, had been a brief one, and by no means private, having been conducted in the presence of their uncle and a second elderly kinsman, Maldeo Rai, as well as their duenna and distant cousin Unpora-Bai, several waiting women, a eunuch and half-a-dozen children. The decencies were preserved by the fact that the brides' faces, and that of Unpora-Bai, were partially covered by the fringed and embroidered saris that they held in such a way that only their eyes and a small segment of forehead were visible. But as the saris were of the finest silk gauze from Benares, this was more a token gesture than anything else, and Ash was able to gain a fairly accurate idea of their looks.
‘You were quite right about them,’ he wrote to Wally in a lengthy postscript to the letter describing his arrival in camp, ‘they are as pretty as pictures. Or the younger one is, anyway. She's not yet fourteen, and just like that miniature of Shah Jehan's Empress, the lady of the Taj. I managed to get a good look at her because one of the children tried to catch her attention by tugging at her sari, and twitched it out of her hand. She's the prettiest thing you ever saw, and it's thankful I am that you can't see her, you susceptible Celt, for you'd fall in love with her on the spot and there would be no holding you. You'd be rhyming heart, part and cupid's dart all the way from here to Bhithor, and I'm not sure I could endure it. Thank God I'm a soured and unimpressionable misanthropist! The other sister kept a bit in the background and is quite old, at least eighteen, which in this country is practically on the shelf, and I can't think what they were about not to marry her off years ago; except that I gather she is only the daughter of some secondary wife, or possibly a concubine of the late Maharajah's, and from what I could see of her I wouldn't say she was exactly the Indian idea of a beauty. Or mine either, for that matter. Much too tall and with one of those rather square faces. I prefer oval ones, myself. But her eyes are magnificent – “like the fishpools in Heshbon