The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [183]
This, it seemed, was once again Janoo-Rani's fault – one could hardly blame the boy, who was barely three years old when he took his first toss off a pony's back. Unaccustomed to being hurt, Nandu had screamed from fright and the pain of a few small scratches, and Janoo-Rani would not let the child ride again, insisting that he had suffered great injury and might easily have been killed. Even now he would not ride one if it could possibly be avoided. ‘He uses elephants instead,’ explained his uncle. ‘Or drives out in a carriage – like a woman.’
Janoo would undoubtedly have done the same to his youngest brother had he not been made of different stuff, for the first time Jhoti took a fall he too screamed aloud. But when he had finished howling he insisted on mounting again and would not let the syce put him back on a leading rein, which delighted his father who had been watching – though Nandu, said Kaka-ji, was not so pleased. ‘I think there has always been a certain jealousy there. It is not so unusual between brothers, when one has talents that the other lacks.’
Fortune had evidently favoured Nandu in many ways. Firstly, he was his mother's darling, her first-born and the favourite child. Then the death of his half-brother, Lalji, had made him heir to the throne, and now he was Maharajah of Karidkote. But it seemed that he could still be jealous, and that he was wholly the Nautch-girl's child both in character and physique. Like her he possessed a violent and ungovernable temper: and no one had ever made any attempt to control his rages, for his mother thought them royal and high-spirited and the servants were afraid of them, while his father, seeing little of him, was unaware of them. He had never excelled in any sport, and had not the build for it, being short and stout, like his mother; though, unlike her, he had few claims to beauty and was strangely dark-skinned for a northerner: A ‘Kala-admi,’ said the citizens of Karidkote scornfully, a ‘black man’. And they would cheer when Jhoti rode past, and keep silent when it was Nandu who drove through the city or the countryside.
‘Jealousy is an ugly thing,’ mused Kaka-ji, ‘but alas, few if any of us can claim to be free of it. I myself was often afflicted by it in my youth, and though I am now old and should by rights have outgrown such unprofitable emotions, there are still times when I can feel its claws. Therefore I am afraid for Jhoti, whose brother is both jealous and powerful…’
The old man broke off to select another sugared plum from a box of candied fruit that he had brought as a present to the invalid, and the invalid inquired in a deceptively casual tone: ‘And not above doing away with him, you think?’
‘No, no, no! You must not think – I did not mean…’ Kaka-ji swallowed the plum in his agitation and had to be restored with a drink of water, and Ash realized that he had made a grave mistake in trying to rush the old gentleman and put words into his mouth. There was nothing to be gained by such methods, and much by letting him ramble on unprompted. But if Kaka–ji was indeed afraid for Jhoti, what exactly was he afraid of? To what lengths did he think his nephew the Maharajah would go to injure a young brother of whom he was jealous, and who had had the temerity to flout him?
Ash was well aware that Jhoti had joined the bridal camp without permission and against his elder brother's expressed wishes. But the very fact that