• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2695 0

he would not have considered it at all proper for any man outside the immediate family circle to continue to meet and converse with his nieces in such a relaxed and friendly fashion, but then the present situation was far from normal. They were, in effect, in the wilderness where every-day rules need not apply; and the man in question being a foreigner to whom they were greatly indebted, if his talk of Belait and the ways of foreigners amused Shushila and served to distract her attention from such things as homesickness and a morbid terror of the future, what harm? In any case, it was not as though he was ever likely to be alone with her; there would always be at least half a dozen others present, and this (and the fact that he was at the moment incapable of moving out of a chair without assistance and therefore could hardly be regarded as a threat to any woman), decided Kaka-ji to second Shushila's command that the Sahib should repeat his visit on the following day.

The Sahib had done so, and after that – though Kaka-ji was never quite sure how it had come about – it became an accepted thing that he should be carried to the durbar tent every evening, where he and Jhoti and Kaka-ji, and sometimes Muldeo Rai or Mulraj (who by virtue of his relationship and his office was permitted the entrée), would sit and talk with the brides and their women, or play foolish games and gamble for sweets or cowrie shells. It all helped to pass the time and ease Shushila's nervous tension, and she, like Jhoti, delighted in Ash's descriptions of life in Belait, many of which struck them as excruciatingly funny.

The two would explode into giggles over such things as hunt balls and the absurdity of men and women prancing around in couples to music; of Londoners groping through a pea-soup fog and families bathing in the sea at Brighton; or descriptions of the ludicrously uncomfortable clothes that an Angrezi woman wore: her tight, high-heeled, buttoned boots and tighter corsets – armoured with steel and whalebone and laced to suffocation; the horse-hair bustles worn under innumerable petticoats, the pads of wire and wool over which her hair was rolled and pinned, and the hats that were skewered to this edifice with yet more pins, and decorated with flowers, feathers and fur; or even, on occasions, an entire stuffed bird.

Of them all, only Anjuli-Bai seldom spoke. But she listened, and some-times laughed, and though ostensibly Ash talked to the company at large, his conversation was in fact almost entirely directed at Anjuli. It was Anjuli he exerted himself to please, and for her that he tried to describe something of his life in England, so that she might know what had happened to him and how he had lived in the years since his escape from Gulkote.

He found it astonishingly easy to say things he knew would have one meaning for the others but a different one for Juli, who because of her special knowledge would be able to interpret it in a way that no one else could have done; and often her smile or a faint movement of her head would tell him that she had understood an allusion that had passed the others by. It was as though the clock had turned back, and once again, as they had done in the presence of Lalji and his courtiers, they were speaking to each other in code and using a language that only the two of them understood, for in this respect, if in no other, the rapport that had existed between the children they had once been had survived the years.

The last time they had played that game Juli had been little more than a baby, and until recently Ash himself had forgotten the way they used to speak to Lalji, or pretend to talk to a pet monkey or one of the macaws when they were in reality talking to each other – exchanging news or arranging where and when they would meet, and indicating times and other details by means of hand signals, coughs or the rearranging of a vase or a cushion. He could even remember their code word for the Queen's balcony: Zamurrad (emerald), which was also the name given to the pampered peacock that lived with his