The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [31]
On the other side of the world, in the comfortable upper and middle-class nurseries of Victorian England, children of five and six were still regarded as too young to do more than learn their alphabet with the aid of coloured bricks, and bowl hoops under the careful eye of nursemaids: but in mines and factories and on farms, the children of the poor toiled beside their parents, and in far-off Gulkote, Ash too became a wage-earner.
He was barely six-and-a-half when he went to work as a horse-boy in the stables of Duni Chand, a rich landowner who had a house near the temple of Vishnu and several farms in the country beyond the city limits.
Duni Chand kept a string of horses on which he visited his fields and rode out hawking on the bad-lands by the river, and it was Ash's duty to carry grain and draw water, attend to the harness and lend a hand with anything from cutting grass to curry-combing. The work was arduous and the wages light, but having spent his infancy among horses – his supposed father, Daya Ram, had introduced him to them at an early age – he had never had the least fear of them. It not only pleased him to work with them, but the few annas thus earned gave him an enormous sense of importance. He was a man and a wage-earner and could now, if he so wished, afford to buy halwa from the sweetmeat-seller instead of stealing it. This was a step up in the world, and he informed Sita that he had decided to become a syce and earn enough money for the day when they would set out to find their valley. Mohammed Sherif, the head-syce, was reported to earn as much as twelve rupees a month, a vast sum that did not include dustori – the one anna on each rupee that he levied on every item of food or equipment purchased for use in the stables, and which more than doubled his salary.
‘When I am head-syce,’ said Ash grandly, ‘we will move to a big house and have a servant to do the cooking, and you will never have to do any more work, Mata-ji.’
It is just possible that he might have carried out his plan and spent his days attached to the stable of some petty nobleman. For as soon as it became apparent that he could ride anything on four legs, Mohammed Sherif, recognizing a born horseman, had permitted him to exercise his charges and taught him many valuable secrets of horsemanship, so that the year he spent in Duni Chand's stables had been a very happy one. But fate, with a certain amount of human assistance, had other plans for Ash; and the fall of a weather-worn slab of sandstone was to change the whole course of his life.
It happened on an April morning, almost three years to the day from the morning when Sita had led him away from the terrible vulture-filled camp in the Terai, and started out on the long road to Delhi. The young crown-prince, Lalji, Yuveraj of Gulkote, rode through the city to make offerings at the Temple of Vishnu. And as he passed under the arch of the ancient Charbagh Gate that stands at the junction of the Chandni Bazaar and the Street of the Coppersmiths, a slab of coping-stone slid from its place and fell into the roadway.
Ash had been standing in the forefront of the crowd, having wriggled his way, eel-like, between the close-packed legs of his elders, and his eye had been caught by a movement overhead. He had seen the slab shift and slip just as the head of the Yuveraj's horse emerged from the shadow of the arch, and almost without thinking (for there had not been time for conscious thought) he leapt at the bridle, and clutching it, checked the startled animal as the heavy slab of sandstone crashed into the street and exploded into a hundred sharp-edged fragments under the prancing hooves. Ash and the horse, together with several spectators, had been gashed by the flying splinters, and there was blood everywhere: on the hot