The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [315]
Two paces behind her came Anjuli, tall and slender in green. Her sari was bordered with silver and seed pearls, but once again she was overshadowed by Shushila's splendour. There was an emerald on her forehead, faintly visible through the woven silk that was fine enough to betray the hint of copper in her dark hair and the thin red line that coloured her parting-the streak of kunkum that only a wife may wear. Her hair had been threaded with pearls and braided into a thick plait that swung down almost to her knee, and as she passed him Ash caught the scent of dried rose-petals that he would always associate with her.
She must have known that he would be there among the other spectators, but she kept her head bent and did not glance to left or right. The Rana mounted a silver ladder held against the leading elephant by two scarlet-turbaned servants, and settled himself in the howdah. Shu-shu went next, half-pushed, half-carried by her women, and took her place at his side. And then Anjuli was mounting the steps, slim, straight and royal, a flash of green and silver and the end of a swinging plait of dark hair; narrow feet the colour of carved ivory and a glimpse of slender ankles circled with jewels.
The mahout shouted a word of command and the elephant lurched to its feet: and as it moved off, Anjuli looked down from her seat in the gilded howdah. Her eyes, dark-rimmed with kohl, appeared enormous above the close-held edge of her sari, and they did not search among the sea of faces below her, but went directly to Ash, as though the compulsion of his own intent gaze had been strong enough to tell her exactly where he stood.
For a long, long moment they looked at each other, straight and steadily. Looked with love and longing, and without grief, trying to say with their eyes all those things that did not need saying because they knew them already: ‘I love you… I will always love you… Do not forget me.’ And in Juli's wide eyes the words she had spoken long ago on a moonlit night, looking down on him as she was looking now – Khuda hafiz – God be with you. Then the attendants and the torch-bearers closed up on either side, another band struck up and the howdah swayed as the elephant swung slowly away, taking Juli and Shu-shu and the Rana down the avenue of shade trees towards the gates of the park and the mile-long road that led to the city and the Rung Mahal.
Ash remembered very little of what happened after that. He retained a confused impression of other elephants plodding majestically past him carrying the senior members of the barat, and had a vague recollection of helping Kaka-ji, Jhoti and Maldeo Rai into a gilded howdah, and seeing Mulraj and others of the Karidkote party climb into another and be borne away in their turn. After that it was a discordant blur of drums and flutes and horsemen, and of endless numbers of gaudily dressed men marching off into the night accompanied by files of linkmen bearing torches. The head of that long procession must have reached the Rung Mahal before the last of those who marched in it passed under the flower-decked arch leading out of the park, and Ash supposed that he must have stayed among the spectators outside the Pearl Palace and made polite conversation to the end, for it was long past midnight by the time he walked back through the hot night to his rooms in the airless guest-house.
The punkah-coolie who squatted in the verandah outside his bedroom, and whose task it was to pull the rope that set the heavy punkah swinging to and fro to create an artificial draught, was asleep at his post. So too was the chowkidar who lay, sheeted like a corpse,