The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [330]
Ash looked down from the parapet and saw that several of the household were doing the same in the garden below, and that the aged porter was also at his devotions in the road outside the gate. He watched them for a moment or two as they knelt, bowed their heads to the dust, rose and knelt again, muttering the traditional prayers that were said at this hour; and presently he turned away to face the north-east where, hidden by the heat-haze and the dust and distance, lay the Dur Khaima. But he did not say his own prayer – that ancient Hindu invocation that he had adopted so long ago. He had meant to, but before the words could shape themselves, his mental picture of the goddess of his childhood faded, and he found himself thinking instead of Juli.
He had told her that he would think of her every hour of every day, yet he had tried not to do so; partly because he had not been able to bear it, and also because he had decided that his only hope lay in taking her uncle's advice and putting the past behind him. It had been like barring a door and throwing all his weight against it to keep out a flood that was building up outside, and though it had been impossible to prevent trickles from that flood seeping under the lintel and through cracks in the wood, he had managed somehow to shut out the worst of it. But now, suddenly, the bars snapped and the door gave way, and he was drowning in the same savage tide of love and anguish and loss that had swept over him in Kaka-ji's tent when he realized that he had made his last appeal and lost; and that he would never see Juli again…
Koda Dad finished his prayers and turned to see Ash standing by the parapet with his back towards him, facing the ‘Pindi road and the eastern horizon where a full moon was drifting slowly up into the sky as. the sun sank down in the glowing, dusty, golden West. The rigidity of that back and the spasmodic clenching and unclenching of the lean, nervous hands told Koda Dad almost as much as the determined lightness of Ash's conversation had done, and the old man said quietly:
‘What is amiss, Ashok?’
Ash turned quickly – too quickly, for he had not given himself time to control his features, and Koda Dad caught his breath in the involuntary hiss that greets the sight of a fellow-creature in physical agony.
‘Ai, Ai, child – it cannot be as bad as that,’ exclaimed Koda Dad, distressed. ‘No, do not lie to me' – his uplifted hand checked Ash's automatic denial – ‘I have not known you since your seventh year for nothing. Nor have I become so blind that I cannot see what is written on your face, or so deaf that I cannot hear what is in your voice; and I am not yet so old that I cannot remember my own youth. Who is she, my son?’
‘She –?’ Ash stared at him, startled.
Koda Dad said dryly: ‘You forget that I have seen you troubled in some such manner before – only then it was calf-love and no more than a boy's foolishness. But now… now I think it cuts deeper; for you are no longer a boy. It is Kair-Bai, is it not?’
Ash caught his breath and his face whitened. ‘How did you… But you can't… I did not –’
He stopped, and Koda Dad shook his head and said: ‘No, you did not betray yourself in words. It was those you did not speak that warned me of something amiss. You told of two brides and spoke of the younger one by name, describing her and telling of things that she had said and done. But save when you could not avoid it you did not mention the elder, and when you did, your voice changed and became without feeling and you spoke as though there was a restraint upon you. Yet this was that same Kairi-Bai whom we all knew, and to whom you owed your escape from the Hawa Mahal. Yet you told us almost nothing of her and spoke of her as you would have spoken of a stranger. That told its own tale. That, and the change in you. It could be nothing else. Am I not right?’
Ash smiled crookedly and said: ‘You are always