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By Root 2850 0

from many Angrezi women whose own parents were far less well-born than hers. They would despise her as the Rana and his nobles did, because her grandfather was a feringhi and her mother a half-caste; for in this respect, as you will have learned in Bhithor, her people can be as cruel as yours. It is a failing common to all races, being a matter of instinct that goes deeper than reason: the distrust of the pure-bred for the half-breed. One cannot overcome it, and had you brought Kairi-Bai away with you, you would have discovered these things soon enough – and discovered too that there would be no refuge for you here; your Regiment would not have wished to have you back, and other Regiments would not have been anxious to accept one whom the Guides had rejected.’

‘I know,’ said Ash tiredly. ‘I too had thought of that. But I am not a poor man, and we should have had each other.’

‘Beshak. But unless you lived in the wilderness, or made yourselves a new world, you would also have had neighbours - native-born villagers or townsmen to whom you would have been foreigners. You might well have learned to like their ways and earned their friendship and acceptance, and in the end been content. But bardast (tolerance) is a rare flower that grows in few places and withers too easily. I know that the path you now tread is a hard one, but I believe it to be the best for you both; and if Kairi-Bai has had the courage to choose it, have you so much less, that you cannot accept it?’

‘I have already done so,’ said Ash: and added wryly, ‘There was no choice.’

‘None,’ agreed Koda Dad. ‘Therefore what profit is there in repining? What is written is written. You should rather give thanks for that which was good, instead of wasting your time in fruitless regret for what you cannot have. There are many desirable things in life besides the possession of one woman, or one man: this even you must know. Were it not so, how lonely and desolate a world it would be for the many, the very many, who through ill-luck or by reason of being ill-favoured, or from some other cause, never meet that one? You are more fortunate than you know. And now,’ said Koda Dad firmly, ‘we will talk of other things. The hour grows late and I have much to tell you before I go.’

Ash had expected him to talk of mutual acquaintances in villages beyond the Border, but he had spoken instead of far-away Kabul, where, so he said, agents and spies of the ‘Russ-log’ had recently become so numerous that there was a jest in that city that out of every five men to be met with in the streets, one was a servant of the Tsar, two were taking bribes from him and the remaining two lived in hopes of doing so. The Amir, Shere Ali, had scant love for the British, and when Lord Northbrook, the recently retired Governor General, had refused to give him any firm assurance of protection, he had turned instead to Russia, with the result that during the past three years relations between Britain and Afghanistan had deteriorated alarmingly.

‘It is to be hoped that the new Lat-Sahib will come to a better understanding with the Amir,’ said Koda Dad. ‘Otherwise there will surely be another war between the Afghans and the Raj – and the last one should have taught both that neither can look to gain advantage from such a conflict.’

Ash observed with a smile that according to Kairi's uncle, the Rao-Sahib, no one learnt over-much from the mistakes of their parents and even less from those of their grandparents; for the reason that all men, using hindsight, were convinced that they could have done better, and in trying to prove it either ended up making the same mistakes, or new ones that their children and their children's children would criticize in their turn. ‘He told me,’ said Ash, ‘that old men forget, while young ones tend to dismiss events that occurred before they were born as ancient history. Something that happened very long ago and was naturally mismanaged, considering that everyone involved – as can be seen by looking at the survivors – as either a creaking grey-beard or a bald-headed old fool.