The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [359]
‘I too,’ said Mahdoo fervently. But he had raised no further objections, for he too hoped that Ash's period of exile would soon be over, and that any time now he would be recalled to his own Regiment. With Hamilton-Sahib and Battye-Sahib to plead his cause and press for his return, that day could surely not be too far off, and if so, he, Mahdoo, might never have to return to this pestilential place.
He had left on the tenth of February, accompanied by one of the syces whose home was near Rawalpindi, and Ash had seen him off at the railway station and had stayed on the crowded platform watching the train chug slowly away, a prey to conflicting emotions. He was sorry to see the old man go, and he would miss the pawky advice and the nightly talks that were spiced with gossip and punctuated by the familiar bubble of the hookah. On the other hand there was no denying that it was in some ways a relief to be rid of that anxious surveillance for a while. Mahdoo obviously knew or suspected too much, and was beginning to show it too clearly for comfort. A temporary separation would do them both good, and there was no doubt that the old man's health and spirits had suffered from the move to Gujerat and his dislike for the country and its people. All the same…
Ash watched the train disappearing in the distance, and long after the last smudge of smoke had thinned and vanished he stood staring after it, remembering the first time he had seen Mahdoo. Mahdoo and Ala Yar and Colonel Anderson, who had taken him under their collective wing and had been good to him when he was a bewildered boy speaking, feeling and thinking of himself as Ashok, and unable to credit that he was in reality an Angrezi with a name that he could not even pronounce; or that he was being shipped off to an unknown land to be turned into a ‘Sahib’ by strangers who, so he was told, were his father's people.
Remembering that day, the faces and forms of those three men were all at once as clear in his mind's eye as though they were there in the flesh and standing with him on the crowded platform: Colonel Anderson and Ala Yar, who were both dead, and Mahdoo, who was still very much alive and whom he had just seen on to the train and waved goodbye to as the Bombay-and-Baroda Mail drew out of the station. Yet there was something wrong with their faces – and suddenly he realized what it was. He was not seeing Mahdoo as he was now – grey and wrinkled and shrunk to half his former size – but as he had been then, when Colonel Anderson and Ala Yar were alive and all three men had seemed tall and strong and a little larger than life. It was as if Mahdoo had in some way joined them and become part of the past… which was, of course, absurd.
Gul Baz, who had accompanied them to the railway station, coughed discreetly to indicate that time was passing, and Ash awoke from his reverie, and turning away, walked quickly back along the platform and out into the yard to where a tonga waited to take them back to the bungalow.
Book Six
Juli
36
Perhaps it was just as well for Mahdoo that he left when he did, for his anxiety on Ash's account would have been considerably increased had he been present two days later, when an unexpected visitor arrived at Ash's bungalow in cantonments.
The Regiment had been out on a training exercise, and Ash had returned an hour after sunset to find a hired tonga standing among the shadows near the gate, and Gul Baz waiting on the verandah steps to inform him that he had a caller. ‘It is the Hakim from Karidkote,’ said Gul Baz. ‘The Rao-Sahib's Hakim, Gobind Dass.