The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [481]
For Ash it was enough to see his wife lose her skeletal thinness and regain much of the beauty and health and serenity that the years in Bhithor had taken from her. Though this had not happened overnight: that would have been too much to expect. The road back to normality had been a slow one; almost as slow as their present progress up the ‘Father of Rivers’. But the telling of the true story of those years had been the first step, and those long, peaceful days on the Morala – the hours of talk and the hours of companionable silence, the shared laughter and the wonderful star-splashed nights when they made love and fell asleep to the music of the waves and sea winds – had all helped to heal the cruel wounds that Shushila and Bhithor had inflicted. Ash watched his wife come alive again and was happier and more deeply content than he would have believed possible.
The Father of Rivers ran deep and wide: so wide that it often seemed more like an inland sea than a river, and there were days when the heat-haze or blowing sand made it impossible to see the far bank – or either bank, if the boat was under sail. Much of the countryside was barren and desolate, but palm trees, oleanders, tamarind and tamarisk grew by the river, and even where there were no towns or villages, there was always life to be seen.
Myriads of birds preyed on the swarms of chilwa and other small fish who teemed in the shallows. Mud-turtles and ghariyal – the long-snouted, fish-eating alligators of the Indian river – basked on the sandbanks, and some-times a porpoise could be seen leaping and turning in deep water, or a great salmon-like mahseer, its silver-pink sides flashing in the sun. In the late evening, when the river ran gold and the hills of Baluchistan seemed to move nearer across the shadowed plains, flight after flight of wild duck, geese, pelicans and paddy-birds would pass overhead, while parties of nomads with their goats and camels would straggle past on their way to new camping grounds. And at dusk the deer and antelope, and creatures such as pig and jackal and porcupine, would come down to drink.
Sometimes they saw bands of horsemen far out across the plain, galloping furiously towards a horizon that was hidden by dust. And on the river itself there were always other boats: country-boats laden with fodder or grain, wood, sugar-cane or vegetables, and others crammed with woolly, bleating cargoes of sheep or goats; ferry-boats plying their trade and fishermen paying out their nets or setting fish-traps; and during the earlier days, an occasional river steamer huffing and puffing its way upstream under a cloud of black smoke, or sweeping past with the current on its way to the coast.
Lessons in English and Pushtu, begun on the Morala, became part of the daily routine, and Anjuli proved to be an apt pupil. She made rapid progress, astonishing Ash by the quickness and accuracy with which she assimilated words and phrases and mastered the complicated rules of grammar, and he realized that she must always have had a good brain but until now had lacked the opportunity to use it – women in purdah not being expected to interest themselves in anything but domestic matters. But now that she had escaped from the almost exclusively feminine world of the Zenana, her intelligence leapt to meet the challenge, and by the time the Kurram hills and the Salt Ranges of Kundian came into sight, she could express