The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [493]
They had arrived at the house in the dusty amethyst twilight, where the gatekeeper received them incuriously and in answer to Ash's question said no, Koda Dad Khan had not come – oubtless his son, the Risaldar-Sahib, had been able to prevent his father from setting out. He took charge of the horses while Ash sent a message to the Begum, asking her permission to allow his friend, Hamilton-Sahib, to enter her house and meet his wife.
Had Anjuli been a Muslim the suggestion might well have drawn a shocked refusal from the Begum, who by now regarded herself as standing in loco parentis to the girl. But as Anjuli was neither a Muslim nor a maiden, and her so-called husband not only a Christian but a foreigner, the proper rules could not be expected to apply, and if Pelham-Sahib was prepared to let his men friends hob-nob with his bride, it was no concern of the Begum's. She therefore sent a servant to conduct the two men to Anjuli's room and to tell Ash that if they desired to eat together, the evening meal would be served in a few minutes' time.
The lamps had not yet been lit, but the kus-kus tatties had been rolled up and the high, white-washed room was palely luminous with the last of the daylight and the first glimmer of a full moon that was rising above the low, dun-coloured hills beyond Attock.
Anjuli had been standing by an open window, looking down onto the garden where birds were flocking home to roost among the fruit trees while bats flitted out from a score of dark hidden crannies to greet the night. She had not heard the footsteps on the stairs, for the sound had been lost in the chatter of quarrelling birds, and only when the door opened did she turn.
Seeing Ash, but not the man who stood in the shadows behind him, she ran to him and threw her arms around his neck. And that was how Wally had first seen her. A tall, slender girl running towards him with outstretched arms, and with such a blaze of love in her face that for a moment it seemed to him that a light shone on it. She had taken his breath away – and his heart with it.
Afterwards, sitting alone in the moonlight on the verandah of the dâk-bungalow, he found that he had no clear recollection of what she looked like. Only that she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen – a princess out of a fairy-tale, fashioned from ivory and gold and jet. But then he had never before seen a well-born Indian woman, and knew nothing of the wealth of grace and loveliness that is hidden away behind the purdah screens and jealously guarded from the gaze of all strangers.
Few foreigners were privileged to see or know these women; and those few tended to be the wives of senior British officials, whose views on the charms of ‘native women’ were apt to be lukewarm, or at best, tinged with condescension. So that when Ash had tried to describe his wife, Wally had made due allowance for a man in love and supposed, indulgently, that the bride might be tolerably good looking – as were one or two of the more expensive courtesans of Ash's acquaintance, whom Wally had met in those early, carefree days in Rawalpindi: brown-skinned women who painted their eyes with kohl, chewed pan and stained the palms of their slender hands with henna; and whose supple, small-boned bodies smelled of musk and sandalwood and exuded an almost visible aura of sexuality.
Nothing that he had so far seen of India had prepared him for the sight of Anjuli. He had expected a little, dark-complexioned woman, not a long-limbed goddess – Venus Aphrodite – whose skin was paler than ripe wheat, and whose beautiful black-lashed eyes were the colour of peat-water on the moors of Kerry.
Strangely, she did not suggest the East to him, but rather the North, and gazing at her, he had been