The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [5]
The camp never remained long in one place, Hilary being engaged in studying hill dialects and collecting wild flowers. But sterner matters eventually called him from this work, and leaving the hills behind them the camp turned southward and came at last, by way of Jhansi and Sattara, to the lush greenery and long white beaches of the Coromandal Coast.
The heat of the plains and the humidity of the south did not suit Ash-Baba as the cool air of the hills had done, and Sita, herself a hill-woman, longed for the mountains and would tell him stories of her home in the north among the great ranges of the Hindu Kush. Tales of glaciers and avalanches, of hidden valleys where the rivers teemed with snow trout and the ground was carpeted with flowers; and where fruit blossom scented the air in spring and apples and walnuts ripened in the lazy golden summers. In time these became his favourite stories, and Sita invented a valley which was to be theirs alone and where, one day, they would build a house of mud and pinewood, with a flat roof on which they could spread corn and red peppers to dry, and a garden in which they would grow almond and peach trees and keep a goat and a puppy and a kitten.
Neither she nor any other member of the camp spoke English, and Ash reached the age of four without realizing that the language in which his father occasionally addressed him was, or should have been, his native tongue. But having inherited Hilary's ear for dialects, he picked up a number of tongues in the polyglot camp: Pushtu from Swab Gul, Hindi from Ram Chand, and Tamil, Gujerati and Telegu from the southerners. Though he used, for choice, the Punjabi spoken by Akbar Khan, Sita and Sita's husband Daya Ram. He rarely wore European clothes, since Hilary seldom stayed in places where such things were obtainable. And in any case such garments would have been entirely unsuited to the climate and camp life. He was therefore dressed either in Hindu or Mussulman garb – the difference of opinion between Akbar Khan and Sita as to which he should wear having been settled by compromise: Mussulman one week, Hindu the next. But always the former on a Friday.*
They had spent the autumn of 1855 in the Seeoni hills, ostensibly studying the dialect of the Gonds. And it was here that Hilary had written a report on the events that followed the annexation (he had called it ‘theft’) by the East India Company of the Princely States of Nagpur, Jhansi and Tanjore. His tale of the Company's dismissal of the unfortunate Commissioner and former Resident of Nagpur, Mr Mansel, who had been ill-advised enough to suggest a more generous settlement with the late Rajah's family (and rash enough to protest against the harshness of the action taken) had lost nothing in the telling.
The whole policy of Annexation and Lapse – the taking-over by the Company of any native state where there was no direct heir, in defiance of a centuries-old tradition that permitted a childless man to adopt an heir from among his relations – was, declared Hilary, nothing more than a hypocritical term for an ugly and indefensible act: barefaced robbery and the defrauding of widows and orphans. The rulers in question – and he would point out that Nagpur, Jhansi and Tanjore were only three of the states to fall victims to this iniquitous policy – had been loyal supporters of the Company; yet their loyalty had not prevented their widows and womenfolk being deprived by that same Company of their hereditary rights, together with their jewels and other family heirlooms. In the case of the titular principality of Tanjore, absorbed by right of Lapse on the death of the Rajah, there had been a daughter, though no son; and with commendable courage (considering the treatment meted out to the hapless Mr Mansel) the President, a Mr Forbes, had pleaded the cause of the princess, urging that by the terms of Tanjore's treaty with the Company, the succession had been promised to ‘heirs’ in general and not specifically to heirs male. But his