The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [560]
The years that had once seemed to drift by so slowly were now passing with ever-increasing swiftness, like a sluggish train that pants and jerks and puffs as it draws away from a station platform, and then, gathering speed, rattles forward faster and ever faster on the iron rails, eating up the miles as time eats up the years. And Ash, sitting cross-legged on the mud floor and gazing unseeingly at a white-washed wall, looked back down the long corridor of those years and saw many Zarins. The Zarin he had first seen in Koda Dad's quarters in the Hawa Mahal: a tall, handsome youth who could ride and shoot as well as a man, and who had seemed – then and always – to be everything that was brave, splendid and admirable. A dashing, confident Zarin, riding away from Gulkote to join the Guides Cavalry. Zarin at Mardan, wearing the uniform of a sowar; consoling him for the death of Sita and mapping out his future with the aid of Awal Shah. An older Zarin, waiting to greet him on the dock at Bombay, still unchanged, still the same staunch friend and elder brother…
He had been afraid once that their relationship might not survive his return to Mardan as an officer in the Corps, and their sudden reversal in status. But it had done so, thanks in a large part, reflected Ash, to the astringent common-sense and level-headedness of Koda Dad's youngest son rather than to any qualities that he himself possessed. After that it had seemed to him that it would survive anything, short of death, and he had never visualized it ending like this.
Yet it was the end. He realized that quite clearly. They could not continue to see each other and talk together as they used to do, because their paths had already diverged, and the time had come when he must step to the music that he had heard.
That was something that Wigram had once quoted to him, and the words had stayed in his mind: ‘If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer: let him step to the music that he hears.’ It was good advice, and high time he acted upon it, for he knew now that he had never yet succeeded in keeping in step with his companions, whether European or Asiatic, because he himself was neither one nor the other.
The time had come to close the Book of Ashok and Akbar and Ashton Pelham-Martyn of the Guides; to put it away on a shelf and begin a new volume – ‘The Book of Juli’: of Ash and Juli, their future and their children. Perhaps one day, when he was old, he would take down that first volume, and blowing the dust from it, leaf through its pages and re-live the past in memory – fondly, and with no regrets. But for the moment it was better to put all that away and forget it. Ab kutum hogia.*
By the time Zarin returned, the decision had been made: and though Ash did not say so, Zarin was instantly aware of it. Not because of any tension between them, for they spoke together as easily as they had always done, and as though nothing had changed. Yet in some indefinable way, Zarin was aware that Ashok had withdrawn from him; and he knew without being told that in all probability they would not meet again…
‘Perhaps when we are old,’ thought Zarin, as Ash had done. He put the thought away from him and talked cheerfully of the present, speaking of such things as a projected visit to Attock to see his Aunt Fatima and the necessity of purchasing new chargers to replace those lost in the recent campaign, until it was time to take Ash to see the Commandant.
This interview had lasted much longer than the one with Wally on the previous night, for in the hope of persuading Colonel Jenkins to pull any available strings that could possibly help to postpone the sending of a British Mission to Afghanistan (or better still, cause the whole project to be abandoned), Ash had gone into considerable detail as to the situation prevailing in Kabul, and the Commandant, who was well aware that his own Corps were more than likely to be involved, had listened with absorbed attention, and after asking a number of pertinent