The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [73]
‘But of course you will return,’ said Zarin, reassuring the anxious Ash. ‘Only first it is necessary to acquire learning, and that, they say, must be done in Belait. Though I do not myself… Well, no matter. But it is even more necessary to remain alive, and it is certain that you are not safe in this country while there is a price upon your head. You cannot be sure that the Rani's spies have lost your trail, but we can at least be sure that they will not follow it across the sea, and that long before you return, both she and they will have forgotten you. I and my brother Awal Shah have been sworn to secrecy and cannot even send news of you to our father, for as letters may be opened and read by the curious, it is better that he should be kept in ignorance rather than risk betraying your whereabouts and your changed fortunes to those who wish you ill. But later, when the gurrh-burrh has died down, if the Colonel-Sahib thinks that it is safe to do so, I will write to you to Belait; and remember that you do not go there alone. Anderson-Sahib is a good man and one whom you may trust, and he and his servants will see to it that you do not wholly forget us while you learn to be a Sahib – and you will find that the years will go quickly, Ashok.’
Yet there Zarin had been wrong, for they had not gone quickly. They had crawled by so slowly that every week had seemed a month and every month a year. But he had been right about Colonel Anderson. The ex-District Commissioner had taken a liking to the boy, and during the long, tedious days of the voyage he had managed to teach Ash an astonishing amount of English, having impressed upon him that to be speechless in a foreign land would be a grave disadvantage and, moreover, humiliating to pride.
The point had been taken, and Ash, who had inherited his father's gift for languages, had applied himself with such diligence to the mastering of this new tongue that a year later you would never have known that he had spoken any other, for with the natural imitativeness of youth he had come to speak it with the exact drawl and inflection of upper-crust England – the voice of pedantic tutors and elderly Pelham-Martyns. Yet try as he would, he could not learn to think of himself as one of them, nor did they find it easy to accept him as such.
He was to remain a stranger in a strange land, and England would never be ‘Home’ to him, because home was Hindustan. He was still – and always would be – Sita's son; and there were endless things about this new life that were not only alien to him, but horrifying. Trivial things in the opinion of Englishmen, but to one brought up in the religion of his foster-mother's people, incredibly shocking. Such as the eating of pork and beef; the one an abomination and the other sacrilege unspeakable – the pig being an unclean animal and the cow a sacred one.
No less appalling was the European habit of using a toothbrush not once but many times, instead of a twig or a small stick that could be plucked daily and discarded after use; saliva, as everyone knows, being of all things the most polluting. Apparently the English did not know, and there were bitter battles before Ash could be brought to accept this and other practices that seemed to him barbaric.
That first year had been a difficult time for all concerned, not least for Ash's relatives, who were equally horrified by the habits and appearance of this young ‘heathen’ from the East. Rigidly conservative and possessing all the in-bred insularity of their race, they flinched from the prospect of displaying Hilary's son to the critical gaze of their friends and neighbours, and hastily revised their original plans, which had included sending their nephew to the famous public school that had been responsible for the education of seven generations of Pelham-Martyns. Instead, they engaged a resident tutor, together with the weekly attendance of an elderly cleric and a retired Oxford Don, to ‘lick him into shape’, and thankfully