The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [76]
He resented it himself. He hadn't wanted to come to Belait and learn to be a Sahib. He would far rather have stayed in Mardan and become a sowar like Zarin. But he had not been given the choice, and felt in consequence that he understood more about the feelings of subject races than his Uncle Matthew, who had spoken so patronizingly of ‘bestowing the benefits of peace and prosperity on the suffering millions of India’.
‘I suppose they look on me as one of the “suffering millions”,’ thought Ash bitterly, ‘but I'd rather be back there, and working as a coolie, than here, being told what to do all day.’
The holidays had been oases in a dry wilderness of lessons, and but for them he often felt that he would not have been able to endure this new life; for although he was encouraged to walk and ride in the park, it was never alone but always under the watchful eye of his tutor or a groom. And as the park was surrounded by a high stone wall and he was not allowed beyond the lodge gates, his world was in many ways as restricted as that of a prisoner or a mental patient. Yet the loss of freedom had not been the worst thing in those years, for Ash had experienced much the same restriction in the Hawa Mahal. But then Sita had been there, and he had had friends; and at least Lalji had been young.
The age of his present gaolers irked him, and after the colourful muddle of an Indian court he found the decorous and inflexible ritual of Victorian country-house life dreary and meaningless – and alien beyond words. But since his pocket money, like the servants' wages, was too meagre to permit him to think of escape – and in any case, England was an island and India was six thousand miles away – there was nothing he could do about it except endure it, and wait for the day when he could go back to join the Corps of Guides. Only obedience and hard work could hasten that day; so he had been obedient and had worked hard at his lessons, and his reward had been the end of tutors and life at Pelham Abbas, and four years at the school his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had attended before him.
Nothing in Ash's formative years had prepared him for life in an English public school, and he detested every aspect of it: the regimentation, the monotony and the lack of privacy, the necessity to conform and the bullying and brutality that were meted out to weaklings and all whose opinions differed from those of the majority; the compulsory games and the reverence paid to such gods as the Head of Games and the Captain of Cricket. He was not given to talking of himself, but the fact that one of his names was Akbar had elicited questions, and his replies having revealed something of his background, he had promptly been nicknamed ‘Pandy’, a name applied for many years by British soldiers to all Indians, whom they termed ‘Pandies’ in reference to the Sepoy, Mangal Pandy, who had fired the first shot of the Indian Mutiny.
‘Young Pandy Martyn’ had been treated as a species of foreign barbarian who must be taught how to behave in a civilized country, and the process had been a painful one. Ash had not accepted it in the proper spirit, but attacked his tormentors with teeth, nails and feet in the manner of the Gulkote bazaars, which was apparently not only uncivilized but ‘unsporting’ – though it did not appear to be unsporting for five or six of his opponents to set upon him at once when it became clear that in the matter of muscle he was a match for any two of them. But numbers invariably triumphed, and for a time he had again seriously contemplated flight; only to reject it once more as impractical. He would have to endure this as he had endured the lesser evils of Pelham Abbas. But at least he would show these feringhis that on their playing fields he could be as good or better than they.
Koda Dad's training in marksmanship having encouraged a naturally good eye, it had not taken long for Ash's schoolmates to discover that