The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [79]
Hira Lal had vanished. But as Koda Dad's friends were not addicted to writing him letters, he never heard the tale – or anything further from Gulkote. And neither did Ash, since Koda Dad's departure from the state had severed his last link with it. Inevitably, the past retreated, for life in England allowed him little time for retrospect. There was always work to be done and games to be played, school to be endured and holidays to be enjoyed, and in time the memory of Gulkote became shadowy and a little unreal, and he seldom thought of it, though at the back of his mind – ignored but ever-present – there lurked a curious feeling of emptiness and loss, a haunting sense of being incomplete because something that was vitally necessary to him had gone out of his life. He had no idea how long that feeling had been there, and he made no attempt to analyse it for fear that it might lead him back to the day of Sita's death. But he was convinced that just as soon as he returned to his own country and saw Zarin and Koda Dad again, it would vanish; and in the meantime he accepted it much as a man with one arm or one leg accepts his disability and learns to live with it; and to ignore it.
He made no close friends and was never particularly popular among his contemporaries, who found him difficult to know and continued to regard him as something of a freak – a ‘loner’. But in a world where the ability to hit a ball or out-run one's fellows was prized above scholarship, his prowess at sports at least earned him their respect (and in the case of his juniors a large measure of admiration), and in his last year at school he had a batting average of fifty-two point nought three, took seven wickets for sixteen in a house match, made a century at Lord's and passed into the new Royal Military College at Sandhurst by a comfortable margin.
It was a come-down, after those three final terms, to find himself once more in the position of an obscure ‘new boy' at the bottom of a ladder. But on the whole he preferred the R.M.C. to his public school, and did well there; well enough, at all events, for some of his fellow cadets to try and dissuade him from going into the Indian Army – especially now that the purchase of commissions was to be abolished, which meant that the sons of rich men would in future be obliged to rely on ability instead of their purses to obtain promotion. Thus handicapped, few gentlemen would now care to plump for an army career, and Ash's advisers prophesied (correctly as it happened) a disastrous drop in cadets; their own term being the last to enter before the new rule came into force. It was going to be bad enough in a decent regiment, let alone going off to soldier among a lot of pushing, provincial nobodies. ‘And you don't want to do that, you know. After all, it's not as if you were short of the ready, so why go off and bury yourself in some colonial back-woods among a lot of blacks and second-raters? My pater says…’
Ash had retorted with some heat that if the speaker and his father and his friends really thought along these lines, then the sooner the British cleared out of India and left her to run her own affairs the better, for she could probably do so more successfully with her own first-raters than with anyone else's second-raters.
‘Pandy's up on his elephant again!’ jeered