The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [95]
In this, as in all else, she was by no means unique. But as she happened to be the first of her kind whom Ash had met, it was Edith Viccary who was responsible for erasing for ever an uneasy suspicion that he had lately begun to entertain – that Mrs Harlowe and those of her fellow-sightseers who had laughed and talked so loudly during the prayers at the Juma-Masjid were typical of all the British-born ‘memsahibs’ in India. For this alone he would have been willing to forgive her almost anything – even for being the unwitting cause of preventing him from seeing as much of Belinda as he had hoped to do on the journey north.
Apart from that deprivation, the days passed pleasantly. It was good to be with Zarin again and listen to familiar talk while the remembered scenes unrolled beyond the windows; to eat the food that Gul Baz bought from the stalls of vendors in the villages – curries and dais, rice, chuppattis and sticky sweetmeats shimmering with beaten silver – served as often as not on green leaves, and washed down with draughts of buffalo milk or water from the wells that were to be found at every hamlet. The names of towns and rivers and the aspect of every little village was suddenly familiar to him, for this was the country across which he and Sita had wandered in the months that followed their escape from Gulkote.
Karnal, Ambala, Ludhiana, Jullundar, Amritsar and Lahore, the Sutlej and the Ravi Rivers. He knew them all… The temperature at mid-morning and for the best part of the afternoon remained uncomfortably high, and the sun still blistered the paintwork on the roofs and sides of the gharies. But as the teams of starveling ponies rattled them forward across the rich crop-lands of the Punjab, the air became noticeably cooler, and there came a day when Ash, descending in the early dawn to stretch his legs on the quiet roadside, saw above the far horizon to the north a long, jagged line of pale rose glowing bright against the cool green of the sky: and knew that he was looking at the snow peaks of the Himalayas.
His heart seemed to turn over as he looked, and his eyes filled with tears. And all at once he wanted to laugh and cry and to shout aloud – or to pray, as Zarin and Ala Yar and a dozen of their co-religionists were doing. Only it was not towards Mecca that he would face, but to the mountains. His own mountains, in whose shadow he had been born – to the Dur Khaima to which he had prayed as a child. Somewhere over there lay the Far Pavilions, with Tarakalas, the ‘Star Tower’, catching the first rays of the sunrise. And somewhere, too, the valley that Sita had so longed to reach before she died, and that he himself would reach one day.
They had stopped for the previous night on the outskirts of a little village, and there was a food-stall near by. Ash bought a handful of cooked rice, and remembering the offerings he used to make to the Dur Khaima in the Queen's balcony at Gulkote, he strewed it on the dew-wet ground. Perhaps it would bring him luck. A grey-headed plains crow and a famished pariah dog swooped upon the feast, and the sight of the emaciated mongrel recalled him abruptly from the past. Gulkote and the Dur Khaima were forgotten, and it was Ashton Pelham-Martyn and not Ashok who bought half-a-dozen chuppattis and fed them to a starving dog; and Isobel's son, not Sita's, who boarded the ghari again, hands in pockets and whistling ‘John Peel’ as the sun rose above the horizon and flooded the plains with brilliant light.
‘Ah! This smells like my own country again,’ said Ala Yar, snuffing the wind like an elderly horse that scents its stable. ‘Now it will not matter so much if these gharis should break down, for if need be we can walk the rest of the way.’ (Ala Yar distrusted hired vehicles and was convinced that the frequent halts were due to