The Far Pavilions Read online

  Akbar Khan prodded the infant with a bony finger, and laughed when the baby clung to it. ‘Ah, he is a strong, bold boy. He shall be a soldier – a captain of many sabres. Do not trouble yourself on his account, my friend. Daya Ram's wife will feed him as she has done from the day of his birth, having lost her own child, which was surely arranged by Allah who orders all things.’

  ‘But we can't keep him in camp,’ objected Hilary. ‘We shall have to find someone who is going on leave and get them to take him home. I expect the Pemberthys would know of someone. Or young William. Yes, that's what we'd better do: I've got a brother in England whose wife can take care of him until I get back myself.’

  That matter being decided he had taken Akbar Khan's advice and ceased to worry. And as the baby throve and was seldom heard to cry, they came to the conclusion that there was no hurry about going to Peshawar after all, and having cut Isobel's name on a boulder above her grave, they struck camp and headed east towards Garwal.

  Hilary never returned to Peshawar; and being deplorably absent-minded, he failed to notify either his brother-in-law William Ashton, or any of his relatives in England, that he was now a father – and a widower. The occasional letter (there were not many) that still arrived addressed to his wife would from time to time remind him of his obligations. But as he was always too occupied to give them his immediate attention, they were put aside to be dealt with at some later date and invariably forgotten; as he came to forget Isobel – and even, on occasions, the fact that he had a son.

  ‘Ash-Baba’,* as the baby was known to his foster-mother Sita, and to the entire camp, spent the first eighteen months of his life among the high mountains, and took his first steps on a slippery grass hillside within sight of the towering peak of Nanda Devi and the long range of her attendant snows. Seeing him toddling about the camp you would have taken him to be Sita's own child, for Isobel had been a brown beauty, honey-skinned, black-haired and grey-eyed; and her son had inherited her colouring. He had also inherited a considerable proportion of her good looks and would, said Akbar Khan approvingly, make a handsome man one day.

  The camp never remained long in one place, Hilary being engaged in studying hill dialects and collecting wild flowers. But sterner matters eventually called him from this work, and leaving the hills behind them the camp turned southward and came at last, by way of Jhansi and Sattara, to the lush greenery and long white beaches of the Coromandal Coast.

  The heat of the plains and the humidity of the south did not suit Ash-Baba as the cool air of the hills had done, and Sita, herself a hill-woman, longed for the mountains and would tell him stories of her home in the north among the great ranges of the Hindu Kush. Tales of glaciers and avalanches, of hidden valleys where the rivers teemed with snow trout and the ground was carpeted with flowers; and where fruit blossom scented the air in spring and apples and walnuts ripened in the lazy golden summers. In time these became his favourite stories, and Sita invented a valley which was to be theirs alone and where, one day, they would build a house of mud and pinewood, with a flat roof on which they could spread corn and red peppers to dry, and a garden in which they would grow almond and peach trees and keep a goat and a puppy and a kitten.

  Neither she nor any other member of the camp spoke English, and Ash reached the age of four without realizing that the language in which his father occasionally addressed him was, or should have been, his native tongue. But having inherited Hilary's ear for dialects, he picked up a number of tongues in the polyglot camp: Pushtu from Swab Gul, Hindi from Ram Chand, and Tamil, Gujerati and Telegu from the southerners. Though he used, for choice, the Punjabi spoken by Akbar Khan, Sita and Sita's husband Daya Ram. He rarely wore European clothes, since Hilary seldom stayed in places where such things were obtainable. And in any case such garments would have been entirely unsuited to the climate and camp life. He was therefore dressed either in Hindu or Mussulman garb – the difference of opinion between Akbar Khan and Sita as to which he should wear having been settled by compromise: Mussulman one week, Hindu the next. But always the former on a Friday.*

  They had spent the autumn of 1855 in the Seeoni hills, ostensibly studying the dialect of the Gonds. And it was here that Hilary had written a report on the events that followed the annexation (he had called it ‘theft’) by the East India Company of the Princely States of Nagpur, Jhansi and Tanjore. His tale of the Company's dismissal of the unfortunate Commissioner and former Resident of Nagpur, Mr Mansel, who had been ill-advised enough to suggest a more generous settlement with the late Rajah's family (and rash enough to protest against the harshness of the action taken) had lost nothing in the telling.

  The whole policy of Annexation and Lapse – the taking-over by the Company of any native state where there was no direct heir, in defiance of a centuries-old tradition that permitted a childless man to adopt an heir from among his relations – was, declared Hilary, nothing more than a hypocritical term for an ugly and indefensible act: barefaced robbery and the defrauding of widows and orphans. The rulers in question – and he would point out that Nagpur, Jhansi and Tanjore were only three of the states to fall victims to this iniquitous policy – had been loyal supporters of the Company; yet their loyalty had not prevented their widows and womenfolk being deprived by that same Company of their hereditary rights, together with their jewels and other family heirlooms. In the case of the titular principality of Tanjore, absorbed by right of Lapse on the death of the Rajah, there had been a daughter, though no son; and with commendable courage (considering the treatment meted out to the hapless Mr Mansel) the President, a Mr Forbes, had pleaded the cause of the princess, urging that by the terms of Tanjore's treaty with the Company, the succession had been promised to ‘heirs’ in general and not specifically to heirs male. But his pleas had been ignored. A strong force of sepoys† had been marched suddenly into the palace and the whole of the property, real or personal, seized; the Company's seals had been put upon all jewels and valuables, the late Rajah's troops disarmed, and his mother's estate sequestered.

  There was worse, wrote Hilary, to follow, for it affected the lives and livelihood of many people. Throughout the district, the occupier of every piece of land that had at any time belonged to any previous Rajah of Tanjore was turned out of his possession and ordered to come before the British Commissioner to establish a title, and all those who had depended on the expenditure of the state revenue were panic-stricken at the prospect of being left without employment. Within a week Tanjore, from being the most contented area in the Company's dominions, had been transformed into a hot-bed of disaffection. Its people had venerated their ruling house and were infuriated by its suppression – the very sepoys refusing to receive their pensions. In Jhansi, too, there had been a child of the royal house – a distant cousin only, but one formally adopted by the late Rajah – and Lakshmi Bai, the Rajah's lovely widow, had pleaded her husband's long record of loyalty to the Company; but to no avail. Jhansi was declared ‘Lapsed to the British Government’ and placed under the jurisdiction of the Governor of the North-Western Provinces, its institutions abolished, the establishments of the Rajah's government suspended, and all troops in the service of the state immediately paid off and discharged.

  ‘Nothing,’ wrote Hilary, ‘could be more calculated to arouse hatred, bitterness and resentment than this brazen and ruthless system of robbery.’ But the Great British Public had other matters to think of. The war in the Crimea was proving a costly and harrowing business, and India was far away, out of sight and out of mind. Those few who clicked their tongues disapprovingly over the reports forgot about them a few days later, while the Senior Councillors of the Honourable the East India Company pronounced the writer to be ‘a misguided crank’ and attempted to discover his identity and prevent his making use of the mails.

  They had not succeeded in either task, for Hilary's reports were sent home by unorthodox routes. And though there were officials who regarded his proceedings with suspicion – in particular his cl
ose friendship with ‘a native’ – they lacked evidence. Suspicion was not proof. Hilary continued to move freely about India and took pains to impress upon his son that the greatest sin that man could commit was injustice, and that it must always be fought against, tooth and nail – even when there seemed to be no hope of winning.

  ‘Never forget that, Ashton. Whatever else you are, be just. “Do as you would be done by.” That means you must never be unfair. Never. Not under any circumstances. Not to anyone. Do you understand?’

  Of course he did not, for he was as yet too young. But the lesson was repeated daily until gradually it became borne in upon him what the ‘Burra-Sahib’* (he never thought of his father by any other name) meant, for Uncle Akbar too would talk to him of this, telling him stories and quoting from the holy book to illustrate the theme that ‘A man is greater than Kings’; and that when he grew up and became a man he would find that this was true. Therefore he must try always to be just in all his dealings, because at this time there were many and terrible injustices being done in the land by men who held power and had become drunk with it.

  ‘Why do the people put up with it?’ demanded Hilary of Akbar Khan. ‘There are millions of them to a handful of the Company. Why don't they do something? – stand up for themselves?’

  ‘They will. One day,’ said Akbar Khan placidly.

  ‘Then the sooner the better,’ retorted Hilary, adding that, to be fair, there were any number of good Sahibs in the country: Lawrence, Nicholson and Burns; men like Mansel and Forbes, and young Randall in Lunjore, and a hundred others, and that it was ones in Simla and Calcutta who need weeding out – the pompous, greedy and pigheaded old gentlemen with one foot in the grave and heads that had become addled by sun and snobbery and an inflated sense of their own importance. As for the army, there was hardly a senior British officer in India under the age of seventy. ‘I am not,’ insisted Hilary ‘an unpatriotic man. But I cannot see anything admirable in stupidity, injustice and sheer incompetence in high places, and there is too much of all three in the present administration.’

  ‘I will not quarrel with you over that,’ said Akbar Khan. ‘But it will pass; and your children's children will forget the guilt and remember only the glory, while ours will remember the oppression and deny you the good. Yet there is much good.’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Hilary's smile was more than a little wry. ‘Perhaps I myself am a pompous and conceited old fool. And perhaps if these fools I complain of were French or Dutch or German I would not mind so much, because then I could say ‘what else can you expect?’ and feel superior. It is because they are men of my own race that I would have them all good.’

  ‘Only God is that,’ said Akbar Khan dryly. ‘We, his creatures, are all evil and imperfect, whatever the colour of our skins. But some of us strive for righteousness – and in that there is hope.’

  Hilary wrote no more reports on the administrative activities of the EastIndia Company and the Governor-General and Council, but turned instead to those subjects that had always claimed the lion's share of his interest. The resulting manuscripts, unlike his coded reports, were dispatched through the normal channel of the mails, where they were opened and examined, and served to confirm the authorities in their opinion that Professor Pelham-Martyn was, after all, merely an erudite eccentric and entirely above suspicion.

  Once again the camp struck its tents, and turning its back upon the palms and temples of the south, moved slowly northward. Ashton Hilary Akbar celebrated his fourth birthday in the capital of the Moguls, the walled city of Delhi, where Hilary had come to complete, correct and dispatch the manuscript of his latest, and last, book. Uncle Akbar marked the occasion by arraying Ash in the finest of Mussulman dress and taking him to pray at the Juma Masjid, the magnificent mosque that the Emperor Shah Jehan had built facing the walls of the Lal Kila, the great ‘Red Fort’ on the banks of the Jumna River.

  The mosque had been crowded, for it was a Friday. So crowded that many people who had been unable to find places in the courtyard had climbed to the top of the gateway, and two had fallen because of the press and been killed. ‘It was ordained,’ said Uncle Akbar, and went on with his prayers. Ash had bowed, knelt and risen in imitation of the other worshippers, and afterwards Uncle Akbar had taught him Shah Jehan's prayer, the Khutpa, which begins ‘Oh Lord! Do thou great honour to the faith of Islam, and to the professors of that faith, through the perpetual power and majesty of thy slave the Sultan, the son of the Sultan, the Emperor, the son of the Emperor, the Ruler of the two Continents and the Master of the two seas, the Warrior in the cause of God, the Emperor Abdul Muzaffar Shahabuddin Muhammad Shah Jahan Ghazi…’

  What, demanded Ash, was a sea? And why only two seas? – and who had ordained that those two people should fall off the gateway?

  Sita had countered by dressing her foster-son as a Hindu and taking him to a temple in the city, where in exchange for a few coins a priest in yellow robes had marked his forehead with a small smear of red paste, and he had watched Daya Ram do pujah (worship) to an ancient, shapeless shaft of stone, the symbol of the God Shiva.

  Akbar Khan had many friends in Delhi, and normally he would have wished to linger there. But this year he was aware of odd and uneasy undercurrents, and the conversation of his friends disturbed him. The city was full of strange rumours and there was a tension and an ominous sense of suppressed excitement in the narrow, noisy streets and crowded bazaars. It gave him a sharp feeling of apprehension and an awareness of impending evil.

  ‘There is some mischief afoot. One can smell it in the very air,’ said Akbar Khan. ‘It bodes no good for men of your blood, my friend, and I would not have our boy come to any harm. Let us go away from here, to somewhere where the air is cleaner. I do not like cities. They breed foulness as a dunghill breeds flies and maggots, and there is something breeding here that is worse than either.’

  ‘You mean revolt?’ said Hilary, undisturbed. ‘That is true of half India. And in my opinion the sooner it comes the better: we need an explosion to clear the air and blow those lethargic blockheads in Calcutta and Simla out of their complacency.’

  ‘True. But explosions can kill, and I would not have my boy pay for the errors of his countrymen.’

  ‘You mean my boy,’ corrected Hilary with a shade of asperity.

  ‘Ours, then. Though he is fonder of me than of you.’

  ‘Only because you spoil him.’

  ‘Not so. It is because I love him, and he knows it. He is the son of your body but of my heart; and I would not have him harmed when the storm breaks – as it will. Have you warned your English friends in the cantonment?’

  Hilary said that he had done so many times, but that they did not want to believe it: and the trouble was that not only men in high places, the Members of Council in Calcutta and the civil servants in Simla, knew too little of the minds of those whom they governed, but many army officers were equally ignorant.

  ‘It was not so in the old days,’ said Akbar Khan regretfully. ‘But the generals are now old and fat and tired, and their officers are moved so frequently that they do not know the customs of their men, or notice that their sepoys are becoming restless. I do not like that tale from Barrackpore. It is true that only one sepoy rebelled, but when he shot down his officer and threatened to shoot the General-Sahib himself, his fellow sepoys watched in silence and did nothing to prevent it. Yet I think it was unwise to disband that regiment after they had hanged the offender, because now there are three hundred more masterless men to add to the disaffection of many others. Trouble will come of it, and I think very soon.’

  ‘I too. And when it does, my countrymen will be both shocked and enraged at such disloyalty and ingratitude. You will see.’

  ‘Perhaps – if we live through it,’ said Akbar Khan. ‘Wherefore I say, let us go to the hills.’

  Hilary packed his boxes and left a number of them in the house of an acquaintance in the cantonment behind the Ridge. He had intended, before
leaving Delhi, to write several letters that should have been written years ago. But once again he postponed doing so, for Akbar Khan was impatient to be gone and there would be plenty of time for such tedious business when they reached the peace and quiet of the hills. Besides, having neglected his correspondence for so long, a month or two would make no difference. Consoled by this thought, he shovelled a pile of unanswered letters, including half-a-dozen addressed to his late wife, into a cardboard box marked ‘Urgent’, and turned to more interesting tasks.

  There is a book, published in the spring of 1856 (Unfamiliar Dialects of Hindustan, Vol. I, by Prof. H. F. Pelham-Martyn, B.A., D.SC., F.R.G.S., F.S.A., etc.), that is dedicated ‘To the dear memory of my wife Isobel’. The second volume of this work was not published until the autumn of the following year and bore a longer inscription: ‘For Ashton Hilary Akbar, hoping it may arouse his interest in a subject that has given endless pleasure to the author – H.F.P-M.’ But by that time both Hilary and Akbar Khan had been six months in their graves, and no one had troubled to inquire who Ashton Hilary Akbar might be.

  The camp had moved northward in the direction of the Terai and the foothills of the Doon, and it was here, in early April when the temperature had begun to rise and the nights were no longer cool, that disaster overtook them.

  A small party of pilgrims from Hardwar, who had been offered hospitality for a night, brought cholera with them. One of them died in the dark hour before dawn, and his companions fled, abandoning the body which was found by the servants the next morning. By evening three of Hilary's men had taken the disease, and so swiftly did the cholera do its ugly work that none lived to see the dawn. The camp succumbed to panic and many snatched their chattels and vanished, not waiting for their pay. And on the following day Akbar Khan had sickened.

  ‘Go away,’ whispered Akbar Khan to Hilary. ‘Take the boy and go quickly, lest you too die. Do not grieve for me. I am an old man and a cripple, wifeless and childless. Why should I fear to die? But you have the boy… and a son has need of a father.’