Far Pavilions (6 page)

There were no lights at this hour, and roads, bungalows and gardens lay quiet in the dawn. But the smell of burning was suddenly stronger, and it was not the familiar smell of charcoal or dung fires, but the harsher smell of smouldering beams and thatch, of scorched earth and brickwork.

It was still too dark to make out more than the outline of trees and bungalows, and though the tripping tap of the donkey's hooves was now clearly audible on the harder surface of a made road, no one challenged them, and it seemed that the sentries too were asleep.

The Abuthnots' bungalow lay on the near side of the cantonment in a quiet, tree-shaded road, and Sita found it without much difficulty. Dismounting at the gate she lifted the boy down and began to pull at the knots of her bundle.

‘What are you doing?’ inquired Ash, interested. He hoped that she meant to produce something for him to eat, for he was hungry. But Sita was unpacking the sailor suit that she had meant to put on him in the house of Daya Ram's cousin, the grain merchant. It was not fitting that the ‘Burra-Sahib's’ son should be presented to his father's people in the dusty, travel-stained garments of a street-arab, and at least she would see that he was properly clothed. The suit would be crumpled but it was clean, and the shoes well polished; and surely the Memsahib would understand and forgive the lack of pressing?

Ash sighed resignedly and allowed himself to be hurried into the hated sailor suit without protest. He seemed to have grown a lot since he last wore it, for it was uncomfortably tight, and when it came to putting on the strapped European shoes he found it impossible to force his feet into them.

‘You are not trying,
piara
(dear),’ scolded Sita, almost in tears between weariness and vexation. ‘Push hard – harder.’

But it was no use, and she had to let him tread down the heels and wear them as though they had been slippers. The white sailor hat with its wide blue ribbon had not been improved by its long sojourn in the bundle, but she straightened it with an anxious hand and carefully adjusted the elastic band under his chin.

‘Now you are altogether a Sahib, Heart-of-my-heart,’ whispered Sita, kissing him. She wiped away a tear with the corner of her sari, and tying up his discarded clothing in her bundle, came to her feet and led him up the drive towards the house.

The garden was already silver-grey in the first pale wash of the dawn, and the Abuthnots' bungalow stood out clear-cut and distinct – and quiet. So quiet that as they approached it they heard a quick patter of paws on matting as a dark shape appeared out of the blackness of an open doorway, and scuttling down the verandah, loped away across the lawn. It was not a Sahib's dog, or even one of the pariah-dogs that haunted the cantonment bazaars, but a hyena, its high, humped shoulders and grotesquely stunted hind-quarters unmistakable in the growing light…

Sita stood still, her heart once again racing in panic. She could hear the receding rustle of leaves as the hyena vanished among the bushes, and the steady munching of the donkey by the gate. But there was still no sound from the house, or from the servants' quarters behind it, where surely someone should be awake and stirring. Where was the
chowkidar
, the night watchman who should have been guarding the bungalow? Her eye was caught by a small white object that lay on the gravel almost at her feet, and she stooped slowly and picked it up. It was a high-heeled satin shoe such as she had seen the memsahibs wear in the evenings for balls or
burra khanas
,
*
an incongruous object to find lying discarded on the front drive at that hour – or any hour.

Sita's frightened gaze darted over the lawns and flower-beds and she saw for the first time that there were other objects littering the garden: books, pieces of broken china, torn fragments of clothing, a stocking… She dropped the satin slipper, and turning, ran back to the gate dragging Ash with her, and thrust him into the shadows of the pepper tree.

‘Stay there,
piara
,’ ordered Sita in a voice that Ash had never heard her use before. ‘Get back – get down into the shadows and do not make a noise. I will see first who is in the bungalow, and then I will come back for you. As you love me, make no sound.’

‘Will you bring something to eat?’ asked Ash, anxiously, adding with a sigh: ‘I'm
so
hungry.’

‘Yes, yes. I will find something. I promise you. Only stay quiet.’

Leaving him, she went across the garden, and gathering all her courage, stole up the verandah steps and into the silent house. There was no one there. The dark, empty rooms were littered with broken furniture and the debris left by men who had looted anything of value and wantonly destroyed anything and everything else. The servants' quarters too were deserted, and there had evidently been an attempt to set fire to the bungalow, but the flames had not caught, and behind the broken door of the larder there was still a quantity of food that no one had bothered to steal, perhaps because the caste of the looters prevented them from touching such stuff.

Under other circumstances Sita might have had similar qualms. But now she filled the torn half of a tablecloth with as much as she could conveniently carry. There was bread and cold curry, a bowl of
dal
and the remains of a rice pudding, some boiled potatoes and a quantity of fresh fruit, a jam tart and half a plum cake as well as several varieties of biscuits. There was also milk, but it was sour, and various tinned foods that were too heavy to carry. But among a welter of broken wine bottles was one that had escaped destruction, and though it was empty there were plenty of corks, and she filled it with cold water from an earthenware
chatti
outside the kitchen and hurried back to Ash.

The sky was growing lighter every minute and soon yesterday's looters, the
budmarshes
†
from the bazaars, would wake after their night's rioting and come back to see if there was anything they had overlooked. It was unsafe to remain here a moment longer, but first she must strip off that betraying sailor suit; and she did so with hands that trembled with anxiety and haste.

Ash did not understand why she had taken all the trouble to dress him in it only to take it off again, but he was thankful to be out of it, and relieved to see that he would not have to wear it again, for Sita left it lying under the pepper tree. He ate his way solidly through a lump of cold rice pudding while Sita filled her brass
lotah
from a little well among the trampled oleander bushes and drew water in a leather bucket for the donkey, and when that was done they mounted again and set off in the pearl-grey light of a new day towards the Grand Trunk Road that stretches northward towards Kurnal and the Punjab.

The donkey would have kept to the level roads of the cantonment, but now that the sky was brighter Sita could see that most of the bungalows had been gutted by fire, and that smoke from a score of smouldering ruins still rose in ghostly columns above the scorched trees. It was a sight that increased her fears, and rather than cross the cantonment area she turned towards the Ridge and the dark bulk of the Flagstaff Tower, where the Delhi road ran northward to join the Grand Trunk.

Looking back from the crest of the Ridge it was difficult to believe that the once busy cantonment that lay below them was now a desolate shell, for the trees provided a kindly screen and the lazy smoke that drifted up to form a haze above it might have been the smoke of kitchen fires, cooking breakfast for the vanished garrison. On the far side of the Ridge the ground sloped down to merge into the level plain through which the silver ribbon of the Jumna wandered between white sandbanks and a wide belt of croplands, while a mile and a half away – a shadow on the shadowy plain – lay the domes and walls of Delhi, afloat on the morning mists that were rising off the river. A long white road, straight as a sword blade, led from the Flagstaff Tower to the Kashmir Gate, but at that hour nothing moved on it, not even the wind. The air was still and the world so quiet that Sita could hear, from far, far away, the crowing of a cock in some village beyond the Najafgarh canal.

The Ridge too was deserted, though even here the mute evidence of panic littered the ground: a child's shoe, a doll, a woman's rose-trimmed and beribboned bonnet hanging on a thorn bush, toys, books, bundles and boxes lost in the darkness or discarded in the frenzy of flight, and a dog-cart lying on its side in the ditch with a broken wheel and smashed shafts. The night dew lay thick on everything, bejewelling the wreckage and dipping the grasses in a film of silver; but the first hot breath of the coming day was already drying the dew, and birds had begun to chirp and twitter among the thorn-scrub.

There was no one in the Flagstaff Tower, but here the debris lay thicker, and around it the trampled ground bore signs that a small army of women and children, officers, servants and horse-drawn vehicles had camped there for hours and left only recently; for there were carriage-lamps on the dog-cart, and one of them was still burning. The marks of wheels, hoof-prints and footmarks showed that those who had been there had fled northwards towards Kurnal, and Sita would have followed them, but for one thing…

Fifty yards beyond the tower, on the road that led north past the Sudder Bazaar to the cut where it turns right-handed onto the Grand Trunk Road, stood an abandoned cart loaded with what at first sight appeared to be women's clothes. And once again, as on the previous night, the donkey jibbed and would not pass it. It was this that made Sita look closer, and now she saw that there were bodies in the cart: the dead bodies of four Sahibs dressed in scarlet uniforms and hideously mutilated, over which someone had hurriedly thrown a woman's flowered muslin dress and a frilled petticoat in a vain attempt at concealment. The flowers on the dress were forget-me-nots and rosebuds and the petticoat had once been white; but both were now blotched with dark brown stains, for the gay scarlet uniforms had been slashed with sword cuts and were stiff with dried blood.

A single hand, lacking a thumb but still wearing a signet ring that no one had thought to remove, protruded stiffly from among the muslin folds, and staring at it, flinching away, like the animal she rode, from the smell of death, Sita abandoned any idea of following in the wake of the British.

The stories of the men on the bridge, the sight of the dead memsahib in the Kudsia Bagh and even the desolation of the cantonments, had not succeeded in bringing home to her the reality of the situation. It was a rising; riot, arson and
gurrh-burrh
.
*
She had heard of such outbreaks often enough, though she had never been involved in them. But the Sahib-log had always put them down, and once they were over those who had caused them were hanged or transported, and the Sahib-log were still there, with their power and their numbers greater than before. But the dead men in the cart had been Sahibs – officers of the Company's army – and their fellow Sahibs had been in such fear and haste that they had not even paused to bury their comrades before they fled. They had merely flung some memsahib's clothes onto the cart to hide the faces of the dead and then run away, leaving the bodies to the mercy of crows and vultures and any passing ruffian who might choose to strip them of their uniforms. There could be no safety any longer with the Sahib-log, and she must take Ash-Baba away, somewhere far away from both Delhi and the British…

They turned and went back down the road they had just come by and crossed the ruined cantonments, past blackened roofless bungalows, trampled gardens, the gutted barracks and bells of arms, and the quiet cemetery where the British dead lay in neat rows under the alien soil. The donkey's small hooves sounded a hollow, tripping tattoo on the bridge over the Najafgarh canal, and a flight of parrots that had been drinking from a puddle in the dry cut flew up in a green, screaming explosion of sound. But they were clear of the cantonment now and out in the open country; and suddenly the world was no longer grey and still, but yellow with dawn and noisy with birdsong and the chatter of squirrels.

Beyond the canal the path narrowed to a track between sugar cane and tall grass, and presently it met the broad level of the Grand Trunk Road. But instead of turning down it, they crossed over it and followed a field path towards the little village of Dahipur. Without the donkey they could not have gone far, but once out of sight of the highroad, Sita dismounted and walked, and in this way they put several miles between themselves and Delhi before the sun became too hot. Their progress had been slower than it might have been, for Sita was still actively aware of danger and made constant detours in order to avoid villages and casual wayfarers. It was true that Ash-Baba had inherited his mother's black hair and that the open-air life of the camp had burned his already brown skin as dark as any Indian's, but his eyes were agate-grey, and who was to say that some suspicious passer-by would not recognize him as a white child and kill him for the sake of blood-money? One could also never be certain what a child would say or do, and she would not feel safe until Delhi and the mutineers from Meerut were many days' march behind her.

The crops as yet provided little cover, but the plain was seamed and scored with dry gullies, and there were thickets of thorn and elephant grass that offered adequate hiding-places even for the donkey. Yet here too the English had passed, for a buzzing cloud of flies betrayed the body of an elderly Eurasian, probably a clerk from one of the Government offices, hidden in a patch of grass by the side of the path. He too, like the fat woman in the Kudsia Bagh, had crawled into the grass and died there; but unlike her he had been so sorely wounded that it was astonishing that he should have been able to drag himself so far.

It disturbed Sita to find that others too had attempted to escape across country instead of taking the road to Kurnal. The sight of such wretched fugitives would only serve to bring news of the rising to previously peaceful villages, and kindle scorn of the
feringhis
(foreigners) and support for the rebellious sepoys, and she had hoped by taking this route to out-distance the news from Delhi. Now it seemed as though she had set herself an impossible task, for the man who had died in the grass had quite obviously been there since the previous day, and it looked as though someone must have helped him to get that far – the same person who had carefully spread a handkerchief over his face before leaving him to the flies and the eaters of carrion. Sita dragged the reluctant donkey past, and distracted Ash's attention and her own anguished thoughts by embarking on his favourite story of the secret valley, and of how they would find it someday and live happily ever after.