It was one of Lalji's good qualities – he had many, and given the right circumstances they might well have outweighed the bad ones – that he was unfailingly kind to his little half-sister. The child was frequently to be found in his apartments, for being as yet far too young to be confined to the Zenana Quarters, she came and went as she pleased. She was a thin little creature who appeared to be half-starved and was dressed with a shabbiness that would have been considered disgraceful by many a peasant family – a state of affairs that was directly traceable to the enmity of the
Nautch
-girl, who saw no reason why money or deference should be wasted on the daughter of her dead rival.
Janoo-Bai could not be sure that the child might not develop some of the beauty and charm that had once so captivated the Rajah, and she had no intention of letting him become either fond or proud of his daughter if she could help it; to which end she saw to it that the baby was banished to a distant wing of the palace and cared for by a handful of slovenly unpaid servants who pocketed the meagre household funds for their own use.
The Rajah seldom inquired after his daughter, and in time almost forgot that he had one. Janoo-Bai had assured him that the child was well cared for, and had added some disparaging comments on its lack of good looks, saying that it would make the arranging of a good marriage a difficult matter. ‘Such a small, sour-looking little thing,’ sighed Janoo-Bai with feigned sympathy, and she had nicknamed the child ‘Kairi’ – that being a small, unripe mango – and laughed with delight when the name was adopted by the palace.
‘Kairi-Bai’ preferred her half-brother's apartments to her own; they were brighter and better furnished, and besides he sometimes gave her sweets and let her play with his monkeys or the cockatoo and the tame gazelle. His servants too were less impatient with her than her own women, and she had taken a strong fancy to the youngest of them, Ashok, who had found her sobbing quietly in a corner of her brother's garden one day, having been bitten by one of the monkeys, whose tail she had pulled. Ash had taken her to Sita to be soothed and petted, and Sita had bandaged the wound, and having given her a piece of sugar-cane, told her the story of Rama, whose beautiful wife had been stolen by the Demon King of Lanka and rescued with the help of Hanuman, the Monkey God: ‘So you see, you must never pull a monkey's tail, because it not only hurts his feelings, but Hanuman would not like it. And now we will pick some marigolds and make a little wreath -see I will show you how – for you to take to his shrine to show him you are sorry. My son Ashok will take you there.’
The story and the construction of the wreath had successfully distracted the child's attention from her hurts, and she had gone off happily with Ash, holding confidingly to his hand, to make her apologies to Hanuman at the shrine near the elephant lines, where a plaster figure of the Monkey God danced in the gloom. After this she was often to be found in Sita's quarters, though it was not Sita but Ash to whom she attached herself, trotting about after him like some small persistent pariah puppy who has chosen its owner and cannot be snubbed or driven away. In fact, Ash did not try very hard to do either, for Sita told him that he must be especially kind to the forlorn little girl, not because she was a princess, or because she was motherless and neglected, but because she had been born on a day that was doubly auspicious for him: the anniversary of his own birth and the day of their arrival in Gulkote.
It was this more than anything else that made him feel in some way responsible for Kairi, and he resigned himself to being the object of her devotion and was the only person who did not address her by her nickname. He either called her ‘Juli’ (which was her own version of her given name, for she was still unable to get her tongue round all three syllables) or on rare occasions
‘Larla’
, which means darling, and in general treated her with the tolerant affection he would have accorded to an importunate kitten, protecting her to the best of his ability from the teasing or insolence of the palace servants.
The Yuveraj's attendants had retaliated by jeering at him for being a nursemaid and calling him ‘Ayah-ji’, until Lalji unexpectedly came to his assistance and turned on them, saying angrily that they would please to remember that the Anjuli-Bai was his sister. After that they had accepted the situation, and in time became so used to it that it was doubtful if anyone noticed it any more; the baby was, in any case, of no importance and would probably not live to grow up, being a scrawny little thing, unlikely to survive the normal ailments of childhood, while as for the boy Ashok, he was of no importance to anyone; not even, it would seem, to the Yuveraj.
But in this last they were wrong. Lalji still trusted him (though he would have found it hard to explain why) and he had no intention of letting him go. The fate of Tuku and the violence that followed it were never referred to again, but Ash soon discovered that Lalji's threat to prevent his leaving the palace had not been an idle one. There was only one gate into the palace, the
Badshai Darwaza
: and after that day he could no longer go through it alone but only, on occasions, in the company of selected servants or officials, who saw to it that he did not stray off on his own or fail to return with them.
‘There is an order,’ said the sentries blandly, and turned him back. It was the same the next day and every day, and when Ash questioned Lalji, the boy had countered by saying: ‘Why should you wish to leave? Are you not comfortable here? If there is anything you lack you have only to tell Ram Dass, and he will send out for it. There is no need for you to go to the bazaars.’
‘But I only wish to see my friends,’ protested Ash.
‘Am I not your friend?’ asked the Yuveraj.
There was no answer to that, and Ash never knew who had given the order that he was not to be allowed to leave: the Rajah, or Lalji himself (who said he had not, but was not to be trusted), or perhaps Janoo-Bai, for reasons of her own? But whoever it was, the order was never rescinded, and he was always aware of it. He was a prisoner in the fortress, though he was allowed to go more or less where he chose inside the walls, and as the Hawa Mahal covered a very large area, he could hardly be considered as closely confined. Nor was he friendless, for he had made two good friends in the palace that year, and found at least one ally among the members of Lalji's suite.
Nevertheless, he felt the loss of his liberty keenly, for from the walls and the half-ruined towers and wooden pavilions that crowned them, he could see the world laid out before him like a coloured map, beckoning towards freedom and the far horizons. To the south-west lay the city, with beyond it the wide stretch of the plateau – its far rim sloping steeply down to the river and the rich land of the Punjab, so that sometimes, on clear days, one could even see the plains. But he seldom faced that way, for northward lay the foothills, and behind them, spanning the horizon from east to west, were the true hills and the vast, serrated massif of the Dur Khaima, beautiful and mysterious, robed in forests of rhododendron and deodar and crowned with snow.
Ash did not know that he had been born within sight of those snows, or that he had spent his earliest years among the high Himalayas, falling asleep to the sight of them rose-dyed by the sunset or silver under the moon, and waking to see them turn from apricot and amber to dazzling white in the full blaze of the morning. They were part of his subconscious mind, because once, long ago, he had known them by heart as other children know the frieze painted on a nursery wall. But looking at them now, he felt sure that somewhere in the folds of those mountains lay the valley that Sita used to speak of at bedtime: their own valley. That safe hidden place that they would one day reach by long marches over hill-roads and through passes where the wind shrieked between black rocks and green glaciers, and the cold glare of snowfields blinded the eyes.
Sita seldom spoke of their valley now; she was too busy during the daytime, and Ash slept in the Yuveraj's quarters at night. But the old bedtime story of his childhood still retained its grip on his imagination, and by now he had forgotten – or perhaps he had never realized – that it was not a real place. It was real to him, and morning and evening, whenever he could steal away from his duties – or, more often, during the long, idle mid-day hours when all the palace dozed and the sun lay hot on the battlements – he would climb up to a little covered balcony that jutted out from the wall of the
Mor Minar
– the ‘Peacock Tower’ – and lying on the warm stone gaze out towards the mountains and think of it. And make plans.
The existence of that balcony was a secret shared only by Kairi, and its discovery had been a happy accident, for it could not be seen from inside the fortress, being hidden from view by the curves of the
Mor Minar
. The
Mor Minar
had been part of the original fort, a guard tower and a look-out, facing the foothills. But both roof and stairway had fallen long ago, and the entrance become blocked by rubble. The balcony was of a later date and had probably been built for the pleasure of some long-dead Rani, for it was no more than a folly, an elegant little pavilion of marble and red sandstone, pierced and carved into the semblance of frozen lace and topped by a hump-backed Hindu dome.
Fragments of wood still adhered to the rusty iron hinges that had once held a door, but the fragile-seeming screens still stood, except where there had once been a window cut in the marble tracery, from which the Rani and her ladies could look out towards the mountains. Here, on the front of the balcony, between the slender arches, there was now only open space and fragments of broken carving, below which the wall dropped for forty feet to meet the scrub and the steep rock faces, that in turn plunged downwards for more than four times that distance before merging into the plateau. There were goat tracks through the scrub, but few humans cared to climb so far; and even had they done so they might well have failed to notice the pavilion, for its outlines were lost against the weather-worn bulk of the
Mor Minar
.
Ash and Kairi, pursuing a truant marmoset, had clambered over the rubble that choked the ruined tower, and looking up the topless funnel had spied the fugitive half way up it. There must once have been rooms in the tower, but although no part of the floors remained, there were still traces of the stairway that had led up to them: broken stumps of stone, some barely large enough to provide foothold for the marmoset. But where a monkey can go an active child can often follow, and Ash had had plenty of practice on the roof-tops of the city, and possessed an excellent head for heights. Kairi too could climb like a squirrel, and the broken staircase had proved easy enough to negotiate once they had removed the untidy bundles of twigs and egg shells deposited there by generations of owls and jackdaws. They had scrambled up it, and following the marmoset through a doorway, found themselves in a carved and canopied balcony that hung dizzily over empty space, as secure and inaccessible as a swallow's nest.
Ash had been delighted with their find. Here at last was a hidden place to which he could retreat in time of trouble, and from where he could look out across the world and dream of the future – and be alone. The claustrophobic atmosphere of the palace, with its incessant whispers of treachery and intrigue, its cabals and plots and place-seeking, was banished by the clean air that crooned through the marble tracery and kept the little pavilion swept and garnished; and best of all there was no one to dispute his possession of it, for apart from the monkeys and owls, the hill crows and the little yellow-crested bul-buls, no one could have set foot in it for fifty years and by now, in all likelihood, its very existence was forgotten.
Given the choice, Ash would have traded the balcony for permission to visit the city whenever he chose, and had he been given it would not have run away – for Sita's sake, if for nothing else. But deprived of that liberty, it was doubly satisfying to have a safe hiding place where he could escape from the quarrels and the gossip, the tantrums and the talk. The humble quarters that he shared with Sita did not fill this need because any servant sent to find him always came there first, so it was preferable to have a safer place of retreat, one from which he could not be haled forth to undertake some trivial errand or answer an idle question that had been forgotten by the time he reached the Presence. The discovery of the Queen's balcony made his life in the Hawa Mahal more bearable. And the possession of two such friends as Koda Dad Khan, the
Mir Akhor
– the Master of Horse – and Koda Dad's youngest son, Zarin, almost reconciled him to staying there for ever…
Koda Dad was a Pathan who as a youth had left his native Border hills to wander among the northern fringes of the Punjab in search of his fortune. He had come by chance to Gulkote, where his skill at hawking had attracted the attention of the young Rajah, who had newly succeeded to the throne on the death of his father only two months previously. That had been more than thirty years ago, and except for occasional visits to his own Border-country, Koda Dad had never returned home. He had remained in Gulkote in the service of the Rajah, and as
Mir Akhor
was now a man of considerable reputation in the state. There was nothing that he did not know about horses, and it was said of him that he could speak their language and that even the wickedest and most intractable became docile when he spoke to it. He could shoot as well as he could ride, and as his knowledge of hawks and falconry equalled his knowledge of horses, the Rajah himself – no mean authority on both – asked his advice and invariably took it. After his first visit home he had returned with a wife who in due course presented him with three sons, and by now Koda Dad was the proud possessor of several grandsons and would occasionally talk to Ash of these paragons. ‘They are myself when I was young; or so says my mother, who sees them often; our home being in the Yusafzai country, which is not far from Hoti Mardan
*
where my son Awal Shah serves with his Regiment – as does my second son Afzal, also.’