By the end of August they had won free of the jungle and were in open country once more, and with September the monsoon slackened. The sun was once again cruelly hot and clouds of mosquitoes rose each evening from the flooded
jheels
and brimming ponds and ditches. But at the edge of the plain and beyond the foothills the high ridges of the Himalayas rose clear and blue above the heat-haze, and the night air held a hint of coolness. Here, in the scattered hamlets, they heard no rumours of strife and insurrection, for now there were few footpaths and no roads, and the land was sparsely populated; the villages consisting of no more than a huddle of huts and a few acres of cultivation, surrounded by miles of rock-strewn grazing ground that was bounded on the one side by jungles and on the other by foothills.
Always, on clear days, they could see the snow peaks, and the sight of them was a constant reminder to Sita that time was running out and that the winter was coming, and that it was necessary for them to find a roof to live under before the cold weather set in. But there was little chance of employment for herself or a hopeful future for Ashok in such country as this, and though she was tired and footsore and desperately weary of travelling she was not tempted to linger in it. They had come a long way since the April morning when they had turned their backs on Hilary's silent camp and set out for Delhi, and they were both sorely in need of rest. And then, in October, when the leaves were turning gold, they came to Gulkote, and Sita realized that here at last was the spot she had been looking for. A place where they could hide and be safe.
The independent State of Gulkote had been too small, too difficult of access and above all too poor to interest the Governor-General and the officials of the East India Company. And as its standing army consisted of less than a hundred soldiers – the majority elderly grey-beards equipped with tulwars and rusty jezails – and its ruler appeared to be popular with his subjects and displayed no disposition to be hostile, the Company had left him in peace.
The capital city, from which the state took its name, stood some five thousand feet above sea-level, at the apex of a great triangular plateau among the foothills. It had once been a fortified town and it was still surrounded by a massive wall that enclosed a rabbit warren of houses, a single main street that bisected these from the Lahori Gate on the south to the
Lal Dawaza
, the ‘Red Gate’, on the north, three temples, a mosque and a maze of narrow alleyways. The whole was overlooked by the Rajah's rambling fortress-palace, the Hawa Mahal – the ‘Palace of the Winds’ that crowned a towering outcrop of rock some thousand yards beyond the city wall.
The ruling house traced its descent from a Rajput chieftain who had come north in the reign of Sikander Lodi, and stayed to carve out a kingdom for himself and his followers. The kingdom had shrunk with the centuries, until by the time the Punjab fell to the Sikhs under Ranjit Singh, it had been reduced to no more than a handful of villages in a territory that a man on horse-back could traverse in a single day. That it had survived at all was probably due to the fact that its present frontiers were bounded on one side by an unbridged river, on another by a dense track of forest and on the third by a waste of rock-strewn country scored by deep ravines, whose ruler was related to the Rajah; while at its back the wrinkled, wooded foothills swept upwards to meet the white peaks of the Dur Khaima and the great snow-capped range that protects Gulkote from the north. It would have been difficult to move an army against such a strategically placed spot, and as there had never been a sufficiently urgent reason to do so, it had escaped the attentions of the Moguls, Mahrattas, Sikhs and the East India Company, and lived serenely remote from the changing world of the nineteenth century.
The ramshackle town had been in a festive mood on the day that Ash and Sita reached it, there having been a distribution of largess from the palace in the form of food and sweetmeats for the poor, in celebration of the birth of a child to the Senior Rani. It had been a modest celebration, for the child was a daughter, but the citizens were disposed to use it as an excuse for a holiday: feasting, making merry and decorating their houses with garlands and paper flags. Little boys threw
patarkars
– home-made squibs – among the feet of the passers-by in the crowded bazaars, and after dark the thin fire of rockets soared into the night sky to blossom above the rooftops where the women-folk clustered like flocks of chattering birds.
To Sita and Ash, accustomed through long months to silence and solitude – or at best the humble society of small villages – the colour and noise of the jostling, lighthearted crowds were exhilarating beyond words, and they ate of the Rajah's bounty and admired the fireworks, and found lodgings for themselves in the house of a fruit-seller in an alley off the Chandi Bazaar.
‘Can we stay here?’ asked Ash sleepily, surfeited with sweetmeats and excitement. ‘I like it here.’
‘I too, little son. Yes, we shall stay here. I will find work and we shall stay and be happy. Yet I wish…’ Sita stopped on a sigh and did not finish the sentence. Her conscience troubled her, because she had not obeyed the Burra-Sahib's order to return his son to his own people. But she did not know what else she could have done. Perhaps one day, when her boy was a man… But for the present they were both weary of wandering, and here they would at least be among the mountains – and safe. An hour or so in the town had convinced her of that last, for in all the talk in the bazaars and the gossip of the loitering, chattering crowds, there had been no word of the troubles that were shaking India, or any mention of mutineers or Sahib-log.
Gulkote was only interested in its own affairs and the latest scandals of the palace. It paid little or no attention to the doings of the world beyond its borders, and at the moment its main topic of conversation (apart from the perennial one of crops and taxes) was the eclipse of the Senior Rani by the concubine, Janoo, a
Nautch
-girl (dancer) from Kashmir, who had acquired such a hold over the jaded monarch that she had recently succeeded in persuading him to marry her.
Janoo-Bai was suspected of practising magic and the black arts. How else could a common dancing-girl have raised herself to the rank of Rani, and ousted from favour the mother of the baby princess, who had reigned undisputed for at least three years? She was known to be both beautiful and ruthless, and the sex of the new baby at the palace was taken as further proof of her malignant powers. ‘She is a witch,’ said Gulkote. ‘Assuredly she is a witch. They at the palace say that it was by her orders that food and sweetmeats were distributed to the hungry to mark the birth of this child, for she rejoices that it is not a son, and would have her rival know it. Now if she herself were to bear a son…!’
Sita listened to the talk and was reassured by it; there was nothing here that spelt danger to Ashok, son of Daya Ram, syce, who (so she informed the fruit-seller's wife) had run off with a shameless gipsy woman, leaving her to fend for herself and the child.
Her story had not been questioned, and later she had found work in a shop in Khanna Lal's Gully behind the temple of Ganesh, helping to fashion the gaudy paper and tinsel flowers that are used in garlands and for decorations at weddings and festivals. The work was ill paid, but it sufficed for their needs; and as she had always been quick with her fingers, it was not uncongenial. She was also able to earn a little extra by weaving baskets for the fruit-seller and occasionally helping in the shop.
As soon as they had settled in, Sita dug a hole in the mud floor of their little room and buried the money that Hilary had given her, stamping down the earth and smoothing cow-dung over the whole surface so that no one could tell where it had been disturbed. There remained only the small packet of letters and papers in its oiled-silk wrapping, and this she would have liked to burn. For though she could not read them, she was aware that they must constitute proof of Ash's parentage, and both fear and jealousy urged her to destroy them. If they were found they might lead to his being killed, as the children of the Sahib-log had been killed at Delhi and Jhansi and Cawnpore and a score of other cities, and her own life might well be forfeit for having tried to save him. Even if he escaped that penalty, they still proved that he was not her son; and by now she could not bear the thought of this. Yet she could not bring herself to destroy them, for they too were a sacred trust: the ‘Burra-Sahib’ had given them into her hand, and were she to burn them his ghost or his God might be angry with her and take revenge for the act. It was better to keep them; but they must never be seen by any other eyes, and if the white ants destroyed them it would not be her fault.
Sita scraped a shallow cavity low down in the wall in the darkest corner of the room, and thrusting the packet into it, covered its hiding place, as she had covered the money, with clay and cow-dung; and having done so, felt that a crushing weight had been lifted off her shoulders and that Ashok was now truly hers.
The boy's grey eyes and ruddy complexion caused no comment in Gulkote, for many of the Rajah's subjects had come from Kashmir, Kulu and the Hindu Kush, and Sita herself was a hill-woman. Ash fraternized with their sons and grandsons and was soon indistinguishable, except to the eye of love, from a hundred other bad little bazaar boys who shouted, frolicked and fought in the streets of Gulkote; and Sita was content. She still believed what the sepoys had told her: that all the English were dead and the rule of the Company broken for ever. Delhi was far away, and beyond the borders of Gulkote lay the Punjab, which had remained relatively quiet; and though an occasional rumour of troubles would drift through the bazaars, these were always vague, garbled and months out of date, and mostly concerned with disasters to the British…
None told of the army that had been hurriedly assembled at Ambala. Of the long march of the Guides – five hundred and eighty miles in twenty-two days of high summer from Mardan to Delhi – to take part in the siege of that city, of the death of Nicholson, or the surrender of the last Mogul and the slaying of his sons by William Hodson of Hodson's Horse; or that Lucknow was still besieged, and that the great rising that had begun with the revolt of the 3rd Cavalry in Meerut was by no means over.
The
Shaitan-ke-Hawa
– the ‘Devil's Wind’ – was still blowing strongly through India, but while thousands died, here in sheltered Gulkote the days were slow and peaceful.
Ash had been five years old that October, and it was not until the autumn of the following year of 1858 that Sita learned, through a wandering
sadhu
,
*
something of what had been happening in the outside world. Delhi and Lucknow re-captured, the Nana Sahib a fugitive, and the valiant Rani of Jhansi killed in battle, dressed as a man and fighting to the last. The Company's rule had been broken, but the
feringhis
, said the
sadhu
, were back in power, stronger than ever and engaged in brutal reprisals against those who had fought them in the great rising. And though the Company was no more, its rule had been replaced by that of the white Rani – Victoria – and all Hind was now a possession of the British Crown, with a British Viceroy and British troops governing the land.
Sita had tried to persuade herself that the man was mistaken, or lying. For if his story was true, she would have to take Ashok back to his people, which by now was a prospect she could no longer face. It
could
not be true… or it might not be. She would wait, and do nothing until she was sure. There was no need to do anything yet…
She had waited all winter, and in spring there had been news that confirmed everything the
sadhu
had said; but still Sita took no action. Ashok was hers, and she would not, could not, give him up. There had been a time when she could have done so, but that was before she had begun to look on him as her son by right, and see him accepted as such. Besides, it was not as though she were depriving a mother or father of their right: he had lost both, and if anyone had a right to him, surely it was herself? Had she not loved him and cared for him from his birth? Taken him from his mother's womb and fed him at her own breast? He knew no other mother and believed himself to be her child, and she would be robbing no one –
no one.
He was no longer Ash-Baba, but her son, Ashok, and she would burn the papers that lay hidden in the wall and say nothing, and no one would ever know.
So they remained in Gulkote and were happy. But Sita did not burn Hilary's papers, for when it came to the point her fear of what the ‘Burra-Sahib's’ ghost might do was greater than her fear of what the papers could prove.
Once again there had been feasting and fireworks in the city. But this time it had been in celebration of the birth of a boy to Janoo-Bai the Rani – some-time dancing-girl, and now virtual ruler of Gulkote, in that she ruled the Rajah to the point where her smallest wish must be gratified.
The Rajah's subjects had been commanded to celebrate and they had done so, though without much enthusiasm; the
Nautch
-girl was not popular with the citizens, and the prospect of a prince of her breeding was displeasing to them. Not that he was the heir, for the Rajah's first wife, who had died in child-birth, had left her lord a son: Lalji, ‘the beloved’ – the eight-year-old Yuveraj, apple of his father's eye and pride of all Gulkote. But life was uncertain in India and who could say if the boy would live to be a man? His mother, in fifteen years of marriage, had given birth to no less than nine children, all of whom, with the exception of Lalji (and the last – a still-born daughter), had died in infancy. She herself had not survived that last confinement, and her husband had soon married again, taking as his wife the daughter of a foreign mercenary, a young and lovely girl who became known in Gulkote as the ‘
Feringhi
-Rani' – the foreign queen.