No Man's Land Read Online Free PDF Page B

kitchen, while a Jodhpur Lancer was gesticulating with his arms and his head as he explained something to a woman who – what was he doing?
    Lalu stopped to listen.
    The Sappers were using foul abuse. It seemed that the woman had walked into their kitchen.
    â€˜Silvoup silvap… ’ the woman said coming up to him.
    Lalu just moved his head and smiled weakly.
    The woman gabbled away in French.
    Lalu stood dumb with humility, and was going to salute, and go away for fear an officer might see him talking to a Mem Sahib, while the Jodhpur Lancer, equally at a loss, said: ‘I don’t know what the sisterin-law wants.’
    The French woman laughed at her own discomfiture, and then said in English ‘picture’, pointing at Lalu, and the Jodhpur Lancer, trying to explain with her head, her eyes, her nose, her fingers, what she wanted.
    But as if the very presence of a Mem Sahib, usually so remote and unapproachable in India, had paralysed them, they stood unresponsive.
    Lalu looked about furtively and scanned the cavalry horses on the right, the shouting cooks and water carriers on the left and the Baluchis and the Gurkhas who were sunning themselves ahead of him. Then he looked back towards the officers’ quarters, and pointed towards them, thinking that the best thing was to send her to the Subedar Major Sahib’s tent. But his gaze met Subah’s, who came running along abreast of a French officer on horseback.
    Lalu and the Jodhpur Lancer sprang to attention and saluted.
    The officer talked in his own tongue to the woman, and then, laughing, said to Subah in English:
    â€˜The Miss wants to draw the pictures of these men.’
    â€˜Draw my picture, Mem Sahib,’ Subah said coming forward.
    The French woman smiled at Subah, said something to the officer, and made a gesture to the Jodhpur Lancer, Lalu and Subah, to stand together.
    But Subah thrust himself forward and thumped his chest to indicate that he wanted a portrait of himself all alone.
    By this time, driven by curiosity, other sepoys were gathering round.
    Whereupon the French officer said in Hindustani: ‘Mem Sahib would like a group.’
    â€˜Fall into the group and let all of them be in the picture,’ Lalu advised Subah.
    â€˜ Han , we also want to be in it,’ said the other sepoys crowding round the woman, several rows deep, at the first touch of the pencil.
    Then they all stood away, twisting their moustachios into shape and stiffening to attention as if they were going to be photographed.
    The officer and the woman laughed as they talked for a moment, then the officer edged aside and the woman began to draw the picture.
    â€˜That was the interpreter sahib,’ Subah said with great importance.
    The French woman sketched the group. But there were any number of subjects before her now, for other sepoys from the nearby tents had gathered round. They would come and look at the woman as though she were a strange animal, because she was so homely, so informal and so unlike the white women who came to Hindustan and never condescended to greet a native. And they posed before her, proud to be sketched, their honest faces suffused with embarrassed laughter, even as they stood, stiff and motionless, their hands glued to their sides.
    The woman could draw the pictures of the sitting, standing, talking, moving sepoys with a few deft strokes even before they knew they had been sketched.
    And then there was much comedy, the sepoys laughing at the caricatures of each other and exclaiming wildly as they came to life on paper, happy as children to see the sketches, and insisting on signing their name in their own language on the portraits.
    When the woman had made various sketches Subah began to press for a portrait of himself. But he could not communicate his wish to her in the little French which he had learnt at school. As he came up to her with a daring familiarity, Jemadar Suchet Singh, a tall, imposing officer of