The Far Pavilions Read Online Free PDF Page A

neither read nor write and she was not clever, but she possessed courage, loyalty and a loving heart, and it never occurred to her to keep for herself the money Hilary had given her, or to disobey his orders. She had loved Hilary's son from the hour of his birth, and now Hilary had given the boy into her keeping and told her to take him back to his own people. There was no one else to care for Ash-Baba now but herself: he was her responsibility and she would not fail him.
    She had no idea who his own people were, or how to find them, but this did not worry her over-much, for she remembered the number of the house in Delhi cantonment where Ash-Baba's father had left the greater part of his luggage, and also the name of the Colonel-Sahib who lived there. She would take the child to Delhi, to Abuthnot Sahib and his Memsahib, who would arrange everything, and as they would certainly need an ayah for the boy she, Sita, need not be parted from him. Delhi lay far to the southward but she never doubted that they would reach it in safety, though because the money she had taken from the tin box was more than she had ever seen in her life, she became afraid of attracting undue attention on the road, and dressed Ash in the oldest garments he possessed, warning him that he must on no account talk to strangers.
    It was May before they came within sight of the city of the Moguls, for Ash was too heavy for her to carry except for short distances, and though he was a sturdy child he could not cover more than a few miles in one day. The weather too, though usually cool for that season of the year, was getting hotter, and the long, burning days made for slow travel. Ash had accepted their journey without question, for he had never known anything else and a constant change of scene was nothing new. The only stability his life had possessed had been the presence of the same people: Sita, Uncle Akbar and the ‘Burra-Sahib’; Daya Ram and Kartar Singh, Swab Gul, Tara Chand, Dunno and a score of others; and though all of them had now gone except Sita, she at least was still here – together with all India and the familiar Indian scene.
    They travelled slowly, buying their food in villages by the way and sleeping for preference in the open in order to avoid questions, and they were both very tired by the time the walls and domes and minarets of Delhi showed on the horizon, wraithlike in a dusty, golden evening. Sita had hoped to reach the city before dark, having planned to spend the night with a distant connection of Daya Ram's who kept a grain shop in a side street of the Chandi Chowk, where she could clean and press the English clothes that she had secreted in her bundle, and dress Ash-Baba correctly before taking him to the cantonment. But they had covered nearly six miles that day, and though the walls of Delhi seemed no great distance away, the sun went down while they were still a quarter of a mile short of the bridge of boats by which they must cross the Jumna.
    A further half mile separated them from the shop in the city, and soon it would be too dark to see. But they had sufficient food and drink for an evening meal, and as the child was too tired and too sleepy to go further, Sita led him a little way off the road to where a peepul tree leaned above a clutter of fallen masonry, and having fed him, spread a blanket among the tree roots and sang him to sleep with an old, old nursery-rhyme of the Punjab, ‘ Arré Ko-ko, Jarré Ko-ko ’, and that best-beloved of lullabies that says –
‘Nini baba, nini,
Muckan, roti, cheeni,
Roti muckan hogya ,
Hamara baba sogya! ’ *
    The night was warm and windless and full of stars, and from where she lay with her arm about the child's small body, Sita could see the lights of Delhi twinkling across the plain, a spangle of gold on the velvet darkness. Jackals howled among the scattered ruins of other and older Delhis, bats and harsh-voiced night birds swooped and called among the branches overhead,