Where Earth Meets Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

lessons, and as she grew confident, she found it exhilarating. After the first week, though, her leg muscles were so strained that she could hardly walk. When she limped into the nursery one morning with a woebegone expression, Srimala put her hand over her mouth and broke into irrepressible giggles.
    ‘Horse riding is not good for ladies,’ she snorted, her eyes dancing with laughter. ‘Not riding legs over, like a man!’
    Lily sat down, wincing. ‘I’m only following orders.’ She squeaked with pain as she tried to move a leg again and then started laughing. ‘Oh dear! I like it really. I just hope I can get used to it. I don’t want to feel like this forever!’
    Srimala just giggled more, shaking her head, but then said, mischievously, ‘Arsalan says you are very good pupil.’ And she realized the servants had been enjoying the progress of her lessons and that she was a bit of a curiosity in the house. ‘And that you are very pretty lady.’
    Soon, she began to ride with Susan Fairford, Arsalan beside her, while Susan Fairford rode with Cosmo perched on the front of her saddle.
    On these excursions, Lily discovered the beauty of the Indian dawn. She would get up in the dark and go outside into the smell of dew on the ground. In the smoky-grey dawn light the trees were like ghosts which became washed in the pink rays of the rising sun. The air filled with smells of flowers and smoke from dung fires and the special aroma of the Indian earth. And she discovered a sense of freedom and space in the immensity of the Indian landscape which lifted her heart into a state of great joy such as she had never experienced before.
    Each day they rode for an hour or more, along the road out of the cantonment and into the countryside, all of them silent for long periods, awed by the scene about them. Lily began to get a sense of Ambala as a tiny dot, like a speck of dust in the immensity of India. Her view of it widened, seeing the vivid green fields round the town, the rising sun glinting on streams and paddies and village tanks, the terracotta temples close to the river and the the wayside shrines and circular haystacks at the edges of the fields. She saw that Ambala was simply one of a myriad of settlements on the great Punjab plain stretching north to the mountains, to the snowy Himalaya whose meltwater poured down to become the great Ganges on its way to the Bay of Bengal.
    It was the first time she had been out, anywhere, into wide countryside, not hemmed in by streets and buildings, and it made her see things afresh. The cantonment was an inward-looking world with its own bazaar, and rituals of church and flag-waving military parades and parties, striving to keep as separate as possible from the ‘native’ town: from India itself. This state of affairs was in fact maintained by a stream of Indian workers whose names Lily was gradually beginning to learn. She liked learning these new words, often from Srimala, who laughed unrestrainedly at the way she pronounced them.
    ‘The man with the donkey – he is the dhobi , the laundryman,’ she instructed. Lily soon came to recognize this man, who peered out through round, pebbly spectacles and carried a flat iron full of heated coals. ‘And the mali – he is doing the garden.’
    The cantonment life seemed to be all-consuming, as if there was nothing else. Yet now, riding through the soft air of these beautiful, roseate dawns, she saw with wonder, with infatuation, that there was so much more; there was all this vast land, and the great arc of the sky, stretching almost unimaginably further than she could see.
    During these morning rides, she began to get to know Susan Fairford differently.
    Over the weeks Lily had watched the Fairfords and found them confusing. Charles Fairford, when he was at home, behaved like a model husband, ever courteous and charming to his wife, and attentive to his children during his brief times with them. The regiment had a number of animals