Didn’t I tell you?’ hissed Sparrow, his cold face pressed to Bublu’s ear. ‘You heard it, didn’t you! Is it them again? Are they coming to kill us?’ His voice almost broke out loud with panic.
Bublu clamped his hand over the youngest boy’s mouth. ‘Shut up, won’t you!’ He whispered. ‘All that’s over now.’ Even so, he was fully alert and sat up swiftly in the darkness, his mind already assessing the escape routes. He and the boys had gone over them many times, working out all the possible strategies. They had explored every part of the deserted palace; all the rooms, chambers, passageways, stairways; the different levels of terraces and even the wild saplings and creepers, down which they could shin in an emergency.
He listened, not breathing. In the past, the speed of his decision had been the difference between life and death.
They heard it again. It sounded like air being puffed out through nostrils; it was like the soft snort of a beast.
He hadn’t realised that Sparrow had clasped him round the waist, terrified that, should there be an order to flee, he would be left behind. Bublu struggled to his feet with Sparrow still clinging to him and shifted the child to his hip. ‘Hush, kid! Take it easy, it’s just an animal. Let’s go and look.’
‘What if it’s Muslims?’ stammered Sparrow.
‘Arreh!’ breathed Bublu, his sound smiling in the darkness. He was a Muslim.
Although it was pitch black, Bublu’s senses were so finely tuned that he knew in which direction was the doorway out onto the great verandah. Very rapidly, his eyes adjusted and he was able to differentiate between the inner darkness of the room in which they were sleeping, and the paler black of the starry night outside.
Sparrow was shaking uncontrollably with cold and fear as Bublu tiptoed to the entrance. A low half-moon came into view, casting a soft glow over the marble terrace. He stepped over the threshold and at first saw nothing but the great vast canopy of trees and undergrowth, which had grown out of control and turned the palace garden into a wilderness. Then there was a slight scrape of hoof on stone. The animal stood motionless, right there at the top of the verandah steps. At first he thought it was one of the palace statues, gleaming as white as the mist which hung over the lake beyond. But then the creature snorted again, and pawed the ground.
‘It’s a horse!’ exclaimed Bublu incredulously. ‘What the heck is a horse doing round here!’ Before he could utter another word, the animal leapt off the verandah and galloped away into the night.
The horse was seen again just before dawn of the next day.
It was Tuesday, 13 January 1948.
It materialised out of the frosty darkness, its hooves echoing strangely on the long white road. It was a pale horse; white as jasmine; white as the fresh snows on the mountain peaks to the north; white as the road beneath its feet.
Although the bridle had been fitted to a bit in its mouth, it had no saddle, and the reins hung loose. It looked to all intents and purposes like a bridegroom’s horse, for garlands of freshly threaded flowers hung round its neck, and a fringe of miniature pearls swung across its brow.
Sleepy farmers, startled out of their huddled blankets, saw it as they drove their bullock carts one behind the other, on their long trek to market. They called out to each other in the chilly darkness, standing up on the wooden yoke which held their beasts in harness.
‘Did you see that?’ they called.
‘Was it a horse?’
‘Whose is it? Where does it come from?’
One of them leapt from his cart and tried to grab it, but the horse reared in the air, shook him off, and galloped away.
The teacher glimpsed it as he cycled to school. It was mirrored in the dark, stagnant water of a ditch by the side of the road, its head stooped low to drink.
Old Ram Singh who, after his house had been razed to the ground, had made his home in the abandoned shell of All Souls’ Church, saw it grazing among the scarred and desecrated tombstones in the graveyard.
All that day the horse was seen, here and there, trotting along the dykes, meandering among the fields and nuzzling at fruit, which hung from the lower boughs in the guava groves. Sometimes it drifted tantalisingly close to the old men smoking their hookahs outside their homes, or the women filling pitchers with water from the well.
Later, after sundown, in the yellow paraffin light of the tea houses in the town, the gossip was all about the horse. They argued about where it had come from, to whom it belonged and what they should do about it. Some confessed they had tried already to catch it, but without success.
Bublu, who came into town every day to hang about, kept his ears open. This must be the same horse he and Sparrow had seen in the night. If the horse were a runaway and if he caught it, he would have as much right to it as anyone else. He wandered up to Dilip Singh, the tea-shop owner. ‘Here, let me hand out the tea while you fill the kettle again,’ he offered ingratiatingly.
‘Arreh! Everyone comes to me for a soft touch,’ Dilip Singh grumbled, but let Bublu hand out the cups anyway. The old-timers, those who had survived the troubles, knew the boy as Nazakhat Khan, son of the Muslim tailor, but they pretended not to, for his own safety.
‘The horse must have come down out of the mountains,’ said a farmer, as Bublu put a cup of tea before him. They all glanced to the northern horizon, where even in the darkness, the distant peaks of the Himalayas gleamed, everlastingly white.
‘Maybe it belongs to a Kashmiri trader,’ suggested a voice.
‘I say it’s a bridal horse that’s run off,’ declared another. ‘Didn’t you see how decorated it was?’
‘I haven’t heard of any weddings taking place today, have you?’ said the proprietor.
‘No! They say this month will not be auspicious,’ old Sharma, the sadhu, warned with a shake of his head. ‘There won’t be many marriages in the next few weeks.’
Old Sharma, the holy man, was another who spent his days hanging round the tea houses, waiting for the farmers to come with their tales and chatter. One of them was always sure to give him a free cup of tea, and a samosa too, if he was lucky. He shook his head like a grizzled prophet. ‘It’s an omen,’ he warned. ‘You mark my words. There has been too much killing. The gods must come now and take their retribution.’
‘Hey, Sharma, don’t bring talk like that into my tea house. You’ve had your cup, you old scrounger, now get out!’ yelled Dilip Singh. He grabbed the sadhu by the scruff of the neck and pushed him out on to the road.
The farmers looked at each other and shrugged. ‘Dilip Singh’s conscience is getting him ruffled!’ they smirked, though they all knew that no one’s hands were clean.
‘Hey, Babuji,’ cried Bublu, running over to help the old sadhu to his feet. ‘Do you mean it? Is the horse a bad omen?’
‘Ugh! Good, bad! How should I know? An omen is an omen.’
The dusty wireless, connected by a long twisted flex into the light socket and draped in wilting marigolds like a neglected goddess, crackled out news from New Delhi.
‘Shush!’
