Companions of Paradise by Thalassa Ali Page B

boy's shoulder?
    “I DO not like the boy,” Dittoo said firmly, as the English lady and her uncle rode toward the bungalow.
    He spoke with the conviction of a man experienced with foreigners. “Bibi,” he declared, “knows nothing of these people. Without knowing it, she has let a thieving little dancing boy into this house. And I can tell you something else. Now that he is here, he will be difficult to get rid of.”
    Having said his piece, he hawked and spat into the dust beneath the tree where he squatted with his two companions. Birds chattered above his head. A goat bleated in a neighbor's garden.
    Ghulam Ali grimaced. “I would have told her not to take him in,” he pointed out, “but she sent me inside to fetch Munshi Sahib.”
    “You should have said something, Yar Mohammad,” Dittoo added accusingly. “You had the opportunity, but you stood there and said nothing.”
    “It was for Munshi Sahib to decide if the boy should stay.” The tall groom got to his feet, and turned far-seeing eyes upon the other two men. “It was not for us to offer our opinions,” he added, as he started away to take the lady's horse.
    Dittoo clucked to himself as he hunched his way to Mariam Bibi's bedroom with a reviving cup of tea. Her munshi was a clever old gentleman, there was no doubt of that. But he was old, and old men made mistakes.
    This was certainly a serious error. How would they manage, with a boy of ill repute in the house?
    Nothing would upset Dittoo more than to see his unusual English lady hurt.
    He had served her through many adventures over the past three years, but the first of these, her miraculous rescue of Saboor, had been the greatest.
    He sighed, missing the child.
    He would never forget the moment on a winter night in Lahore, when he entered her tent and found her sitting on her bed, a badly treated native baby in her arms.
    In his twenty-five years of serving the British, Dittoo had never seen a European woman weep over one of his own people.
    When it dawned on him that the child was Saboor, Maharajah Ranjit Singh's heavily guarded child hostage, whom the Maharajah believed had magical powers, his embarrassment at the lady's previous, unpredictable behavior had turned to admiration.
    From that moment he had been convinced that she was a powerful sorceress, a modest one, to be sure, since she very rarely used her abilities, but a sorceress nonetheless.
    He sniffed as he scuffed his shoes off outside her door. As for Yar Mohammad and his calm magnanimity, he would feel the boy's presence more than anyone. For all that he was a groom by trade, Yar Mohammad had loved and served Munshi Sahib faithfully for two years, bringing his tea, washing his clothes, and seeing to his food.
    He, of all people, must have noticed how the boy had clung to Munshi Sahib from the moment he entered the gate.
    Dittoo would have been willing to bet that Yar Mohammad had just lost his position.

September 20, 1841
    A ll summer in Kabul had been a delight. The days had been pleasantly hot, the evenings balmy, and the air so clear that one could almost read by the light of the moon. The cantonment had reveled in the city's apricots, its cherries, its great, purple mulberries and milky nuts.
    Now that summer was ending, the days were cooler, and the markets were beginning to fill with fresh grapes and melons.
    Sir William Macnaghten had arranged an excursion to the tomb of Babur Shah, the cultivated founder of the Mughal Empire, whose memorial garden stood on the western slope of the Sher Darwaza south of the city. After leaving the cantonment, a large, variously mounted party of officers and ladies had followed the Kabul River upstream, past formal gardens and orchards, then between the Sher Darwaza and Asmai heights, where the river emerged from the hills onto the flat Kabul plain. There, the party had crossed the river near a little painted shrine with pennants waving, and followed an uphill dirt track to the garden. Wild roses