kabaja,*(*Son of an owl.) and I will carry thine eyes and genitals on this point as kebabs.' Then I made him lick the blood off the blade, spat in his face, and respectfully asked the havildar what I should do next. He, being a Mussulman, was all for me, and said, grinning, that I should make a fair recruit; he told my daffadar, Kudrat Ali, about the incident, and presently the word went round the big, airy barrack-room that Makarram Khan was a genuine saddle-and-lance man, from up yonder, who would strike first and inquire after — doubtless a Border lifter, and a feud-carrier, but a man who knew how to treat Hindoo insolence, and therefore to be properly respected.
So there I was — Colonel Harry Paget Flashman, late of the 11th Hussars, 17th Lancers and the Staff, former aide to the Commander-in-Chief, and now acting-sowar and rear file in the skirmishing squadron, 3rd Cavalry, Bengal Army, and if you think it was a mad-brained train of circumstance that had taken me there — well, so did I. But once I had got over the unreality of it all, and stopped imagining that everyone was going to see through my disguise, I settled in comfortably enough.
It was an eery feeling, though, at first, to squat on my charpai*(*Cot.) against the wall, with my puggaree off, combing my hair or oiling my light harness, and look round that room at the brown, half-naked figures, laughing and chattering — of all the things that soldiers talk about, women, and officers, and barrack gossip, and women, and rations, and women — but in a foreign tongue which, although I spoke it perfectly and even with a genuine frontier accent, was still not my own. While I'd been by myself, as I say, I'd even been thinking in Pushtu, but here I had to hold on tight and remember what I was meant to be — for one thing, I wasn't used to being addressed in familiar terms by native soldiers, much less ordered about by an officious naik*(*Corporal.) who'd normally have leaped to attention if I'd so much as looked in his direction. When the man who bunked next to me, Pir Ali, a jolly rascal of a Baluch, tapped my shoulder in suggesting that we might visit the bazaar that first evening, I absolutely stared at him and just managed to bite back that 'Damn your impudence' that sprang to my tongue.
It wasn't easy, for a while; quite apart from remembering obeisances at the prescribed times, and making a show at cooking my own dinner at the choola,*(*Cooking-place, camp oven of clay.) there were a thousand tiny details to beware of — I must remember not to cross my legs when sitting, or blow my nose like a European, or say 'Mmh?' if someone said something I couldn't catch, or use the wrong hand, or clear my throat in the discreet British fashion, or do any of the things that would have looked damned odd in an Afghan frontiersman.15
Of course I made mistakes — once or twice I was just plain ignorant of things that I ought to have known, like how to chew a majoon*(*Green sweetmeat containing bhang) when Pir Ali offered me one (you have to spit into your hand from time to time, or you'll end up poisoned), or how to cut a sheep-tail for curry, or even how to sharpen my knife in the approved fashion. When I blundered, and anyone noticed, I found the best way was to stare them down and growl sullenly.
But more often than not my danger lay in betraying knowledge which Makarram Khan simply wouldn't have had. For example, when Kudrat Ali was giving us sword exercise I found myself once falling into the 'rest' position of a German schlager-fencer (not that anyone in India was likely to recognise that), and again, day-dreaming about fagging days at Rugby while cleaning my boots one evening, I found myself humming 'Widdicombe Fair' — 'fortunately under my breath. My worst blunder, though, was when I was walking near a spot where the British officers were playing cricket, and the ball came skipping towards me — without so much. as thinking I snapped it up, and was looking to throw down the wicket when I remembered, and threw it back as clumsily as I could. Once or two of them stared, though, and I heard someone say that big nigger was a deuced smart field. That rattled me, and I trod even more carefully than before.
My best plan, I soon discovered, was to do and say as little as possible, and act the surly, reserved hillman who walked by himself, and whom it was safest not to disturb. The fact that I was by way of being a protege of the woordy-major's, and a Hasanzai (and therefore supposedly eccentric), led to my being treated with a certain deference; my imposing size and formidable looks did the rest, and I was left pretty much alone. Once or twice I walked out with Pir Ali, to lounge in the Old Market and ogle the bints, or dally with them in the boutique doorways, but he found my grunts a poor return for his own cheery prattle, and abandoned me to my own devices.
It wasn't, as you can guess, the liveliest life for me at first — but I only had to think of the alternative to resign myself to it for the present. It was easy enough soldiering, and I quickly won golden opinions from my naik and jemadar* for the speed and intelligence with which I appeared to learn my duties. At first it was a novelty, drilling, working, eating, and sleeping with thirty Indian troopers — rather like being on the other side of the bars of a monkey zoo — but when you're closed into a world whose four corners are the barrack-room, the choola, the stables, and the maidan, it can become maddening to have to endure the society of an inferior and foreign race with whom you've no more in common than if they were Russian moujiks or Irish bog-trotters. What makes it ten times worse is the outcast feeling that comes of knowing that within a mile or two your own kind are enjoying all the home comforts, damn 'em — drinking *Under-officer barra pegs, smoking decent cigars, flirting and ramming with white women, and eating ices for dessert. (I was no longer so enamoured of mutton pilau in ghee,*(*Native butter, cooking-fat.) you gather.) Within a fortnight I'd have given anything to join an English conversation again, instead of listening to Pir Ali giggling about how he'd bullocked the headman's wife on his last leave, or the endless details of Sita Gopal's uncle's law-suit, or Ram Mangal's reviling of the havildar, or Gobinda Dal's whining about how he and his brothers, being soldiers, had lost much of the petty local influence they'd formerly enjoyed in their Oudh village, now that the Sirkar had taken over.
When it got too bad I would loaf up to the Mall, and gape at the mem-sahibs with their big hats and parasols, driving by, and watch the officers cantering past, flicking their crops as I clumped my big boots and saluted, or squat near the church to listen to them singing 'Greenland's Icy Mountains' of a Sunday evening. Dammit, I missed my own folk then — far worse than if they'd been a hundred miles away. I missed Lakshmibai, too — odd, ain't it, but I think what riled me most was the knowledge that if she'd seen me as I now was — well, she wouldn't even have noticed me. However, it had to be stuck out — I just had to think of Ignatieff- so I would trudge back to barracks and lie glowering while the sowars chattered. It had this value — I learned more about Indian soldiers in three weeks than I'd have done in a lifetime's ordinary service.
You'll think I'm being clever afterwards, but I soon realised that all wasn't as well with them as I'd have thought at first sight. They were Northern Muslims, mostly, with a sprinkling of high-caste Oudh Hindoos — the practice of separating the races in different companies or troops hadn't come in then. Good soldiers, too; the 3rd had distinguished itself in the last Sikh War, and a few had frontier service. But they weren't happy — smart as you'd wish on parade, but in the evening they would sit about and croak like hell — as first I thought it was just the usual military sore-headedness, but it wasn't.
At first all I heard was vague allusions, which I didn't inquire about for fear of betraying a suspicious ignorance — they talked a deal about one of the padres in the garrison, Reynolds sahib, and how Colonel Carmik- al-Ismeet (that was the 3rd's commander, Carmichael-Smith) ought to keep him off the post, and there was a fairly general repeated croak about polluted flour, and the Enlistment Act, but I didn't pay much heed until one night, I remember, an Oudh sowar came back from the bazaar in a tremendous taking. I don't even remember his name, but what had happened was that he'd been taking part in a wrestling match with some local worthy, and before he'd got his shirt back on afterwards, some British troopers from the Dragoon Guards who were there at the time had playfully snapped the sacred cord which he wore over his shoulder next the skin — as his kind of Hindoos did.
'Banchuts!*(*A highly offensive term.) Scum!' He was actually weeping with rage. 'It is defiled — I am unclean!' And for all that his mates tried to cheer him up, saying he could get a new one, blessed by a holy man, he went on raving — they take these things very seriously, you know, like Jews and Muslims with pork. If it seems foolish to you, you may compare it with how you'd feel if a nigger pissed in the font at your own church.
'I shall go to the Colonel sahib!' says he finally, and one of the Hindoos, Gobinda Dal, sneered:
'Why should he care — the man who will defile our atta*(*Flour.) will not rebuke an English soldier for this!'
'What's all this about the atta?' says I to Pir Ali, and he shrugged.
'The Hindoos say that the sahibs are grinding cow bones into the sepoys' flour to break their caste. For me, they can break any Hindoo's stupid caste and welcome.' 'Why should they do that?' says I; and Sita Gopal, who overheard, spat and says:
'Where have you lived, Hasanzai? The Sirkar will break every man's caste — aye, and what passes for caste even among you Muslims: there are pig bones in the atta, too, in case you didn't know it. Naik Shere Afzul in the
