the world, towering so high they ate the sky itself. Step by step we had been drawn into their icy embrace, until finally on Wednesday we reached the town of Kalka, huddled at their very feet.
We found rooms for the night, and arranged to leave the donkey and our heavier belongings with the innkeeper while we took the train to Simla. The man swore that no one would so much as lay a finger on anything, and guaranteed it by taking only a small payment, leaving the larger part until we returned. Holmes then went off to make arrangements with an ironmonger and carpenter for some conversions to the cart itself, which negotiations took the better part of the afternoon. We had intended to leave Bindra with our possessions, but the boy, unimpressed by the town, would have none of it, and in the end, it was easier to allow him to come than to keep arguing. At least he did not insist on a space in our room that night, making do with a
The boy was waiting for us when we came down in the morning, no doubt fearful we would sneak out and leave him behind. Still, I could not quite understand why a trip into the mountains with us was preferable to a warm, quiet holiday in the stables. So when we were standing on the platform waiting for the train that would climb with us to Simla, I asked him.
“Why do you keep following us?”
“Because you are so very interesting,” he retorted. “And I learn many things—see?” That morning he had demanded that I give him the yellow ball, and he now stood, tossing the three spheres up and catching them in a smooth rhythm, talking nonchalantly all the while. Soon he would be better than I.
“You’re going to wear them out,” I said.
“When do I throw the mirror-balls? And when do I throw with you?”
“The mirror-balls when you can keep these in the air for two hundred paces without dropping them. And as a partner when you can keep five up.” It would be far more expertise than he’d need to hold up his end of a two- person team, but it condemned the urchin to solitary labours for a few more days while I accustomed myself to the idea of a three-person partnership. “Bindra, can you read and write?”
“Oah yes. I write my name,” he asserted, but he began to concentrate closely on the trio of coloured balls he was tossing and catching with smooth competence.
“Why are you not in school?”
“I told you, I learn things from you.”
“You should be in school.”
He did not bother to answer. I tried another tack. “How old are you, Bindra?”
“Maybe twenty?” But before I could react, he changed it to “Or eleven? I think more than eight, I can remember eight.”
“Where are you from? Where is your family?”
“I have no family.”
“You’re an orphan?”
“I have an auntie in Calcutta. I was with her, oh, two or three years I think, before she sold me to the horse-dealer.”
“
“Oah yes,” he said nonchalantly. “I was happy to go. His hand was lighter than hers.”
“There’s no slavery in India.”
The brief look he shot me was eloquent. It occurred to me that I’d just given myself away definitively: He’d long overlooked my chronic oddities of speech and habit, but only a foreigner could assert that slavery did not exist in a place where clearly it did. I tried to regain my standing.
“Truly, Bindra, under the white man’s law, slavery is not allowed. Your aunt could not sell you, although she told you she could.”
“Oah, I know that. But I am a child. If I stand up and say, ‘I am not to be sold,’ what then? I am turned out to live on the street and go hungry. I did not mind. And ho! It has meant that I found you and the magician. I eat good food and breathe clean air. And now I am going to ride a train.”
Every boy’s dream, in this country as in others: to run away and join the circus. “Yes, well. We must talk more about a school for you. Because one day you will be a man, and need the skills you can only learn in school. Unless you wish to be a farmer in a village,” I added, knowing his disdain for the man with the hoe.
“I shall be a magician,” he said, adding slyly, “when you have taught me to pick the coin out of the air.”
I laughed and reached out to clap him on the back, and stopped with my hand an inch from his shoulder. To most Hindus, I as a Moslem was horribly unclean, and making contact with them would be deeply offensive, requiring lengthy purification. “What is your caste, Bindra?”
“Oah, I have no caste.”
“No caste? What do you mean, all India has some kind of caste.”
“No. I am a Kee-ristian.” It took a moment for my ears to translate the word from Hindi. The boy was a Christian? Good Lord, I thought; were we dealing with another Kim here, an abandoned European? The boy went on, oblivious. “Some Kee-ristians came into our village when I was quite small—this was before I went to Calcutta to live with my auntie. They wore long dresses, the women always, the men on some days, and one such day they made a great ceremony under the trees and dipped water on our heads and told us that in Jesu there was neither Brahmin nor Kshatriya, no Sudra or foreigner. Some of the village were angry, and in the end they drove those Kee- ristian men away with sticks and paid the priests great sums to return them to their proper place. I had no money to pay the priests, but although I did not ask to have my caste taken from me, truly, I have found that to have no caste is altogether a good thing, for now I can eat what I like, sleep where I please. I will have to pay a priest to restore me when I wish to marry, of course—who but the lowest Sudra would take a casteless man into his house? But that is a long time away.”
I could only gaze at him, open-mouthed, and follow him into the little carriage when the train pulled in a few minutes later.
Holmes had told me that the narrow-gauge train would climb six thousand feet, in sixty miles, taking six hours or more to do so. We should need our heavy coats at the end of it. The sites of my chilblains tingled in anticipation, as I found that our third-class car was heated only by the body warmth of its occupants. Bindra seemed not to notice, so rapt was he with wonder at the passing scenery. Then the train entered a tunnel, and he scrambled away from the window in surprise.
“Have you ever been on a train before?” I asked him.
“Oah yes, many times,” he said, although his unconcealed excitement declared that he was lying through his teeth. Still, he had plenty of practise on that run to become used to passing hills and the darkness of tunnels: Holmes thought there were a hundred or more, although I would have believed it if he’d said a thousand.
Simla was the year-round headquarters of the British Indian Army and with it the Survey of India, both its open and its hidden faces. The government as a whole moved up here, bag and baggage, as soon as the temperature climbed in the plains. From March to November this small Olympus ruled all the land from the Red Sea to the hills of Burma—what Gandhi a few years earlier had scornfully called “government from the five hundredth floor”—and it bustled with life, bursting with political and social intrigue, ringing with the voices of English children and their
Hotel rooms for our kind, however, were plentiful, and we had our choice of locations, sizes, and services. We hiked into the native bazaar that lay below the town’s European centre, a tumbling hotch-potch of buildings that climbed onto one another’s backs and looked over one another’s shoulders, with the street entrance of one shop giving out onto a rooftop exit at the rear. We took a suite of rooms in a native-style hotel that did not look too poisonous, with a mat near the kitchen for Bindra. I indulged in my first true bath since the night of the hotel fire, eleven days before, although I had to renew my skin and hair dye at the end of it. And if the meal we were served was a bastard imitation of English-style mutton curry, the beds we were given were soft, the sheets thin with wear but fairly clean.
I settled under the thick cotton coverlets with a sigh of contentment. My hair was still damp, but I was warm, and the solid walls were a reassurance after canvas. Holmes shed his shoes and crawled into the shelter beside me.
