Free Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye

forbidden it, many widows had preferred to become suttees and burn themselves alive on their husband's funeral pyres rather than face the bitterness of long years of servitude and humiliation. But a stranger in a strange town could adopt any identity she chose, and who was to know that Sita was a widow – or care? She could pretend that her husband had taken work in the south, or run off and left her. What did it matter? She could hold up her head as the mother of a son, and wear gay colours and glass bangles and her few modest pieces of jewellery. And when she found work she would be working for the boy and herself, and not as an unpaid slave for Daya Ram's family.
    Several times during the months that followed their escape from Delhi, Sita thought she had discovered the right place: the haven where they could end their wanderings and find work and safety. But each time there had been something that drove her on: the arrival of an armed band of sepoys from some regiment that had risen against its officers, and who were roaming the country in search of English fugitives; the sight of a family of starving
feringhis
, who had been given shelter by a kindly villager, being dragged out of hiding and put to death by a jeering mob; a passing traveller flaunting a murdered officer's uniform, or half a dozen sowars galloping through the crops…
    ‘Aren't we ever going to stop
anywhere?
’ inquired Ash wistfully.
    June gave place to July, and July to August. And now the crop-lands were behind them and there was only jungle ahead. But Sita and Ash were both used to jungles. The silence and the hot, wet thickets held fewer terrors for them than the villages, and the jungle provided them with edible roots and berries, water and fuel, and shade from the heat as well as shelter from the rain.
    Once, walking down a game-track through high grass, they had come face to face with a tiger. But the great beast was full fed and peaceably disposed, and after exchanging a long, surprised stare with the intruders, it had turned aside without haste and vanished into the grass. Sita had not moved for five long minutes, until the scolding chatter of a jungle-cock some thirty yards to their right told her the direction in which the tiger had gone; and then she had turned back and made a detour that took them away from the grass. It was astonishing that they had not lost themselves in those trackless miles of trees and thickets, elephant grass, bamboos, rocks and creepers. But here Sita's unerring sense of direction helped them, and as they were heading for no particular goal, but merely moving hopefully northward, it did not matter very much which path they chose.
    By the end of August they had won free of the jungle and were in open country once more, and with September the monsoon slackened. The sun was once again cruelly hot and clouds of mosquitoes rose each evening from the flooded
jheels
and brimming ponds and ditches. But at the edge of the plain and beyond the foothills the high ridges of the Himalayas rose clear and blue above the heat-haze, and the night air held a hint of coolness. Here, in the scattered hamlets, they heard no rumours of strife and insurrection, for now there were few footpaths and no roads, and the land was sparsely populated; the villages consisting of no more than a huddle of huts and a few acres of cultivation, surrounded by miles of rock-strewn grazing ground that was bounded on the one side by jungles and on the other by foothills.
    Always, on clear days, they could see the snow peaks, and the sight of them was a constant reminder to Sita that time was running out and that the winter was coming, and that it was necessary for them to find a roof to live under before the cold weather set in. But there was little chance of employment for herself or a hopeful future for Ashok in such country as this, and though she was tired and footsore and desperately weary of travelling she was not tempted to linger in it. They had