Free The Day of the Scorpion by Paul Scott Page B

a younger listener, but also of being undisturbed by any doubts about the meaning and value of that life and the opinions I’d formed while leading it; although that suggests knowingness, and when she said, ‘What a lot you know’ she made it sound like a state of grace, one that she envied me in the mistaken belief that I was in it, while she was not and didn’t understand how, things being as she finds them, one ever achieved it. It would be interesting to meet the rest of the family, who from their general appearance and conduct I would describe as typically army if I hadn’t learned that people are never typical. But what I mean is that one could probably plot a graph of typical experience, attitude, behaviour and expectations of an army family in India and find it a rough but not inaccurate guide to that girl’s background and the surrounding circumstances of her daily life. I was touched by the flowers – and by the factthat they have not lasted and will be dead by the time I leave and go down to Pindi.
*
    Picture her then, an old lady dressed in a fawn tweed jacket and skirt, a high collar to a cream silk blouse that is buttoned with mother-of-pearl. No longer agile she scarcely welcomes the luxury of the embroidered mattress in the shikara which she finds it difficult to get down to and stretch out on; difficult but not yet impossible for someone trained to the custom of not inviting sympathy, or causing amusement, with evidence of weakness or infirmity; so that now, reclining safely, propped against the back rest, her topee-covered head turned at an angle of dignified farewell, one hand raised and the other seeking and finding some kind of old woman’s reassurance from the pleats and buttons just below her throat, there is an air about her of faded Edwardian elegance, Victorian even, for Victorian women were great travellers when they bothered to travel at all; and the early morning mist swathed in the mountains and above the lake, the movement of the boat, the pointed paddles dipping and sweeping, the totem figure of Suleiman, the huddled permissive attitude of the Kashmiri girl nursing the child, all combine to make, as it were, a perpetual willow-pattern of the transient English experience of outlandish cultures.

II
    If English people in India could be said to live in (in the sense of belonging to) any particular town, the Laytons lived in Ranpur and Pankot. Ranpur was the permament cool weather station of Colonel Layton’s regiment, the 1st Pankot Rifles. Their hot weather station was in the hills of Pankot itself, a place to which the provincial government also moved during the summer. It was from the hills and valleys around Pankot that the regiment recruited its men: sturdy agriculturalists who had a martial tradition going back (it was said) to pre-Moghul times. Somewhere round about thesixteenth century the hill people turned their backs on the old hill gods, embraced Islam and intermarried with their country’s Moghul conquerors. So far as the British were concerned they ranked as Muslims, although it might have been more accurate to describe them as polytheists. In the hill villages images of old local Hindu gods were still to be found. To these the women liked to make offerings – at sowing and harvest-times, when they were in love, when they were pregnant, after the birth of a son or the death of a husband. The men held aloof from such things, unless they were going a journey, when they made sure that a female relation left a bowl of curds and a chaplet of flowers at the local wayside shrine the day before.
    The only mosque in the entire hill area was in Pankot itself. Many of the boys who made the trek from their village to Pankot to offer themselves as soldiers at the recruiting depot were unable to distinguish between the mosque, the Kali temple, and the Protestant and Catholic churches. They knew the names of Allah, and of their tribal gods, they accepted that Allah was all-knowing,