Read Absolute Friends for Free Online Page A

with mold.
    Few possessions survive so many moves. The Major's tiger skins, his military chests and treasured ivory carvings are all posted missing. Even his late wife's memory has been stolen, her diaries, letters and a box of precious family jewelry: that thieving bastard of a stationmaster at Lahore, the Major will have him flogged, and every one of his rascally _chaprassis__ with him! He makes the vow one night in his cups after Mundy has driven him over the edge with his persistent damn-fool questioning. "Her _grave,__ boy? I'll tell you where her bloody grave is! Gone! Smashed to bits by rampaging tribesmen! Not a stone left standing! All we've got of her is _here!__" And he drives his tiny fist against his breast, and pours himself another _chota peg.__ "That woman had class you wouldn't believe, boy. I can see her every time I look at you. Anglo-Irish nobility. Vast estates, razed to the ground in the Troubles. First the Irish, now the bloody Dervishes. Entire clan dead or scattered to the winds."
    They come to rest in the garrison hill town of Murree. While the Major vegetates in a mud-brick barrack hut smoking Craven A for his throat's sake and growling over pay imprests, sick lists and leave rosters, the boy Mundy is consigned to the care of a very fat Madrasi ayah who came north with independence, and has no name but Ayah, and recites rhymes with him in English and Punjabi, and surreptitiously teaches him holy sayings from the Koran, and tells him of a god called Allah who loves justice and all the peoples of the world and their prophets, even Christians and Hindus, but most of all, she says, he loves children. It is only most unwillingly, after much pressing on Mundy's part, that she admits to possessing no husband, children, parents, sisters or brothers left alive. "They are all dead now, Edward. They are with Allah, every one. It is all you need to know. Go to sleep."
    Murdered in the great massacres that came of the Partition, she admits under interrogation. Murdered by Hindus. Murdered at railway stations, in mosques and marketplaces.
    "How did you stay alive, Ayah?"
    "It was the will of God. You are my blessing. Go to sleep now."
    Come evening, to a chorus of goats, jackals, bugles and the insistent twanging of Punjabi drums, the Major will also contemplate mortality, under a neem tree at the river's edge, puffing at cheroots that he calls Burmas and cuts into lengths with a tin penknife. Intermittently he refreshes himself from a pewter hip flask while his overgrown son splashes with his native peers and, acting out the never-ending tales of adult slaughter all around them, plays Hindus versus Muslims and takes turns at being dead. Forty years on, Mundy has only to close his eyes to feel the magic cooling of the air that comes with sundown, and smell the scents that leap out of the sudden dusk, or watch the dawn rise over foothills glistening green from the monsoon, or hear the catcalls of his playmates give way to the muezzin and the nocturnal bellows of his father berating that damned boy of mine who killed his mother--_Well, didn't you, boy, didn't you? Come here__ juldi _when I order you, boy!__ But the boy declines, _juldi__ or otherwise, preferring to let Ayah clutch him to her flank until the drink has done its work.
    Now and then, the boy must endure a birthday, and from the moment it appears on his horizon he succumbs to a variety of illnesses: stomach cramps, feverish headaches, Delhi belly, the onset of malaria, or fears that he has been bitten by a poisonous bat. But the day still comes round, the kitchen wallahs prepare a fearsome curry and make a great cake with _Many Happy Returns to Edward__ on it, but no other children are invited, the shutters are closed, the dining table is laid for three, candles are lit and the servants stand silently round the wall while the Major in full mess kit and decorations plays the same Irish ballads on the gramophone again and again, and Mundy wonders how much