The pagoda at Pillaji

I have hesitated over how to write this story, and for how long it should be. It is the part of the journey I am most often asked about and least inclined to describe, because the person at the centre of it is not me and was not, at the time, in a position to speak for herself. She has since read what follows and corrected it in three places. I have accepted all three corrections.

01 The procession

We left the ruined bungalow at six on the morning of Wednesday the 23rd of October and went on through the forest towards Allahabad. The guide meant to reach the railway again that evening. At about four in the afternoon, in thick woodland not far from a village called Pillaji, he stopped Kiouni, listened, and told us very quietly to get down and keep silent.

A procession was coming along the path ahead of us. We drew back among the trees with the elephant and watched it pass. There were priests at the head of it, and musicians with drums and pipes, and a great number of people walking behind. Among them, borne on a litter, was the body of an old man richly dressed. Behind the litter, held up on either side by others, walked a young woman.

She was perhaps twenty, and dressed in a costly manner, with a good deal of gold about her. She walked as though she did not know where she was. Her eyes were open but did not seem to see. I am not a judge of such things, but I knew a person in that condition was not walking anywhere of her own will.

When the procession had gone by, the guide told us what we had seen. The dead man was a rajah of that region, a man of great age. The young woman was his widow. She was to be burned with his body the next morning at dawn, at a temple a few miles off. The practice, he said, had been forbidden by law in the parts of India under British government for more than forty years, and was abhorred by most people of every faith. But this was an independent state, the rajah's relatives were powerful, and there were people there who still held to it, and who meant to see it done.

He knew her story, as it happened; it was spoken of in the district. Her name was Aouda. She was the daughter of a wealthy Parsi merchant of Bombay and had been educated in that city, in English as well as in her own languages, and was by every account a woman of uncommon intelligence. Her parents had died and she had been married, against her wishes and without her consent, to the old rajah. She had been a wife three months. On his death she had understood at once what his family intended for her. She had tried to escape. She had been taken back. She had been kept since then under a drug, the smoke of hemp and opium, so that she would not resist again.

02 Twelve hours

I took out my watch and said that I had, by my reckoning, twelve hours in hand, and that I proposed to spend them on this. Sir Francis looked at me for a moment and then said that he was with me. The guide, who had more to lose than any of us, since he was a Parsi like Mrs Aouda and lived in that country and would have to go on living there, said at once that he was with me too, and asked only that we understand the risk: if we were caught, it would not be a fine or a reprimand. I said I understood it. Passepartout did not say anything. He did not need to. I could see his face.

Twelve hours in hand is not a fortune. It is, however, enough to be decent with.

I want to be exact here, because I have since been given more credit than I deserve. I did not decide this because I am brave. I decided it because I could see no arithmetic by which the wager was worth more than a woman's life, and I have always believed that a sum which comes out wrong should not be paid.

03 The night

The pagoda where she was being held stood some distance from Pillaji. We came up to it through the wood at about six o'clock and lay in the trees to watch. The pyre had been built in an open space nearby. The young woman had been taken inside, and the door was watched by armed guards with torches.

Our first plan was to wait until the guards dozed and go in by the door. By midnight it was clear they would not doze.

Our second plan was to get in from behind. The guide and I crept round the pagoda in the dark and found the back wall made of brick and timber, not stone. With our knives, very slowly and without a sound, we began to cut a hole in it. By two in the morning we had loosened several bricks. Then, at the back too, we saw torches. Someone had heard something, or had simply thought of the back wall, and men were now posted there as well. We withdrew into the trees with nothing for our trouble but sore hands.

I had decided by then that when they brought her out at dawn I would go forward myself and try to take her from them in the open, and that if it failed it would fail on my account alone. Sir Francis argued against it, very low and very earnestly. I listened to all of it and did not change my mind.

It was at some point during this conversation, I now know, that Passepartout left us. Neither of us saw him go.

04 Dawn

At first light the doors of the pagoda opened. The priests came out singing, and behind them two men brought Mrs Aouda, still deep in the drug, and carried her to the pyre and laid her beside her husband's body. The crowd pressed in. A torch was put to the wood, which had been soaked in oil, and it took at once. I stood up. Sir Francis and the guide took hold of me, one on each arm.

And then a cry went up from the crowd, and they fell back, and some of them fell to the ground and covered their faces. A figure had risen up on the pyre, through the smoke, and was climbing down from it with Mrs Aouda in its arms. In the half-light, through the smoke, it was impossible to say who it was. The people nearest believed it was the old rajah himself, risen from the dead. They had reason to think so, for the figure was dressed in his clothes.

It came straight towards us through the parted crowd, quite unhurried, and when it was close it said, in a voice I knew very well: Let us go, sir.

It was Passepartout. In the darkness, while we argued, he had slipped through the crowd, crept up on to the pyre unseen, and taken the place of the dead man under his robes, and had lain there quite still until the moment came. I do not know of a braver thing done by anyone in my acquaintance. I have told him so once, and he became so embarrassed that I shall not tell him again, but I set it down here.

We were on Kiouni and into the forest before the crowd understood what had happened. They understood it soon enough. There was shouting, and a few shots, one of which went through Passepartout's hat, which seems to be the fate of his hats in India. But the guide knew the paths, and Kiouni went faster than I had believed an elephant could go, and within a quarter of an hour the noise was behind us and then gone.

05 Mrs Aouda

She did not wake properly until we were near the railway at Allahabad, and when she did she was frightened, and then confused, and then, as Sir Francis explained to her in English what had happened, quite composed. She thanked each of us in turn. To the guide she spoke at some length in their own language, and he bowed very low. To Passepartout she said in excellent English that she would never be able to repay him, and he turned scarlet to the ears.

To me she put a question, and it was not one I had expected. She asked what I intended to do with her. Not in a frightened way: she wished to know my plans so that she could judge them. I told her that Sir Francis believed she would not be safe anywhere in India now, because the rajah's family would look for her. She said that she believed so too. She had a relation, a merchant of standing, in Hong Kong. I said that Hong Kong was on my route and that she was welcome to travel with us as far as that, if it suited her. She considered this, gravely, for some moments, and said that it did.

I should record that I offered her this as a convenience to both of us. She has since told me that she accepted it as one. I believe neither of us was entirely truthful.

Balance: the twelve hours are spent, and I do not regret one of them. Twenty-four hours spent in all since Kholby. One day in hand.