He had not to pay for her, because it was arranged that his sister was to marry her brother, and in cases where an exchange like this is made nothing further is required.
They had two sons, ’Alam Gul and Abdul Majid. The father intended that the elder should be educated, and one day he hoped would become a great man, perhaps Tahsildar (meaning Revenue Officer) of the British Government, so he was going to give him the best education he could afford; while Abdul Majid was to look after the lands and become a farmer, for which it is not supposed that any education is necessary.
Pir Badshah was very orthodox and punctilious in all the observances of his religion, so the two boys were not to learn anything else until they had sat at the feet of the village Mullah, and learnt to read the Quran.
The mosque was a little building on the hillside. It was built of stones cemented together with mud, and in the centre was a little niche towards the setting sun, where the Mullah, with his face towards Mecca, led the congregation in their prayers. There was a wooden verandah, the corners of which were ornamented with the horns of the markhor, or mountain goat. Beyond this was the open court, in which prayers were said when the weather was fine, and either in this verandah or the courtyard ’Alam Gul and his brother used to sit at the feet of the old Mullah, reciting verses from the Quran in a drawling monotone, and swaying their bodies backwards and forwards in the way that all Easterns learn to do from the cradle when reciting or singing.
When they had finished the Quran and learnt the prayers and other essentials of the Muhammadan religion, ’Alam Gul was sent to the village school, while Abdul Majid began to make himself useful on the farm.
He used to go out with his father’s buffaloes to take them to pasture, and sometimes he used to take his brother out for a ride on one of these ungainly animals. Then, when the harvest was ripening, a bed was fastened up at the top of four high poles, and he had to sit all day on this to protect the crops from the birds. For this purpose cords are fastened across the field up to the bed, and oil-cans or other pieces of tin are fastened to them here and there, so that as Abdul Majid had all the ends of the cords in his hands, he could make a din in any part of the field where he wished to frighten away the birds, and sometimes was able to take half a dozen home for the evening meal.
’Alam Gul, on the other hand, was being initiated into the mysteries of the Hindustani language and of arithmetic.
The school was a little mud building in the centre of the village, and the schoolmaster was a Muhammadan from the Panjab, who found himself rather uncomfortable in the midst of these frontier Pathans, whose language seemed to him so uncouth and their habits so barbarous. His meagre salary of ten rupees (13s. 4d.) a month was somewhat augmented by his holding the additional post of village postmaster; but it had this disadvantage—that when one of the villagers came in to buy an envelope, and get the postmaster to address it, as probably he did not know how to write himself, teaching had to be dropped for a season: for it must be remembered that for a Pathan villager to send off a letter is quite an event, and he may well afford to spend a quarter of an hour or so, and give the postmaster a few annas extra to get it properly addressed and despatched to his satisfaction. Meantime, ’Alam Gul and his companions would take the opportunity of drawing figures on the sand of the floor, or of playing with a tame bullfinch or a quail, which they were fond of bringing into the school.
Boy and Girl grazing Buffaloes