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Updated: June 24, 2025
Lalun hid her face in her hands for an instant and said something about Wali Dad that I could not catch. Then, to my extreme gratification, she threw her arms round my neck and murmured pretty things. I was in no haste to stop her; and Nasiban, being a handmaiden of tact, turned to the big jewel-chest that stands in the corner of the white room and rummaged among the contents.
Nor did it strike me that Wali Dad was the man who should have convoyed him across the City, or that Lalun's arms round my neck were put there to hide the money that Nasiban gave to Khem Singh, and that Lalun had used me and my white face as even a better safeguard than Wali Dad who proved himself so untrustworthy.
One small lamp in the white room showed Lalun and her maid leaning half out of the window, breathing heavily and evidently pulling at something that refused to come. 'Thou art late very late, gasped Lalun without turning her head. 'Help us now, O Fool, if thou hast not spent thy strength howling among the tazias. Pull! Nasiban and I can do no more! O Sahib, is it you?
'If I am of no value, I am unworthy of this honour, said Lalun. 'If I am of value, they are unworthy of Me. And that was a crooked sentence. In the long hot nights of latter April and May all the City seemed to assemble in Lalun's little white room to smoke and to talk.
He composed songs about her, and some of the songs are sung to this day in the City from the Street of the Mutton-Butchers to the Copper-Smiths' ward. One song, the prettiest of all, says that the beauty of Lalun was so great that it troubled the hearts of the British Government and caused them to lose their peace of mind.
So she took her sitar and sat in the windowseat and sang a song of old days that had been sung by a girl of her profession in an armed camp on the eve of a great battle the day before the Fords of the Jumna ran red and Sivaji fled fifty miles to Delhi with a Toorkh stallion at his horse's tail and another Lalun on his saddle-bow.
But consider the gorgeous simplicity of it all! Then she let them down by a cord through the window; for her house was upon the town-wall, and she dwelt upon the wall. Joshua ii. 15. Lalun is a member of the most ancient profession in the world. Lilith was her very-great-grandmamma, and that was before the days of Eve as every one knows.
The Muhammadan sat on the floor and glared. 'One service more, Sahib, since thou hast come so opportunely, said Lalun. 'Wilt thou' it is very nice to be thou-ed by Lalun 'take this old man across the City the troops are everywhere, and they might hurt him for he is old to the Kumharsen Gate? There I think he may find a carriage to take him to his house.
A petty Nawab had given Lalun the horror, and she kept it for politeness' sake. The floor of the room was of polished chunam, white as curds. A latticed window of carved wood was set in one wall; there was a profusion of squabby pluffy cushions and fat carpets everywhere, and Lalun's silver huqa, studded with turquoises, had a special little carpet all to its shining self.
He pulled at the huqa and mourned, half feelingly, half in earnest, for the shattered hopes of his youth. Wali Dad was always mourning over something or other the country of which he despaired, or the creed in which he had lost faith, or the life of the English which he could by no means understand. Lalun never mourned.
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