1 a vizier's daughter - Hazara.net

105
A VIZIER’S DAUGHTER – A TALE OF THE HAZARA WAR
indifference; but, as a matter of fact, she wished the bird had not taken
it into its head to fly over them just then. “Look at that lovely creature,
Shereen. What a colour! Did you ever see anything so beautiful?”
It was a yellow oriole, a “dochter-e-sofie,” as the Afghans call it.
“Ah, that must mean brightness after trouble, surely,” Shereen went on.
“I don’t mind a little trouble first, if things will only end up well. I’m
tired of being a war prisoner already, aren’t you, Gul Begum? And I’m
so hungr y, I should like some bread and sour curd, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, I shouldn’t refuse it,” Gul Begum answered, smiling. “It will
take us some time to ‘eat ourselves satisfied,’ after all the starving we
have been having. Let us ask that woman. She doesn’t look bad and
she’s got something in her lap, she looks as if she were preparing food
of some sort.”
The woman to whom they alluded ceased looking at the girls when she
found she had been observed, and kept her eyes fixed on her work. “We
arrived here last night,” Gul Begum said, addressing her. “And though
we did have some supper before we went to bed, we are very hungr y
now.”
The woman said nothing, but handed them some young vegetables she
was paring and cleaning. They were sweet juicy, and the girls were
glad to have anything to eat, they were so hungr y.
“Has every one gone out to work?” Shereen asked after a pause. The
woman only shook her head, and went quietly on with her work.
“I wonder if she is a stranger, and does not understand us,” Shereen
remarked again.
Gul Begum was very silent; she had a sense as of something uncanny in
presence of this strange, silent woman, and instinctively she looked
first at the walls then at the door the y had tried and had found locked.
“What time do you expect the others back?” Shereen asked again. “Will
they be away all day?” The woman shook her head and shrugged her
shoulders at the same time, much as a Frenchwoman might do who
wished to say that she neither knew nor cared.
“Why don’t you speak? Are you not allowed to, or don’t you
understand?” the girl went on. “We don’t want to do you any harm, but
we are strangers, and we want to know something of the household we
have come to.”
For answer the woman looked round furtively towards the house, and
then round the garden; then, seeing no one else about, she touched
Shereen’s hand, beckoning to her to look into her mouth which she