Historical romance: In 1906, an Englishwoman is infatuated by the handsome Indian groom of her horse

Norman Evans woke up at the crack of dawn each day with the muezzin’s call to prayer. He was not a Muslim, not even a particularly devout Christian. Four years ago, when the Indian Public Works Department posted him to its survey and canal division in the small town of Jaunpur, somewhere in the eastern neck of the vast North Indian plains, he found the deeply sonorous voice of the crier atop the minaret of the Atala Mosque more to his taste than the shrill trilling of an alarm clock. In Jaunpur, it had become a personal ritual to wake up to the dawn cry that floated down from the minaret and cascaded through the sleeping settlement to rouse the faithful to prayer.

The trill of the alarm clock was a sound he was averse to. It took him back to the school siren of his boyhood in Northern Yorkshire, a poor miner’s son struggling hard to better his lot. The foreign sounds of the call to prayer, rousing and majestic, reminded him each morning that he was in some place far away and exotic. At long last, he was a nobleman in his own domain.

Gobind, the bearer, his eyes still...

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