Flight of Pidgeons and other stories: by Ruskin Bond

Flight of Pigeons is about the time of first war of independence of India - naturally termed mutiny by British, which is as false as it gets since the British rule was far from established or even ubiquitous, at that time.

This was when East India company had established offices through India, brought in soldiers supposedly to protect its own property with local rulers' permissions, and then gone about playing machiavellian political games and browbeating and dominating various rulers, of which many were far from happy or submissive.

When the war erupted with soldiers working for the British refusing to use the cartridges - the cartridges needed to be used in mouth before loading and had grease from animals that various religions in India forbade their followers from being used this way - various rulers and so forth joined hands and fought. British were able to recruit poor mainly from southern region of Madras, especially those of low castes, for little money to fight the wars in north for them and thus win a war where they had a superiority of weapons.

Subsequently Queen Victoria and the British government took over from East India company and proceeded to follow policies that would help them stay longer, of which the chief weapon was the usual British "divide and rule". A second one was to badmouth and malign the local culture, achievements, knowledge, and so forth at every turn, even falsely - just to break spirit of the ruled, a typical tactic of those who would enslave others.
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This story, from which the book takes its name, uses a flight of pigeons as an analogy for the British during the 1857 war when they might fly away - as eventually they did inf act less than a century later - having eaten their fill and having no bond of heart or otherwise to the land itself or people therein.

The story deals with various angles of the people and their relationship - there is the honest Hindu trader attempting to help the women of the slain British man's family, which consists of his half Indian wife (her mother was from family of Nawab of Rampur) with her mother and her daughter. The daughter Ruth has attracted due to her sheer beauty a Pathan who would rather marry her (needless to say, having converted her first) than give up the women to those only too happy to slaughter them. The various complications in this, and their resolution and the war raging without, is the story.

The characters are sketched well with the wife of the pathan unhappy about a new young girl - just about sixteen or so - that her husband is crazy about, the mother of the girl attempting to keep the marriage question at bay and unwilling to give up her three quarters British daughter to an Indian husband, the grandmother of the girl counseling her daughter to think it over since he is a good guy and the grandmother sees no reduction of value in such a marriage - (until then cross marriages were common, mostly with local women being married to British males who could not after all persuade their own countrywomen to come over to settle so far away, and thus grew a whole new community of Anglo Indians who were held at mid level by British subsequently, lower than themselves and higher than Indians) - and then there are those fighting the war that have contempt for this pathan raging with love for a foreigner, a girl with a British father.

The girl's mother cleverly tied up the question with the victory of the war, and for a while it looked as if she would marry him after all, but then the tide turned and they were able to get away and join the British.

This happens to be a true story, and realising this gives one goosebumps - because the fact is Ruth lived to be old enough, lived in UK, and never married. She never forgot the pathan with his ardent but distant courting.