But the scene this morning was very beautiful, with these red garments spread out to dry upon the steps, between the blue of the water and the blue of the sky, against a background of white cupolas and minarets and bright evergreen trees. I stood there for some time in the sunlight, idly contemplating, while the men came up out of the water, their thin brown bodies flashing and sparkling, the wet loincloth shaping their thighs. But what poor physique all of them had.
The women were abundantly adorned with cheap jewelry —countless colored glass bangles and rough silver necklaces and anklets; for the poorer people invest their small savings in this way, by converting them into silver ornaments for their womenfolk. They knelt with their red cloths in their hands, beating them with stones. I saw a woman sitting with her child between her knees, catching the lice in its hair and placing them dead on the child’s palm, outstretched to receive them. I saw a boy take a handful of dirt, and descending with it to the water’s edge, use it to cleanse his face and neck. I saw an old man standing immersed to his waist, facing the sun, making passes across his chest, and lifting handfuls of the water to spill it out again like glittering beads between his fingers. Babaji Rao, whom I questioned later, told me he was offering oblations to the sun, the scattered water representing rice, and the passes across his body meant that he was painting himself with sandal.
Similar oblations are also poured to one’s ancestors by the head of any Hindoo house. Apparently, when a person dies the house is considered unclean, and none but the inhabitants will enter it for a period of fourteen days. For seven days after death the male relations of the deceased will not shave; but on the seventh day they shave head and face, and on the fourteenth day, the house being purified by such ritual, a feast is given.
Oblations of water, sesame, or rice are poured, and afterwards white bands will be worn round the arm in sign of mourning, and during a particular fortnight every year the head of the house will not shave. If the deceased had been aged and spent, Babaji Rao reluctantly admitted, the feast might be rather an enjoyable affair. His own father is living, and is therefore responsible for carrying out these duties; but when he dies Babaji Rao himself will be obliged to undertake them.
His Highness and I went in to Rajgarh this afternoon to have tea with the Political Agent. On the way there he told me that Sharma had been very naughty and had had to be punished. He had been poking fun at one of the sentries outside the Palace. So the King had threatened him with a cane.
Well,” said Sharma impertinently, “you have your cane—why do you not strike me with it?”
Perhaps he did not believe that His Highness intended, or was able, to use it; but he was mistaken, and at the first stroke implored mercy.
My hair wants cutting, and I asked whether Sharma, being a barber’s son, could do it for me; but the King retorted that the boy was a fool and could do nothing—except look at motors and go to sleep. The clean military cut of the Political Agent’s thick graying hair reminded me again later of the state of my own.
“Who cuts your hair, Major?” I asked him.
“A boy named Rahim. He’s quite good. He cuts your hair, too, Maharajah, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, he cut it the other day,” said His Highness, “but he cut it all off the top. I should like hair like yours, Major Sahib. If you let your hair grow, Major Sahib, would it reach to your shoulders?”
“Good Lord!” said the Major, spilling his tea on his trousers.
Later on I composed, at the Maharajah’s request, an answer to the A.G.G.’s letter which His Highness showed me a few days ago. His Highness had already attempted the answer himself, to convey his gratitude for the A.G.G.’s promise, and to keep him up to the mark; but in his anxiety not to say too little or too much he had got muddled, and had given the unfinished letter to me to revise. It was a pathetic document, very ingratiating and “diplomatic,” and strongly spiced with fulsome compliments. About halfway through it, when the main object, the question of the decoration, was reached, the A.G.G. began to be referred to as “Your Honor.” I rewrote the whole thing, cutting out most of the compliments and all the “Your Honors,” and sent it down to the Palace.
This evening when I went up to the Guest House for dinner, Mrs. Bristow, the young wife of one of the Shikaripur officers, was sitting by the fire reading a book.
“What are you chewing?” she asked, looking up at me.
“A clove.”
“Well, for Heaven’s sake don’t! I can’t bear the sight. I suppose you chew gum at home?”
“No, I don’t like chewing-gum,” I said.
“Well, do spit that out.”
“But I like cloves.”
“Well, I don’t. It’s disgusting and irritating. Go on, spit it out!”
“Certainly not.”
“Go on! I’m accustomed to being obeyed.”
“But obedience is a duty,” I said; “and I have no duty towards you—except to see that you, too, are fed.”
For a moment she tried on me the power of her eye (which works, I believe, upon the subalterns of her husband’s regiment), but this also failed to move my clove.
“Look here,” she said, “let me give you a word of advice: don’t go Indian!”
JANUARY 16TH
Mrs. Bristow apologized to me this evening.
“I’m sorry for what I said yesterday,” she began; “please forgive me. You must have thought me awful; but I’m not, really. I’m very nice when you get to know me.”
I said I had taken no offense and hoped I had given none. Then she asked if I had a sister, and whether she was beautiful. I said I had, and she was.
“I supposed she was. You’re rather beautiful, you know. You do know, don’t you?” she asked. I said I did.
“Not that I like it in a man,” she concluded. “I hate beauty in a man.”
Anyway, it was a very handsome apology.
In my lesson this morning Abdul asked me, in Hindi:
“What did you think when you saw Ali and me sitting on the steps of that house yesterday?” Then, in English: “Now give me your answer, and let it be the truthful answer.”
Laboriously I pieced out a sentence which I hoped would be understood to mean, “I wondered whose house it was”; but I wasn’t surprised when Abdul pulled me up.
“No, that is not good.”
“It’s the best I can do,” I returned.
“Try again,” he said encouragingly.
I started off once more, but he interrupted me almost immediately with a movement of impatience.
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m trying to say that I wondered whose house it was, whether it was yours or Ali’s.”
“But that is the first answer you made,” said Abdul. “I want the right answer.”
“The right answer?” I said, mystified. “You asked me what I thought when I saw you and Ali sitting together on the steps of a house yesterday?”
“Yes?” Abdul leant a little forward.
“Well, that is what I thought.”
“But I asked for the right and truthful answer,” said he. “You should have said, ‘I wondered what you were both saying about me.’ You see? In this way.”
“Such a thought never entered my head,” I said indignantly.
But he scarcely believed me.
“No?” he said. “That is what I or any man would have thought.”
I stared at him speechlessly, which caused him to titter self-consciously and twist his hands in his lap. It was only after he had gone that it occurred to me that this was probably another attempt to induce me to answer his question of the other day, for had I been the reasonable-minded person he expected, I would have been consumed with curiosity to know what Ali and he had been saying about me, and he would not have satisfied my curiosity until I had satisfied his as to what Ali and I had been saying—of course about him.
MRS. BRISTOW: “And did you like Mrs. Montgomery?”
MYSELF: “Pa
rtly, not altogether.”
MRS. BRISTOW: “O but you must like her! She’s a great friend of mine.”
MYSELF: “I like her better already.”
MRS. BRISTOW: “Tell me all about her and what she did here. Did you go out hunting with her?”
MYSELF: “Yes, once—if it could be called hunting.”
MRS. BRISTOW: “And did you ask to go home in the middle of it?”
MYSELF: “No, not like that. I got a bit sore and tired, and pretended some interest, as a joke against myself, in the direction of home. But I never actually asked to return.”
MRS. BRISTOW: “What a liar she is!”
In the bazaar to-day I noticed a shop-keeper sitting cross-legged on the platform of his shop making up his ledger. A common sight—and yet there was something wrong, I could not at first see what. Then I understood: what was his heavy ledger resting on? It was lying open before him, on his stomach, but unsupported by his free hand, not resting against his knees. What on earth was propping it up?
The problem teased my mind so much that I had to retrace my steps for another look. There he still was, comfortably scribbling away in the large ledger, which was standing up, apparently unsupported, in his lap. Then, as I stared, he closed it and got to his feet—and the mystery was explained. He had elephantiasis of the scrotum, and had been utilizing this huge football of tissue as a book-rest.
I asked His Highness some time ago whether he would allow me to take a short holiday so that I might travel a little and visit such places as Delhi, Agra and Benares. He agreed at once to my request, saying that I must certainly see more of India than just Chhokrapur during my stay, for that would help me to make up my mind to return and live here. Much encouraged by this generous response to a request I felt I had little right to make, I further asked that I might be allowed to go as soon as possible so that I could make my tour in the comfort of the cool weather, which lasts until about the end of February or the beginning of March. This, too, he agreed to, saying that he himself was making a religious pilgrimage of a month’s duration at the end of this month, and that we would synchronize our separate tours. He said this in such a business-like and decisive manner, as though the entire pilgrimage were already mapped out and fixed in time as immutably as a season of the year, that I was quite contented, although I had heard that he feared and disliked traveling, and never left Chhokrapur, and had, on one pretext or another, been putting off this very important pilgrimage for some years. And, indeed, yesterday the first complication arose, for when I asked him whether his day of departure had been selected, he told me that the pundits, without whose advice I doubt whether he would even leave his Palace, had informed him that the only two days propitious for starting were January 31st and February 18th.
“I have to decide which day I will go,” he said.
This was ominous; I felt little doubt that he would choose the remoter of the two days merely because it was the remoter, and the weather was getting appreciably warmer all the time. I pulled out my calendar and looked them up.
“January 31st is a Friday,” I said; “that is a very lucky day.”
“A very unlucky day,” he at once replied flatly.
This was discouraging; but I thought the issue worth another attempt.
“In England we consider it a lucky day,” I said, “except when it falls on the 13th of the month.”
“Oh?” he said, raising his brows and inclining his head; but the sound was more polite than interested.
“It will be nice weather, too, for traveling,” I added.
“Won’t it be very cold?” he asked.
“Oh no, not a bit. It’s getting warmer every day.”
But to-day is unfortunately colder, and he has now definitely decided to go on February 18th.
Sharma paid me a call in the late afternoon. I had not seen him for four days, and asked in Hindi why I had been neglected; but I did not understand his reply. He did not seem in the least nervous of me now, made no attempt to hang the curtain over the door so as to have his friend Narayan in view, and even came and sat by me on the sofa while I traced for him my intended journey on the map.
I looked at him sitting there, all bunched up, his bony hands on his knee, his toes turned in. He had not removed his shoes on entering, I noticed, which I have been told is a very grave discourtesy. They were ordinary black laced shoes, but the laces had been taken out, and since he was not wearing socks or stockings I asked whether he would like me to give him some; but he said he had plenty at home.
“Who is more beautiful than the Gods?” I asked, looking at his wild eyes and childish mouth, and he was pleased and smiled, exposing small, undeveloped teeth discolored with beteljuice. I had never seen him without his turban, and asked him to take it off, which he did; but the result was disappointing and a little shocking, for he showed very large ears and a skull as undeveloped as his teeth, with a low narrow brow towards which his short coarse hairs pointed. I told him to put it on again.
“You are not frightened of me now?” I asked, when he was once more beautiful.
“No.”
“Then we are friends?” He nodded, smiling.
“Then give me a kiss.” Still smiling, he shook his head. Then, after idly turning over the pages of a book on Indian architecture, and pointing, without comment, to some of the illustrations, he got up and, taking another cigarette from the table, shambled off.
“Good . . . bye,” he said in childish English as he left.
JANUARY 18TH
A play was performed for me to-day by a party of traveling players (not, however, the company to which Napoleon the Third belongs), assisted by His Highness’s Gods. A general invitation to the Guest House had been issued, but I begged the Maharajah to confine it to myself, for I had already attended a play with those two women, and my note-taking had so irritated them both (especially Mrs. Bristow: “What are you writing down all this rubbish for?”) that at last I had been prevented from continuing it, to the deprivation of this journal. He gave in to me, and only Babaji Rao, the Secretary, and his little son Ram Chandra, attended this performance with me. It was not, of course, a private Palace entertainment like the other I had seen, or the women would never have been invited, but took place on a low wooden platform, roughly constructed in the open space near the sundial, just behind the Palace. A canvas screen enclosed it, and a carpet roofed it in. Inside we found everything ready. A white drugget was spread in front of the stage, and down the center of it, from under the drop-curtain, ran a narrow strip of carpet. Red cloths were stretched on strings from both sides of the proscenium to the canvas enclosure; the one on the left concealed the orchestra and its friends, the other formed the actors’ dressing-room.
An incandescent light on a stand glared in front of each of these curtains. I took longer to remove my shoes, which were laced, than Babaji Rao and his son took to remove theirs, which were not; so Babaji Rao said I might retain them if I wished, but if I did so I must not point my feet at the actors. In these circumstances I thought it safer to take them off, and we seated ourselves on the low divan, covered with a sheet, which was prepared for us. The drop-curtain represented Vishnu enthroned and attended; it was set between two flat cardboard pillars—pink on a green ground. The orchestra begins to throb, like a quick, irregular pulse—there seems to be a harmonium as well as tom-toms and fiddles—and the curtain rises, disclosing the Manager (Sutradhar), who always introduces “orthodox drama.”
He is dressed in white vestments, with a puce hat and “scapulary,” which give him the appearance of a priest, and stands in the left wing in front of another drop-curtain which represents an ornate, pinky street, deserted and uninhabited except for one almost invisible figure, apparently female—and probably a domestic servant, for she stands at the highest window of one of the houses peeping out. As the music works up, the Manager begins to chant and to beat incessantly two small cymbals. He is invoking the blessing of the Gods on this his play. To him, f
rom the opposite wing, comes the clown (Bidoushak). He is dressed in rags, and a bundle of thorny branches is bound across his face with a white napkin.
He dances, and when he has finished the Manager remarks:
“I was praying to the Gods for a blessing—and look what has come!”
He then addresses himself to the clown.
“What are you wearing over your face?”
“The good deeds of my wife,” answers the clown, removing the bush. “And what might you be doing?”
“I am making a play of the Gods.”
“What! You are making an auction of the Gods?”
This is a poor pun on the Hindoo word involved, and the conversation continues for a time in this strain.
“Do you know English?” asks the Manager.
“Yes,” answers the clown.
“How much?”
“Only ‘Yes.’”
At length the clown is told to go and get the blessing of Ganesh, the Elephant-headed God, who is supplicated at the outset of all undertakings owing to his particular faculty for warding off evil; so he retires with instructions as to where the God may be found, and after the Manager has done a little more chanting, the raising of the street-drop gives him his cue for departure and discloses Ganesh, seated upon his throne before a curtain representing a marble hall with a vista of stumpy pink pillars. He is hideously ugly. He wears a red elephant’s head (the symbol of great wisdom) with large human ears, and a gold hat. His right hand is raised, his left extended, in the attitude of bead-counting.
The remainder of his costume is red, and there are cardboard shields upon his shoulders and upper arms. Why has he been invoked? he inquires of the entering clown. The clown explains; Ganesh gives his blessing, and the former returns to convey the glad tidings to the Manager in the deserted street. But Ganesh’s protection is not enough. The negative preventive blessing having been obtained, the positive favor of success and fluency for the actors is now required, and for this Saraswati, wife to the Creator, Brahma, and Goddess of the Arts, is invoked. She appears, in a forest scene, riding upon her peacock (which is in two pieces, tacked on to her fore and aft) and executes a slow, joyless dance.
Hindoo Holiday Page 8
