Hindoo Holiday

by J. R. Ackerley

  “Ah, on probation!” he said. “That is their craftiness. I shall not be allowed to please them, and when you go they will turn me out! I know!”

  However, he thanked me before he left, and offered his hand.

  But the order to remove was not given, so I spoke to Babaji Rao about it and was told that Abdul must present his petition to the Dewan in the usual way, and the Dewan, under the Maharajah’s instructions, would pass it. But Abdul seemed nervous of the Dewan. Could not the business be done through Babaji Rao? he asked; and, in any case, would I draw up his petition for him? But I was rather fed up with the whole affair, which was eating up more and more of the lesson hours, and told him he’d have to manage the rest by himself. But I was not to get out of it so easily. On the 13th I learnt, to my distress, that the very thing I had been trying to avoid was happening; Narayan was to be moved from the Guest House to make way for Abdul.

  This might not have been unfortunate, for Narayan, I knew, wanted a change; but the post to which he was to be moved was not as good as the one he held. And it seemed to me that, at about this time, his manner towards me began to alter. I had had his confidence and respect; but now, I felt, he was avoiding me. On the evening before Abdul was to present his petition, while Babaji Rao and I were discussing this muddle on my front verandah, Narayan, who had been sitting with Sharma under the neem tree by the kitchen, came over to us to get a paper signed by Babaji Rao. He salaamed and smiled at me in answer to my smile, and I asked him if he would care to walk with us. He said he would; but when we started off a few minutes later he had returned to his seat under the neem tree. He had his face turned away, and was pretending, I thought, not to notice us; but his friend Sharma was watching me. This made me very unhappy, and I wrote to Babaji Rao that night to say that I would be much easier in my mind if he would try to rearrange matters with the Dewan so that Abdul remained in his office with an eight-rupee increase of salary until Narayan was properly suited. He replied very agreeably that he would do his best though he feared the Dewan’s reply, and asked me to send Narayan to him at seven o’clock in the morning, before the Dewan’s court sat, so that he could find out what the boy wanted. But Narayan had an attack of vomiting in the morning and could not keep his appointment; however, Babaji Rao told me yesterday afternoon, greatly to my relief, that he had fixed it all up satisfactorily in the way I had suggested. The Dewan had been very cross, but had nevertheless agreed, and now a little scene would have to be enacted in which Abdul’s officer would feign anger with Abdul and tell him he could not yet be spared. The petition would still have to go through the Dewan, and he would write on it “Eight rupees advance”—and that would be the end.

  FEBRUARY 16TH

  “When are you going on your tour?” asked His Highness this afternoon as we started on our drive. “Are you going on Thursday?”

  “No, Prince,” I answered firmly; “you gave me permission to go on Wednesday.”

  He inclined his head slightly, widening his eyes, as much as to say that he experienced surprise but was too polite to express it.

  “And you will be away for . . . two weeks?” he inquired, glancing at me.

  “Two weeks!” I exclaimed, a little crossly. “Now you know quite well, Prince, that we agreed that . . .”

  “Then how long will it be?” he interrupted me.

  “You said I might be away for a month, the period of your pilgrimage,” I said, feeling unkind and guilty, but nevertheless obstinate. Once again, without looking at me, he indicated his surprise by a movement of the head and eyes; then in a gentle voice, touching me on the sleeve, he said:

  “Do not be away for more than three weeks. I cannot spare you.”

  We drove into Chetla. There the Maharajah received presents of betel and fruit, and gave audience to that same young betel-leaf planter whose physical deterioration had disappointed us so much on a previous visit. He was in trouble.

  Some wicked man, a relative, was disputing his claim to a certain plantation and had threatened to kill the boy unless he yielded. His Highness gave a merely perfunctory attention to this story, and after instructing the boy to bring the case before the civil court in Chhokrapur, ordered the chauffeur to drive on. Indeed the young man was very disappointing, we once more agreed; and His Highness remarked, with a chuckle, that he could not understand what he could be doing to have got so thin. For a short time after this we drove in silence, and then he asked:

  “Do people in England drink the urine of the cow or any animal?”

  I said I’d never heard of any one doing so there.

  “Why, do you?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” he said; “I must drink it. All Hindoos must take the five products of the cow. It is our religion.”

  “What are the five products?” I inquired.

  “Urine, dung, milk, curd, butter.”

  “What about sweat?” I asked. “Isn’t that a product?”

  “Unholy!” he said, tapping his knee with his hand.

  “And saliva? How about saliva?”

  “Unholy!” he repeated, tapping his knee again. “The mouth of the cow is unholy and is never worshipped.”

  “Will any cow do?” I asked. “Or must it be a special cow, like the Frenchman’s frog?”

  “Any cow,” he replied.

  “Those cows, for instance?” I indicated some scraggy specimens in a passing field.

  “They are peasants’ cows,” he said, with a deprecating smile.

  “And how often do you take the five products, Prince?” I inquired.

  “Every day; in small quantities. I must do so.” Then he began to giggle. “Dung and urine are very holy,” he added.

  “Cow’s urine is said to have medicinal properties too, isn’t it?” I asked. “I’ve heard that most Indian medicines contain it.”

  “It is quite true,” he replied; then, after a pause; “I like it very much. I drink it like water.”

  I asked him why the cow was reverenced above all other animals, and he said that it was looked upon as the universal Mother, and with the Lion, the Peacock, the Black Bee, the Secretary Bird, the Black Humming-bird, and the perfect male and female human bodies, was thought to be the Seat of the Unknown. He could not account for this selection, he said, any more than he could say why maize, onions, celery, and spinach were unholy, or why the cat was sacred and the dog not; but so it was. As we drove through the outskirts of Chetla I pointed out to His Highness one of the rude tree-shrines one sees frequently hereabouts and asked him what they meant. They are small circular platforms of clay-covered brick, roughly built round the trunks of trees, and the actual shrine is a small knob of clay or mud on top of this, hollowed out to receive some relic. He said that they are built to propitiate ghosts, spirits of the dead—genii loci, perhaps—which were often ferocious and harmful. Sacrifices of eggs and coco-nut milk were made. But they were the work and beliefs of the ignorant, superstitious peasants, he said contemptuously, many of whom worshipped demons.

  When I was changing for dinner this evening, and had nothing on but my socks, Habib entered the room.

  I shouted at him and he vanished. I have tried to teach him that whenever my curtains are closed he must tap for permission to enter; but he always enters without tapping, is always shouted at, and always vanishes. As I went on leisurely dressing I wondered what he had wanted and what had become of him, whether he had left the house or was waiting in the next room. I listened for sounds and heard nothing; but I felt sure, nevertheless, that he would not have left the house before accomplishing his mission—whatever that might be. The idea of going away and coming back later on would not occur to him. When I had my trousers on I peered into the next room. It was empty. Then I looked on the back verandah. There he was, in the gloom, polishing something with a cloth. I gazed at him severely. His thick lips moved nervously, sticking together, then unsticking, as though indicating their readiness to answer to a smile.

  “What do you want?” I asked in Hin
di.

  He presented to view the object he was polishing. It was a soda-water bottle.

  With a sigh of resignation I returned to my dressing. A bottle of soda-water is put on the table in my bedroom every evening, and I knew that Habib would patiently await the opportunity to put it in its accustomed place. I might remain in the bedroom for hours and hours; he would stay on the verandah, quietly polishing the bottle with his cloth, awaiting his opportunity. To put it anywhere else would not be right. On the table in the bedroom it was always put; on the table in the bedroom it must therefore go. Eventually, when I had almost finished dressing, I had occasion to go into the bathroom for a moment, and when I returned there was the soda-water bottle on my bedroom table, and Habib had disappeared.

  Narayan’s vomiting yesterday morning didn’t put things straight internally. I met him in the evening and asked him how he felt.

  “I have a pain in my belly,” he said.

  So I got Captain Drood to examine him. Drood asked him what he ate, and he said rice, milk, and bread; so the doctor warned him off bread for a day or two and gave him some castor-oil, after which he felt better. He came in to see me this evening after dinner.

  “Is Sharma angry with me?” I asked him. “Or am I angry with Sharma?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Yes, you do. Tell me.”

  “He is not angry with you.”

  “Well, I am not angry with him.”

  “He think so,” said Narayan. “He say me yesterday, ‘The Sahib is angry with me.’”

  “I like him very much,” I said. “Will you tell him?”

  “Yes, I will tell him.”

  “You were angry with me the other day.”

  “No, I was not angry.”

  “A little, yes, a little.”

  “No. You are my big brother, and I am your little brother.”

  FEBRUARY 18TH

  Poor Abdul! In the afternoon of the day on which he had been told to present his petition to the Dewan, when the Dewan “would write on it ‘eight rupees advance,’ and that would be the end,” he came at his usual time to my house.

  But he was clearly not in his usual spirits; he was subdued, jerky, and mysterious; something had clearly gone wrong. He greeted me with a perfunctory movement, and seating himself at the table, began arranging his books and papers without a word.

  “Mr. Ackerley,” he said at length, in an uncontrolled voice, “I want you to know that nothing has been done. Your recommendation—your strong recommendation—has come to nothing. But do not ask me any more! Do not speak of it any more! Do not speak of it any more! We will never talk of it again.”

  Nor did we—that afternoon; he drew in his chin, frowned, and concentrated painfully on his books; for the first time for some weeks I had a full hour’s lesson. At the end of it he set my next lesson, collected his things beneath his arm, and bowing stiffly, departed.

  But yesterday afternoon, when he returned, he was unshaven and did not look as if he had slept very well.

  “If I tell you something, Mr. Ackerley,” he began at once, “will you give me your solemn promise not to speak of it to any man?”

  “What is it, Abdul?” I asked, and at once his eyes filled with tears and his voice became husky. His officer had been angry at not having been consulted. There had been a scene in which the officer had said that Abdul had behaved in a deceitful, underhand manner, that he could not be spared from his post, and that an apology was due from him to the Dewan, who had been put, on his account, to considerable annoyance. Abdul’s voice shook. The interview had been terrible.

  “You are a bad man, a wicked man!” the Dewan had screamed. “Not one extra pice will I give you, but I will have you dismissed from the office you already hold if I ever hear of you again!” There had been a lot more like this, and then the Dewan had ejected him, saying that if he breathed a word of this to me or any one else he would have him killed.

  I couldn’t help smiling at this; the “little scene” that Babaji Rao had spoken of seemed to have been acted with some enthusiasm; but Abdul observed me.

  “Ah, you are pleased, Mr. Ackerley?” he said, smirking.

  I hastened to correct this impression, without, however, giving the plot away. I said that I simply was not worried by his story; the Maharajah had promised him twenty rupees a month, and this sooner or later he would get, but he must not expect the managership of the Guest House until Narayan was suited. But he had been too badly scared. The Dewan hated him, he said, and would seek to injure him; he was Mohammedan and they Hindoo, and so they hated him. I had done nothing for him, nothing; it was all over, and now the least that I could do was to get him, through the Political Agent, a good job in some other State.

  He looked at me appealingly. He was abject with fear and self-pity; the whites and browns of his eyes seemed to have run together. I did not like him at all; but I soothed him as best I could, and said that if nothing had been done by the time I returned from my holiday I would write to His Highness to ask why his promise had not been given effect. He seemed a little comforted, and left repeating his first request:

  “And I have your promise not to speak of all this to any man? It will be very bad for me, gentleman; very dangerous for me!”

  We had done no work at all.

  But to-day he was quite his old self. This was our last lesson but one before my departure, he said, and so he had some requests to make. First he wished me to get for him the letter of recommendation from the Political Agent which I had promised—and he also wanted a similar letter from me as well.

  I shook my head. I would do nothing more, I said, until I returned; he would have to be patient—and now we would get on with the lesson.

  We did so, for a few minutes. Then he began again, clearing his throat and speaking in short, dry sentences as he patted and shuffled his papers.

  “You see, you have failed, Mr. Ackerley. You have made a recommendation—a strong recommendation—but nothing has come of it. You have been defeated by the Dewan, and it is an insult to you—and to the whole English people! You see?”

  He glanced up, with a sly smile, for his effect. I laughed.

  “Look here, Abdul,” I said, “as a matter of fact, it’s my doing that you haven’t got the managership of the Guest House”; and I explained what had happened.

  But he did not seem able to get this quite straight.

  “Why have you not told me?” he asked, bewildered. “You have not opened your heart to me.”

  “Well, you know now, anyway; and I think it’s time for you to go.”

  “Mr. Narayan asked you to do this,” he said thoughtfully, as he put his books together. “Is it not? I think so.”

  I gave him ten rupees over his salary.

  “Thank you, Mr. Ackerley; and I shall come to-morrow at the same time for a last lesson.”

  “No, Abdul,” I said, “this must be the last till I return; I shall be too busy to-morrow to see you.”

  But this was not at all in accordance with his plans. He had not yet got any of his requests granted.

  “Then I shall prepare some work for you to study while you are away. I will bring it to-night at nine o’clock.” I shook my head. “Ah, you do not want? Then I will come at five, and take you for a walk. You walk often with Mr. Narayan at five o’clock, so it is a good time.”

  “No, Abdul,” I said; “I don’t want to see you again before my return.”

  “Ah, Mr. Ackerley, and what will happen to me while you are away? Will you not grant me a few minutes more of your valuable time and write for me a letter of recommendation—now—before my eyes? I shall dictate it to you, and so it will be a very good letter—the best.”

  “No, Abdul,” I said.

  He picked up his books.

  “Very well, Mr. Ackerley. I do not wish to bore upon your time. You will write to me from your travels?”

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  “Only ‘perhaps’? Ah, Mr. Ackerley, th
at is not good, gentleman. . . .”

  “Very well,” I said weakly, “I’ll write to you.”

  “Ah, thank you, Mr. Ackerley. How many times will you write? Twice a week?”

  “At least twice a week,” I said, yawning.

  “And you will write in your letters your future addresses so that I may answer if I wish? You will say ‘I am here’—then you will write your present address—‘until’—then you will give the date—‘and then I shall proceed to’—”

  He really is the most tiresome person I ever met.

  Captain Drood and his wife left here yesterday morning.

  On the previous evening His Highness paid them a farewell visit at the Guest House, and presented Mrs. Drood with a very beautiful piece of muslin worked with green and gold thread. He had quite recovered his health and spirits, and told us that if he had gone upon his tour he would have had to shave his head and mustache—everything except his eyebrows.

  “If I did not do so,” he said, “I should have had to pay double fees to the priests!”

  “Oh, I should have loved to have seen you, Maharajah Sahib!” cried Mrs. Drood mischievously. He tittered into his sleeve and waved a protesting hand.

  “I should not have come before you,” he said.

  She was delighted with her piece of muslin, and when he said he had a state coat rather like it—of green and gold brocade—she begged to be allowed to see his finery and jewels, and he at once sent Hashim off in the car to fetch some of his wardrobe from the Palace. They were certainly lovely things: necklaces and brooches of precious stones; beautiful skirted coats of rich brocade, and turbans to match them, jeweled and plumed. The jewelry was all Indian work; but the robes, he said, were made in Paris. Mrs. Drood went into raptures over them, and her husband too expressed the greatest admiration. When they had finished examining and ejaculating, His Highness, who had been looking on in silence, waved the things away with a slight movement of his hand.

  “I do not like them,” he said gently; “I like people.”