Hindoo Holiday (31 page)

I felt that I was not getting accurate information from him, and forbore questioning him further on the subject.

When I was riding in the jungle this morning I saw a tree in the near distance more beautiful, I thought, than any other tree I had seen. Its feathery foliage was so light that it seemed more like a soft green cloud drifting a little in the breeze. It was a mango tree.

I rode up with a desire to touch it, but reined in my horse when I saw a blue jay sitting in the branches. I watched it for a little until suddenly, for no reason, it flew away.

“Yes,” I called after it, “and if I had wings like yours I would spread them too.”

The blue jay is sacred to Siva, the destroyer and recreator; not, as I was told, because blue is Siva's color, but because both the bird and the God are called
Nil-Kanth
(Blue Throat). Siva has a blue throat because, out of compassion for the human race, he swallowed a deadly poison which would otherwise have destroyed the world. He kept this poison in his throat and would not let it go further, “for,” said he, “I have the Lord Vishnu in my heart.”

But Siva's color is white. The bull Nandi on which he rides is white, his hair and face are white, and his body is covered with pale ashes. And the commonest distinguishing mark used by his followers is three horizontal white lines, representing the God's trident, which are painted across the forehead.

As Babaji Rao and I were walking in the outskirts of the village this evening, two old peasants, a man and a woman, begged of me. The woman was ill, it seemed; she squatted on the ground at my feet and moaned and rocked herself, holding out clawlike hands, while the old man, who was thin and hairy and almost entirely naked, begged for medicine for her. “
Good
medicine,” he kept saying, “ ‘Rodgers' medicine.”

Babaji Rao was very amused and explained to me that there were some steel articles of recognized excellence, marked “Rodgers,” being sold at the fair, and the old man wanted some medicine as good as this steel.

“Of course he thinks you are a doctor,” he said; “these poor people think that all white men are doctors.”

I asked him to explain that I was unfortunately not a doctor, and I gave the old man a rupee to buy some “Rodgers” medicine.

The Dewan took me with him to see a bridge being built in the neighborhood, and I remarked on the poor physique of the builders—lean, under-nourished men with little round bellies—and asked what wages they were getting.

“Twopence-halfpenny a day,” said the Dewan. They had recently mutinied, he said, and had been given a rise.

I asked what their wages had been before the rise.

“Twopence a day,” said the Dewan.

He remarked, too, that this was a great advance upon the past, for fairly recent statistics showed that the average wage of a laborer in Garha used to be one and a half rupees (two shillings) a month. Chhokrapur does even better. No laborer there gets less than fourpence a day.

I asked whether they did not find it a little problematical to live on even fourpence a day, and he said abruptly: “Not at all! It is exactly twice as much as they require.” A laborer's expenses were twopence a day, he said—two pounds of grain (barley) which cost him a penny-ha'penny, and a ha'porth of vegetables. He could live on this on his present wages and treat himself every now and then, out of his savings, to rice, which, at its lowest quality, costs twopence-ha'penny a
seer
. The better quality rice, such as Narayan, for instance, eats, costs fourpence a
seer
.

For a little time I watched these poor emaciated creatures carrying blocks of stone—eight men to each block, which was suspended on chains from a long pole. The Dewan said that there were sculptures on the Garha temples showing that the laborers a thousand years ago had handled stone in exactly the same way.

“If I am introduced to an Englishman, and he says ‘How d'you do?' to me, what do I reply?” he asked, as we drove back. “Shall I say, ‘I am very well, thank you, how are you?' What is the rule, please?”

I said I did not think there was any rule, but that the best thing was to say “How d'you do?” too, and to try to get it in first and to say it with as little fuss as possible.

His question reminded me of a young man who got into conversation with me in the train from Benares. Having questioned me closely about myself, he said that he hoped soon to travel, too, and to visit England. I remarked how difficult I thought it must be for Hindoos to go about outside their own country, considering their religious and caste restrictions.

“But I know how to use the spoon and fork,” said he; “I have learnt.”

He then inquired whether it would be all right for him to wear in England the clothes in which he was now dressed—a round brown hat, cotton pajamas and a Condy's Fluid colored coat.

“Will they make fun at me?” he asked.

We returned to Chhokrapur yesterday. It is oppressively warm, and I have not gone back to the little house I used to occupy, but live alone in the spacious rooms of the Guest House, which has hot-weather facilities. During meals the
punkah
waves ceaselessly over my head, pulled by an unseen hand or foot in the kitchen, and all the doorways are being fitted with
khus-khus tattis
. These are bamboo screens thickly plaited with the sweet-smelling
khus-khus
grass, and made to fit into the frames of the doors; and the water-carrier, visiting them at intervals throughout the day, slings water against them from the verandah outside, so that not only do they shade the blinding light, but the hot air, beating against them, is cooled and perfumed as it enters the room.

His Highness is still reported to be ill.

I asked Narayan if he took the five products of the cow. He did not understand what I meant by products, so I recited them.

“Yes,” he said, “when I get mistake.”

It was now my turn to require an explanation; he meant when he had done anything wrong—eaten, for instance, something he should not have eaten. Then he would have to go to the pundits, and they would give him a mixture of the five products—a purifying dose.

His father is a pundit, so I dare say the old man doses his son himself, for he is a very holy man and reads the
Puranas
aloud from eleven till one o'clock every day, and tells his beads for an hour in the morning, which practices amuse Narayan very much, though he does not show his amusement, of course, for he is frightened of his father.

“But now I do not take it,” he said, referring back to the cow, “it is much dirty.”

“Then how do you purify yourself now after getting mistakes?” I asked.

“I do not get mistakes now,” he replied with a sly smile.

He then told me, in confidence, that after the Maharajah had recalled him to Garha Palace the other day and forgiven him his alleged faults, His Highness had beckoned him nearer the royal
charpai
. Narayan had asked respectfully why he was required to come closer, and His Highness had spoken flatteringly to him, had said he had always loved him and wished to see him naked. It was not the first time that the Maharajah had made such advances, Narayan said, and not the first time he had refused. His Highness had then threatened to punish him and send him out of the State, but Narayan had remained inflexible.

“Why did you refuse?” I asked.

“It is a sin!” he cried vehemently. I smiled at the warmth of his tone. “It is!” he repeated, with the same force. “It say so in the
Purān
.”

“And why do you tell me these secret things?” I asked him mischievously. “I thought you did not care to hear secret things repeated?”

“But you are my friend,” he said, looking at me in surprise; “so I must say you everything, everything. Is that not good?”

“That is very good,” I replied quickly, for I wanted to hear everything, everything.

Abdul came to-day. He had done his best to persuade me to take him to Garha, but I was sick of him and left him behind. However, he turned up to-day, unsummoned, to give me a lesson. It was of the usual kind—the only slight variation being that this time it was a
friend
of his, to whom he would introduce me, who wished to feast me.

I am polite and diffident by nature, and it is owing to this weakness that I am still suffering from Abdul's requests. Driven by his egoistic persistence, and unable to speak my mind bluntly and rudely, which would have been the best thing to do, I have usually dodged and evaded, temporized and prevaricated, and so got deeper and deeper into difficulties. But I am better at it now.

Hindoo food is divided into
kuchcha
and
pukka
.
Pukka
food is cooked food;
kuchcha
food is raw, that is to say it comprises all the things like rice, pulse, bread, curry, etc., which are not cooked in clarified butter. These latter foods are the ones which receive the strictest care; they can only be taken, Babaji Rao says, from his own caste or from orthodox Brahmans; over
pukka
food, I seemed to gather, a certain laxity is permitted.

Once, he said, he had accepted an invitation to dinner, which really he should not have accepted at all, on the understanding that he would be given
pukka
food to eat; but he was served with
kuchcha
food instead and felt obliged to eat it. It is one of the worst heterodoxies he has ever committed. But, he went on to say, he would not greatly mind eating
pukka
food in even my presence, provided that I too was eating
pukka
food and no meat, and had a separate table at some distance from his.

“What sort of distance would you consider safe?” I asked.

“Just out of touch would be sufficient.”

Some people insisted, he said, that there should be no connection even
beneath
the tables; that is to say that they should not be placed, for instance, upon the same strip of carpet; but he felt this to be a little extreme.

“Would you really be upset,” I asked, “if I happened to touch your table?”

“No,” he replied with a smile.

“Of course not; or you would not shake hands with me.”

“The fact is,” he explained, “we have made such a fetish of eating that we believe ourselves to be in a state of holiness when we are doing so.”

The Dewan is a meat-eating Brahman, so Babaji Rao ought not to eat with him at all; but he does so, nevertheless.

Cooks are usually relatives, because they have to be of the same caste as the household, and so a man like the Dewan, who is of the very highest caste, would no doubt be hard put to it if he were single, strictly orthodox, and had no poor relations.

Cooks are usually female; otherwise difficulties arise. If Babaji Rao had a male cook, Mrs. Babaji Rao would not be able to appear before him, which would be highly inconvenient. He had a female cook recently, but when she grew old she contracted asthma and coughed a lot, so he got rid of her and is now looking for a new one. Meanwhile his wife cooks for him; but she does not eat with him; a Hindoo woman never eats with her husband.

I asked why not, and was informed by the Dewan that it wasn't considered proper; it was her business to wait upon her husband, or at any rate to see that he was looked after.

I asked him if his wife had ever seen me. “She must have,” he said, meaning, I suppose, that she had had so many opportunities to peep at me out of the window that it was most improbable that she had not done so. Then he clearly felt uneasy about this, and added that though, theoretically, she was not supposed to look, few people nowadays insisted upon such extreme
purdah
.

The European dresses, but the Hindoo undresses, for dinner. When a Hindoo feeds he wears nothing but his nether garment, his
dhoti
, his shirt being under various disqualifications. It is not washed as frequently as the
dhoti
, which one bathes in every day, and for other reasons, too, it cannot be considered so clean an article of clothing.

For one thing, being only an adopted garment, it is seldom of Indian manufacture and is usually sewn, and Heaven knows what fingers have sewn it; whereas the
dhoti
is a single piece of cloth, and is not sewn anywhere. Moreover, the shirt, unlike the
dhoti
, is always sent to the washer-woman, and the washerwoman starches it, and starch is often made out of rice, and rice is
kuchcha
food. So, altogether, the shirt is under grave suspicion. Babaji Rao's brother, who is rather lax, eats in his shirt, but Babaji Rao has never done such an improper thing in his life.

Narayan invited me to his house the other day. If I stood outside it on its western side and called his name he would come, he said. I did so, and a tiny door high up in the bright wall popped open, and he beckoned me up the flight of dungwashed brick steps that led to it. Hindoos do all their charing with cow-dung. Narayan had nothing on but his
dhoti
, and showed a poor physique. A roll or two of fat, seen above the waistline of the
dhoti
, suggested that his belly would probably bulge if released from the constriction of that garment.

His room, though small, was larger than Abdul's, and was furnished chiefly with European furniture, easy-chairs, a dressing-table with a mirror, and a mosquito curtain over the
charpai
.

Pinned or nailed to the walls were two photographs of His Highness, one of His Highness's grandfather, a cheap highly-colored print of an Indian hero about to embrace an Indian heroine, and my drawing of Sharma, now thickly outlined with ink and subscribed “Drawn by Narayan.” On the floor was a carpet, and on the carpet was the subject of our drawing, squatting in front of a betel-leaf chest, on the top of which he was smearing and preparing the leaves with various ingredients from various little drawers. I was invited to sit down and was shown many treasures—safety razors, a cigarette-case, and a broken watch—produced from locked boxes under the bed. Scents and oils were handed round, and then a harmonium was brought out of a corner, and Narayan and Sharma tinkled on it by turns. I was not feeling very well, so I refused the betel, cigarettes, and Marsala that were offered.