A WEEK later Helen took over the accounts. In the meantime she had
learned to count rupees and annas, pi and pice, also a few words of that
tongue in which orders are given in Calcutta. She arose on the seventh
morning of her tenure of office rigidly determined that the office
should no longer be a sinecure. She would drop curiosity and pleasure,
and assume discipline, righteousness and understanding. She would make a
stand. She would deal justly, but she would make a stand. It would be
after George had gone to office. When he came home, tired with tea
affairs, he would not be compelled to rack his brain further with the
day’s marketing. He would see that the lady he had made Mrs. Browne was
capable of more than driving about in a tum-tum and writing enthusiastic
letters home about the beauties of Calcutta.
George went to office. The kitmutgar softly removed the blue and white
breakfast things. Outside the door, in the “bottle khana,” the
mussalchi, squatting, washed them in an earthen bowl with a mop-stick.
It occurred to Helen that she might as well begin by going to look at
the mussalchi, and she did. She looked at him with a somewhat severe
expression, thereby causing him dismay and terror. She walked all round
the mussalchi, but found nothing about him to criticise. “But,
probably,” thought she, as she went back to the dining-room, “my looking
at him had its moral effect.” Then she sent for the cook.
The cook arrived with an expression of deep solemnity, tempered by all
the amiable qualities you can think of. He held in his hand an extremely
dirty piece of paper, covered with strange characters in Nagri—how
little anybody would have thought, when they were designed in the dawn
of the world, that they would ever be used to indicate the items of an
Englishman’s dinner! The cook put a pair of spectacles on to read them,
which completed the anomaly, and made him look more benevolent than
ever.
“Well, bawarchi,” said Helen, ready with pencil and note-book, “account
hai?”
“Gee-ha, hai!” responded he. Then after a respectful pause, “S’in-beef,”
he said, “_char anna_.”
“Shin beef,” repeated Helen, with satisfaction, “four annas. Yes?”
“Fiss—che[34] anna. Bress mutton—egrupee, che anna. Eggis—satrah—aht[35]
anna.”
Footnote 34:
Six.
Footnote 35:
Eight.
“_Seventeen_ eggs, bawarchi? When did we eat seventeen eggs? How did we
eat seventeen eggs yesterday?”
Mrs. Browne spoke impulsively, in English, but Kali Bagh seemed to
understand, and with an unruffled front proceeded to account
circumstantially for every egg. His mistress was helpless. But,
“to-morrow,” thought she earnestly, “I will _see_ whether he puts four
in the soup!”
The cook went on to state that since yesterday the Browne family had
consumed three seers of potatoes—six pounds—at two annas a seer, which
would be six annas. “And I don’t believe that, either,” mentally
ejaculated Mrs. Browne, but Kali Bagh continued without flinching. He
chronicled salt, pepper, sauce, sugar, he mentioned rice, dhal,
“garden-isspice,” “guava isstew,” “k’rats,”[36] “kiss-miss,”[37]
“maida,”[38] and enough “mukkan”[39] to have supplied a charity-school.
Helen was amazed to find the number of culinary articles which
undeniably might have been used in the course of twenty-four hours—she
did not consider the long calm evening that went to meditation over the
list. When it was finished she found that the day’s expenses in food had
been exactly eight rupees six annas, or about eleven shillings. Helen
had had a thrifty education, and she knew this was absurd. She turned to
the flagrant eggs and to the unblushing potatoes, and she made a
calculation.
Footnote 36:
Carrots.
Footnote 37:
Raisins.
Footnote 38:
Flour.
Footnote 39:
Butter.
“Bawarchi!” said she, “Potatoes—four annas. Eggs—five annas,
_daga_.”[40]
Footnote 40:
I will give.
“Bahut atcha!” said the cook, without remonstrance. He still had
twenty-five per cent of profit.
Helen observed, and was encouraged. She summoned up her sternest look,
and drew her pencil through the total. “Eight rupees,” she remarked with
simplicity, “daga na. _Five_ rupees daga,” and she closed the book.
Kali Bagh looked at her with an expression of understanding, mingled
with disappointment. He did not expect all he asked, but he expected
more than he got. As it was, his profit amounted only to two rupees, not
much for a poor man with a family. But in after days, when his memsahib
grew in general sagacity and particular knowledge of the bazar, Kali
Bagh had reason to look back regretfully to those two rupees as to the
brief passing of a golden age.
“I will now go down,” said Mrs. Browne with enthusiasm, “and look at his
pots.”
The compound, as she crossed it, was full of the eternal sunlight of
India, the gay shrill gossip of the mynas, the hoarse ejaculations of
the crows. A flashy little green parrot flew out of a hibiscus bush by
the wall in full crimson flower; he belonged to the jungle. But a pair
of grey pigeons cooed to each other over the building of their nest in
the cornice of a pillar of the Brownes’ upper veranda. They had come to
stay, and they spoke of the advantages of co-operative housekeeping with
another young couple like themselves, knowing it to be on a safe and
permanent basis. The garden was all freshly scratched and tidy; there
was a pleasant smell of earth; the mallie, under a pipal tree, gathered
up its broad dry fallen leaves to cook his rice with. It was a graphic
bit of economy, so pleasantly close to nature that its poetry was plain.
“We are the only people who are extravagant in India,” thought Helen, as
she regarded the mallie, and in this reflection I venture to say that
she was quite correct.
The door of the _bawarchi khana_[41] was open—it was never shut. I am
not sure, indeed, that there was a door. There were certainly no
windows. It is possible that the bawarchi khana was seven feet square,
and its mistress was just able to stand up straight in it with a few
inches to spare. It contained a shelf, a table, and a stove. When Kali
Bagh sat down he used his heels. The shelf and the table were full of
the oil and condiments dear to the heart of every bawarchi. The stove
was an erection like a tenement house, built with what was left over
from the walls, and artistically coloured pink to be like them. It
contained various hollows on the top, in one or two of which charcoal
was glowing—beyond this I cannot explain its construction to be plain to
understandings accustomed to the kitchen ranges of Christianity and
civilisation. But nothing ever went wrong with Kali Bagh’s stove, the
boiler never leaked, the hot water pipes never burst, the oven never
required relining, the dampers never had to be re-regulated. He was its
presiding genius, he worked it with a palm leaf fan, and nothing would
induce him to look at a modern improvement. Kali Bagh was a conservative
institution himself, his recipes were an heritage, he was the living
representative of an immemorial _dustur_.[42] Why should Kali Bagh
afflict himself with the ways of the memsahib!
Footnote 41:
Cook-house.
Footnote 42:
Custom.
The bawarchi khana had another door, opening into a rather smaller
apartment, otherwise lightless and airless, which contained Kali Bagh’s
wardrobe and bed. The wardrobe was elementary and hung upon a single
peg, the bed consisted of four short legs and a piece of matting. Kali
Bagh had reposed himself on it, and was already snoring, when Mrs.
Browne came in. He had divested himself of his chuddar and his
spectacles, and looked less of a philosopher and more of an Aryan. Mrs.
Browne made a rude clatter among the pans, which brought him to a sense
of her disturbing presence. Presently she observed him standing behind
her, looking anxious. His mistress sniffed about intrepidly. She lifted
saucepan lids and discovered within remains of concoctions three days
old; she found the day’s milk in an erstwhile kerosene tin; she lifted a
kettle and intruded upon the privacy of a large family of cockroaches,
any one of them as big as a five-shilling piece. Kali Bagh would never
have disturbed them. She found messes and mixtures and herbs and spices
and sauces which she did not understand and could not approve. The day’s
marketing lay in a flat basket under the table. Helen drew it forth and
discovered a live pigeon indiscriminately near the mutton with its wings
twisted around one another at the joint, while from beneath a débris of
potatoes, beans and cauliflower, came a feeble and plaintive “Quack!”
“What is this?” said Mrs. Browne with paler and sterner criticism,
looking into a pot that was bubbling on the fire.
“_Chaul hai, memsahib! Hamara khana!_”[43]
Footnote 43:
It is rice, memsahib; my dinner.
“Your dinner, bawarchi! All that rice?” And, indeed, therein was no
justification for Kali Bagh. It was not only his dinner, but the dinner
of the sweeper and of the syce and of the mussalchi, to be supplied to
them a trifle below current market rates, and Mrs. Browne had paid for
it all that morning. Helen found herself confronted with her little
domestic corner of the great problem of India—the natives’ “way.” But
she had no language with which to circumvent it or remonstrate with it.
She could only decide that Kali Bagh was an eminently proper subject for
discipline, and resolve to tell George, which was not much of an
expedient. It is exactly what we all do in India, however, under the
circumstances. We tell our superior officers, until at last the Queen
Empress herself is told; and the Queen Empress is quite as incapable of
further procedure as Mrs. Browne; indeed, much more so, for she is
compelled to listen to the voice of her parliamentary wrangling-machine
upon the matter, which obeys the turning of a handle, and is a very fine
piece of mechanism indeed, but not absolutely reliable when it delivers
ready-made opinions upon Aryan problems. At least I am quite sure that
is my husband’s idea, and I have often heard young Browne say the same
thing.
There was a scattering to right and left when Helen reappeared in the
compound. Her domestics were not dressed to receive her, and they ran
this way and that, noiselessly like cockroaches to their respective
holes. There seemed to be a great many of them, more by at least half a
dozen than were properly accredited to the house; and Helen was
afterwards informed that they were the _bhai_[44] of the other servants,
representing a fraction of the great unemployed of Asia, who came daily
for fraternal gossip in the sun and any patronage that might be going.
They were a nuisance, these bhai, and were soon sternly put down by the
arm of the law and the edict of the sahib, who enacted that no strange
native should be allowed to enter the compound without a chit. “It’s the
only way to convince them,” said he, “that the Maidan is the best place
for public meetings.”
Footnote 44:
Caste-brothers.
[Illustration: “WHAT IS THIS?” SAID MRS. BROWNE, WITH PALER AND STERNER
CRITICISM.]
The quarters of the syce and the pony were the only ones that invited
further inspection. The same roof sheltered both of these creatures of
service, a thatched one; but between them a primitive partition went
half way up. On one side of this the pony was tethered and enjoyed the
luxuries of his dependence, on the other the syce lived in freedom, but
did not fare so well. The pony’s expenses were quite five times as
heavy. His food cost more, his clothes cost more, his medical attendance
cost more, to say nothing of his requiring a valet. He was much the more
valuable animal of the two, though the other is popularly believed in
England to have a soul. His wants were even more elaborately supplied
than the syce’s—he had a trough to feed from, and a pail to drink out
of, a fresh bed every night, a box for his grain, and a curry-comb for
his skin; while the syce’s domestic arrangements consisted of an
earthenware pot, a wooden stick, and a rickety charpoy. When he was cold
he borrowed the pony’s blanket, and I never heard of any toilet articles
in connection with him. The accommodation was not equally divided
between him and the pony, either. The pony had at least twice as much,
and it was in better repair.
The pony looked much askance at Helen. He was accustomed only to the
race of his dark-skinned servitor. The sahib with his white face and
strange talk he associated with the whip and being made to pull an
objectionable construction upon wheels from which he could not get away;
but a memsahib might be something of inconceivable terror—her petticoats
looked like it. Therefore the pony withdrew himself into a remote corner
of his stable, where he stood looking ineffably silly, and declined to
be seduced by split pieces of sugar-cane or wheedling words.
“_Gorah atcha hai?_”[45] asked Helen, and was assured that he was very
“atcha,” that his grain he ate, his grass he ate, his water he ate, and
“_cubbi kooch na bolta_——” “he never said anything whatever,” which was
the final proof of his flourishing condition.
Footnote 45:
Is the horse well?
It was getting a little discouraging, but Helen thought that before
retreating she might at least inspect the bearer’s cow, a cow being a
gentle domestic animal, of uniform habits, all the world over. One’s own
cow is a thorn in the flesh and a source of ruin, in India. She declines
to give milk, except to the outside world at so much a seer,[46] she
devours abnormal quantities of food, she is neglected and becomes
depraved, being nobody’s particular business. But it is impossible to
draw lacteal supplies from an unknown source in India. It is paying a
large price for cholera bacilli, which is absurd, since one can get them
almost anywhere for nothing. To say nothing of the depravity of the
milk-wallah,[47] who strains his commodity through his dhoty, and
replenishes his cans from the first stagnant tank he comes to. The wise
and advisable thing is to permit the bearer, as a gracious favour, to
keep a cow on the premises and to supply the family at current rates. It
is a source of income to him, and of confidence to you, while the cow
does her whole duty in that clean and comfortable state whereto she is
called. The bearer, too, is honoured and dignified by the possession of
the sacred animal. He performs every office for her himself, though he
would scorn to bring a pail of water to a horse, and he is happy to live
in the odour of her sanctity. Helen discovered the cow of their
establishment tied with her calf outside the best “go-down” in the
compound—the largest and cleanest—which she occupied at night. The
bearer himself had not nearly such good quarters, and this was of his
own dispensation. She wore a string of blue beads around her horns, and
munched contentedly at a large illegal breakfast of straw which had been
bought and paid for to supply the pony’s bed.
Footnote 46:
Two pounds.
Footnote 47:
Man.
“Poor cooey!” said Helen, advancing to attempt a familiarity, but the
cow put down her head and made such a violent lunge at her that she beat
a hasty and undignified retreat. This was partly on account of the calf,
which stood a little way off, but well within the maternal vision, and
it was quite an unreasonable demonstration, as the calf was stuffed, and
put there to act upon the cow’s imagination only. This is a necessary
expedient to ensure milk in India from a cow that has no calf of her
own; it is a painful imposition, but uniformly successful. The fact is
one of reputation, as being the only one invariably rejected by
travellers as a lively lie, whereas they are known to swallow greedily
much larger fictions than stuffed calves.
From an upper window, shortly after, Helen saw the cow’s morning toilet
being performed by the bearer. And it was an instructive sight to see
this solemn functionary holding at arm’s length the utmost end of her
tail, and with art and precision improving its appearance.
In the cool of the evening after dinner, the two Brownes sat together in
the shadow of the pillars of their upper veranda, and Helen told the
story of her adventure in the compound. Overhead the pigeons cooed of
their day’s doings, the pony neighed from his stable in the expectation
of his content. A light wind stirred the palms where they stood against
the stars, the smoke of the mallie’s pipal leaves curled up faintly from
his roof where he dwelt beside the gate. Below, in the black shadow of
the godowns, easeful figures sat or moved, the subdued tones of their
parley hardly came to the upper veranda. They had rice and rest and the
comfortable hubble-bubble. And the sahib and the memsahib devised how
they might circumvent these humble people in all their unlawful doings,
till the air grew chill with the dew, and the young moon showed over
their neighbour’s tamarind tree.
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