_Treats of the Startling Effect of a reduction in Wages and the
Pleasures of Loaferdom. Paints the State of the Boondi Road and the
Treachery of Ganesh of Situr._
“A twenty-five per cent. reduction all roun’ an’ no certain leave when
you wants it. _Of_ course the best men goes somewhere else. That’s only
natural, and ’eres this sanguinary down mail a stickin’ in the eye of
the Khundwa down! I tell you, Sir, India’s a bad place--a very bad
place. ’Tisn’t what it was when I came out one and thirty years ago, an’
the drivers was getting their seven and eight ’undred rupees a month an’
was treated as _men_.”
The Englishman was on his way to Nasirabad, and a gentleman in the
Railway was explaining to him the real reason of the decadence of the
Empire. It was because the Rajputana-Malwa Railway had cut all its
employes twenty-five per cent. And, in truth, there is a good deal of
fine free language where gentlemen in the carriage department,
foremen-fitters, station and assistant stationmasters do foregather. It
is ungenerous to judge a caste by a few samples; but the Englishman had
on the road and elsewhere seen a good deal of gentlemen on the Railway,
and is prepared to write down here that they spend their pay in a manner
that would do credit to an income of a thousand a month. Now they are
saying that the twenty-five per cent. reduction is depriving them of the
pleasures of life. So much the better if it makes them moderately
economical in their expenditure. Revolving these things in his mind,
together with one or two stories of extravagance not quite fit for
publication, the Englishman came to Nasirabad, before sunrise, and there
to a tonga. Imagine an icy pause of several minutes followed by
language. Quoth Ram Baksh, proprietor, driver, _sais_, and everything
else, calmly:--“At this time of the year and having regard to the heat
of the sun who wants a top to a tonga? I have no top. I have a top, but
it would take till twelve o’clock to put it on. And behold, Sahib, Padre
Martum Sahib went in this tonga to Deoli. All the officer Sahibs of
Deoli and Nasirabad go in this tonga, for _shikar_. This is a
‘shutin-tonga!’” When Church and Army are brought against one, argument
is in vain. But to take a soft, office-bred unfortunate into the
wilderness, upon a skeleton, a diagram of a conveyance, is brutality.
Ram Baksh did not see it, and headed his two thirteen-hand rats straight
towards the morning sun, along a beautiful military road. “We shall get
to Deoli in six hours,” said Ram Baksh the boastful, and, even as he
spoke, the spring of the tonga bar snapt “mit a harp-like melodious
twang.” “What does it matter?” said Ram Baksh. “Has the Sahib never seen
a tonga-iron break before? Padre Martum Sahib and all the officer Sahibs
in Deoli"--“Ram Baksh,” said the Englishman sternly, “I am not a Padre
Sahib nor an officer Sahib, and if you say anything more about Padre
Martum Sahib or the officers in Deoli I shall grow very angry, and beat
you with a stick, Ram Baksh.”
“Humph,” said Ram Baksh, “I knew you were not a Padre Sahib.” The little
mishap was patched up with string, and the tonga went on merrily. It is
Stevenson who says that the “invitation to the road,” nature’s great
morning song, has not yet been properly understood or put to music. The
first note of it is the sound of the dawn-wind through long grass, and
the last, in this country, the creaking of the bullock wains getting
under way in some unseen _serai_. It is good, good beyond expression, to
see the sun rise upon a strange land and to know that you have only to
go forward and possess that land--that it will dower you before the day
is ended with a hundred new impressions and, perhaps, one idea. It is
good to snuff the wind when it comes in over grassy uplands or down from
the tops of the blue Aravalis--dry and keen as a new-ground sword. Best
of all is to light the First Pipe--is there any tobacco so good as that
we burn in honour of the breaking day?--and, while the ponies wake the
long white road with their hooves and the birds go abroad in companies
together, to thank your stars that you are neither the Subaltern who has
Orderly Room, the ’Stunt who has _kacherri_, or the Judge who has Court
to attend; but are only a loafer in a flannel shirt, bound, if God
please, to “Little Boondi,” somewhere beyond the faint hills across the
plain.
But there was alloy in this delight. Men had told the Englishman darkly
that Boondi State had no love for Englishmen, that there was nowhere to
stop, and that no one would do anything for money. Love was out of the
question. Further, it was an acknowledged fact that there were no
Englishmen of any kind in Boondi. But the Englishman trusted that Ganesh
would be good to him, and that he would, somehow or other, fall upon his
feet as he had fallen before. The road from Nasirabad to Deoli, being
military in its nature, is nearly as straight as a ruler and about as
smooth. It runs for the most part through “Arthurian” country, just such
a land as the Knights of the Round Table went a-looting in--is gently
sloping pasture ground, where a man could see his enemy a long way off
and “ride a wallop” at him, as the Morte D’Arthur puts it, of a clear
half mile. Here and there little rocky hills, the last off-shoots of the
Aravalis to the west, break the ground; but the bulk of it is fair and
without pimples. The Deoli Force are apparently so utterly Irregular
that they can do without a telegraph, have their mails carried by
runners, and dispense with bridges over all the fifty-six miles that
separate them from Nasirabad. However, a man who goes shikarring for any
length of time in one of Ram Baksh’s tongas would soon learn to dispense
with anything and everything. “All the Sahibs use my tongas; I’ve got
eight of them and twenty pairs of horses,” said Ram Baksh. “They go as
far as Gangra, where the tigers are, for they are ‘shutin-tongas.’” Now
the Englishman knew Gangra slightly, having seen it on the way to
Udaipur; and it was as perverse and rocky a place as any man would
desire to see. He politely expressed doubt. “I tell you my tongas go
anywhere,” said Ram Baksh testily. A hay-waggon--they cut and stack
their hay in these parts--blocked the road. Ram Baksh ran the tonga to
one side, into a rut, fetched up on a tree-stump, rebounded on to a
rock, and struck the kunkur. “Observe,” said Ram Baksh; “but that is
nothing. You wait till we get on the Boondi road and I’ll make you
shake, shake like a _botal_.” “Is it _very_ bad?” “I’ve never been to
Boondi myself, but I hear it is all rocks--great rocks as big as the
tonga.” But though he boasted of himself and his horses nearly all the
way, he could not reach Deoli in anything like the time he had set
forth. “If I am not at Boondi by four,” he had said, at six in the
morning, “let me go without my fare.” But by mid-day he was still far
from Deoli, and Boondi lay twenty-eight miles beyond that station. “What
can I do?” said he. “I’ve laid out lots of horses--any amount. But the
fact is I’ve never been to Boondi. I shan’t go there in the night.” Ram
Baksh’s “lots of horses” were three pair between Nasirabad and
Deoli--three pair of undersized ponies who did wonders. One place, after
he had quitted a cotton waggon, a drove of _Bunjaras_ and a man on
horseback, with his carbine across his saddle-bow, the Englishman came
to a stretch of road, so utterly desolate that he said:--“Now I am
clear of everybody who ever knew me. This is the beginning of the waste
into which the scape-goat was sent.”
From a bush by the road side sprang up a fat man who cried aloud in
English:--“How does Your Honour do? I met Your Honour in Simla this
year! Are you quite well? Ya-as, I am here. Your Honour remembers me? I
am travelling. Ya-as. Ha! Ha!” and he went on, leaving His Honour
bemazed. It was a Babu--a Simla Babu, of that there could be no doubt;
but who he was or what he was doing, thirty miles from anywhere, His
Honour could not make out. The native moves about more than most folk,
except railway people, imagine. The big banking firms of Upper India
naturally keep in close touch with their great change-houses in Ajmir,
despatching and receiving messengers regularly. So it comes to pass that
the necessitous circumstances of Lieutenant McRannamack, of the Tyneside
Tail-twisters, quartered on the Frontier, are thoroughly known and
discussed, a thousand miles south of the cantonment where the
light-hearted Lieutenant goes to the “beastly _shroff_.”
This is by the way. Let us return to the banks of the Banas river, where
“poor Carey,” as Tod calls him, came when he was sickening for his last
illness. The Banas is one of those streams which runs “over golden sands
with feet of silver,” but, from the scarp of its banks, Deoli in the
rains must be isolated. Ram Baksh, questioned hereon, vowed that all the
Officer Sahibs never dreamed of halting, but went over in boats or on
elephants. According to Ram Baksh the men of Deoli must be wonderful
creatures. They do nothing but use his tongas. A break in some low hills
give on to the dead flat plain in which Deoli stands. “You must stop
here for the night,” said Ram Baksh. “I will not take my horses forward
in the dark; God knows where the dak-bungalow is. I’ve forgotten, but
any one of the Officer Sahibs in Deoli will tell you.” Those in search
of a new emotion would do well to run about an apparently empty
cantonment, in a disgraceful shooting-tonga, in search of a place to
sleep in. Chaprassis come out of the back verandahs, and are rude, and
regimental Babus hop out of godowns and are flippant, while in the
distance a Sahib looks out of his room, where he has evidently been
sleeping, and eyes the dusty forlorn-hope with silent contempt. It
should be mentioned that the dust on the Deoli road not only powders
but masks the face and raiment of the passenger.
Next morning Ram Baksh was awake with the dawn, and clamorous to go on
to Boondi. “I’ve sent a pair of horses, big horses, out there and the
_sais_ is a fool. Perhaps they will be lost, I want to find them.” He
dragged his unhappy passenger on to the road once more and demanded of
all who passed the dak-bungalow which was the way to Boondi. “Observe!”
said he, “there can be only one road, and if I hit it we are all right,
and I’ll show you what the tonga can do.” “Amen,” said the Englishman
devoutly, as the tonga jumped into and out of a larger hole. “Without
doubt this is the Boondi road,” said Ram Baksh; “it is so bad.”
Beyond Deoli the cultivated land gave place to more hills peppered with
stones, stretches of _ak_-scrub and clumps of thorn varied with a little
jhil here and there for the benefit of the officers of the Deoli
Irregular Force.
It has been before said that the Boondi State has no great love for
Sahibs. The state of the road proves it. “This,” said Ram Baksh, tapping
the wheel to see whether the last plunge had smashed a spoke, “is a very
good road. You wait till you see what is ahead.” And the funeral
staggered on--over irrigation cuts, through buffalo wallows, and dried
pools stamped with the hundred feet of kine (this by the way is the most
cruel road of all), up rough banks where the rock ledges peered out of
the dust, down step-cut dips ornamented with large stones, and along
two-feet deep ruts of the rains, where the tonga went slantwise even to
the verge of upsetting. It was a royal road--a native road--a Raj road
of the roughest, and, through all its jolts and bangs and bumps and dips
and heaves, the eye of Ram Baksh rolled in its blood-shot socket,
seeking for the “big horses” he had so rashly sent into the wilderness.
The ponies that had done the last twenty miles into Deoli were nearly
used up, and did their best to lie down in the dry beds of nullahs.
[_Nota bene._--There was an unbridged nullah every five minutes, for the
set of the country was towards the Mej river. In the rains it must be
utterly impassable.]
A man came by on horseback, his servant walking before with platter and
meal bag. “Have you seen any horses hereabouts?” cried Ram Baksh.
“Horses! horses! What the Devil have I to do with your horses? D’you
think I’ve stolen them?” Now this was decidedly a strange answer, and
showed the rudeness of the land. An old woman under a tree cried out in
a strange tongue and ran away. It was a dream-like experience, this
hunting for horses on a “blasted heath” with neither house nor hut nor
shed in sight. “If we keep to the road long enough we must find them.
Look at the road! This Raj ought to be smitten with bullets.” Ram Baksh
had been pitched forward nearly on to the off-pony’s rump, and was in a
very bad temper indeed. The funeral found a house--a house walled with
thorns--and near by were the two big horses, thirteen-two if an inch,
and harnessed quite regardless of expense.
Everything was re-packed and re-bound with triple ropes, and the Sahib
was provided with an extra cushion; but he had reached a sort of
dreamsome Nirvana; having several times bitten his tongue through, cut
his boot against the wheel-edge, and twisted his legs into a
true-lover’s-knot. There was no further sense of suffering in him. He
was even beginning to enjoy himself faintly and by gasps. The road
struck boldly into hills with all their teeth on edge, that is to say,
their strata breaking across the road in a series of little ripples. The
effect of this was amazing. The tonga skipped merrily as a young fawn,
from ridge to ridge, and never seemed to have both wheels on the ground
at the same time. It shivered, it palpitated, it shook, it slid, it
hopped, it waltzed, it ricochetted, it bounded like a kangaroo, it
blundered like a sledge, it swayed like a top-heavy coach on a
down-grade, it “kicked” like a badly coupled railway carriage, it
squelched like a country-cart, it squeaked in its torment, and, lastly,
it essayed to plough up the ground with its nose. After three hours of
this performance, it struck a tiny little ford, set between
steeply-sloping banks of white dust, where the water was clear brown and
full of fish. And here a blissful halt was called under the shadow of
the high bank of a tobacco field.
Would you taste one of the real pleasures of Life? Go through severe
acrobatic exercises in and about a tonga for four hours; then, having
eaten and drank till you can no more, sprawl, in the cool of a nullah
bed with your head among the green tobacco, and your mind adrift with
the one little cloud in a royally blue sky. Earth has nothing more to
offer her children than this deep delight of animal well-being. There
were butterflies in the tobacco--six different kinds, and a little rat
came out and drank at the ford. To him succeeded the flight into Egypt.
The white bank of the ford framed the picture perfectly--the Mother in
blue, on a great white donkey, holding the Child in her arms, and
Joseph walking beside, his hand upon the donkey’s withers. By all the
laws of the East, Joseph should have been riding and the Mother walking.
This was an exception decreed for the Englishman’s special benefit. It
was very warm and very pleasant, and, somehow, the passers by the ford
grew indistinct, and the nullah became a big English garden, with a
cuckoo singing far down in the orchard, among the apple-blossoms. The
cuckoo started the dream. He was the only real thing in it, for the
garden slipped back into the water, but the cuckoo remained and called
and called for all the world as though he had been a veritable English
cuckoo. “Cuckoo--cuckoo--cuck;” then a pause and renewal of the cry from
another quarter of the horizon. After that the ford became distasteful,
so the procession was driven forward and in time plunged into what must
have been a big city once, but the only inhabitants were oil-men. There
were abundance of tombs here, and one carried a life-like carving in
high relief of a man on horseback spearing a foot-soldier. Hard by this
place the road or rut turned by great gardens, very cool and pleasant,
full of tombs and black-faced monkeys who quarrelled among the tombs,
and shut in from the sun by gigantic banians and mango trees. Under the
trees and behind the walls, priests sat singing; and the Englishman
would have enquired into what strange place he had fallen, but the men
did not understand him.
Ganesh is a mean little god of circumscribed powers. He was dreaming,
with a red and flushed face, under a banian tree; and the Englishman
gave him four annas to arrange matters comfortably at Boondi. His priest
took the four annas, but Ganesh did nothing whatever, as shall be shown
later. His only excuse is that his trunk was a good deal worn, and he
would have been better for some more silver leaf, but that was no fault
of the Englishman.
Beyond the dead city was a jhil, full of snipe and duck, winding in and
out of the hills; and beyond the jhil, hidden altogether among the
hills, was Boondi. The nearer to the city the viler grew the road and
the more overwhelming the curiosity of the inhabitants. But what befel
at Boondi must be reserved for another chapter.