_August_ 1891.
My bag left behind, my clothes daily get more and more intolerably
disreputable,--this thought continually uppermost is not compatible with a
due sense of self-respect. With the bag I could have faced the world of
men head erect and spirits high; without it, I fain would skulk in
corners, away from the glances of the crowd. I go to bed in these clothes
and in them I appear in the morning, and on the top of that the steamer is
full of soot, and the unbearable heat of the day keeps one unpleasantly
moist.
Apart from this, I am having quite a time of it on board the steamer. My
fellow-passengers are of inexhaustible variety. There is one, Aghore Babu,
who cannot allude to anything, animate or inanimate, except in terms of
personal abuse. There is another, a lover of music, who persists in
attempting variations on the Bhairab[1] mode at dead of night, convincing
me of the untimeliness of his performance in more senses than one.
[Footnote: A Raga, or mode of Indian classical music, supposed to be
appropriate to the early dawn.]
The steamer has been aground in a narrow ditch of a canal ever since last
evening, and it is now past nine in the morning. I spent the night in a
corner of the crowded deck, more dead than alive. I had asked the steward
to fry some _luchis_ for my dinner, and he brought me some
nondescript slabs of fried dough with no vegetable accompaniments to eat
them with. On my expressing a pained surprise, he was all contrition and
offered to make me some hotch-potch at once. But the night being already
far advanced, I declined his offer, managed to swallow a few mouthfuls of
the stuff dry, and then, all lights on and the deck packed with
passengers, laid myself down to sleep.
Mosquitoes hovered above, cockroaches wandered around. There was a
fellow-sleeper stretched crosswise at my feet whose body my soles every
now and then came up against. Four or five noses were engaged in snoring.
Several mosquito-tormented, sleepless wretches were consoling themselves
by pulls at their hubble-bubble pipes; and above all, there rose those
variations on the mode _Bhairab_! Finally, at half-past three in the
morning, some fussy busy-bodies began loudly inciting each other to get
up. In despair, I also left my bed and dropped into my deck-chair to await
the dawn. Thus passed that variegated nightmare of a night.
One of the hands tells me that the steamer has stuck so fast that it may
take the whole day to get her off. I inquire of another whether any
Calcutta-bound steamer will be passing, and get the smiling reply that
this is the only boat on this line, and I may come back in her, if I like,
after she has reached Cuttack! By a stroke of luck, after a great deal of
tugging and hauling, they have just got her afloat at about ten o'clock.