Glimpses of Bengal | Page 8

cannot tell. They might have done so with as good a reason an hour earlier, or, for the matter of that, twelve hours later! Their decision was clearly arrived at empirically, entirely without method.

SHAZADPUR,
July 1891.
There is another boat at this landing-place, and on the shore in front of it a crowd of village women. Some are evidently embarking on a journey and the others seeing them off; infants, veils, and grey hairs are all mixed up in the gathering.
One girl in particular attracts my attention. She must be about eleven or twelve; but, buxom and sturdy, she might pass for fourteen or fifteen. She has a winsome face--very dark, but very pretty. Her hair is cut short like a boy's, which well becomes her simple, frank, and alert expression. She has a child in her arms and is staring at me with unabashed curiosity, and certainly no lack of straightforwardness or intelligence in her glance. Her half-boyish, half-girlish manner is singularly attractive--a novel blend of masculine nonchalance and feminine charm. I had no idea there were such types among our village women in Bengal.
None of this family, apparently, is troubled with too much bashfulness. One of them has unfastened her hair in the sun and is combing it out with her ringers, while conversing about their domestic affairs at the top of her voice with another, on board. I gather she has no other children except a girl, a foolish creature who knows neither how to behave or talk, nor even the difference between kin and stranger. I also learn that Gopal's son-in-law has turned out a ne'er-do-well, and that his daughter refuses to go to her husband.
When, at length, it was time to start, they escorted my short-haired damsel, with plump shapely arms, her gold bangles and her guileless, radiant face, into the boat. I could divine that she was returning from her father's to her husband's home. They all stood there, following the boat with their gaze as it cast off, one or two wiping their eyes with the loose end of their saris. A little girl, with her hair tightly tied into a knot, clung to the neck of an older woman and silently wept on her shoulder. Perhaps she was losing a darling Didimani [1] who joined in her doll games and also slapped her when she was naughty....
[Footnote 1: An elder sister is often called sister-jewel (Didimani).]
The quiet floating away of a boat on the stream seems to add to the pathos of a separation--it is so like death--the departing one lost to sight, those left behind returning to their daily life, wiping their eyes. True, the pang lasts but a while, and is perhaps already wearing off both in those who have gone and those who remain,--pain being temporary, oblivion permanent. But none the less it is not the forgetting, but the pain which is true; and every now and then, in separation or in death, we realise how terribly true.

ON BOARD A CANAL STEAMER GOING TO CUTTACK,
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