Hindoo Holiday
J.R. Ackerley
Language: English
Pages: 0
ISBN: B001V6KPKW
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Humming-bird, and the perfect male and female human bodies, was thought to be the Seat of the Unknown. He could not account for this selection, he said, any more than he could say why maize, onions, celery, and spinach were unholy, or why the cat was sacred and the dog not; but so it was. As we drove through the outskirts of Chetla I pointed out to His Highness one of the rude tree-shrines one sees frequently hereabouts and asked him what they meant. They are small circular platforms of
was sickly with the scent of sajna. His Highness was curled up outside the Palace on a charpai. A dilapidated canvas fence had been erected round him, forming a private enclosure. My chair and the usual tables were set beside him; charcoal glowed through its soft gray ash in a bowl on the ground. Apparently the weather was not yet warm enough for him; but my shirt was sticking to my back. We chatted about one thing and another, while whiteclad servants were visible now and then behind him, pale
this morning. It is on the outskirts of the town and is called the garden of Dilkhusha or Heart’s Ease. The Dewan, or Prime Minister, himself accompanied us. He is an enormously fat man, with small well-shaped hands, with which he frequently gesticulated. He was very voluble and excitable, and his voice, which even normally was surprisingly high for his age and bulk, rose often to a shrill cry. His features, too, were strangely small and refined in the midst of his heavy cheeks and jowls, and his
babies were received into the world was very sad. But he denied that these first feelings of disappointment and indifference continued. “We worship our daughters,” he said. “We touch their feet. They do not touch ours. We cannot ask them to—it would be a scandal, a disgraceful request. Nor can we ask them to do any menial labor.” Narayan said to me this evening: “I like you very much; give me fifteen rupees a month, and I will come and live with you for always. I will be your servant
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’