Behind the Bungalow

by Edward Hamilton Aitken

Our “Nowkers”—The March Past.

Now it is time to close our inspection and order a march past. I think I have marshalled the whole force. It may seem a small band to you, if you have lived in imperial Bengal, for we of Bombay do not generally keep a special attendant to fill and light our pipe, and our tatoo does not require a man to cut its grass. Some of us even put on our own clothes. In short, we have not carried the art of living to such oriental perfection as prevails on the other side of India, and a man of simple tastes will find my company of fourteen a sufficient staff. There they are, Sub hazir hai, “they are all present,” the butler says, except one humble, but necessary officer, who does not like to appear. He is known familiarly by many names. You may call him Plantagenet, for his emblem is the lowly broom; but since his modesty keeps him in the background, we will leave him there. The rest are before you, the faithful corps with whose help we transact our exile life. You may look at them from many standpoints, and how much depends on which you take! I suspect the commonest with us masters is that which regards boy, butler, mussaul, cook, as just so many synonyms for channels by which the hard-earned rupee, which is our life-blood, flows from us continually. This view puts enmity between us and them, between our interests and theirs. It does not come into our minds, that when we submit our claim for an extra allowance of Rs. 200 under section 1735 of the Code, and the mussaul gets the butler to prefer a humble request for an increase of one rupee a month to his slender puggar, we and the mussaul are made kin by that one touch of nature. We spurn the request and urge the claim, with equal wonderment at the effrontery of mussauls and the meanness of Governments. And “the angels weep.”

Shift your standpoint, and in each cringing menial you will see a black token of that Asiatic metamorphosis through which we all have passed. What a picture! Look at yourself as you stand there in purple sublimity, trailing clouds of darkness from the middle ages whence you come, planting your imperial foot on all the manly traditions of your own free country, and pleased with the grovelling adulations of your trembling serfs. And now it is not the angels who weep, but the Baboo of Bengal. His pale and earnest brow is furrowed with despair as he turns from you. For whither shall he turn? When his bosom palpitates with the intense joy of newborn aspirations for liberty, to whom shall he go if the Briton, the champion of the world’s freedom, has drunk of Comus’s cup and become an oriental satrap? Ah! there is still hope. The “large heart of England” beats still for him. In the land of John Hampden and Labouchere there are thousands yet untainted by the plague, who keep no servant, who will listen to the Baboo while he tells them about you, and perhaps return him to parliament.

There is a third view of the case, fraught with much content to those who can take it, and, happily, it is the only view possible to the primitive intelligences over which we exercise domestic lordship. In this view they are, indeed, as we regard them—so many channels by which the rupee may flow from us; but what are we, if not great reservoirs, built to feed those very channels? And so, with that “sweet reasonableness” which is so pleasant a feature of the Hindoo mind, your boy or butler, being the main conduit, sets himself to estimate the capacity of the reservoir, that he may adapt the gauge of each pipe and regulate the flow. And, as the reservoir grows greater, as the assistant becomes a collector and the collector a commissioner, the pipes are extended and enlarged, and all rejoice together. The moral beauty of this view of the situation grows upon you as you accustom your mind to dwell on it. Is it not pleasant to think of yourself as a beneficent irrigation work, watering a wide expanse of green pasture and smiling corn, or as a well in a happy garden, diffusing life and bloom? Look at the syce’s children. Phil Robinson says there are nine of them, all about the same age and dressed in the same nakedness. As they squat together there, indulging “the first and purest of our instincts” in the mud or dust of the narrow back road, reflect that their tender roots are nourished by a thin rivulet of rupees which flows from you. If you dried up, they would droop and perhaps die. The butler has a bright little boy, who goes to school every day in a red velvet cap and print jacket, with a small slate in his hand, and hopes one day to climb higher in the word than his father. His tendrils are wrapped about your salary. Nay, you may widen the range of your thoughts: the old hut in the environs of Surat, with its patch of field and the giant gourds, acknowledges you, and a small stream, diverted from one of the channels which you supply, is filling a deep cistern in one of the back streets of Goa. Pardon me if I think that the untutored Indian’s thought is better even for us than any which we have framed for ourselves. Imagine yourself as a sportsman, spear in hand, pursuing the wild V.C. through fire and water, or patiently stalking the wary K.C.B., or laying snares for the gentle C.I.E.; or else as a humble industrious dormouse lining a warm nest for the winter of your life in Bath or Tunbridge Wells; or as a gay butterfly flitting from flower to flower while the sunshine of your brief day may last; or simply as a prisoner toiling at the treadmill because you must: the well in the garden is a pleasanter conception than all these and wholesomer. Foster it while you may. Now that India has wakened up and begun to spin after the rest of the great world down the ringing grooves of change, these tints of dawn will soon fade away, and in the light of noon the instructed Aryan will learn to see and deplore the monstrous inequalities in the distribution of wealth. He will come to understand the essential equality of all men, and the real nature of the contract which subsists between master and servant. Yes, I am afraid the day is fast drawing near when you will no longer venture to cut the hamal’s pay for letting mosquitoes into your bed curtains and he will no longer join his palms and call you his father and mother for doing so. What a splendid capacity for obedience there is in this ancient people! And our relations with them have certainly taught us again how to govern, which is one of the forgotten arts in the West. Where in the world to-day is there a land so governed as this Indian Empire?

And now each man wants his “character” before he makes his last salaam, and what shall I say? “The bearer — has been in my service since — and I have always found him — ” So far good; but what next? Honest?—Yes. Willing?—Certainly. Careful?—Very. Hardworking?—Well, I have often told him that he was a lazy scoundrel, and that he might easily take a lesson in activity from the bheestee’s bullock, and perhaps I spoke the truth. But, after all, he gets up in the morning an hour before me, and eats his dinner after I have retired for the night. He gets no Saturday half-holiday, and my Sabbath is to him as the other days of the week. And so the hard things I have said of him and to him are forgotten, and charity triumphs at the last. And when my furlough is over and I return to these shores, the whole troop will be at the Apollo Bunder, waiting to welcome back their old master and eat his salt again.

POSTSCRIPT.
The Gowlee, or Doodwallah.

Gopal, the Gowlee, haunts me in my dreams, complaining that he has been left out in the cold. I had classed him with the borah and the baker, as outsiders with whom I had merely business relations; but Gopal seems to urge that he is not on the same footing with these. How can he be compared to a mercenary borah? Has he not ministered to my wants, morning and evening, in wet weather and dry? Have not my children grown up on his milk? He will not deny that they have eaten the baker’s bread too; but who is the baker? Does he come into the saheb’s presence in person as Gopal does? No. He sits in his shop and sends a servant. Not so Gopal. He is one of my children, and I am his father and mother. And I am forced to admit there is some truth in this view of the case. The ill-favoured man who haunts my house of a morning, with a large basket of loaves poised slantwise on his head, and converses in a strange nasal brogue with the cook, is not Mr. de Souza, “baker of superior first and second sort bread, and manufacturer of every kind of biscuit, cake,” &c., but a mere underling. My intercourse with the head of the firm is confined to the first day of each month, when he waits on me in person, dressed in a smart black jacket, and presents his bill. Also on Good Friday he sends me a cake and his compliments, but the former, if it is not intercepted by the butler and applied to his own uses, is generally too unctuous for my taste. Very different are our relations with the Doodwallah. Our chota hazree waits for him in the morning; our afternoon tea cannot proceed till he comes; the baby cries if the Doodwallah is late. And even if you are one of the few who strike for independence and keep their own cow, I still counsel you to maintain amicable relations with the Doodwallah. One day the cow will kick and refuse to be milked, and the butler will come to you with a troubled countenance. It is a grave case and demands professional skill. The Doodwallah must be sent for to milk the cow. In many other ways, too, we are made to feel our dependence on him. I believe we rarely die of cholera, or typhoid fever, without his unobtrusive assistance. And all his services are performed in person, not through any underling. That stately man who walks up the garden path morning and evening, erect as a betel-nut palm, with a tiara of graduated milk-pots on his head, and driving a snorting buffalo before him, is Gopal himself. Scarcely any other figure in the compound impresses me in the same way as his. It is altogether Eastern in its simple dignity, and symbolically it is eloquent. The buffalo represents absolute milk and the lessening pyramid of brass lotas, from the great two-gallon vessel at the base to the ¼-seer measure at the top, stand for successive degrees of dilution with that pure element which runs in the roadside ditches after rain. Thus his insignia interpret themselves to me. Gopal does not acknowledge my heraldry, but explains that the lowest lota contains butter milk—that is to say, milk for making butter. The second contains milk which is excellent for drinking, but will not yield butter; the third a cheaper quality of milk for puddings, and so on. If you are an anxious mother, or a fastidious bachelor, and none of these will please you, then he brings the buffalo to the door and milks it in your presence. I think the truth which underlies the two ways of putting the thing is the same: Gopal and I differ in form of words only. However that may be, practice is more than theory, and I stipulate for milk for all purposes from the lowest lota—that is, milk which is warranted to yield butter. If it will not stand that test, I reject it. Gopal wonders at my extravagance, but consents. The milk is good and the butter from it plentiful. But as time goes on the latter declines both in quantity and quality, so gradually that suspicion is scarcely awakened. When at last you summon the butler to a consultation, he suggests that the weather has been too hot for successful butter making, or too cold. If these reasons do not satisfy you, he has others; if they fail, he gives his verdict against the Doodwallah. Next morning Gopal is called to superintend the making of the butter and convicted, convicted but not abashed. He expresses the greatest regret, but blames the buffalo; its calf is too old. To-morrow you shall have the produce of another buffalo. So next day you have the satisfaction of seeing a fine healthy pat of butter swimming in the butter dish, carved and curled with all the butler’s art, like a full-blown dahlia. But the milk in your tea does not improve, for Gopal, after ascertaining how much milk you set aside for butter every day, finds that the new buffalo yields only that quantity, and so what you require for other purposes comes from another source. The butler forgot to tell you this. What bond is there between him and honest Gopal? I cannot tell. Many are the mysteries of housekeeping in India, and puzzling its problems. If you could behead your butler when anything went wrong, I have very little doubt everything would go right, but the complicated methods of modern justice are no match for the subtleties of Indian petty wickedness. And yet under this crust of cunning there is a vein of simple stupidity which constantly crops up where you least expect it. I remember a gentleman, a bachelor, who set before himself a very high standard. He would be strictly just and justly strict. He suspected that his milk was watered, but his faithful boy protested that this could not be, as the milking was begun and finished in his presence. So the master provided himself with a lactometer, and the suspicion became certainty. Summoning his boy into his presence, he explained to him that that little instrument, which he saw floating in the so-called milk before him, could neither lie nor be deceived. “It declares,” he added sternly, “that there is twenty-five per cent. of water in this milk.” “Your lordship speaks the truth,” answered the faithful man, “but how could I tell a lie? The milk was drawn in my presence.” “Do you mean to say you were there the whole time the animal was being milked?” “The whole time, your lordship. Would I give those rogues the chance of watering the saheb’s milk?” The master thought for a moment, and asked again, “Are you sure there was no water in the pail before the milking began?—these people are very cunning.” “They are as cunning as sheitan, your lordship, but I made the man turn the pail upside down and shake it.” Again the master turned the matter over in his just mind, and it occurred to him that the lactometer was of English manufacture and might be puzzled by the milk of the buffalo. “Is this cow’s milk, or buffalo’s?” he asked. The boy was beginning to feel his position uncomfortable and caught at this chance of escape. “Ah! that I cannot tell. It may be buffalo’s milk.” Tableau.

I have spoken of having butter made in the house, but Gopal carries on all departments of a dairyman’s business, and you may buy butter of him at two annas a “cope.” Let philologists settle the derivation of the word. The “cope” is a measure like a small tea-cup, and when Gopal has filled it, he presses the butter well down with his hand, so that a man skilled in palmistry may read the honest milkman’s fortune off any cope of his butter. How he makes it, or of what materials, I dare not say. Many flavours mingle in it, some familiar enough, some unknown to me. Its texture varies too. Sometimes it is pasty, sometimes semi-fluid, sometimes sticky, following the knife. In colour it is bluish-white, unless dyed. All things considered, I refuse Gopal’s butter, and have mine made at home. The process is very simple, and no churn is needed. Every morning the milk for next day’s butter is put into a large flat dish, to stand for twenty-four hours, at the end of which time, if the dish is as dirty as it should be, the milk has curdled. Then, with a tin spoon, Mukkun skims off the cream and puts it into a large pickle bottle, and squatting on the ground, more suo, bumps the bottle upon a pad until the butter is made. The artistic work of preparing it for presentation remains. First it is dyed yellow with a certain seed, that it may please the saheb’s taste, for buffalo butter is quite white, and you know it is an axiom in India that cow’s milk does not yield butter. Then Mukkun takes a little bamboo instrument and patiently works the butter into a “flower” and sends it to breakfast floating in cold water.

Gopal is a man of substance, owning many buffaloes and immensely fat Guzerat cows, with prodigious humps and large pendent ears. His family, having been connected for many generations with the sacred animal, he enjoys a certain consciousness of moral respectability, like a man whose uncles are deans or canons. In my mind, he is always associated rather with his buffaloes, those great, unwieldy, hairless, slate-coloured docile, intelligent antediluvians.