Juggernaut, Hanuman, and in addition to these Hindoo deities—Buddha—I saw together in one shrine. On the bank of the river are some large houses for pilgrims, painted all over with various subjects. Kali, holding her head in two of her four hands, spouts blood in tall fountains: Hanuman, the monkey god, fights with the eagle god, and the wife of Vishnu plays peacefully with her husband's legs.
Near by were five trees (not pictured but actual) growing together as one, with their roots intertwined—Peepul, Bodh, Banyan, Neem and Oshhuck, their many-shaped leaves trembling in the air in an arboreal pas de cinq, with lingams round the base of the joined trunks. Four men passed me here carrying a dead body.
I had to walk back the same way that I had come; and as I crossed the courtyard of the Kali temple a strange figure in rags stood blowing upon a large white conch-shell a long, long strange note. A white conch-shell on the wrist marks a pilgrimage to the great seaside Siva Temple of Rameswaram in the South, but the conch-shell is also one of the marks of the Vaishnavas. "He is a mad one," said the priest; "he eats the mouse and snakes."
While I was in Calcutta I wanted to go to one of the native theatres, but the only one the hotel people knew about was a Parsee theatre in Durumtolla Street. I saw there Kismatka Sitara, a serious version of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves; but I was determined to see a Bengali company, in spite of the remonstrances of my table companions at the Grand Hotel, who were perfectly satisfied with the Merry Widow touring company, and declared it was not reasonable for an Englishman to visit native theatres at all.
It was a Sunday evening when I drove along Bentinck Street and approached the neighbourhood of Beadon Square. The performances at the Bengali theatres begin very early, so it was not yet dark and a soft after-sunset light irradiated the thousands of tiny shops with all the myriad kinds of work going on in them.
There were large three-storeyed houses on each side of the road, now with balconies full of women; then I passed a vast building with tall Ionic columns and two great porticoes—a Nawab's palace; then hundreds more little houses, and at last Beadon Square with its palm trees and white statue. And the warm glow fell upon the ample robes of many people walking up and down after the heat and turmoil of the day and upon many white oxen, and against the sky, rows of seated figures watched from the tops of walls and from the edges of roofs; while all the time, interwoven with humanity like the warp and woof of Indian city life, here, there and everywhere skipped and walked and flapped and scrimmaged the squawking black innumerable crows.
BENGALEE ACTRESS, MISS TIN CORRY DASS THE YOUNGER.
After I had been in to the box-office in front of the theatre and purchased my ticket—an orchestra stall for three rupees—I waited in a rectangular court at one side of the building. Over the row of doors giving entrance to various parts of the house, there was a veranda, and facing this, some seats by an oval-railed enclosure containing ornamental plants. On the other side of this gambolled fifteen or twenty white rabbits behind wire-netting. One star was just showing in the sky, which was now a pale rose colour, and against it I could see the top of a coconut-palm.