The nights were sultry and the ship rolled worse every watch. I think, however, that I never saw people try harder than those natives did to keep clean. They had all brought new palm-leaf mats to lie upon, but they could not lie down without overlapping. I asked the captain what he did about scrubbing decks, and he said it was always done at the end of the voyage! Next morning the downpour, already referred to, began and did the business with cruel effectiveness.
As we neared Burmah the sea grew calm again and the rain abated. The sun dried sick bodies and cheered despondent hearts. I spoke to a woman crouching by some sacks and tin cans, with an old yellow cloth round her head and shoulders, and another cloth swathing her loins. She had very dark brown eyes, and her fingernails were bright red and also the palms of her hands from the "maradelli" tied round the nails at night. She was the wife of a man the other side of fourteen people, some four yards away. I asked his name, not knowing that a Hindoo woman may not pronounce her husband's name. She called him "Veetkar," which means uncle or houseman: the man was of the Palla caste, which is just a little higher than the Pariah, and they had been married five years but had no children. This was the man's second marriage, his first wife having died of some liver complaint he said. Like most of the passengers they were going out for paddy-field work, but unlike so many others, they were "on their own" not being taken over by a labour contractor. The man said he should get work at Kisshoor village, about eight miles from Rangoon. Every year for seven years he had been over.
Altogether, this man had saved, according to his own statement, two hundred rupees in the seven years' work, and had invested this in bullocks and a little field near his village, which was named Verloocooli. He had left the son of his first wife to look after the house and the field.
MONGOLIAN TYPE OF MOHAMMEDAN.
Under a thin muslin an ayah was watching our talk. She said she was a Christian and came from Lazarus Church. Her husband ran away, leaving her with three children in Madras, so she works now as an ayah to an Eurasian lady, while her mother looks after the children in Madras.
About twenty people round one corner of the open hatch seemed to belong to one another. They came from the Soutakar district and were drinking rice-water—that is the water poured off when rice is boiled. A Mohammedan with two sons was going to sell things. The boys would watch the goods, he told me. He was returning to Upper Burmah, where he had lived twenty-four years, and he had only been over to Madras to visit his mother and father. He has "just a little shop" for the sale of such goods as dal, chili, salt, onions, coconut oil, sweet oil, tamarind, matches and candles.
Then there was the Mongolian type of Mohammedan. He was very fat and greasy, and had one of his dog teeth long like a tusk. He was a tin-worker and made large cans in his shop in Rangoon.
I went down between decks and never saw people packed so closely before except on Coronation Day. Even "marked" men discarded all clothing but a small loin cloth: most of them could not move hand or foot without their neighbours feeling the change of position; and as upon the deck above, they often lay partly over each other. Yet in spite of the general overcrowding, I noticed a woman of the Brahmin caste lying at her ease in a small open space marked out by boxes and tin trunks. There was a large lamp in a white reflector hanging by the companion-way, and some of those lying nearest to it held leaf fans over their faces to keep the light from their eyes.