THE FOOLISH FAKĪR.
Beneath a group of beautiful palm-trees, a half-witted young Fakīr, adorned with peacocks’ feathers, is sitting and talking to the men around him, who regard as prophetic whatever his wandering and unsettled mind induces him to utter, and look upon him as the favourite of heaven—the natives treat persons thus afflicted with the greatest kindness, and supply them with food. A leaf of the fan palm, here represented, may be seen in the Museum. The whole group, as well as the trees, are portraits.
On the sands below and close to the edge of the river, is an Hindū in the last stage of illness. His friends have carried him down to the sacred stream on a charpāī, (a rude native bed,) and are in the act of making him drink the Ganges water, ere they half immerse his body in the sacred stream. His wife, on the edge of the bed, is weeping, and her dopatta (or veil), is drawn over her face; the Brahman is offering the prayers usual on this occasion.
The Hindūs are extremely anxious to die in sight of the Ganges, that their sins may be washed away in their last moments. A person in his last agonies is frequently carried on his bed, by his friends or relatives, in the coldest or in the hottest weather, from whatever distance, to the river-side, where he lies, if a poor man, without a covering day and night, until he expires. With the pains of death upon him, he is placed up to the middle in water and drenched with it; leaves of the shrub goddess, the sacred tulsī plant, are also put into his mouth, the marks on the pebble god, the Salagram are shown to him, and his relations call upon him to repeat, and repeat for him, the names of Rām, Hurī, Ganga, &c. In some cases the family priest repeats some prayers, and makes an offering to Voitŭrŭnēē, the river over which, they say, the soul is ferried, after leaving the body. The relations of the dying man spread the sediment of the river on his forehead and breast, and afterwards with the finger write on this sediment the name of some deity. If a person should die in his house, and not by the river-side, it is considered as a great misfortune, as he thereby loses the help of the goddess in his last moments. If a person choose to die at home, his memory becomes infamous.
If these unfortunate people recover, after having been exposed by their relatives to die on the banks of the river, they take refuge in the village of Chagdah on the left bank of the Matabangah, forty-six miles from Calcutta, of which people who ought to be corpses, are the sole inhabitants. They are considered to prefer a debased existence to a righteous end, agreeing therein with the highest authorities. Pope’s Homer makes Achilles in the Elysian fields say:—
“Rather I’d choose laboriously to bear
A weight of woes, and breathe the vital air,
A slave to some poor hind that toils for bread,
Than reign the scepter’d monarch of the dead.”