The weather is very uncertain; sometimes very hot, then suddenly comes a north-wester, blowing open every door in the house, attended with a deluge of heavy rain, falling straight down in immense drops: the other evening it was dark as night, the lightning blazed for a second or two, with the blue sulphureous light you see represented on the stage; the effect was beautiful; the forked lightning was remarkably strong; I did not envy the ships in the bay.
The foliage of the trees, so luxuriously beautiful and so novel, is to me a source of constant admiration. When we girls used to laugh at the odd trees on the screens, we wronged the Chinese in imagining they were the productions of fancy; the whole nation was never before accused of having had a fanciful idea, and those trees were copied from nature, as I have found from seeing the same in my drives and rides around Calcutta. The country is quite flat, but the foliage very fine and rich. The idleness of the natives is excessive; for instance, my ayha will dress me, after which she will go to her house, eat her dinner, and then returning, will sleep in one corner of my room on the floor for the whole day. The bearers also do nothing but eat and sleep, when they are not pulling the pankhās.
Some of the natives are remarkably handsome, but appear far from being strong men. It is impossible to do with a few servants, you must have many; their customs and prejudices are inviolable; a servant will do such and such things, and nothing more. They are great plagues; much more troublesome than English servants. I knew not before the oppressive power of the hot winds, and find myself as listless as any Indian lady is universally considered to be; I can now excuse, what I before condemned as indolence and want of energy—so much for experience. The greatest annoyance are the musquito bites; it is almost impossible not to scratch them, which causes them to inflame, and they are then often very difficult to cure: they are to me much worse than the heat itself; my irritable constitution cannot endure them.
The elephantiasis is very common amongst the natives, it causes one or both legs to swell to an enormous size, making the leg at the ankle as large as it is above the knee; there are some deplorable objects of this sort, with legs like those of the elephant—whence the name. Leprosy is very common; we see lepers continually. The insects are of monstrous growth, such spiders! and the small-lizards are numerous on the walls of the rooms, darting out from behind pictures, &c. Curtains are not used in Calcutta, they would harbour musquitoes, scorpions, and lizards.
The Chŭrŭk Pooja.
THE CHŬRŬK PŪJĀ
فاني پارکس
The other day, hearing it was a Burra Din, (day of festival in honour of the goddess Kālee, whose temple is about a mile and a half from Calcutta,) I drove down in the evening to Kālee Ghaut, where, had not the novelty of the scene excited my curiosity, disgust would have made me sick. Thousands of people were on the road, dressed in all their gayest attire, to do honour to the festival of the Chŭrŭk Pooja, the swinging by hooks. Amongst the crowd, the most remarkable objects were several Voiragee mendicants; their bodies were covered with ashes, their hair clotted with mud and twisted round their heads; they were naked all but a shred of cloth. One man had held up both arms over his head until they had withered and were immoveable, the nails of the clenched fists had penetrated through the back of the hands, and came out on the other side like the claws of a bird. To fulfil some vow to Vishnoo this agony is endured, not as a penance for sin, but as an act of extraordinary merit. At first the pain must be great, but it ceases as the arms become benumbed. A man of this description is reckoned remarkably holy, having perfect dependence upon God for support, being unable, his arms having become immoveable, to carry food to his mouth or assist himself. Two or three other mendicants who were present had only one withered arm raised above their heads. Some Hindoos of low caste, either for their sins or for money, had cut three or four gashes in the muscular part of the arm, and through these gashes they kept running a sword, dancing violently all the time to hideous music; others ran bamboos as thick as three fingers through the holes in the arm, dancing in the same manner. One man passed a spit up and down through the holes, another a dagger, and a third had a skewer through his tongue.
A little further on were three swinging posts erected in this fashion; a post some thirty feet in height was crossed at the top by a horizontal bamboo, from one end of which a man was swinging, suspended by a rope, from the other end another rope was fastened to a horizontal pole below, which was turned by men running round like horses in a mill. The man swung in a circle of perhaps thirty feet diameter, supported by four iron hooks, two through the flesh of his back, and two in that of his chest, by which, and a small bit of cloth across the breast, he was entirely supported: he carried a bag in one hand, from which he threw sweetmeats and flowers to the populace below. Some men swing with four hooks in the back and four on the chest without any cloth, eight hooks being considered sufficient to support the body. The man I saw swinging looked very wild, from the quantity of opium and bengh he had taken to deaden the sense of pain. Bengh is an intoxicating liquor, which is prepared with the leaves of the Gánja plant (Cannabis Indica).