Under the absolute Amir

by Frank A. Martin

One Hindustani servant who was with me on the journey up to Kabul through Kandahar, some months later developed into a drunkard, drinking the raw spirit which is distilled in the Government shops and sold to Hindoos in the bazars, as well as being used in different manufactures. I put up with it for a long time, but when I found that matters got worse daily, and not only the work was not properly done in the house, but a good deal of swindling was going on, I wrote to some friends in India, and had another man sent up to replace him. I had kept back part of his pay for some time to prevent him wasting it in drink and women, as he was fond of doing, and had given orders to the sepoys on the gate to stop him going out at night to other Hindustanis’ houses where cards were played, drink supplied, and loose women were kept; but all this failed to stop the man’s misbehaviour, and when the other servant at last arrived I obtained a passport to enable him to return to India, and told him to arrange by which caravan he would travel, and to see me the day before he started, when I would give him the wages I had kept in hand. In the mean time he went to live with some friends, and two or three weeks passed before he came to me one evening to say good-bye, and tell me that he was starting for India the next morning. I said good-bye to him, gave him his money and his road permit, and he went away. A short time after I found that he had not gone back to India, but had used the money to get married to a widow—a rather notorious character—and had been paying daily visits to my old enemy, the Kotwal, who tried to compromise me before the Amir through this man. He had told the Kotwal many lies to revenge himself on me; but as nothing he said could be proved, the Amir refused to listen, whereupon the Kotwal clapped the man in prison as the best means of preventing his tongue wagging about his own part in the matter of getting up a case against me, and some few weeks later had his throat cut at night, and the body disposed of. Of the sequel I knew nothing for some months, but eventually a man told me the particulars related to him by a Kotwali sepoy, of how this sepoy had been one of those appointed to cut the servant’s throat late one night, and how the body had been stripped of its clothing, and then thrown into a ditch and covered with earth. He said the man’s screams were fearful when he saw they had come to kill him, and, knowing his timid nature, I can believe it.

The Hindustani servants I had in Kabul all swindled more or less, and generally more toward the end of their service, when I was forced to dismiss them and get others. I had little time to attend to household affairs, except at night, and then I was, as a rule, too tired to go into matters properly, and it is not at night that one can thoroughly see to such things, and I had perforce to accept their statements, such as the quantity of cattle and horse food bought and used, without knowing whether the animals had received all that was charged for, and being morally certain they had not; so the servants, seeing the position, took advantage of it, as natives ever will. Thrashing servants does little good, and it besides engenders in them a spirit of retaliation, which shows itself in small things, such as forgetting trivial household duties, while pretending to do their utmost to please the sahib, and though these offences are so trivial, yet when one has other worries which are irritating they loom large, and are very trying to bear. In retaliation of this sort the natives are past masters, and mention of the small duty forgotten sends them into apparent fits of abject contrition. Both the servant and one’s self know it is all humbug, but there is nothing of malice aforethought to be proved, so the servant retires gracefully with, when far enough off, a smug smile, while his master stands and fumes at his impotence to punish without losing dignity. Those who do not know the native, and he seems to be much the same in all Eastern countries, may think that they would find means of counter-retaliation, but rather than let matters go so far as that, it is better to get rid of the servant and try a new man, and this has its drawback, for one who changes servants frequently will soon find it difficult to get a good one, and in native servants there are many degrees of quality. The general experience of Englishmen in the East seems to be much the same, except that some fare worse with their servants than others, and if those who do not understand the native were present on some occasions, it is extremely probable they would think the master most unpleasantly unjust to poor servants, who were doing their best for him.

If one wants to buy cheaply from the bazar, it is better to send a native of the country to do the buying, rather than a Hindustani, for the latter, being known to be an Englishman’s servant, is charged double the price asked from any one else. When a native of the country does the buying, he always adds something on to the price when rendering the account, and so does a Hindustani, but generally the amount of the commission he charges is less than the other one, and one also saves the extra price asked by a shopkeeper from the Hindustani servant. I have tried sending the latest engaged, and therefore the poorest, Hazara servant to the bazar to buy things, and in his innocence the man has charged me the prices asked by the shopkeeper, who thought he was dealing with a poor Hazara, and from the prices so obtained, I was able to keep some sort of a check on the other servants, and prevent their commission becoming too excessive. This dustoori, or commission on things bought, is recognized as quite the right thing by all servants when buying for a foreigner, and the poor Hazara, who charged me no more than what he paid, used to have a bad time from the other servants when they found out that he had made nothing for himself; but a few months’ service and advice from, and the example of, other servants always corrected such stupidity. However, I always found the Hazaras more reasonable in their dustoori, and therefore cheaper to send to the bazar than Hindustani servants, for the latter were always grasping to the last degree, and generally managed to kill the goose with the golden eggs by their avaricious tendencies, and it was a great blow to their pocket, to say nothing of their dignity, when I would take the purchase of requirements from their hands and appoint some poor servant to do the work instead, much to the latter’s importance and swagger before the others.

CHAPTER XII
LIFE OF EUROPEANS IN KABUL—continued

Lawlessness—Food: raising cattle, sheep, fowls, etc.—Presents from princes and others—Famines in Kabul—Cholera—Moullah’s pilgrimage and preaching—Use of roofs of houses—Work and working hours—Amusements—Hindu dealers and old curios—Festival visits to Amir and princes—Europeans tried by jury—Letters: cost of postage—Interpreters.

After the death of Amir Abdur Rahman, a good deal of lawlessness prevailed in the bazars, which was principally due to soldiers interfering with most of the people they met, for the men of the army looked upon themselves, and not altogether without reason, as the cocks of the wall, since the Amir’s death, and of course, did their best to show that they were not subject to any authority. I had, therefore, to send one of my guards with the servant, who went to the bazar daily to make purchases, to prevent the man being molested, and to ensure his returning with all the articles he had bought.

Shopkeepers also took advantage of the unsettled nature of affairs to give short weight, and in other ways increase their profits, no doubt thinking it best to make all they could before the disturbances, which all expected, set in. One shopkeeper took half the matches from each box in the packets of twelve, and sold them in this half-filled condition, in order to reap a double profit. One of these packets being sold to one of my servants, and the fraud detected, the soldier who accompanied the servant knocked two of the shopkeeper’s teeth out, whereupon the shopkeeper made complaint to the Kotwal, who reported the case to the soldier’s commanding officer, and the affair ended in my being several rupees out of pocket in obtaining the soldier’s acquittal. Bribery and corruption, of course; but I could not let the man suffer for his over-zealous protection of my interests. He was a simple Afghan soldier, and such men are usually very straightforward, and only think of carrying out the orders given them. I once sent a soldier of this description to tell one of the workshop foremen to come to my office, and on the foreman impudently sending back word to the effect that he was busy and would come later, I told the soldier to bring him by the beard if he did not come on being told to do so. The soldier went off, and presently returned dragging the man by the beard, the two together making sufficient noise on their progress to attract a crowd of workmen, who followed to see the end of the matter. Although I had not intended my instructions to be literally carried out, the effect on the rest of the workmen was that I had no occasion to send twice for another man.

In the bazars it is not an easy matter to get good meat, the sheep killed for the supply of meat being generally the large Turkestani sort, the flesh of which is tough, and, being also rather flavourless, is poor eating. For this reason I bought my own, the small Hazara ones, which much resemble the Welsh sheep, and having got together a flock of fifty to sixty ewes, I sent them to Hazara, where pasturage is cheap and plentiful, and had others bred from them there. The young lambs were sent down to me from time to time in batches of eight or ten, to enable me to feed them up ready for killing, and in this way I got very good mutton, and each sheep killed cost less than a couple of shillings on an average, but I paid nothing for pasturage and no wages, the man in charge taking the sheep’s milk, from which he made cheese, in lieu of pay. I also bred fowl, duck, geese, turkey, and guinea-fowl, and as food for them is cheap, they were inexpensive, and the fowl provided me with all the fresh eggs I wanted. I kept a couple of cows for milk, and the supply of occasional veal, when their calves grew up large enough to kill. The cows of the country seldom give a good supply of milk for long, so that I found it necessary to keep two to ensure a constant supply of milk sufficient for daily use, and for making butter. Flour used to be cheap, but the price for several years past has been going up steadily, so that it is now three times the price it was five years ago, and when I left Kabul, it was selling at six pounds per rupee (a little less than three half-pence per pound).

Tea, coffee, tinned provisions, tobacco, wines, etc., must be got up from India and usually it takes about three months from the time ordered before they are received. The reason it takes so long to get up provisions is due to the karaya-kash people (carriers for hire), first in the difficulty in persuading one of them to undertake to carry the goods from Peshawar to Kabul, and next in delaying the goods on the road for many weeks. It very frequently happens that a man carrying for hire gets a load in Peshawar for all his camels, horses, etc., part of the load being booked to Jelalabad, which is half way to Kabul, and the other part of the load to Kabul. On the man reaching Jelalabad he delivers the goods which are consigned there, and leaving there those goods which are to go further on, he returns to Peshawar for another load, and he continues going backwards and forwards until the goods for Kabul are sufficient for all his animals and then he goes on to that place. As the journey to Jelalabad from Peshawar takes five or six days, the various trips to and fro until the man is ready to go on to Kabul, take time, and if one happens to be out of tobacco, or anything else one wants, this prolonged waiting for fresh supplies is very irritating, particularly when one has been advised by letter from Peshawar that the goods left there some weeks before, but when the goods at last arrive one is so pleased in getting them, that all former irritation is forgotten. It often happens that goods are spoilt or go bad on the road on account of the boxes being left in the serais (caravan yards) at different places exposed to the weather, but there is no remedy, and one has to take one’s chance.