“Oh! sahib!” screamed the native, in excellent English, “See what you have done! You have made me lose caste. For weeks I may not go among my friends nor see my family. I must stop my business, and wear rags, and sit in the street, and pour ashes on my head, and go often to the temple to purify myself.”
“Tommy-rot,” said Haywood.
But was it? Certainly not to the weeping Hindu, who turned back the way he had come.
These strange superstitions make India a land of especial hardship to the white vagabond “on the road.” He is, in the natural course of events, as safe from violence as in England; but once off the beaten track he finds it difficult to obtain not only food and lodging, but the sine qua non of the tropics—water. In view of this fact the rulers of India have established a system which, should it come to his ears, would fill the American “hobo” with raging envy. The peninsula, as the world knows, is divided into districts, each governed by a commissioner and a deputy commissioner. Except in isolated cases, these executives are Englishmen, of whom the senior commonly dwells in the most important city of his territory, and the deputy in the second in size. The law provides that any penniless European shall, upon application to any one of these governors, be provided with a third-class railway ticket to the capital of the next district, and also with “batter”—money with which to buy food—to the amount of one rupee a day. The beachcomber who wanders inland, therefore, is relayed from one official to another, at the expense of the government, to any port which he may select. This ideal state of affairs is well known to every white vagrant in India, who takes it duly into account, like every published charity, in summing up the ways and means of a projected journey.
Hindus of all castes now travel by train
“Haywood” snaps me as I am getting a shave in Trichinopoly
Not many hours after our arrival in Trichinopoly, Marten had “gone broke.” The four rupees a day of a tally clerk was a princely income in the Orient; but the ex-pearl-fisher was imbued with the adventurer’s philosophy that “money is made to spend,” and as the final act of a day of extravagance had tossed his last anna to an idiot roaming through the bazaars. Haywood was anxious to “salt down” the rupees in his hat band, I to make the acquaintance of so important a personage as a district commissioner. Thus it happened that as noonday fell over Trichinopoly, three cotton-clad Americans emerged from the native town and turned northward towards the governor’s bungalow.
Heat waves hovered like fog before us. Here and there a pathetic tree cast its slender shadow, like a splash of ink, across the white highway. A few coolies, their skins immune to sunburn, shuffled through the sand on their way to the town. We accosted one to inquire our way, but he sprang with a side jump to the extreme edge of the roadway, in terror of our polluting touch.