“Suttee” having been forbidden by their English rulers, Hindu widows must now shave their heads, dress in white, and gain their livelihood as best they can
A seller of the wood with which the bodies of Hindus are burned on the banks of the Ganges. Very despised caste.
The term “old maid” has no synonym in Hindustanee, and needed none until the first female missionary invaded the peninsula. Bachelors, too, are rare. There chanced to fall into my hands an Anglo-Indian sheet wherein was propounded this enigma over the signature of “a puzzled babu.”
“Why,” demanded the puzzled one, after the usual incomprehensible introduction necessary to prove his knowledge of the sahib tongue, “is the Englishman living many times without a wife? If the Hindu is more than very young and has not yet married himself he is contemplated wicked and unclean. I am reading that in all the white man countries there live more women than the men are. Why has not every sahib taken one for his wife?”
Why not, indeed?
Marten had begun to display an arrogant author’s pride in the tale that had carried him so rapidly northward. Several times he had gone out of his way in Puri to tell some Eurasian or babu the sad story of his marooning, and, as afternoon crept on, he resolved to repeat it once more for the entertainment of the commissioner of the district.
“But,” I protested, “you have a ticket to Calcutta. You can’t use two!”
“Right,” he answered, “but it’s about six cigarettes from the commish’s bungalow to the station, and he may come up with the dibs without sending a nigger so far to buy the pasteboard. If he don’t loosen we’ll have to fix it up with the station master.”
The commissioner had fled to the hills and his deputy was a native; a strange one, though, for he not only acceded to the request of the stranded seaman for a through ticket, but actually and visibly hurried to complete the necessary formalities before the departure of the daily train. He did not “come up with the dibs,” however, nor would the station master buy back the ticket which a government clerk purchased for my companion. But there was some gain in the manœuvre; for upon his arrival in Calcutta the railway officials very kindly refunded to Marten some four rupees on the unused portion of the ticket from Berhampore.