When We Were Strolling Players in the East

by Louise Jordan Miln

I caught my breath, she was so pretty! Her skin was fairer than mine, but with a lovely olive tinge in it. Her scarlet lips were trembling with a shy, half smile. She was dressed, or rather wrapped, in a pale-blue satin sari; it was edged with a delicate embroidery of pink and gold. Her little hands were heavy with gems. Her slender throat was hidden by a string of big pearls, and a string of bigger diamonds. There were diamonds at her girdle, and diamonds caught here and there her satin draperies. As she moved slowly forward, her graceful garment half hid, half revealed, the delicate outlines of her svelte figure. She lifted her big brown eyes for a half instant to the face of the man who was waiting for her, and I thought of Byron’s Zadie.

The contracting couple were seated upon the chairs that were on the stone. They were facing each other. Then the ceremony proper began. A priest tied their right hands together with a soft, silken, bright-red thread. Two younger priests stepped forward, carrying a large piece of yellow cloth. This they held between the bride and bridegroom. The chief priest stood near them, holding in one hand a lit censer and in the other a dish of benjamin. Another priest gave a handful of rice to both the bridegroom and his bride. The chief priest began a long prayer. At a certain word, for which the young couple listened intently, he threw the incense into the fire. At that moment the couple threw their handfuls of rice each into the other’s face. Then their position was changed, and they were placed side by side. Two of the priests stood before them, and two witnesses stood beside them, holding brass plates heaped with rice. The priests began the marriage blessing. This they recited in Zend and Sanscrit, and at every sentence they pelted the couple with rice.

Then the priest put the two questions, “Have you espoused her?” and “Have you espoused him?” He was answered, “Yes, I have espoused her,” and “Yes, I have espoused him.” The questions and the answers were in Persian, of which, I believe, the contracting parties, the priests, and the guests, were equally ignorant.

During the long prayers I looked at the assembled company as often as I could tear my eyes from the bride’s pretty, flushing face. I saw a royal banquet once. It was in Munich, in celebration of the marriage of the King’s brother with the Emperor of Austria’s daughter. I have always remembered it as a gigantic display of diamonds. But it was insignificant beside the display of diamonds at that Parsi wedding. Many of the Parsis in Bombay are very rich. All the Parsis are extravagantly fond of gems; and the Parsi men dearly delight in decking their women to the utmost. A European man, who was more bored than interested with the strange marriage service, told me afterwards that he had tried to compute how many lakhs of rupees were represented there by diamonds,—“But I had to give it up after half an hour,” he said; “the things flashed and danced so, that they made my head ache.” All the women were exquisitely dressed. The Parsis have an almost French abundance of good taste. Indeed they are like the French in many ways. The bride’s mother wore more diamonds than any lady present, excepting only the bridegroom’s mother. It was hard to say which of those two was the most bejewelled, and harder still to understand how they held their heads up, and moved their arms.

After the marriage benediction there were other ceremonies, more fanciful and less interesting. The husband and wife (which they now were) ate out of one dish, and each found in it a ring.

The marriage feast followed in an adjacent room. This was a very European innovation. Among strictly conservative Parsis the marriage feasts are all held at the house of the bridegroom’s father.

Upon the floor of the “dining-room” were laid long silken carpets. They were about a foot and a half wide, and about fifty feet long. Upon them the Parsi guests seated themselves. We Europeans were shown to an elaborately-laid table, in an adjacent room. I asked permission to sit and eat with the Parsis. They made me very welcome, and I ate all sorts of good things, with my fingers. I do not know whether my intrusion was felt a pollution, as it would have been at an orthodox Hindoo feast. My hosts (which they all seemed to feel themselves) were too well bred to let me feel that I was de trop, and I believe they were far too sensible to resent my respectful curiosity. Indeed the presence of the Parsi ladies was so very improper that they could well afford to wink at the greater enormity of eating with one European woman.

When we were living at Khandalah our nearest neighbours were Parsis. I never grew to know them well. We had very little in common, the graceful feminine women and I, but my bairns became very much at home in their bungalow. My boy used to come home with bulging pockets, and I very often took a surreptitious nibble of the Parsi sweetmeats that had been given him—they were so very good. But I had tasted nothing in Khandalah so nice as many of the dishes given me at this Parsi wedding in Bombay. I had a plantain leaf for a plate, and, as I have said, my fingers for forks. The other Europeans laughed at me, and told me they had oysters and champagne and a score of other conventional dainties at their nicely damasked table. I returned their laugh with something very like a sneer. I had eaten of a hundred unknown delicacies, and I could have oysters and champagne galore any time at the hotel.

Except in the matter of hats and caps, many Parsi men, on ordinary occasions, dress quite like Europeans; but I have never seen a Parsi woman in European dress. In this respect, at least, they are wiser than the Japanese women, whom they are like in being fragile, pretty, and dainty.

Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji said, in a paper read before the Liverpool Philomathic Society in 1861: “There is neither bigamy nor polygamy amongst the Parsis. They are simple monogamists.” When Mr. Naoroji wrote that, it was undoubtedly true. In the strict, narrow sense it is true now, but in the broadest and most beautiful sense, it is, I think, no longer wholly true. Chastity is the great law of Parsi life, and the Parsi women have, I believe, been guarded, not only from any possible infringement of that law, but even from the knowledge that the law is ever broken. But I am disinclined to believe that the Parsi men obey the chief command of their ancestral faith as staunchly as they used to do. Perhaps, alas, when the Parsi women have learned to mingle as freely with the Europeans, and to adopt their ways as fully as the Parsi men do now, they may gain the sad knowledge that there is one law for man and another for woman—that right is of one sex and wrong of another.