Bombay is on an island, with many bridges connecting it to the mainland. We went to a tarven close to Bombay Bay; the wide verandas full of flowers and singin’ birds made it pleasant. We got good things to eat here; oh, how Josiah enjoyed the good roast beef and eggs and bread, most as good as Jonesville bread. Though it seemed kinder queer to me, and I don’t think Miss Meechim and Arvilly enjoyed it at all to have our chamber work done by barelegged men.
I told Josiah that I didn’t know but I ort to have a Ayah or maid whilst I wuz there, and he said with considerable justice that he guessed he could ayah me all that wuz necessary.
And so he could, I didn’t need no other chaperone. But the Bombay ladies never stir out without their Ayah, and ladies don’t go out in the streets much anyway.
The market here in Bombay wuz the finest I ever see; it has a beautiful flower garden and park attached to it, and little rills of clear water run through the stun gutters. Tropical fruit and vegetables of all kinds wuz to be seen here. The native market wimmen didn’t have on any clothes hardly, but made it up in jewelry. Some on ’em weighin’ out beef to customers would have five or six long gold chains hanging 246 down to their waist. Bombay has a population of about a million, a good many English, some Hindus, Persians, Chinese, Siamese, Turks, and about one-tenth are Parsees, sun-worshippers. They are many of them wealthy and live in beautiful villas a little out of the city; they are very intelligent and firm friends of the English.
The Parsees dress in very rich silks and satin, the men in pantaloons of red or orange and long frocks of gorgeous colored silk; they wear high-pinted black caps, gold chains and rings and look dretful dressy.
Josiah loved their looks dearly, and he sez dreamily, “What a show such a costoom would make in Jonesville; no circus ever went through there that would attract so much attention,” and he added, “their idees about the sun hain’t so fur out of the way. The sun duz give all the heat and light we have, and it is better to worship that than snakes and bulls.”
My land! had that man a idee of becomin’ a Parsee? I sez, “Josiah Allen, be you a Methodist deacon, or be you not? Are you a-backslidin’ or hain’t you?” Sez I, “You had better ask the help of him who made the sun and the earth to keep you from wobblin’.”
He wuz real huffy and sez, “Well, I say it, and stick to it, that it is better to worship the sun than it is to worship snakes,” and come to think it over, I didn’t know but it wuz.
The Parsees live together in big families of relations, sometimes fifty.
They do not bury their dead, but put ’em up in high towers, called Towers of Silence. And I believe my soul that I’d ruther be put up in the sky than down in the mouldy earth.