The compound, as she crossed it, was full of the eternal sunlight of India, the gay shrill gossip of the mynas, the hoarse ejaculations of the crows. A flashy little green parrot flew out of a hibiscus bush by the wall in full crimson flower; he belonged to the jungle. But a pair of grey pigeons cooed to each other over the building of their nest in the cornice of a pillar of the Brownes’ upper veranda. They had come to stay, and they spoke of the advantages of co-operative housekeeping with another young couple like themselves, knowing it to be on a safe and permanent basis. The garden was all freshly scratched and tidy; there was a pleasant smell of earth; the mallie, under a pipal tree, gathered up its broad dry fallen leaves to cook his rice with. It was a graphic bit of economy, so pleasantly close to nature that its poetry was plain. “We are the only people who are extravagant in India,” thought Helen, as she regarded the mallie, and in this reflection I venture to say that she was quite correct.
The door of the bawarchi khana[[41]] was open—it was never shut. I am not sure, indeed, that there was a door. There were certainly no windows. It is possible that the bawarchi khana was seven feet square, and its mistress was just able to stand up straight in it with a few inches to spare. It contained a shelf, a table, and a stove. When Kali Bagh sat down he used his heels. The shelf and the table were full of the oil and condiments dear to the heart of every bawarchi. The stove was an erection like a tenement house, built with what was left over from the walls, and artistically coloured pink to be like them. It contained various hollows on the top, in one or two of which charcoal was glowing—beyond this I cannot explain its construction to be plain to understandings accustomed to the kitchen ranges of Christianity and civilisation. But nothing ever went wrong with Kali Bagh’s stove, the boiler never leaked, the hot water pipes never burst, the oven never required relining, the dampers never had to be re-regulated. He was its presiding genius, he worked it with a palm leaf fan, and nothing would induce him to look at a modern improvement. Kali Bagh was a conservative institution himself, his recipes were an heritage, he was the living representative of an immemorial dustur.[[42]] Why should Kali Bagh afflict himself with the ways of the memsahib!
[41]. Cook-house.
[42]. Custom.
The bawarchi khana had another door, opening into a rather smaller apartment, otherwise lightless and airless, which contained Kali Bagh’s wardrobe and bed. The wardrobe was elementary and hung upon a single peg, the bed consisted of four short legs and a piece of matting. Kali Bagh had reposed himself on it, and was already snoring, when Mrs. Browne came in. He had divested himself of his chuddar and his spectacles, and looked less of a philosopher and more of an Aryan. Mrs. Browne made a rude clatter among the pans, which brought him to a sense of her disturbing presence. Presently she observed him standing behind her, looking anxious. His mistress sniffed about intrepidly. She lifted saucepan lids and discovered within remains of concoctions three days old; she found the day’s milk in an erstwhile kerosene tin; she lifted a kettle and intruded upon the privacy of a large family of cockroaches, any one of them as big as a five-shilling piece. Kali Bagh would never have disturbed them. She found messes and mixtures and herbs and spices and sauces which she did not understand and could not approve. The day’s marketing lay in a flat basket under the table. Helen drew it forth and discovered a live pigeon indiscriminately near the mutton with its wings twisted around one another at the joint, while from beneath a débris of potatoes, beans and cauliflower, came a feeble and plaintive “Quack!”
“What is this?” said Mrs. Browne with paler and sterner criticism, looking into a pot that was bubbling on the fire.
“Chaul hai, memsahib! Hamara khana!”[[43]]
[43]. It is rice, memsahib; my dinner.
“Your dinner, bawarchi! All that rice?” And, indeed, therein was no justification for Kali Bagh. It was not only his dinner, but the dinner of the sweeper and of the syce and of the mussalchi, to be supplied to them a trifle below current market rates, and Mrs. Browne had paid for it all that morning. Helen found herself confronted with her little domestic corner of the great problem of India—the natives’ “way.” But she had no language with which to circumvent it or remonstrate with it. She could only decide that Kali Bagh was an eminently proper subject for discipline, and resolve to tell George, which was not much of an expedient. It is exactly what we all do in India, however, under the circumstances. We tell our superior officers, until at last the Queen Empress herself is told; and the Queen Empress is quite as incapable of further procedure as Mrs. Browne; indeed, much more so, for she is compelled to listen to the voice of her parliamentary wrangling-machine upon the matter, which obeys the turning of a handle, and is a very fine piece of mechanism indeed, but not absolutely reliable when it delivers ready-made opinions upon Aryan problems. At least I am quite sure that is my husband’s idea, and I have often heard young Browne say the same thing.
There was a scattering to right and left when Helen reappeared in the compound. Her domestics were not dressed to receive her, and they ran this way and that, noiselessly like cockroaches to their respective holes. There seemed to be a great many of them, more by at least half a dozen than were properly accredited to the house; and Helen was afterwards informed that they were the bhai[[44]] of the other servants, representing a fraction of the great unemployed of Asia, who came daily for fraternal gossip in the sun and any patronage that might be going. They were a nuisance, these bhai, and were soon sternly put down by the arm of the law and the edict of the sahib, who enacted that no strange native should be allowed to enter the compound without a chit. “It’s the only way to convince them,” said he, “that the Maidan is the best place for public meetings.”