Availing ourselves of the kind hospitality of our friend in Carnac Street, we reposed during the day intending to leave Calcutta again by the night train (Madras Mail) for Madras, our next destination. This was a considerable journey as a glance at the map will show; in fact it was our longest in India, occupying two nights and two days.
After some anxious moments in Carnac Street, through our tickorgary not turning up for us at the time ordered, or through some muddling on the part of our bearer, we eventually got conveyed to Howrah Station. Luckily the train did not start so soon as stated—it never does in India—and we were saved.
CALCUTTA TO MADRAS—SECTION OF SLEEPER—OR SOMETHING LIKE IT
The train proved, however, to be very crowded, and we could only secure a berth each in separate compartments, though there was a small sliding door between the ladies’ and the gentlemen’s sleeping compartment, through which communication could be made. Four ladies, a baby, and a parrot, and the green pigeons made up the complement in the ladies’ part. I had two travelling companions only, a river-steamer captain or engineer on sick leave, going south with his family, and an English officer of the Army Medical Service going to some hill station beyond Madras. The former kept himself going with whiskey and soda, of which he freely invited his fellow travellers to partake. The latter proved to be Capt. J. B. Dalzell Hunter of the 64th pioneers. He was studying Persian, and introduced me to a most interesting book, the “IQD-I-GUL,” or “The Rose Necklace,” being selections from the Gulistan and auwār-i-suhaite translated into literal English with notes by Adālat Khan. This was full of delightful stories, and rich with oriental imagery and wisdom.
Leaving Calcutta in the darkness of night, of course nothing could be seen of the country till next morning when we were approaching Cuttack, when we took “Chota Hazri”—or early light breakfast. A little south of this hills appeared inland reminding one in character and apparent height of our lake country. We passed Poori, the junction for Juggernath, where crowds of pilgrims go, especially at the time of the great festival of Krishna in March, when the image of the god is borne through the town on the famous car, out to a temple in the country. The old story we were told in childhood of the dreadful heathen custom of the natives on such occasions throwing themselves under the wheels of the car of Juggernath has been discredited. Krishna, being a god of love and life, not a destroyer, would not be pleased with human sacrifices, and they would be quite inappropriate. It might be possible, however, that the car, drawn as it is by men with great cables, through the press of pilgrims, might accidentally crush some one fallen in the crowd, and European missionaries may have misunderstood what had really happened, and had misrepresented and exaggerated it.
There were many new and different types of natives at the stations. We were now on the Bengal-Nagpur Railway, and the native crowds, and groups entering or leaving the train all down the line, were most interesting in character and colour. Pilgrims from Juggernaut bearing small canes back with them as signs of their pilgrimage, Brahmans with red marks like seals on their foreheads, and others with the triple pronged fork-like mark of Siva in white and red. The men wore their hair long like women, sometimes done up in ample knots at the back of the head, and sometimes hanging down the back. All wore a sort of tight cotton skirt or piece of drapery chequered or patterned in colour wrapped round the loins, and depending from the waist to the feet; a white loose jacket frequently surmounted this, so that judging only from the back view, the stranger with European prepossessions as to dress distinctions between the sexes, might have some difficulty in saying which was which, or who was who, especially as the native women frequently wore similar skirts, white bodices, and their hair in knots. It was chiefly the beards that betrayed the gentlemen; otherwise the equality of the sexes was fairly well established, as to outward appearance at least, in the way that might astonish some of our Western reformers. It is true some of the men, like the ancient Egyptians, wore nothing above the skirt, except perhaps a white scarf on the shoulders, and the field-workers and coolies all down the Coromandel coast wore nothing but white turbans and waist cloths.
LADIES OR GENTLEMEN? (FASHIONS IN SOUTHERN INDIA)
We passed the Silver Lake, really an inlet of the sea nearly surrounded by hills, the train startling large flocks of brown geese from the margin as it passed. Our old friends the white cranes we saw again lower down the line among the marshy pools. Paddy fields in various stages, often under water, irrigation wells drawn by oxen, as well as another pattern—like the Hungarian or Egyptian, a walking beam weighted at one end, the other having a rope attached to the bucket. The Southern Indian ones are, however, worked by the natives, generally two, working up and down from the centre, from which the beam swings, making it dip and rise again with bucket, the men steadying themselves by upright bamboos fixed each side, sometimes chanting a song to mark the time and enable them to move together.