THE ADVENTURES OF A MEMSAHIB.

Lyttelton Times, Volume LXXX, Issue 10104, 1 August 1893, Page 2

THE ADVENTURES OF A MEMSAHIB.

(Si James 1 Budget.)

We have obtained our views of AngloIndian life either through the distorted medium of the globe-trotter who scampers through the country in the cold season, and is there only long enough to obtain ludicrously false impressions on the subject, or from the old resident who has lost hia early appreciation of the of the local colour, and perchance has imbibed prejudices or acquired hobbies which he feels bound to air to the detriment of the literary value of his writings. For the production of a perfectly truthful and yet enduring picture there seems to be wanted a man (or perchance a woman) who has been long enough in the country to throw off the misconceptions and illusions which the new-comer takes as readily as a child does measles, and gets rid of just as easily in most instances, and yet who has not been there long enough to lose the freshness of his impressions or to fall a victim to the prevailing indifference and ennui of Anglo-India. In the writer of this book {“ The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib,” by Mrs S. J. Duncan) we have a near approach to this ideal. Mrs Duncan casts her experiences in the form of a narrative descriptive of the life of a young couple named Browne, who marry and start housekeeping in Calcutta on aa income of a few hundreds a year. The career of the lady is traced from the time she meets her future husband at a lawn tennis party at a quiet vicarage in Wiltshire until she blossoms forth into a mature memsahib, with the prospective cares of a family upon her. Her experiences on the voyage out to meet her betrothed, who had preceded her, were of the usual description. She bad a stormy time of it in the Buy, “did” Gibraltar and Fort Said, and bought sham sapphires and rubies at Colombo, At length her vessel arrivedin the Hooghly, and then came the marriage in the Cathedral, graced by the presence of "two heads of departments, one ex-Com-miasioaer, and one member of Council none of whom, it is frankly admitted, were people the Brownes were likely to see much of afterwards. A honeymoon at a solitary hill station followed. Here they lived a quiet happy existence and fared moderately well, SETTLING DOWN IN CALCUTTA. The honeymoon over, the young couple returned to Calcutta and commenced their life there in earnest. After prolonged search and much deliberation they settled upon a residence in an unfashionable neighbourhood : —“ It was a bungalow, and it sat down flatly in a luxuriant tangle of Beauroontia and Bougainvilleas, and trailing columbine. It had a verandah all round about, and the verandah was a bower of creeping things. Not only cocoanut palms, but date palms, and areca palms, and toddy palms grew in the corners of the compound, with hibiscus bushes all in crimson flower along the wall, a banyan tree in the middle, and two luxuriant peepuls, one oa each side, almost meeting over the roof of the house. The walls and pillars of the bungalow were in delicate tones of grey and green; close behind it were all the picturesque features of a native hustee, and immediately in front a lovely reflection of the sky lay in a mossy tank in places where the water was deep enough. The rent was moderate; it had been empty a long time.” INDIAN SERVANTS. Their retinue of servants was a large and miscellaneous one. There was the Hindoo bearer, or butler, who had charge of the whole domestic arrangements; the Mahommedan kitmufgar, or table servant; the cook, who was “probably a moog from Chittagongthe low-caste mussahhi , who washes the dishes, keeps the silver clean and carries the supplies home from the market in the morning for the cook ; the Brahmin mallie, or gardener; the syce, or groom; the dhohy, or washerman ; the bheesty, or water-carrier; and the ayah, or nurse. It was a formidable body, and the wage-list came to 85 rupees a month—almost £7. But, as George explained tp his bewildered spouse, these were the very least they could have to ha at all comfortable. A few days after her arrival Helen thought she would make an inspection of the servants’ quarters : " 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 Browne’s upper verandah. 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 oa 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 ia this reflection I venture to say that she was quite correct. The door of the bawarchi khana 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 standi 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 hotwater 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 iook at a modern improvement. Kali Bagh was a conservative institution himself—his recipes were an heritage, he was the living representative of an immemorial dusfcur. Why should Kali Bagh afflict himself with the ways of the memsahib ?” CHUA. The liveliest personage in the household was Chua, who figures very prominently in Mrs Duncan’s pages as the heroine of several curious escapades s—" She was a little Mussulman woman of thirty-five, with bright eyes, and an expression of great worldly wisdom upon her small, square, high-boned face. She dressed somewhat variously; but her official garments were a short jacket and a striped cotton petticoat, a string of beads round her neck, silver bangles on her arms and ankles, hoops in her ears, and a Btne.il gold button in her right nostril. This last bit of coquetry affected Helen uncomfortably for some time. Her name was Chua, signifying ‘ a rat,’ and her heathen sponsors showed rather a fine discrimination in giving it to her. She was very like one. It would be easy to fancy her nibbling in the dark, or making unwarrantable investigations when honest people were asleep.” Helen, we are told, found great difficulty in assimilating this handmaid into her daily life. She had been told that au ayah was indispensable, and she could accept Chua aa a necessary appendage to the lofty state of her Oriental existence, but to find occupation for her became rather a burden to the mind of Mrs Browne. THE GLOBE-TROTTING M.P. Almost as a matter of course, Helen made early acquaintance with the Parliamentary globe-trotter, Mr Jonas Batcham, M.P., oa the strength of a die-

tant connection with her husband's father, “ kindly put up with them for several weeks, and when he went away he eave four annas to the sweeper. Mr Batcham was very much aware of his value to the Brownes as a new arrival from England—a delicate appreciation of himself, which is never wanting to a globetrotter. Mr Batcham blandly mixed himself up with the days when people came round the Cape in a sailing ship, or across the sands of Suez on a camel, and invested himself with all the sentimental interest that might attach to a fellcrw-countryman discovered in the interior of Bechuanaland. A generous philanthropic instinct rose up and surged within him as he thought, in the midst of his joyful impressions of the tropics, how much pleasure his mere presence was probably imparting.” Mr Batcham was as gullihljß as the rest of his class, and he accepted without question the terrible stories of oppression and misgovernment which the unctuous Baboo poured into his willing ear. ANGLO-INDIAN PADRES. Also by this time she had made acquaintance with the various types of clergymen who ministered to the spiritual needs of the place. The chaplains of the establishment are the most favoured :—" The reverend brotherhood are eligible for three months’ privilege leave every year upon full pay, and three years' furlough during service on half-pay. In addition to which they do not scruple to hold * retreats,’ also doubtless upon full official allowances, though their cardinal features may be fish and eggs. They enter into their reward early, and it is a substantial one—three hundred a year, and such pickings as offer themselves in England to reverend gentlemen with a competency. Neither is the exercise of faith required of them in regard to it; it is in the bond. In this respect it is obvious that the Indian vineyard offers a distinct advantage over others, where the labourers are expected to be contented with abstract compensations to be enjoyed after their decease. Popularly they are known as ‘padres,’ which is a Portuguese survival more respectable than any other, and a demi-offi-cial tag which admits its owner to society. It ought to be mentioned that the Indian padre does not move in the atmosphere of feminine admiration which would be created for him in England; there are too many other men for that. Doubtless the more attractive of the junior chaplains, sent out, as it were, in cotton wool, miss the little attentions of the ladies of the parish at home, but then they have their polo ponies and their pegs.” Here we must hold our hand. The book is full of lively and entertaining reading which might be quoted with advantage, but we have probably given a sufficient insight into it to show that it is one of the most accurate and readable descriptions of Anglo-Indian life which has been published of late years.