Indian Furnishing

Southland Times, Issue 12730, 14 October 1893, Page 1 (Supplement)

Indian Furnishing

It is a divinely simple thing to furnish a bouse in India. It must be cleaned and it must be matted. This is done in a certain number o£ hours while you sleep, or ride, or walk, or take your pleasure, by a God of Immediate Results, whom you colloquially dub the ’bearer,’ working through an invisible agency of coolies; Then you may go and live in it with two chairs and a table if you like, and people will only think you have a somewhat immoderate hatred of hangings and fnrniture and other obstscles to the free circulation of air. This you might easily possess to an extreme, and nobody wilt consider you any the worse for it. I should have added an ‘slmirah’ to the list of your necessaries, however. You would be criticised if you had not one or more almirabs. An almirah is awardrobe, unless it contains shelves instead of books, and then it is a tall cupboard with doors. Almirahe, therefore, receive all your per son»l property, from a dressing-gown to - box of sardines, and it is not possible to live decently or respectably in India without them. But the rest is at your good pleasure, and nobody will expect you to have anything but plated forks and bazaar china. Outward circumstance lies not in these things, but in the locality of your residence and the size of your compound. If you wish to add toyour dignity buy another pony; if you wish to enhance it let the pony be a horse and. the horse a Waler. But think not to aggrandise yourself in the eyes of your iellow AngloIndians by treasures of Chippendale or of Sevres, by rare tapestries or modern masters,or even a piano. Dust and mosquitoes and the moneoon war against all these things ; but obiefly our inconstancy. to the country. We are in conscious exile here for twenty or twenty-five years, and there is a general theory that it is too hot and too expensive to make the exile any more than comfortable. Besides which, do we not pass a quarter of our existence in the cabins of the P. and 0. ’—Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (U.S.A.)