India -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, English
To cut a long story short, Dunnoo is now my personal servant on a gold
mohur a month--a sum which I still think far too little for the services
he has rendered. Nothing on earth will induce me to go near that devilish
spot again, or to reveal its whereabouts more clearly than I have done. Of
Gunga Dass I have never found a trace, nor do I wish to do. My sole motive
in giving this to be published is the hope that some one may possibly
identify, from the details and the inventory which I have given above, the
corpse of the man in the olive-green hunting-suit.
IN THE HOUSE OF SUDDHOO
A stone's throw out on either hand
From that well-ordered road we tread,
And all the world is wild and strange;
_Churel_ and ghoul and _Djinn_ and sprite
Shall bear us company to-night,
For we have reached the Oldest Land
Wherein the Powers of Darkness range.
--_From the Dusk to the Dawn_.
The house of Suddhoo, near the Taksali Gate, is two-storied, with four
carved windows of old brown wood, and a flat roof. You may recognize it by
five red hand-prints arranged like the Five of Diamonds on the whitewash
between the upper windows. Bhagwan Dass the grocer and a man who says he
gets his living by seal-cutting live in the lower story with a troop of
wives, servants, friends, and retainers. The two upper rooms used to be
occupied by Janoo and Azizun and a little black-and-tan terrier that was
stolen from an Englishman's house and given to Janoo by a soldier. To-day,
only Janoo lives in the upper rooms. Suddhoo sleeps on the roof generally,
except when he sleeps in the street. He used to go to Peshawar in the
cold, weather to visit his son who sells curiosities near the Edwardes'
Gate, and then he slept under a real mud roof. Suddhoo is a great friend
of mine, because his cousin had a son who secured, thanks to my
recommendation, the post of head-messenger to a big firm in the Station.
Suddhoo says that God will make me a Lieutenant-Governor one of these
days. I dare say his prophecy will come true. He is very, very old, with
white hair and no teeth worth showing, and he has outlived his
wits--outlived nearly everything except his fondness for his son at
Peshawar. Janoo and Azizun are Kashmiris, Ladies of the City, and theirs
was an ancient and more or less honorable profession; but Azizun has since
married a medical student from the Northwest and has settled down to a
most respectable life somewhere near Bareilly. Bhagwan Dass is an
extortionate and an adulterator. He is very rich. The man who is supposed
to get his living by seal-cutting pretends to be very poor. This lets you
know as much as is necessary of the four principal tenants in the house of
Suddhoo. Then there is Me of course; but I am only the chorus that comes
in at the end to explain things. So I do not count.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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