Twenty-One Days in India, or, the Tour Of Sir Ali Baba K.C.B.; and, the Teapot SeriesAberigh-Mackay, George
General
Twenty-One Days in India, or, the Tour Of Sir Ali Baba K.C.B.; and, the Teapot Series
Aberigh-Mackay, George
India -- Description and travel; India -- Politics and government -- 1765-1947; India -- Social life and customs
In the evening Baby will go out for an airing with the Bearer and Ayah
people, and while they dawdle along the dusty road, or sit on
kerb-stones and on culvert parapets, he will listen to the extensile
tale of their simple sorrows. He will hear, with a sigh, that the
profits of petty larceny are declining; he will be taught to regret
the increasing infirmities of his Papa's temper; and portraits in
sepia of his Mamma will be observed by him to excite laughter mingled
with dark impulsive words. Thus there will pass into Baby's eyes
glances of suspicious questionings, "the blank misgivings of a
creature moving about in worlds not realised."
In the long summer days Baby will patter listlessly about the darkened
rooms accompanied by his suite, who will carry a feeding bottle--Maw's
Patent Feeding Bottle--just as the Sergeant-at-Arms carries the mace;
and, from time to time, little Mister Speaker will squat down on his
dear little hams and take a refreshing pull or two. At breakfast and
luncheon time little Mister Speaker will straggle into the
dining-room, and fond parents will give him a tidbit of many soft
dainties, to be washed down with brandy and water, beer, sherry, or
other alcoholic draught. On such broken meals Baby is raised.
The little drawn face, etiolated and weary-looking, recommends sleep;
but Baby is a bad sleeper. The Bearer-in-waiting carries about a small
pillow all day long, and from time to time Baby is applied to it. He
frets and cries, and they brood over him humming some old Indian song,
["Keli Blai," or "Hillu Milli Pania"]. Still he turns restlessly and
whimpers, though they pat him and shampoo him, and call him fond names
and tell him soothing stories of bulbuls and flowers and woolly sheep.
But Baby does not sleep, and even Indian patience is exhausted. Both
Ayah and Bearer would like to slip away to their mud houses at the
other end of the compound and have a pull at the fragrant _huqqa_ and
a gossip with the _saices;_[Q] but while _Sunny Baba_ is at large, and
might at any moment make a raid on Mamma, who is dozing over a novel
on a spider-chair near the mouth of the thermantidote, the Ayah and
Bearer dare not leave their charge. So _Sunny Baba_ must sleep, and
the Bearer has in the folds of his waist-cloth a little black fragment
of the awful sleep-compeller, and Baby is drugged into a deep uneasy
sleep of delirious, racking dreams.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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