EAST INDIA
VADE-MECUM;

On the Term Griffin

A newcomer to India is styled a griffin for his first year, and everything he does wrong in that year is forgiven under the name. The griffin pays too much for everything, dresses wrongly for the heat, offends his servants by kindness and his hosts by ignorance, and is watched with great enjoyment by everyone he meets.

The Day

The day here is built around the sun, and fighting the arrangement kills men. Rise before dawn, when the air is cool, and ride or walk then, for it is the only exercise the climate permits. Breakfast follows at nine or ten. Calls are paid before noon. At one or two comes tiffin, a light meal of curry and rice, and after it the whole settlement sleeps through the worst of the heat behind closed shutters. Dinner is at sunset, and the evening after it belongs to society: cards, dancing, music, conversation, as late as the candles last.

The

The Household

No European keeps house in Bengal with fewer than a dozen servants, and a respectable establishment employs twenty or more. This is not extravagance. Caste divides the work: the man who cooks will not sweep, the man who sweeps will not touch the table, the man who waits at table will not hold a horse. Each office is a separate man, each man a separate wage, and the whole is governed by the khansamah, the house steward, through whom all purchases pass.

A rupee stands at about two shillings and sixpence.

Dress

By day a gentleman wears white: jean, nankeen, or calico, made loose, changed as often as the heat demands, which is often. Full English dress, dark cloth and all, is worn at dinner and after, whatever the thermometer says, and the man who appears at a ball in his cool morning clothes has resigned from society. A lady's case is harder still. Muslin is her salvation, and Bengal weaves the finest muslin on earth, though the London pattern books arrive five months old.

The Table

Dinner is the great performance of the settlement. Soup, fish, joints, curries, game, puddings, all of it in courses that would stagger a London table, all of it eaten in a room at ninety degrees. The drinking matches the eating: claret and hock by the bottle, brandy with water, and no ice to be had in Bengal at any price, so that every glass arrives at the temperature of the room. Drink the water only where you trust the well — which is to say, drink the wine.

Health

The two rainy seasons carry off the greater part of those who die here, and the griffin's first rains are his trial. The fevers, the flux, and the disorders of the liver do the work, and the treatments are bark, calomel, and the lancet. A man taken ill in the morning may be dead by evening, and burial follows within the day, for the climate does not wait upon mourning. The burial ground on Park Street receives the settlement's dead by torchlight, the same evening, coffin and all.

Getting About

The palanquin is the carriage of Bengal: four bearers and a relief, a shilling's distance for an anna or two, available at every corner and at every hour. Horses serve for the morning, carriages for the evening drive on the Course. There is no bridge over the Hooghly, and there will be none — the river does not permit it. Howrah and the western bank are reached by ferry, the up-country stations by boat and by the dak, the post relay, which carries a letter faster than it carries a man.

What Money Buys

Everything in Calcutta is for sale twice. The Europe shops around Tank Square sell London goods a year stale at three times the London price. The auction houses sell the same goods secondhand at a third of it, for this is a city of short residences, and the effects of the departed — their furniture, their plate, their horses, their libraries — come under the hammer weekly. For everything else there are the bazaars, where the price begins at treble and falls with your patience, and where a stranger buys well only through a broker.

Law and Rogues

The King's court at Calcutta tries Europeans under English law, with English juries, and hangs housebreakers with English regularity. Beyond the town the Company's courts try everyone else under a different law entirely, and between the two systems there is a gap into which a great deal of wickedness falls unexamined. The rivers have their dacoits, armed gangs who take boats whole. The port has its crimps, who deliver drunk or drugged sailors to short-handed ships for a fee. And gentlemen still settle affairs of honour at dawn on the Maidan, which is against the law, and conducted like an institution.

The Other City

North of the Europe town the streets narrow and Calcutta becomes ten times itself: the bazaars, the temples, the great houses of the Bengali merchant princes built around courtyards no sahib has seen, the tanks where each quarter draws its water and its gossip. Its faith is everywhere and unashamed, the goddess above every doorway, the great autumn festival just concluded with drums and lamps and images carried to the river. Its learning is old and its conversation, they say, is an art. Few of us can report on any of it at first hand.