ON BOARD A CANAL STEAMER GOING TO CUTTACK,
_August_ 1891.
My bag left behind, my clothes daily get more and more intolerably
disreputable,--this thought continually uppermost is not compatible with a
due sense of self-respect. With the bag I could have faced the world of
men head erect and spirits high; without it, I fain would skulk in
corners, away from the glances of the crowd. I go to bed in these clothes
and in them I appear in the morning, and on the top of that the steamer is
full of soot, and the unbearable heat of the day keeps one unpleasantly
moist.
Apart from this, I am having quite a time of it on board the steamer. My
fellow-passengers are of inexhaustible variety. There is one, Aghore Babu,
who cannot allude to anything, animate or inanimate, except in terms of
personal abuse. There is another, a lover of music, who persists in
attempting variations on the Bhairab[1] mode at dead of night, convincing
me of the untimeliness of his performance in more senses than one.
[Footnote: A Raga, or mode of Indian classical music, supposed to be
appropriate to the early dawn.]
The steamer has been aground in a narrow ditch of a canal ever since last
evening, and it is now past nine in the morning. I spent the night in a
corner of the crowded deck, more dead than alive. I had asked the steward
to fry some _luchis_ for my dinner, and he brought me some
nondescript slabs of fried dough with no vegetable accompaniments to eat
them with.
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