Glimpses of Bengal — On Board to 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.

On my expressing a pained surprise, he was all contrition and offered to make me some hotch-potch at once.

But the night being already far advanced, I declined his offer, managed to swallow a few mouthfuls of the stuff dry, and then, all lights on and the deck packed with passengers, laid myself down to sleep.

Mosquitoes hovered above, cockroaches wandered around.

There was a fellow-sleeper stretched crosswise at my feet whose body my soles every now and then came up against.

Four or five noses were engaged in snoring.

Several mosquito-tormented, sleepless wretches were consoling themselves by pulls at their hubble-bubble pipes; and above all, there rose those variations on the mode _Bhairab_!

Finally, at half-past three in the morning, some fussy busy-bodies began loudly inciting each other to get up.

In despair, I also left my bed and dropped into my deck-chair to await the dawn.

Thus passed that variegated nightmare of a night.

One of the hands tells me that the steamer has stuck so fast that it may take the whole day to get her off.

I inquire of another whether any Calcutta-bound steamer will be passing, and get the smiling reply that this is the only boat on this line, and I may come back in her, if I like, after she has reached Cuttack!

By a stroke of luck, after a great deal of tugging and hauling, they have just got her afloat at about ten o'clock.

TIRAN.