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It is too much trouble to frame an answer, or give the desired information, and the 'greel admi' comes naturally to the lip.
Ask any common labourer or one of the low castes about immortality, about salvation, about the higher virtues, about the yearnings and wishes that every immortal soul at periods has, and he will simply tell you 'Khoda jane, hum greel admi, i.e. 'God knows; I am only a poor man! There they take refuge always when you ask them anything puzzling.
Then other news came gathering terror from mouth to mouth as it crossed Rajputana and Abdul told his wife one evening, after she had put Sonny Sahib to sleep with a hymn to Israfil, that a million of English soldiers had come upon Cawnpore, and in their hundredfold revenge had left neither Mussulman nor Hindoo alive in the city also that the Great Lord Sahib had ordered the head of every kala admi, every black man, to be taken to build a bridge across the Ganges with, so that hereafter his people might leave Cawnpore by another way.
What does it mean? 'It is an order, said Tallantire. He had expected something of this kind. 'He is a very clever S-sahib. 'He a Sahib! He's a kala admi a black man unfit to run at the tail of a potter's donkey. All the peoples of the earth have harried Bengal. It is written. Thou knowest when we of the North wanted women or plunder whither went we? To Bengal where else?
If you are rating them for a fault, asking them to perform a complicated task, or inquiring your way in a strange neighbourhood, the first answer you get will, ten to one, be 'Hum greel admi. It is said almost instinctively, and no doubt in many cases is the refuge of simple disinclination to think the matter out. Pure laziness suggests it.
His never-failing good-humor and his earnest desire to learn and to be useful were quite refreshing. My luck seemed to have turned. A few minutes later Chanden Sing, quite unaware that any one had undertaken to accompany me, entered the tent, and exclaimed, in a disgusted manner: "Shoka crab, sahib! Hunya log bura crab. Hazur, hum, do admi jaldi Lhassa giao." The Hunyas are very bad.
The Indian juggler or Jadoo-wallah arrives with a basket large enough to contain a man, as we will see later, a huge dilapidated bag, a voluminous dhotie or loin cloth, and possibly a snake basket or two. He is a poor man or "gareeb admi" and looks it. He starts a whine in the hope of getting an audience through sympathy.
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