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Updated: May 12, 2025
A light chuckle behind you, as the last words are spoken, brings you sharp round on your heels; and you discern huddled in the semi-darkness of the corner what appears in the miserable light of the cocoanut oil lamp to be a Goanese boy.
It was the first that had come from him since she had left Poona, although, as he said in it, he had obtained her new address from the Goanese clerk in the Munster Hotel office on the day of her flight, thanks to the persuasive powers of a fifty-rupee note.
Here I unfortunately had occasion to give my miserable Goanese cook-boy a sound dressing, as the only means left of checking his lying, obstinate, destructive, wasteful, and injurious habit of intermeddling.
After six weeks' rest, having received orders to join his regiment, which was then stationed at Baroda, he engaged some Goanese servants and made the voyage thither in a small vessel called a pattymar. It took them four days to march from the Tankaria-Bunder mudbank, where they landed, to Baroda; and Burton thus graphically describes the scenery through which they passed.
Please yourself, therefore, in the choice of your personal friends and companions, but as regards your servants keep up your standard. The next who offers himself will probably be of the Goanese variety. He comes in a black coat, with continuations of checked jail cloth, and takes his hat off just before he enters the gate.
He did not take Sita Ram with him, so there is a gap in the story at that point, partly bridged by Samson's own sketchy account of the interview to Colonel Willoughby de Wing, overheard by Carlos de Sousa Braganza the Goanese club butler, and reported to Yasmini at third hand. There were no aeroplanes or official motor-cars at that time to take officials at outrageous speed on urgent business.
But Asia was not so inimical, mentally or bodily, to the European frame as Africa; the Goanese throve after a fashion, the mixed breed became the staple population, and thus it continues till this day. On the other hand the Hamitic element so completely asserted its superiority over insititious Japheth, that almost every trace has disappeared in a couple of centuries.
Maria Graham tells us that in her time "the Dirdjees, or tailors, in Bombay" were "Hindoos of respectable caste," but in these days the Goanese, who has not capacity to be a butler or cook, becomes a Dirzee, and in Bombay I have seen Bunniah Dirzees. Hurree can hold his own against these, I doubt not, but the advancing tide of civilization is surely crumbling down his foundations.
In Bombay there is a regular club or society of these Goanese travelling servants, and when the transient wayfarer lands in that city from the Peninsular and Oriental mail boat, one of the first things he is advised to do is to send round to the "Goa Club" and desire the secretary to send him a travelling servant. The result is a lottery.
The Butler on this side of India is now a Goanese, or a Soortee, or, more rarely, a Mussulman. Each of these has, doubtless, his own characteristics; but have you ever stepped back a few paces and contemplated, not your own or anyone else's individual servant, but the entire phenomenon of an Indian Butler?
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