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Updated: June 20, 2025
Deriving the only education it ever gets directly from its personal attendants, this young monster of bad temper, bad manners, and bad language becomes precociously proficient in overbearing ways, and voluble in Hindostanee Billingsgate, before it has acquired enough of its ancestral tongue to frame the simplest sentence.
During the time that he waited at Aldeen he improved himself in Hindostanee, and began to study Sanscrit, and learnt the most approved method of dealing with the natives.
They had, as their attendants, ten men of the Cape Mounted Rifles, who were Hottentots; a native commandant, Sheikh Said; five old black sailors, who spoke Hindostanee; in addition to Bombay, Speke's former attendant, factotum, and interpreter; a party of sixty-four Waguana blacks, emancipated from slavery; and fifteen porters of the interior.
It was the failing health of the little exotic creatures, endangered by their English blood, though they had never seen England, and talked nothing but Hindostanee, which had brought them "home" at this inhospitable time of the year; and to get the rooms warm enough for them became the entire thought of the anxious aunts, who contemplated these wan babies with a curious mixture of emotions, anxious to be "very fond" of them, yet feeling difficulties in the way.
Only four months since, two English soldiers fell victims to this neglect of Hindostanee customs. They killed several peacocks; the enraged people fell upon them and ill-used them in such a way that they shortly afterwards died. Fattipoor Sikri stands upon a hill; the fortress walls, the mosque, and other buildings can therefore be seen from a distance.
"Only you?" "Only me." "Did you ask to learn?" "No." "He wished to teach you?" "Yes." A second pause. "Why did he wish it? Of what use could Hindostanee be to you?" "He intended me to go with him to India." "Ah! here I reach the root of the matter. He wanted you to marry him?" "He asked me to marry him." "That is a fiction an impudent invention to vex me."
I kissed and fondled her dark cheeks as gladly as if they had been fair and ruddy, and oftener than I touched my mother's, which were like the petals of a china rose. My most intimate friends were of the Ayah's complexion. We had more than one "bearer" during those years, to whom I was greatly attached. I spoke more Hindostanee than English.
The Gopa, or head-man of the village, could speak a little Hindostanee, besides being able to read and write his own language in two characters, and as he seemed unusually sharp and intelligent, I was very glad to have a chat with him while waiting for the commissariat to come up.
A gasp of amazement came from the two girls in the window, for a knowledge of Hindostanee had never been included in the list of Peggy's accomplishments, and she was not accustomed to hide her light under a bushel. They gazed at her with widened eyes, and Rosalind scented scepticism in the air, and cried quickly "Say something, then. If you can speak, say something now, and let us hear you."
The Indians have the custom of writing Arabic with Hindostanee characters. They are said to be extremely parsimonious; and, from what I saw of them in the houses of some of their first merchants, they seem to deserve the character. They are shrewd traders, and an overmatch, sometimes, even for the Arabians.
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