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Updated: June 7, 2025
The untidy khansamah the custodian of the rest-home hurried on to the verandah to greet the unexpected visitor and show his "boy" where to put the sahib's bedding and baggage in a bleak room with a cane-bottomed wooden bed hung with torn mosquito-curtains.
The khansamah tiptoed cautiously into the room and found the Virginian sleeping like a log, his head upon the table. His face was deeply coloured with crimson, as if a fever burned him, and his breathing was loud and stertorous. Pausing, the native beckoned to one who skulked without, and the latter entering, the two laid hold of the unconscious man and bore him to the charpoy.
Three sets of doolie-bearers came to the bungalow late last night when I was sleeping outside, and said that it was their custom to rest in the rooms set apart for the English people! What honor has the khansamah? They tried to enter, but I told them to go. No wonder, if these Oorias have been here, that the Presence is sorely spotted. It is shame, and the work of a dirty man!"
It had run down. He thrust it back into his pocket and enquired: "What's o'clock?" "Eight of the evening, sahib." Amber gasped and stared. "Eight of the ... Let me think. Go and bring me food and a brandy-peg or, hold on! Bring a bottle of soda-water and a glass only." The khansamah withdrew. Amber fell back with his shoulders to the wall and stared unwinking at the lamp.
No locust horde of personally-conducted "trippers" pollutes its ways and byways, nor has the khansamah of the dâk bungalow as yet felt constrained to add sauerkraut and German sausage to his bill of fare for which Allah be praised! The world is growing very small, and the globe-trotter rushes round it in eighty days. Egypt has become his footstool, and the shores of the Mediterranean his wash-pot.
Because it was dark and his memory not working properly, time had ceased to be for him, and to-day was as yesterday and to-morrow. The ceiling-cloth above him was blood-red with light from the sepoys' fire in the compound, and all was as it had been when he had first lain down the night before. And yet.... Suddenly he raised himself upon the charpoy and called huskily for the khansamah.
They are generally very old, always dirty, while the khansamah is as ancient as the bungalow. He either chatters senilely, or falls into the long trances of age. In both moods he is useless. If you get angry with him, he refers to some Sahib dead and buried these thirty years, and says that when he was in that Sahib's service not a khansamah in the Province could touch him.
He was for some seconds occupied with the problem of regaining his poise, and it was not until he heard an Englishwoman's voice uplifted in accents of anger, that he remembered the other wayfarer with whom he was to share his tonga, or associated the white-clad figure in the dark doorway of the bungalow with anything but the khansamah, coming to greet and cheat the chance-brought guest.
Three sets of doolie-bearers came to the bungalow late last night when I was sleeping outside, and said that it was their custom to rest in the rooms set apart for the English people! What honor has the khansamah? They tried to enter, but I told them to go. No wonder, if these Oorias have been here, that the Presence is sorely spotted. It is shame, and the work of a dirty man!"
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