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Gray iguanas and pendants of dove orchids hung from the limbs above, and green and gold lizards scuttled up the trees at our approach. At the first plot of wet ground Aboo Din sent up a shout, and awaited my coming. I found him on his hands and knees, gazing stupidly at the prints in the moist earth. "Tuan," he shouted, "see Baboo's feet, one two three more! Praise be to Allah!"
Over against the gate of our compound the Baboo's walks are bright with roses, and ixoras, and the creeping nagatallis; the Baboo's park is shady with banians, and fragrant with sandal-trees, and imposing with tall peepuls, and cool with sparkling fountains; and Chinna Tumbe, the Little Brother, the brown apple of the Baboo's eye, plays among the bamboos by the tank, just within the gate, and pelts the gold-fishes with mango-seeds.
They had not been in Singapore long enough to become acquainted with the Malay language or character, but they knew their duty, and I trusted to their military training rather than to my Malay's superior knowledge for our safety during the night. I found out later that the cunning in Baboo's small brown finger was worth all the precision and drill in the Sikh sergeant's great body.
Caste is God, and Mamoul is his prophet! At the gate-lodge of the Baboo's garden-house on the Durumtollah Road, a gray and withered hag, all crippled and leprosied, sits durhna. What may that be? Be patient; you shall know. When the Baboo was as yet a youth, his uncle Rajinda, the pride of the Mullicks, died of cholera, and the administration of the estate devolved upon our free-thinking Kalidas.
The Brahmin averts his face as he passes, and mutters, "She is as the flower which is out of reach, she is dedicated to God." That insolent official, the Baboo's pampered durwan, sees in her only Mamoul; he would as soon think of shaving himself as of driving her away.
"Your Enormity" is a delightful variant on "Your Excellency;" and there is something really pathetic in the Baboo's benediction, "You have been very good to us, and may Almighty God give you tit for tat." But to deride these errors of idiom scarcely lies in the mouth of an Englishman. A friend of mine, wishing to express his opinion that a Frenchman was an idiot, told him that he was a "cretonne."
Last year, they say, when little Dwarkanath Mullick, the Baboo's adopted son, nine years old, was married to the tender child Vinda, old Lulla Seal's darling, on her fifth birthday, the Baboo Kalidas Raniaya Mullick made the occasion famous by liberating fifty prisoners-for-debt, of the Soodra sort, with as many flourishes of his illustrious signature. Ramee Durwan has not a change of turbans.
Only a slender, smooth cord, with a slip-knot at the end of it. Within the twelvemonth, in a stony nullah, hard by a clump of crooked saul-trees, a mile away from the Baboo's gate, some jackals brought to light the bones of a little child; and the deep grave from which they dug them with their sharp, busy claws, bore marks of the mystic pick-axe of Thuggee.
Presently, from his low desk, in the lowliest corner, uprises, and comes forward quietly, Mutty Loll Roy, the head circar, venerable, placid, pensive, every way interesting; but he is only the Baboo's head circar, an humble accountant, on fifteen rupees a month. Do you perceive that fact in the style of his salutation?
Johnson's Dictionary was to the Bengali Baboo, he unquestionably spoke in terms of figurative exaggeration; nevertheless, a core of truth lies hidden in his remark. It is by the Baboo's words you know the Baboo.
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