Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 25, 2025
In the evening, tea is served up. During meal-times, a large punkah is employed to diffuse an agreeable degree of coolness through the apartment. The punkah is a large frame, from eight to ten feet long, and three feet high, covered with white Indian cloth, and fastened to the ceiling.
Too hot to read or write, almost to smoke, they lay in long cane chairs, gasping and perspiring freely, while the whining punkah overhead barely stirred the heated air.
It is getting on for ten at night; but we sit with windows all wide open, the punkah going, the thinnest conceivable garments, and yet we sweat, my brother, very profusely.... To-morrow I shall be up at gun-fire, about half-past four A.M. and drive down to the civil station, about three miles off, to see a friend, an officer of our own corps ... who is sick, return, take my Bearer's daily account, write a letter or so, and lie down with Don Quixote under a punkah, go to sleep the first chapter that Sancho lets me, and sleep till ten, get up, bathe, re-dress and breakfast; do my daily business, such as it is hard work, believe me, in a hot sleep- inducing, intestine-withering climate, till sunset, when doors and windows are thrown open ... and mortals go out to "eat the air," as the natives say.
Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to teach him to think, or to do a day's honest work; he will pull a punkah while you are awake to keep him at it, or row a boat if allowed to sing, and sometimes he will fish if hungry and quite near the sea; but agriculture involves the hard work of digging, and that is too much for him.
A faintly sour smell of parched things, oppressing the night without breath or motion, was like an interminable presence, irritating, poisonous. The punkah, too, flapped incessant, and only made the lamp gutter.
A large reclining chair is placed immediately beneath the punkah, and a punkah-wallah, ambitious to please, causes the frilled hangings of this desirable and necessary piece of furniture to wave vigorously to and fro but a foot or eighteen inches above my head. A smiling servant kneels at my feet and proceeds to knead and "groom" the muscles of the legs.
'News is not meant to be thrown about like dung-cakes, but used sparingly like bhang. 'So I think now, and moreover, it did me no sort of good. But that was very long ago, he made as to brush it all away with a thin brown hand 'and since then, and especially in the nights under the punkah at the madrissah, I have thought very greatly.
"There's nothing for me to do this evening." "I know," Mark agreed contentedly. "I want to give you a rest for once." "Rest?" the priest echoed. "You don't seriously expect a fat man like me to sit down in an armchair and rest, do you? Besides, you've got your own reading to do, and you didn't come to Chatsea as my punkah walla."
He paused, struck a match, and in an empty glass, shielding the flame against the breeze of the punkah, lighted a cigarette. "Since we have appointed our dictator," he began amiably, "we may repose " From the landing, without, a coolie bawled impudently for the master of the house. "Wutzler!" said Heywood, jumping up. "I mean his messenger." He was gone a noticeable time, but came back smiling.
Tell that pig as you go out that if he doesn't make the punkah go a little better I will break every bone in his body," finished up Hudig, wiping his purple face with a red silk handkerchief nearly as big as a counterpane. Noiselessly Willems went out, shutting carefully behind him the little green door through which he passed to the warehouse.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking