Heat and Dust Read Free

my clothes are very loose indeed but they serve their purpose and I'm glad to have them. I now wear a pair of baggy trousers tied with a string at the waist such as the Punjabi peasant women wear, and their kind of knee-length shirt. I also have a pair of Indian sandals which I can shuffle off and leave on thresholds like everyone else. (They are men's sandals because the women's sizes don't fit me). Although I'm now dressed like an Indian woman, the children are still running after me; but I don't mind too much as I'm sure they will soon get used to me.
    There is one word that is often called after me: hijra. Unfortunately I know what it means. I knew before I came to India, from a letter of Olivia's. She had learned it from the Nawab who had told her that Mrs. Crawford looked like a hijra (Great-Aunt Beth was, like me, tall and flat-chested). Of course Olivia also didn't know what it meant, and when she asked; the Nawab shouted with laughter. But instead of explaining he told her "I will show you," and then he clapped his hands and gave an order and after some time a troupe of hijras was brought and the Nawab made them sing and dance for Olivia in their traditional style.
    I have also seen them sing and dance. It was when I was walking back with Inder Lal from seeing his office. We were quite near home when I heard a noise of drums from a side-street. Inder Lal said it was nothing worth looking at - "a very common thing," he said - but I was curious so he reluctantly accompanied me. We went through a succession of alleys winding off from each other and then we entered an arched doorway and went down a passage which opened up into an inner courtyard. Here there was the troupe of hijras eunuchs - doing their turn. One played a drum, others sang and clapped their hands and made some dancing motions. There was a cluster of spectators enjoying the performance. The hijras were built like men with big hands and flat chests and long jaws, but they were dressed as women in saris and tinsel jewellery. The way they danced was also in parody of a woman's gestures, and I suppose that was what amused people so much. But I thought their faces were sad, and even when they smirked and made suggestive gestures to what I guessed to be suggestive words (everyone laughed and Inder Lal wanted me to come away), all the time their expression remained the worried workaday one of men who are wondering how much they are going to be paid for the job.
     
    24 February. Today being Sunday, Inder Lal kindly offered to take me to Khatm to show me the Nawab's palace. I felt bad about taking him away from his family on his one day off, but neither he nor they seemed to think anything of it. I wonder his wife does not get tired of being shut up in her two small rooms all day and every day, with her mother-in-law and three small children. I never see her go out anywhere except sometimes - accompanied by her mother-in-law - to buy vegetables in the bazaar.
    I have not yet travelled on a bus in India that has not been packed to bursting-point, with people inside and luggage on top; and they are always so old that they shake up every bone in the human body and every screw in their own. If the buses are always the same, so is the landscape through which they travel. Once a town is left behind, there is nothing till the next one except flat land, broiling sky, distances and dust. Especially dust: the sides of the bus are open with only bars across them so that the hot winds blow in freely, bearing desert sands to choke up ears and nostrils and set one's teeth on edge with grit.
    The town of Khatm turned out to be a wretched little place. Of course Satipur isn't all that grand either, but it does give a sense of having been allowed to grow according to its own needs. But Khatm just huddles in the shadow of the Nawab's palace. It seems to have been built only to serve the Palace, and now that there is no one left in there, doesn't know what to do with itself. The