Letters from India Volume II/From the Hon F H Eden to a Friend 3
, I've got your No. 15; as usual it dropped in in an odd unexpected manner. It could not have come in a ship, for there was. not one in the river; nothing else came but a packet from the ‘Company.’ Perhaps, after all, you are the ‘Company.’ We have all been busy during the rainy-season fever—all but his ‘Excellency,’ who is atrociously and inhumanly well—for the whole of Calcutta has been sick. We don’t die of our influenzas, because we have not strength enough; we are only left a shade weaker and a shade yellower, and if a healthy European lands it makes us all sneeze. B has escaped it, owing to his great serenity and being constantly engaged in plucking ahingas. I have another bunch of feathers for you, and some day I’ll freight a ship with them.
Our first and best energies are devoted towards making a clinquant figure of his Excellency, in order that he may shine in the eyes of the native princes; and I take it he will make a pretty considerable figure seen through a long vista of embroidered punkahs, peacocks’ feathers, silver sticks, spearmen, &c., and two interesting females caracoling on their elephants on each side of him.
I have at last made listen to reason about my howdah, and it is a model of comfort. There have been unpleasant doings at Napâl—very! They make me rather sick. The physician there was suspected of having poisoned a little prince, intending to poison the queen. He would not own to any such intention, upon which the king took his wife and children and tortured them to make him confess—scorched them. Of course the man did confess at last; indeed, I should like to see George and not confess anything and everything if they took to scorching Emily and me. It is a very bad precedent that of torturing the women of a family by way of punishing the men. It might just happen they would not mind, certainly less than if they were tortured themselves. One of the native princes made his prime minister pound his family’s heads in a mortar with a pestle. I should not object to that so much if he set about it judgematically.
It sometimes strikes me we really are in what is called a barbarous country. The other day the baboo died here—a very high caste servant, through whose hands great sums of money pass. He might have been saved, but would not degrade himself by taking English nourishment, and, being a Hindu, was at last carried off by his attached friends before he was dead and laid by the side of the river, where they poked mud into his mouth, and there was no choice for us but to let him be murdered in his own way.