“Very well.”
Rather sulkily, she covered herself again, and the numerous Malayu who had congregated behind nearby deckhouses and things dispersed again about their business.
“I will not,” Tofaa said stiffly, “enumerate the Hindu qualifications for beauty in the male, Marco-wallah, since you fall lamentably short of them. You are not even handsome. A handsome man’s eyebrows meet above the bridge of his nose, and his nose is long and pendulous. My dear late husband’s nose was as long as his royal pedigree. But as I say, I will not list your shortcomings. It would not be ladylike of me.”
“By all means, Tofaa, be ladylike.”
She may have been a beauty by Hindu standards—in truth, she was, as I later was often told by admiring Hindu men, openly envying me my companion—but I could think of no other people that would have judged her even passable, except possibly the Mien or the Bho. Despite Tofaa’s daily and highly visible and well-attended ablutions, she somehow never got quite clean. There was always that measle on her forehead, of course, and always a gray scurf about her ankles and a darker gray curd between her toes. But while I cannot say that the rest of her, from the measle down to the curd, was ever actually, in the Mien and Bho manner, encrusted, it was always just perceptibly dingy.
Back in Pagan, Hui-sheng had gone always barefoot in the Ava fashion, and Arùn had done so all her life, and even after a day of padding about the dusty city streets, their feet had always been, even before bath time, kissably clean and sweet. I honestly could not understand how Tofaa always managed to have such dirty feet, especially out here on the sea, where there was nothing to smirch them but fresh breezes and sparkling spindrift. It might have had something to do with the India-nut oil with which she coated all her exposed skin after each day’s washing. Her late dear husband had left her with very little in the way of personal possessions: not much but a leather flask of the nut oil and a leather bag that contained a quantity of wood chips. As her employer, I had voluntarily bought her a new wardrobe of the sari fabrics and other necessities. But she had regarded the leather containers as necessities, too, and brought them along. I had known that the oil of India-nut was to keep herself glistening in that unattractively greasy way. But I had no notion of what the wood chips were for—until one day, when she did not emerge from her cabin at mealtime, I tapped on her door and she bade me come in.
Tofaa was squatting in her immodest bathing position, and facing me, but her thicket was hidden by a small ceramic pot she was pressing to her crotch. Before I could make my excuses and step back out of the cabin, she calmly lifted the pot away from herself. It was the sort of pot used for brewing cha, and the spout of it came sliding, slick with secretions, out from among the hair. That would have been surprising enough, but even more so was the fact that the spout was emitting blue smoke. Tofaa had evidently put into the pot some of those wood chips, and set them smoldering, and stuck the smoking spout up inside herself. I had seen women play with themselves before, and with a variety of playthings, but never with smoke, and I told her so.
“Decent women do not play with themselves,” she said reprovingly. “That is what men are for. No, Marco-wallah, daintiness of the inside of one’s person is more to be desired than any merely exterior appearance of being clean. The application of nim-wood smoke is an age-old and cleanly practice of us fastidious Hindu women, and I do this for your sake, though little you appreciate it.”
I frankly saw little there to appreciate: a plump, greasy, dark-brown female squatting on the cabin floor, with her legs shamelessly apart, and the entrapped blue smoke oozing lazily up through her dense bush. I could have remarked that some exterior daintiness might have improved her chances of attracting someone nearer to her interior, but I chivalrously refrained.
“Nim-wood smoke is a preventive of unexpected pregnancy,” she went on. “It also makes the kaksha parts fragrant and tasty, should anyone happen to nuzzle or browse there. That is why I do this. Just in case you should sometime be overwhelmed by your brute passions, Marco-wallah, and seize me against my will, despite my pleas for mercy, and fling yourself upon me without giving me time to make ready, and force your rigid sthanu through my chaste but soft defenses, I take this precaution of administering the nim-wood smoke every day.”
“Tofaa, I wish you would stop.”
“You want me to?” Her eyes widened, and so must her yoni have done, for a voluminous puff of the blue smoke came suddenly up from there. “You want me to bear your children?”
“Gèsu. I want you to cease this everlasting preoccupation with matters below the waist. I engaged you to be my interpreter, and I am already shuddering for fear of what words you are likely to speak, ostensibly mine. But right now, Tofaa, our rice and goat meat are getting wet with salt spray. Come and put something in your other end.”
I really believed, at that time, that in choosing a Hindu woman for my translator in India, I had unfortunately chosen a particularly unlovely and witless and pathetic specimen. How she had come to be the consort of a king was beyond my comprehension, but I sympathized more than ever with that wretched man, and thought I better understood now why he had thrown away a kingdom and his life. But I have here recounted a few of Tofaa’s charmless attributes—only a few of them—and have repeated some of her fatuous garrulity—only some of it—by way of making her both visible and audible in all her awfulness. I do that because, on arriving in India, I discovered to my horror that Tofaa was not an anomaly. She was an unexceptional and purely typical adult Hindu female. From a crowd of Hindu women, whatever the assortment of classes, or jati, I could hardly have picked out Tofaa. Worse yet, I found the women to be immeasurably superior to the Hindu men.
In my journeying I had got acquainted with numerous other races and nations before visiting those of India. I had concluded that the Mien droppings of the Bho of To-Bhot had to be the lowest breed of mankind, and I had been mistaken. If the Mien represented humanity’s ground level, then the Hindus were its worm burrows. In some of those countries I had earlier inhabited or visited, I could not help seeing that some of the people despised and detested other people—for their different language or their lesser refinement or their lower class in society or their peculiar ways of life or their choice of religion. But in India I could not help seeing that everybody despised and detested everybody else, and for all those reasons.
Let me be as fair as I can. Let me say that I was in some small error from the start, in thinking of all Indians as Hindus. Tofaa informed me that “Hindu” was only a variant of the name “Indian,” and properly referred only to those Indians who practiced the Hindu religion of Sanatana Dharma, or Eternal Duty. Those preferred to be dignified by the name of “Brahmanists,” after the chief god (Brahma the Creator) of the three chief gods (the other two being Vishnu the Preserver and Siva the Destroyer) of their numberless multitude of gods. Other Hindus had picked out some lesser god from that mob—Varuna, Krishna, Hanuman, whoever—and gave more devotion to that one, and thereby rated themselves superior to the greater ruck of Hindus. Many others of the population had adopted the Muslim religion seeping in from the north and west. A very few Indians still practiced Buddhism. That religion, after originating in India and spreading afar, had almost died out in its homeland, possibly because it enjoined cleanliness. Still other Indians followed other religions or sects or cults: Jain, Sikh, Yoga, Zarduchi. In all their teeming diversity and jumble and overlap of faiths, however, the Indian people maintained one holy attribute in common: the adherents of every religion despised and detested the adherents of every other.