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 insideof one’s person is more to be desired than any merely exterior appearanceof 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 someexterior 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 wantme 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 wantme 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 notan 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 everybodydespised 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.
The Indians did not much like, either, to be lumped all together as “Indians.” They were a seething and still unmixed caldron of different races, or so they claimed. There were the Cholas, the Aryans, Sindi, Bhils, Bangali, Gonds … I do not know how many. The lighter brown Indians called themselves white,and claimed they were descended from fair-haired, pale-eyed ancestors who came from somewhere far to the north. If that was ever true, then there had since been so much intermingling that, over the centuries, the darker browns and blacks of the southern races had predominated—as mud does when poured into milk —and all the Indians were now but shades and tints of muddy brown. None was of any color worth boasting about, and the insignificant differences of hue served only as one more basis for their abhorring each other. The lighter brown ones could sneer at the darker brown, and they at the indisputably black.
Also, depending on their race, tribe, family lineage, place of original origin and place of current habitation, the Indians spoke one hundred seventy-ninedifferent languages, hardly any two of them mutually comprehensible, and every one was deemed by its speakers the One True and Holy Tongue (though few of them ever bothered to learn to read and write it, if indeed it had a script or character or alphabet to be written in, which not many did), and the speakers of every True Tongue scorned and reviled those who spoke any False Tongue, which meant any of the one hundred and seventy-eight others.