A little Brahman village at the railway station of Rajpaira is reached in
the middle of the afternoon; but it provides little or nothing in the way
of accommodation for a European. The chow-keedar of the dak bungalow
blandly declares his inability to provide anything eatable for a Sahib,
and the Eurasian employes at the railway station are unaccommodating and
indifferent, owing to the travel-stained and ordinary appearance of my
apparel. The Eurasians, by the by, impress me far less favorably as a
race than do the better-class full-blood natives. It seems to be the
unfortunate fate of most mixed races to inherit the more undesirable
qualities of both progenitors, and the better characteristics of neither.
No less than the mongrel populations of certain West Indian islands, the
Spanish-speaking republics, and the mulattoes of the Southern States, do
the Eurasians of India present in their character eloquent argumentation
against the error of miscegenation.
A little Brahman village is anything but, an encouraging place for a
traveller to penetrate in search of eatables. A thin, yellow-skinned
Brahman, with a calico fig-leaf suspended from a cocoa-nut-fibre
waist-string, and the white-and-red tattooing of his holy caste on his
forehead, presides over a big lump of goodakoo (a preparation of tobacco,
rose-leaves, jaggeree, bananas, opium, and cardamom seed, used for
hookah-smoking), and his double performs the same office for sickly, warm
goats' milk and doughy, unleavened chup-patties.
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