INTRODUCTION
BY
KADIR BAKSH, KHITMATGAR.
Heavenborn,
Through your favour this is a book written by my Sahib. I know that he wrote it because it was his custom to write far into the night; I greatly desiring to go to my house. But there was no order: therefore it was my fate to sit without the door until the work was accomplished. Then came I and made shut all the papers in the office box, and these papers, by the peculiar operation of Time and owing to the skilful manner in which 'I picked them up from the floor, became such a book as you now see. God alone knows what is written therein, for I am a poor man, and the Sahib is my father and my mother, and I have no concern with his writings until he has left his table and gone to bed.
Nabi Baksh, the clerk, says that it is a book about the black men—common people. This is a manifest lie, for by what road can my Sahib have acquired knowledge of the common people? Have I not, for several years, been perpetually with the Sahib: and throughout that time have I not stood between him and the other servants who would persecute him with complaints or vex him with idle tales about my work? Did I not smite Dunnoo, the groom, only yesterday in the matter of the badness of the harness composition which I had procured? I am the head of the Sahib's household and hold his purse. Without me he does not know where are his rupees or his clean collars. So great is my power over the Sahib and the love that he bears to me! Have I ever told
