Winter India/Chapter 28
CHAPTER XXVII
BOMBAY
FTER two months "up-country," Bombay seemed a European city, a Western metropolis; and that hotel which strikes such dismay and disgust to the heart of the tourist coming from Europe seemed to us a very palace of comfort; that hotel whose corridors are strewn with servants and their rolls of bedding, their pots, pipes, and traps,—servants who gabble and smoke, eat and sleep, dress and undress, each before his employer's door, as unconcernedly as in their own serais; that hotel of hard and hillocky beds, which all one's winter accumulation of razais cannot soften; that hotel whose partition walls stop two feet from the ceiling, where every room has an outer balcony and an inner dark bath-room whose primitive plumbing puts the American in fear for his life. By contrast with up-country hotels it was the home of comfort, and at last we understood how people could talk of the "luxury of Indian travel." All things are comparative, and one's ideas of splendor depend on what has gone before. Even the Madras and Calcutta hotels would have seemed splendid after a round of inns and banglas.
The soft, sea air, the warm days and mild nights were balm to us, after the dry scorch and frostbites up-country. The sight of Gothic architecture was a revelation after having reached the edge of satiety among Hindu, Jain, Mogul, Pathan, and Dravidian masterpieces. Street-cars, European shop-windows and houses were objects of interest; and to drive over sprinkled roads beside the soft-sounding sea, where bands played and fashion walked; to drink tea on club-house porches,—all this was too exciting.
We were invited to a Parsi wedding on our first day, and drove across the native city, around the curve of the Back Bay, and up the slopes of Malabar Hill to the villa of the bride's family. A procession of Parsi ladies, wrapped in saris of delicate silks, and preceded by a band, entered the gates before us and joined the group of Parsi women in gold-bordered saris who made the drawing-room blaze with their jewels. The bride was quiet and subdued, the groom self-possessed to the point of flippancy when he came in from the assemblage of Parsi men in the garden, all attired in white ceremonial dress and queer black hats. Bands played, and the ceremony by the priest was very long and full of symbolism. The bride, at one point, held a cocoanut and clasped the hand of the groom, while the priest delivered a long exhortation and showered them with rice, fruit, and flowers. The bride was invested with the jeweled necklaces and other gifts of the groom, sprinkled with rose-water, and touched with attar of roses in the strangely mixed Parsi and Hindu ceremony that has come about during the long residence of the fire-worshiping Parsis in India. The conventional menu of a London wedding breakfast, with champagne and ices, was served to the company of Anglo-Indian officials, foreign consuls and merchants, a Portuguese bishop, and some Japanese naval officers and American visitors. The Parsi ladies and children were served in the large marquees on the lawn, where ceremonial dishes were added to the foreign dainties. Each had a palm-leaf for a plate, and a vegetarian repast was partaken of without knives or forks. Each visitor was garlanded with tuberoses and sprinkled with rose-water when he left, but the gilded pan, or betel-nut part of Hindu ceremony, was omitted.
A few days later we attended a second Parsi wedding, where still more of the old ceremonial was observed. There was the same garden company of men in white ceremonial dress, and a drawing-room full of Parsi ladies covered with jewels and draped in silks of every delicate color. The bride seemed not to like the way in which her veil was pulled and rumpled by clumsy hands, and sweetmeats thrust in her mouth, and with some emphasis unwound her sari herself and wrapped around her the silver-bordered one given by the groom's mother. The bride and groom sat in chairs facing each other, and the priest wound around and bound them together with the symbolical white cord, and then bound them further with the groom's kamarband. A veil was held between them at the next stage, and finally they ate rice from the same dish, the groom feeding the bride with his fingers. There was a pantomime of her washing the groom's feet with milk, and his purse was given the bride, that she might spend it on a feast for the poor. The ceremony was full of meaning and deep significance to the beautiful, dark-eyed Parsi women and to the serious, priestly looking men, but it would take many pages to convey the full meaning of the customs brought from Persia so many centuries ago.
There were stock sights to be seen in Bombay, and we took the red Murray book and did them; but it was not exciting after the up-country sights and people. First, to the twin Towers of Silence, with the friezes of living vultures on their cornices, where the Parsis, who do not believe in defiling the earth, expose the bodies of their dead to the elements and the birds of the air. Nothing could be more gruesome and repellent than the rows of huge, motionless birds awaiting their prey. There were chill, sepulchral halls where ceremonies are held by the mourners, and from the parapet of the high garden one has a fine view down over the Back Bay and the city, and across the harbor to the mainland shores.
In all the many accounts I have read of these Towers of Silence, the narrators always looked down the winding road and saw a procession of white-clad mourners approaching with a body, and gruesomely told how the vultures saw it too, and flapped their wings. We looked and looked in vain, the first travelers to miss that regulation spectacle. When we boasted our exemption to a resident of Bombay, he said wearily: "But of course you will go home and say you saw a funeral winding up. 
"PLEASE BUY MY NIKLASS"
Guide-book in hand, and Sir Edwin Arnold's caves of Elephanta fresh in mind, we rose with the dawn one morning and sped away by steam-launch across the harbor to the cave-temples of Shiva that date before the twelfth century. We landed at a pier of detached concrete blocks, and made our way by leaps to land, where the old sergeant who guards the place described every temple, every bas-relief, every group and image, so minutely that we ought never to forget a detail of those rock-sculptures, many of them of such beauty that we echoed the sergeant's anger at the Portuguese for firing cannon into the caves to destroy the idolatrous work. We tiptoed here and there, kept away from the darker corners, looked suspiciously at every rock and bush and tuft of grass, remembering Sir Edwin Arnold's tales of the deadly cobras on Elephanta; but the sergeant insisted that there were no snakes, that he had never seen one. It only remained for him to tell us, as he did, that he never had fever, for our last illusion to vanish. If we were not to be bitten by cobras and filled with fever germs by visiting Elephanta, what more was it than a pleasure excursion and boating picnic? What glory in daring it? What credit for anything more than one morning's hire of a steam-launch? We did the museum, the art school, the hospital for animals, the markets, and the serais where Mohammedan pilgrims stop on their way to and from Mecca. At the large serai we met the three tuneful Bokhara beggars we had seen in the serai at Amritsar. They were still red-cheeked and cheerful, still wrapped in their north-country wadded clothes on that warm morning, and they showed proudly their Cook coupon ticket for the pilgrim-ship and further journey to Mecca. For the rest, Bombay was a European city; the hotel life, the teas, the drives, all of the West only. It was hardly India to us, save as Delhi jewelers salaamed in recognition and sang to us beseechingly: "Please buy my niklass. Please take that griddle."
We had but a few days to wait for the ship to Ismailia,—hot days, when the thermometer stood at 90° for hours; a haze hung over the ocean, and the evening drives to the Breach of Kandy and Malabar Hill were none too refreshing. All Bombay turned out of doors at sunset, to drive, to walk at the edge of the ocean, to linger by the band-stands long after dark. The groups of white-clad Mohammedans gathered together to pray and to listen to the Koran, and the groups of Parsis playing cards by electric light as they sat on the grass by the Queen's statue, were the sharpest pictures in memory after Bombay and the mainland hills had faded on the horizon, and one turned gratefully toward lands where it is not always afternoon.
"Did you enjoy India?" my friends continued to ask me, with unhappy choice of words; and, to be literal, the answer could only be negative.
"What impressed you most?" To that it was easy to answer: "What England has done for India; the incalculable debt all that continent of diverse peoples owes for the just, intelligent, humane rule of the Great White Queen and her son; for the treasure of noble lives poured into the peninsula for a century, for the burdens the white man has borne." If all the people should gather daily, like the multitudes praying on the Ganges bank at Benares, salaam toward England, and chant their acknowledgments, it would be fitting; but one discovers an ingratitude of dependencies degrees blacker than that of republics.