My bag left behind, my clothes daily get more and more intolerably disreputable,—this thought continually uppermost is not compatible with a due sense of self-respect. With the bag I could have faced the world of men head erect and spirits high; without it, I fain would skulk in corners, away from the glances of the crowd. I go to bed in these clothes and in them I appear in the morning, and on the top of that the steamer is full of soot, and the unbearable heat of the day keeps one unpleasantly moist.
Apart from this, I am having quite a time of it on board the steamer. My fellow-passengers are of inexhaustible variety. There is one, Aghore Babu, who cannot allude to anything, animate or inanimate, except in terms of personal abuse. There is another, a lover of music, who persists in attempting variations on the Bhairab mode at dead of night, convincing me of the untimeliness of his performance in more senses than one.
The steamer has been aground in a narrow ditch of a canal ever since last evening, and it is now past nine in the morning. I spent the night in a corner of the crowded deck, more dead than alive. I had asked the steward to fry some luchis for my dinner, and he brought me some nondescript slabs of fried dough with no vegetable accompaniments to eat them with. On my expressing a pained surprise, he was all contrition and offered to make me some hotch-potch at once. But the night being already far advanced, I declined his offer, managed to swallow a few mouthfuls of the stuff dry, and then, all lights on and the deck packed with passengers, laid myself down to sleep.
Mosquitoes hovered above, cockroaches wandered around. There was a fellow-sleeper stretched crosswise at my feet whose body my soles every now and then came up against. Four or five noses were engaged in snoring. Several mosquito-tormented, sleepless wretches were consoling themselves by pulls at their hubble-bubble pipes; and above all, there rose those variations on the mode Bhairab! Finally, at half-past three in the morning, some fussy busybodies began loudly inciting each other to get up. In despair, I also left my bed and dropped into my deck-chair to await the dawn. Thus passed that variegated nightmare of a night.
One of the hands tells me that the steamer has stuck so fast that it may take the whole day to get her off. I inquire of another whether any Calcutta-bound steamer will be passing, and get the smiling reply that this is the only boat on this line, and I may come back in her, if I like, after she has reached Cuttack! By a stroke of luck, after a great deal of tugging and hauling, they have just got her afloat at about ten o’clock.