And when they had sat themselves down beneath the hanging banyan roots beside the porch, men, women and children, the bundles and baskets beside them, the maistri went in, and came out with the sahib, a tall, fat man with golden hair, and he had spectacles large as your palm, and he looked this side at the men and that side at the women, now at the arms of Pariah Chennayya and now at the legs of Pariah Siddayya, and he touched Madhavanna’s son, Chenna, then but a brat of seven, with the butt of his whip, and he laughed and he wanted everyone to laugh with him, and when the child began to cry, he looked at the child’s face and began to laugh at him, but the child cried more and more, and the sahib rose up suddenly and went in, and came out with a round white peppermint and said he was not a bad man and that everybody would get a beating when they deserved one and sweets when they worked well. ‘Tell them that — repeat them that,’ he said to the maistri who was standing behind him, and the maistri repeated, ‘The sahib says that if you work well you will get sweets and if you work badly you will get beaten — that is the law of the place.’ And they all rose up like one rock and fell on the ground saying, ‘You are a dispenser of good, O maharaja, we are the lickers of your feet. ’; and the women rose behind the men, and they stood fleshy with joy, and turning to the sahib, Madanna’s widow Sankamma says, ‘Sahib — we shall have a two-anna bit for each woman-hand and a four-anna bit for each man-hand?’ And the maistri grew so fierce at this that he howled and spat at her and said his word was the word, and that he hadn’t a hundred and eight tongues, and Sankamma simply put her hand upon her stomach and gaped at him, while the sahib said, ‘What is all this, Anthony?’ and Anthony said something to the sahib in the Christian tongue, and the sahib said, ‘You all go and settle down in your huts — and tomorrow be ready for work at five!’ And they all fell down to kiss the feet of the sahib, and the sahib fetched a few more peppermints and the children all ran to him and the women came running behind them, and the men put their hands shyly between the hands of the women, and at this the maistri grew so furious again that he beat them on the back and drove them to their huts by the foot of the hill. And each one took a hut to himself and each one began to put up a thatch for the one that had no thatch, a wall for the one that had no wall, a floor for the one that had no floor, and they spent the whole afternoon thatching and patching and plastering; and when the evening came they all said, ‘This will be a fine place to live in,’ and they slept the sleep of princes.
And the next morning they rise with the sun, and the men begin to dig pits and to hew wood and the women to pluck weeds and to kill vermin; and when the sun rises high, and one rests his axe for a while to open the tobacco pouch, or one rests his basket to open the betel bag, there he is, the maistri, there behind some jack, and he says, ‘Hè, there! What are you waiting for? Nobody’s marriage procession is passing. Do you hear?’ and when you do not pick up your axe or put your hand to a coffee plant, he rushes down the hill, crunching the autumn leaves beneath him, and up there by the bamboo cluster the red face of the sahib peeps out, and they all swing their arms this way and that and the axes squeak on the tree and the scissors on the leaves. But when the talkative Papamma opens her Ramayana and speaks of the leaks in the roofs and leaks in the measures and leaks in the morals, there’s a crunch of feet again, but it dies away into the silence only to rise on the top of the other shoulder of the hill. And they have hardly begun to work again when Lakkamma cries out, ‘Hè, hè, hè, a snake! a huge snake! a cobra!’ and rushes away to hide behind a tree. And they all leave their work and come to see if there is a snake and what he looks like. But he has disappeared into the bamboo bush; and Pariah Siddayya, who has been in these estates for ten years and more, says never mind, and explains that cobras never harm anyone unless you poke your fuel chip at them; and seating himself on a fallen log, he tells you about the dasara havu that is so clever that he got into the sahib’s drawer and lay there curled up, and how, the other day, when the sahib goes to the bathroom, a lamp in his hand, and opens the drawer to take out some soap, what does he see but our maharaja, nice and clean and shining with his eyes glittering in the lamplight, and the sahib, he closes the drawer as calmly as a prince; but by the time he is back with his pistol, our maharaja has given him the slip. And the sahib opens towel after towel to greet the maharaja, but the maharaja has gone on his nuptial ceremony and he will never be found.
‘Now,’ continues Pariah Siddayya, mopping his face, ‘now as for water snakes, take my word, they are as long as they are silly, like the tongues of our village hussies. They just hang over a streamlet or pond, as though the whole world has closed its eyes. You can pick them up by their tails and swing them round and round, once, twice, thrice, and throw them on the nearest rock you find. If they don’t die, they’ll at least leave basket and bundle for ages to come. But the snake that is as short as he is wicked is the green snake. You would think it was a rope, but when it is beside a bamboo, you would say, “Why! it is a bamboo leaf!” That’s how our Sankamma, gathering cow dung, put her hand out to remove a bamboo leaf, and what should the bamboo leaf do but hiss and fall upon her arm, where by Kenchamma’s grace she had her dung basket, and he, furious, ran back into the thicket like a barking puppy and left a palm’s width of poison on the ground.
‘He is bad enough, the green snake, but you haven’t seen the flying snakes of this country. Now you know the cobra, the python, the green snake, the water snake, the krait and the rattlesnake, and you know how they move. They move like this — on the earth, like all living creatures. But here there’s another monster; he flies from tree to tree, and when your turban is just a little loose, and say your pate uncovered, this fine gentleman merely hangs down and gives you a nice blessing. But thank heavens it is not with us here that he is often found. He likes the sumptuous smell of cardamoms and his home is amongst them. That’s why all these cardamom-garden coolies wear, you know, a slab thin as a cloth on their heads. There was that fellow Mada who died leaving three children and a yelling wife. There was also that bent-legged Chandrayya. He died God knows how, but they found him in the garden, dead. This flying snake, I tell you, is a sly fellow. He is not like the cobra, frank in his attack and never aggressive. Why, the other day there was Ramayya pushing the maistri’s bicycle up through the Wadawalè Ghats, for the maistri had come up in a passing lorry, and the bicycle was left down at the Sukkur police station, and the maistri says, “Go and get it, Ramayya.” So Ramayya goes down that night, and the next morning he says to himself, “Why go by the main road, there’s daylight and I have the bicycle-bell to ring if there’s anything coming.” And so he takes the Kalhapur tank-weir path, and crossing into the Siddapur jungles he is pushing the bicycle when he sees the flat footmarks of a tiger that must have feasted on a deer somewhere, and he says to himself, “This might be difficult business,” and begins to ring the bell. Then, as he is just by a flowering aloe, what should rattle up but a huge cobra as long as this — that the bicycle-wheel had run down. Ramayya cried out, “Ayyo. Ayyoo. ” and ran away. And after a whiff of breath and a thousand and eight Rama-Ramas, he comes back and there is no cobra nor his dirt there, and he takes the bicycle, and looking this side and that side, he runs with it along the footpath and no cobra pursued him.