Sea of Poppies

+ bheesty / bheestie / beasty / bhishti: 'The mysteries of water-carrying, the instrument of which trade was the mussuck. In the south, according to Sir Henry, the terms are tunny-catcher or tunnyketchi.'

bichawna/bichana (*The Glossary): 'Bedding or bed, from which bichawnadar, or "bed-maker", an expression that must be used with some care because of the possibility of innuendo.'

bichawnadar: See above.

bilayuti (*The Glossary): 'Strange that we should have become accustomed to using a version of the Turkish/Arabic wilayat to refer to England; even stranger that the English should adapt it to their own use as blatty. In its bilayutee form it was often attached, as Sir Henry correctly notes, to foreign and exotic things (hence bilayati baingan for "tomato"). Sir Henry was however gravely in error on another such compound, namely bilayuteepawnee. Although he correctly glosses this as "soda-water", he is wrong in his contention that the people of Hind. believed bilayutee-pawnee could confer great strength to the human body by reason of its gaseous bubbles. As I remember the matter, our wonder was occasioned not by the power of the bubbles as they were imbibed, but rather by the explosive detonations with which they were expelled.'

biscobra (*The Glossary): Neel took issue with Sir Henry's suggestion that this was the name of some kind of venomous lizard. 'Here is another example of a beautiful marriage of the eastern and western lexicons. The word "cobra" comes of course from a Portuguese contraction of a Latin root meaning "serpent". "Bis", on the other hand, is certainly a derivative of the Bengali word for poison, which has been absorbed into English as bish, although with the sense of a "blunder" or "mistake". It is impossible that such a term could be applied to a lizard, no matter how vengeful. In my opinion, it is none other than an English colloquialism for the hamadryad or King Cobra.'

+bish: See above.

b'longi/blongi (*The Linkister[6]): 'Frequently mistaken as a contraction of the English "belong", this word is actually an elegant and economical copula, doing duty for the verb "to be" in all its many forms. Imagine then the embarrassment of the gri ffin who pointed to his wife's dog and said: "Gudda blongi wife-o massa."'

+bobachee: 'As a barkentine is to a country boat, a Kaptan to a Nacoda, a vinthaleux to a dumbpoke, so in the kitchen is a bobachee to a consummer. Each a potentate in his own way, they rule over a vast lashkar, consisting of spice-grinding masalchies, cabob-grilling caleefas, and others whose titles have mercifully lapsed from use. The bobachee, however, is the only culinary mystery to lend his name to the kitchen.'

bobachee-connah/bawarchee-khana (*The Glossary): 'On this latter term I am at odds with every authority who has given the matter any thought: whereas they derive it from Hind. khana, "place" or "room", it is my intuition that it comes from the Bengali element kona/cona, meaning corner. This seems self-evident to me, for if the meaning of bobachee-connah were indeed "cook-room", then surely the proper locution would be "bobbachy-camra". That this variant does sometimes occur, is to me the exception that proves the rule. Similarly goozle-coonuh/goozul-khana appears to me to be often wrongly rendered as "bathing-room": when applied to a place where a bathtub is kept, it must surely mean "bathing-corner". But so far as other connah/khana compounds are concerned, I will concede that it is often used in the sense of room: e.g. karkhana, jel-khana, babkhana and the like.'

+bobbery/bobbery-bob: 'This word for "commotion", so much used in southern China, was nothing but an adaptation of our common baap-rébaap.' The Oracle's translation of this as 'oh my father!' is surely a rendition rather of the equally common baap-ré, for the full expression would be rather: 'father oh father!' An alternative derivation, from the Cantonese pa-pi – a noise – is, as the Barney-Book rightly observes, extremely doubtful.

bolia/bauleah/baulia (*The Glossary): 'One of Bengal 's lighter river-craft, usually equipped with a small cabin.'

bora (*The Glossary): 'A large many-oared boat, commonly used in Bengal for the transportation of cargo.'

bowla (*The Glossary): 'These were, as I recall, portmanteaux or trunks, which were made to order by a few of our most skilled moochies.'

bowry/bowly (*The Barney-Book): 'In Hind. this generally referred to step-wells known as baolis. But after its passage into English it often came to be applied to pavilions that stood upon the banks of waterways large and small. Every nullah and nuddee could boast of a few. It was sometimes used interchangeably with chabutra/chabutter.'

[6] 'The Linkister', when it appears in the Chrestomathy, is always in reference to Charles Leland and his Pidgin English Sing-Song: Or Songs and Stories in the China-English Dialect; with a Vocabulary. Charles Leland was, of course, one of the most prodigious lexicographers of the nineteenth century and he was another of Neel's girmit-granting authorities. But being himself a master of the South China Pidgin, Neel appears to have disapproved, or disagreed, with it in some respects: hence the somewhat disparaging name.