Maidan, a very large park containing among other
things a race-course, and cricket and football grounds. The word
Maidan is Arabic and Persian and Hindustani for an open space, and I
hope you like the superior way I explain things to you. You, who
can be silent in so many languages, will probably know what Maidan
means--but no matter.

This, then, is the European Calcutta, clean and spacious and pleasant,
but not nearly so interesting as the native part. Turn down a side
street, walk a little way and you are in a nest of mean streets,
unpaved, dirty, smelling vilely, lined with open booths, where squat
half-naked men selling lumps of sticky sweetmeats and piles of things
that look like unbaked scones and other strange eatables; and little
naked babies tumble in the dust with goats and puppies. It seems to
me that I go about asking "Why?" all day and no one gives me a
satisfactory answer to anything. Why, for example, should we require a
troop of servants living, as we do, in a kind of hotel? And yet there
they are--Boggley's bearer and my _ayah_--I can see some reason for
their presence--a _kitmutgar_ to wait on us at table and bring tea in
the afternoon, another young assistant _kitmutgar_ who scurries like a
frightened rabbit at my approach, a delightful small boy who rejoices
in the name of _pani-wallah_, whose sole duty is to carry water for
the baths, the _dhobi_ who washes our clothes by beating them between
two large--and I should say, judging by the state of the clothes,
sharp--stones, losing most of them in the process, and a _syce_ or
groom for each pony. Seated, as one sometimes sees them, in rows on
the steps, augmented by a _chuprassi_ or two, brilliant in uniform
they make a sufficiently imposing spectacle. I have few words, but I
look at them in as pleasant a way as I know how, partly because I like
to be friends with servants, and partly because I'm rather afraid of
them and don't want to rouse them to Mutiny or do anything desperate,
but Boggley discouraged me at the outset. "You needn't grin at them
so affably," he remarked, "they will only think you are weak in the
head." They quite evidently regard me as a poor creature, even Bella,
though she humours me and condescends to say "pretty pretty," or
"nicey nicey" when I am dressed in the evening. I think she must once
have nursed children, for the words she knows are baby words; she
always calls me "poor Missy baba" and strokes me! The _pani-wallah_
fi