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S’la’s notions of what went on in the ‘English pagoda’ were vague in the extreme; but he did know
that church-going signified respectability–a quality which, like all bachelors’ servants, he hated in his
bones.
‘There is trouble coming,’ he said despondently to the other servants. ‘I have been watching him’
(he meant Flory) ‘these ten days past. He has cut down his cigarettes to fifteen a day, he has stopped
drinking gin before breakfast, he shaves himself every evening–though he thinks I do not know it, the
fool. And he has ordered half a dozen new silk shirts! I had to stand over the dirzi railing him
bahinchut to get them finished in time. Evil omens! I give him three months longer, and then good-bye
to the peace in this house!’
‘What, is he going to get married?’ said Ba Pe.
‘I am certain of it. When a white man begins going to the English pagoda, it is, as you might say, the
beginning of the end.’
‘I have had many masters in my life,’ old Sammy said. ‘The worst was Colonel Wimpole sahib,
who used to make his orderly hold me down over the table while he came running from behind and
kicked me with very thick boots for serving banana fritters too frequently. At other times, when he
was drunk, he would fire his revolver through the roof of the servants’ quarters, just above our heads.
But I would sooner serve ten years under Colonel Wimpole sahib than a week under a memsahib with
her kit-kit. If our master marries I shall leave the same day.’
‘I shall not leave, for I have been his servant fifteen years. But I know what is in store for us when
that woman comes. She will shout at us because of spots of dust on the furniture, and wake us up to
bring cups of tea in the afternoon when we are asleep, and come poking into the cookhouse at all
hours and complain over dirty saucepans and cockroaches in the flour bin. It is my belief that these
women lie awake at nights thinking of new ways to torment their servants.’
‘They keep a little red book,’ said Sammy, ‘in which they enter the bazaar-money, two annas for
this, four annas for that, so that a man cannot earn a pice. They make more kit-kit over the price of an
onion than a sahib over five rupees.’
‘Ah, do I not know it! She will be worse than Ma Hla May. Women!’ he added comprehensively,
with a kind of sigh.
The sigh was echoed by the others, even by Ma Pu and Ma Yi. Neither took Ko S’la’s remarks as a
stricture upon her own sex, Englishwomen being considered a race apart, possibly not even human,
and so dreaded that an Englishman’s marriage is usually the signal for the flight of every servant in his
house, even those who have been with him for years.