Statedly, on his birth-day, the Anglo-Indian child is treated to a kat-pootlee nautch, and Hastings Clive has a birth-day every time he conceives a longing for a puppet-show; so that our wilful young friend may be said to be nine years, and about nineteen kat-pootlee nautches, old.

To make a birth-day for Hastings Clive, three or four tamasha-wallahs, or show-fellows, are required; these, hired for a few rupees, come from the nearest bazaar, bringing with them all the fantastic apparatus of a kat-pootlee nautch, with its interludes of story-telling and jugglery.  A sheet, or table-cloth, or perhaps a painted drop-curtain, expressly prepared, is hung between two pillars in the drawing-room, and reaches, not to the floor, but to the tops of the miniature towers of a silver palace, where some splendid Rajah, of fabulous wealth and power, is about to hold a grand durbar, or levee.  All the people, be they illustrious personages or the common herd, who assist in the ceremony, are puppets a span long, rudely constructed and coarsely painted, but very faithful as to costume and manners, and most dexterously played upon by the invisible tamasha-wallahs, whom the curtain conceals.

A silver throne having been wheeled out on the portico by manikin bhearers, the manikin Rajah, attended by his manikin moonshee, and as many manikin courtiers as the tamasha property-man can supply, comes forth in his wooden way, and seats himself on the throne in wooden state; a manikin hookah-badar, or pipe-server, and a manikin chattah-wallah, or umbrella-bearer, take up their wooden position behind, while a manikin punkah-wallah fans, woodenly, his manikin Highness, and the manikin courtiers dance wooden attendance around.  Then manikin ladies and gentlemen come on manikin elephants and horses and camels, or in manikin palanquins, and alight with wooden dignity at the foot of the palace stairs, taking their respective orders of wooden precedence with wooden pomposities and humilities, and all the manikin forms of the customary bore.  The manikin courtiers trip woodenly down the grand stairs to meet the manikin guests with little wooden Orientalisms of compliment, and all the little wooden delicacies of the season; and they conduct the manikin Sahibs and Beebees into the presence of the manikin Rajah, who receives them with wooden condescension and affability, and graciously reciprocates their wooden salaams, inquiring woodenly into the health of all their manikin friends, and hoping, with the utmost ligneous solicitude, that they have had a pleasant wooden journey:  and so on, manikin by manikin, to the wooden end.  Of course, much desultory tomtomry and wild troubadouring behind the curtain make the occasion musical.