Following the Equator eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 703 pages of information about Following the Equator.

Following the Equator eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 703 pages of information about Following the Equator.
was not the usual place where Tookaram slept.  He usually slept inside the room.  The body of the deceased remained on the loft when I went to sleep.  The room in which we slept was locked, and I heard that my paramour, Tookaram, was restless outside.  About 3 o’clock the following morning Tookaram knocked at the door, when both myself and my mother opened it.  He then told me to go to the steps leading to the quarry, and see if any one was about.  Those steps lead to a stable, through which we go to the quarry at the back of the compound.  When I got to the steps I saw no one there.  Tookaram asked me if any one was there, and I replied that I could see no one about.  He then took the body of the deceased from the loft, and having wrapped it up in his saree, asked me to accompany him to the steps of the quarry, and I did so.  The ‘saree’ now produced here was the same.  Besides the ‘saree’, there was also a ‘cholee’ on the body.  He then carried the body in his arms, and went up the steps, through the stable, and then to the right hand towards a Sahib’s bungalow, where Tookaram placed the body near a wall.  All the time I and my mother were with him.  When the body was taken down, Yessoo was lying on the cot.  After depositing the body under the wall, we all returned home, and soon after 5 a.m. the police again came and took Tookaram away.  About an hour after they returned and took me and my mother away.  We were questioned about it, when I made a statement.  Two hours later I was taken to the room, and I pointed out this waistband, the ‘dhotur’, the mattress, and the wooden post to Superintendent Nolan and Inspectors Roberts and Rashanali, in the presence of my mother and Tookaram.  Tookaram killed the girl Cassi for her ornaments, which he wanted for the girl to whom he was shortly going to be married.  The body was found in the same place where it was deposited by Tookaram.”

The criminal side of the native has always been picturesque, always readable.  The Thuggee and one or two other particularly outrageous features of it have been suppressed by the English, but there is enough of it left to keep it darkly interesting.  One finds evidence of these survivals in the newspapers.  Macaulay has a light-throwing passage upon this matter in his great historical sketch of Warren Hastings, where he is describing some effects which followed the temporary paralysis of Hastings’ powerful government brought about by Sir Philip Francis and his party: 

“The natives considered Hastings as a fallen man; and they acted after their kind.  Some of our readers may have seen, in India, a cloud of crows pecking a sick vulture to death—­no bad type of what happens in that country as often as fortune deserts one who has been great and dreaded.  In an instant all the sycophants, who had lately been ready to lie for him, to forge for him, to pander for him, to poison for him, hasten to purchase the favor of his victorious enemies
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Following the Equator from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.