Part 1 Section 2 Summary

The date of the narrator's first journal entry is February 2nd. She had just arrived in Bombay, which was not at all as she had imagined. She spent her first night in a missionary hostel, in a room with seven other women. The one woman who is awake tells her to always boil her water, never eat any of "their" food and be careful with her possessions. This strange woman said she had been in India for 30 years; she spoke of her Christian devotion and the little chapel in a growing town dominated by the textile industry; she lamented the changes—all for the worse—she had observed over the years: higher wages have generated greater liquor consumption, more selfishness but, she added, one cannot expect the Indians to behave any better than the British themselves. The narrator, who...