For an unrelenting attitude towards farting the palm must be given to the Persians and the Arabs. There is a tale told on a young Iranian who broke wind in a mehfil. He was so overcome with remorse that he left the town. After many years in self-imposed exile he returned home hoping that his small misdemeanour would have been forgotten. Naming himself, he asked some boys to direct him to his old home. ‘You mean the home of so-and-so the farter?’ demanded the urchins. The poor man went back into exile.

The first prize for courtesy extended to farters goes to Sufi Abdul Rahman Hatam Ibn Unwan Al-Assam of Balkh, known for reasons of his noble attitude to farting as Hatam the Deaf. It is said that while he was explaining a matter of some theological import to an old woman, the lady farted. The saintly Sufi raised his voice and said, ‘Speak louder, I am hard of hearing.’ And for the fifteen long years that the woman continued to live, Hatam pretended to be hard of hearing and suffered people shouting in his ears. Hatam the Deaf is the patron saint of embarrassed farters.

I wonder if Bhagmati will accept this learned thesis on wind-breaking in lieu of the real thing.

1857

Alice Aldwell

I can never forgive myself for persuading my hubby to move to Delhi. ‘What’s wrong with Calcutta? We are quite happy here,’ he used to say.

There wasn’t anything wrong with Cal but there were many reasons why I did not want to go on living there. For one the place was full of Eurasians and if you didn’t cut yourself off completely from them, English gentry began to suspect you were one of them. Mind you I have nothing personal against Eurasians! I know some fine gentlemen who have a bit of the tar-brush in them. Being half-caste is not their fault, is it? but I simply had to get away from them. Mum had lived in Cal so long that she had forgotten where she had come from back Home. She had also picked up that awful chichi of the half-castes. For another I had married a pucca English gentleman: Alexander Aldwell Esquire of Her Majesty’s Post and Telegraph Services. Although yours sincerely was only a sweet eighteen and he going into his fifties when she went up the altar with him, he was, as I said before, of pucca English stock—sixteen annas to the sicca rupee! I didn’t want him to mix with the riff-raff of Cal.