Published: Civil and Military Gazette, 24 September 1887.

Attribution: In Scrapbook 3 (28/3, p. 144).

Text: Civil and Military Gazette.

Notes: Unrecorded and unreprinted. RK was in Simla in August and September, 1887, when no doubt he saw much rain.

A Letter from “Nessus”

Sir, stronger than my sense of helpless baffled rage is my sense of the absurdity of the situation. I, “the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time and, what is more, a house-holder and one that hath had losses,” am positively unable to dine, dance or mix with my neighbours. Had I, in an access of frankness, beaten my best friend and kissed my best friend's wife on the open Mall, I could not be more utterly ostracised, abject, or alone. The desolate freedom of an old flannel shirt and unlimited tobacco is to me poor consolation for social pleasures foregone and – but my more tender emotions concern myself only.

On Thursday last the rain began to fall; on Friday it really made up its mind to continue falling; on Saturday it discovered that it had forgotten something and went back to the beginning to find it; on Sunday it settled down to business; on Monday it rained heavily; to-day is Tuesday, and it is still raining. I am – how shall I put the fact most delicately? House-keeping matrons, all India over, listen to me. Since Thursday last the dhobi – may he perish miserably of pneumonia at his own ghat – has ceased to take any interest in my movements, has vanished, fled with the whirling, ragged brown clouds, gone, Heaven knows whither, with the valleyward-falling waste-water of the roads.

He has informed me, by the mouth of a perfectly nude and drippingly wet child, that so long as the rain falls he, though always my servant and revering me as his father and his mother, is wholly unable to return me my raiment. The small child, with a piety I considered hypocritical, added of his own notion that the rain was the will of God; and, on the strength of this, demanded bakshish.