HMS Surprise (Aubrey & Maturin, #3)

by Patrick O'Brian

This dear child Dil teaches me a great deal, talking indefatigably, a steady flow of comment and narrative, with incessant repetition where I do not understand – she insists on being understood, and no evasion deceives her. Though I do not believe Urdu is her mother-tongue. She and the crone with whom she lives converse in quite a different language: not a familiar word. The ancient gentlewoman, offering me the child for twelve rupees, assured me she was a virgin and wished to show me the fibula that guaranteed her state. It would have been quite superfluous: what could be more virginal than this tubular fearless creature that looks me directly in the face as though I were a not very intelligent tame animal, and that communicates her thoughts, views, the moment they are born as though I, too, were a child? She can throw a stone, leap, climb like a boy; and yet she is no garçon manqué neither, for in addition to this overflowing communicative affection she also has a kind of motherliness and wishes to rule my movements and my diet for my own good – disapproves my smoking bhang, eating opium, wearing trousers of more than a given length. Choleric, however: on Friday she beat a doe-eyed boy who wished to join himself to us in the palm-grove, threatening his companions with a brickbat and with oaths that made them stare. She eats voraciously: but how often in the week? She owns one piece of cotton cloth that she wears sometimes as a kilt, sometimes as a shawl; an oiled black s...