ranee's Hospital, which is by day a home and a house to me,
minister to me as daughters to a father. They run after me and rebuke
me if I do not wear a certain coat when it rains daily. I am like a
dying tree in a garden of flowers.

THE FUMES OF THE HEART

_Scene._ Pavilion and Dome Hospital, Brighton--1915.

_What talk is this, Doctor Sahib? This Sahib says he will be my
letter-writer? Just as though he were a bazar letter-writer at home?...
What are the Sahib's charges? Two annas? Too much! I give one.... No.
No! Sahib. You shouldn't have come down so quickly. You've forgotten,
we Sikhs always bargain.... Well; one anna be it. I will give a bond to
pay it out of my wound-pension when I get home. Sit by the side of my
bed...._

_This is the trouble, Sahib. My brother who holds his land and works
mine, outside Amritsar City, is a fool. He is older than I. He has done
his service and got one wound out of it in what they used to call
war--that child's play in the Tirah years ago. He thinks himself a
soldier! But that is not his offence. He sends me postcards,
Sahib--scores of postcards--whining about the drouth or the taxes, or
the crops, or our servants' pilferings or some such trouble. He doesn't
know what trouble means. I want to tell him he is a fool.... What?
True! True! One can get money and land but never a new brother. But for
all that, he is a fool.... Is he a good farmer? Sa_-heeb! _If an
Amritsar Sikh isn't a good farmer, a hen doesn't know an egg.... Is he
honest? As my own pet yoke of bullocks. He is only a fool. My belly is
on fire now with knowledge I never had before, and I wish to impart it
to him--to the village elders--to all people. Yes, that is true, too.
If I keep calling him a fool, he will not gain any knowledge.... Let me
think it over on all sides! Aha! Now that I have a bazar-writer of my
own I will write a book--a very book of a letter to my fool of a
brother.... And now we will begin. Take down my words from my lips to
my foolish old farmer-brother:--_

* * * * *

"You will have received the notification of my wounds which I took in
Franceville. Now that I am better of my wounds, I have leisure to write
with a long hand. Here we have paper and ink at command. Thus it is
easy to let off the fumes of our hearts. Send me all the news of all
the crops and what is being done in our village. This poor parrot is
always thinking of Kashmir.

"