Page:Old Deccan Days.djvu/31

 Rh bazaar. Now you'd have to pay that for each guava. This shows how much more money people need now than they did then.

The English fixed the rupee to the value of sixteen annas; in those days there were some big annas and some little ones, and you could sometimes get twenty-two annas for a rupee.

I had seven brothers and one sister. Things were very different in those days to what they are now. There were no schools then to send the children to, it was only the great people who could read and write. If a man was known to be able to write he was 'plenty proud,' and hundreds and hundreds of people would come to him to write their letters. Now you find a pen and ink in every house! I don't know what good all this reading and writing does. My grandfather couldn't write, and my father couldn't write, and they did very well; but all's changed now.

My father used to be out all day at his work, and my mother often went to do coolie-work, and she had to take my father his dinner (my mother did plenty work in the world); and when my granny was strong enough she used sometimes to go into the bazaar, if we wanted money, and grind rice for the shopkeepers, and they gave her half a rupee for her day's work, and used to let her have the bran and chaff besides. But afterwards she got too old to do that, and besides there were so many of us children. So she used to stay at home and look after us while my mother was at work. 'Plenty bother' 'tis to look after a lot of children. No sooner my granny's back turned than we all ran out in the sun, and played with the dust and stones on the road.

Then my granny would call out to us, 'Come here, children, out of the sun, and I'll tell you a story. Come in, you'll all get headaches.' So she used to get us together (there were nine of us, and great little fidgets, like all children) into the house; and there she'd sit on the floor, and tell us one of the stories I tell you. But then she used to make them last much longer, the different people telling their own stories from the beginning as often as possible; so that by the time she'd got to the end she had told the beginning over five or six times. And so she went on, talk, talk, talk, Mera Bap reh! Such a long time she'd go on for, till all the children got quite tired and fell asleep. Now there are plenty of schools to which to send the children, but there were no schools when I was