Page:Oriental Stories Volume 01 Number 04 (Spring 1931).djvu/127



UGU PAYAPAN SOORLIE—or just Gugu, as his mother called him for short—was no gurgling infant. His chest measurement was forty-eight inches, with an expansion of six when he gently sighed; he stood five feet and a bit high and was in fact a very healthy, average specimen of the bad Moplah-men who inhabited the fever-stricken backwater country of the Malabar Coast in India.

Gugu had the hawk eyes and the hook nose of his ancestors, the Arab pirates who, generations past, scourged the East and left racial legacies on every coast from the Laccadives and the Coromandel to the distant Carolines—and back again. He had inherited much of their fierce, cruel nature and indifference to suffering, early demonstrations of which occasioned his doting mother much pardonable pride.

At the age of fifteen, Gugu one day tired of the everlasting maternal worship, artistically skewered the lady with his ten-inch pen-knife and threw her remains to the muggers in the oozy backwaters. For this precocious prowess he was rewarded with the envy of all the young men in his village—and incidentally earned the immediate displeasure of Saunders Sahib, the European Senior District Police Superintendent.

With his worldly belongings packed tightly in a srrtall chatty-pot, his loincloth and his knife, Gugu fled the neighborhood and took up residence farther south in the malodorous hamlet of Pallampaki, wot not to Saunders Sahib of the North. Here, by dint of his strength, his ready aptitude amicably to settle all personal discussions with his trusty blade, and his irreproachable piety—for he was a good Mohammedan—Gugu quickly ingratiated himself with his foster-tribe. Five months later found him installed as yard-coolie at the bungalow of Pemberton Sahib, the young, red-haired, pink-complexioned and newly-appointed representative of His Majesty's Law in Pallampaki.

Young Pemberton, three months out from home, employed his ample leisure, fanned by a punkah and refrigerated by lime-juice and soda, in the earnest composition of a treatise entitled The Mind of the Oriental. In Gugu, his new yardboy, Pemberton found endless "material." Gugu's piety, inherited from those same passionate Moslems who left their ineradicable marks all over the East, set the Moplah turning his shiny eagle-face Mecca-wards at least three times a day—quite regardless of where circumstances and his bungalow duties found him. Pemberton, much impressed, spent hours questioning the ingenuous Gugu—through a Mallialum interpreter—and learning all about it. Much he learnt; among it, why boot-leather was unclean and how the Prophet would one day lift Gugu into Paradise by the little top-knot of hair that grew, like a solitary coco-palm in a convex paddy-field, on the very summit of Gugu's shaven cranium.

It was at about this time that there stalked righteously forth from the provinces of England a spinster lady bent on the salvation of the heathen. Armed with