In some of the little shops, bamboo
structures that thrust an underlip out into the street, there was Mhowa
liquor, and _julabis_, and _kabobs_ of goat meat. Open spaces held
tiny circuses--abnormal animals and performing goats, and a moon-bear
on a ring and strap.
The street was full of gossiping men and women and children dodging
here and there; it was an outing where the _ryot_ (farmer) had escaped
from his crotched stick of wood that was a plough, and the village
tradesmen had left his shop, and the servant his service, to feel the
joyousness of a holiday. Mendicants were in abundance prowling in
their ugliness like spirits in a nightmare; some naked, absolute,
others with but a loin-cloth, their lean shrivelled bodies smeared with
ashes--sometimes the ashes of the dead--and cow-dung, carrying on their
arms and foreheads the red and white horizontal bars of Shiva--who was
Omkar at Mandhatta. In their hands were either iron-tongs, with loose
clattering ring, or a yak's tail, or the three-ribbed horn of a
black-buck.
Some of the _yogis_, perhaps Goswamies that had come from the country
where Eklinga was the tutelary deity, had their hair braided and woven
around their foreheads, holding in its fold lotus seeds; beneath the
tiara of hair a crescent of white on their foreheads.
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