The Phantom Rickshaw
Jack Pansay has just bought an engagement ring for the bewitching Kitty Mannering, yet to his annoyance it is the late Mrs Wessington he is thinking about.
1888
© Vyacheslav Argenberg, WIkimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.
An antique hand-drawn rickshaw standing idle in Calcutta, West Bengal. In 1888, when Kipling wrote his story, the word was very young. It derives from Japanese jinrikisha, meaning ‘man-powered vehicle’, which explains why Kipling placed an apostrophe at the start, ’rickshaw, indicating an omission similar to the early spelling ’bus for omnibus. Rickshaws began to appear in 1879, following the repeal of a centuries-old ban on wheeled vehicles in Japan, and were introduced to India at Simla (where the action in this story takes place) by the Revd J. Fordyce (1819–1902), a missionary with a special interest in the education of women. From there, they spread quickly to Calcutta and beyond. The modern form is the auto rickshaw or tuk-tuk, powered by petrol engine.
Introduction
Jack Pansay last saw Mrs Agnes Keith-Wessington here in Simla, perched in a rickshaw and weeping her eternal cuckoo cry: “Jack, darling! it’s all a mistake; do let’s be friends”; but for him their shipboard romance had long been over. Now she was dead, and April 1885 found him at Hamilton’s, buying Kitty Mannering an engagement ring, and trying to shake the feeling that someone has been calling his name.
IMMEDIATELY opposite Peliti’s shop* my eye was arrested by the sight of four jhampanies* in “magpie” livery, pulling a yellow-panelled, cheap, bazar* ’rickshaw. In a moment my mind flew back to the previous season and Mrs Wessington with a sense of irritation and disgust. Was it not enough that the woman was dead and done with, without her black and white servitors reappearing to spoil the day’s happiness? Whoever employed them now I thought I would call upon, and ask as a personal favour to change her jhampanies’ livery. I would hire the men myself, and, if necessary, buy their coats from off their backs. It is impossible to say here what a flood of undesirable memories their presence evoked.
“Kitty,” I cried, “there are poor Mrs Wessington’s jhampanies turned up again! I wonder who has them now?” Kitty had known Mrs Wessington slightly last season, and had always been interested in the sickly woman.
“What? Where?” she asked. “I can’t see them anywhere.”
Even as she spoke, her horse, swerving from a laden mule, threw himself directly in front of the advancing ’rickshaw. I had scarcely time to utter a word of warning when to my unutterable horror, horse and rider passed through men and carriage as if they had been thin air.
* Federico Peliti (1844-1914) was an Italian-born baker and confectioner, who maintained a landmark hotel and fashionable cafe in Simla, as well as a restaurant in Calcutta and a flourishing canned food business. Peliti was also an amateur photographer of some distinction. His cafe in Simla stood close by the premises of Hamilton & Co. Ltd, jewellers, where Jack bought Kitty her engagement ring. Hamilton’s was founded at Calcutta in 1808 by Robert Hamilton (1772-1848), and branches later opened at Bombay and Delhi, and at Simla in 1865. The Calcutta office closed in 1973.
* Hamilton’s stood at the eastern end of Lower Bazar, where it joins with Mall Road. Lower Bazar is to this day an ‘extremely chaotic yet full of life’ market (so the Times of India tells us) where one can buy anything from vegetables to mobile phones. Kipling tells us something about Mrs Keith-Wessington by having her buy her modest but faintly garish rickshaw here in the 1880s. There is a more exclusive Upper Bazar.
* A jhampani is an Indian rickshaw-bearer. According to a letter published in the Times on August 17th, 1879, “The gondola of Simla is the “jampan” or “jampot’, as it is sometimes called, on the same linguistic principle as that which converts asparagus into sparrow-grass. Every lady on the hills keeps her jampan and jampanees just as in the plains she keeps her carriage and footmen.” A jampan is a type of sedan chair, not wheeled but borne on poles. The term jampanees or jhampanies was then applied to the men who pulled the wheeled ’rickshaws.
