[Illustration: A Bhandari Mystery.]

In the heart of the great palm-groves to the north-west of Dadar lies an
"oart" known as Borkar's Wadi, shaded by tall well-tended trees whose
densely-foliaged summits ward off the noon-day sun and form a glistening
screen at nights, what time the moon rises full-faced above the eastern
hills. Not very long ago, at a time when cholera had appeared in the city
and was taking a daily toll of life, this oart was the scene of a bi-weekly
ceremony organized by the Bhandaris of Dadar and Mahim and designed to
propitiate the wrath of the cholera-goddess, who had slain several members
of that ancient and worthy community. For the Bhandaris, be it noted, know
little of western theories of disease and sanitation; and such precautions
as the boiling of water, even were there time to boil it, and abstention
from fruit seem to them utterly beside the mark and valueless, so long as
the goddess of cholera, Jarimari, and the thirty-eight Cholera Mothers are
wroth with them. Thus at the time we speak of, when many deaths among their
kith and kin had afforded full proof that the goddess was enraged, they met
in solemn conclave and decided to perform every Sunday and Tuesday night
for a month such a ceremony as would delight the heart of that powerful
deity and stave off further mortality. The limitation of the period
of propitiation to one month was based not so much upon religious
grounds as upon the fact that a Municipality, with purely Western
ideas of sanitation and of combating epidemics, refused to allow
the maintenance of the shed, which was to be the temporary home of
Jarimari, for more than thirty days. Yet it matters but little, this
time-limit: for a month is quite long enough for the complete assuagement
of the anger of one who, though proverbially capricious, is by no means
unkindly.