NEITHER IN AUSTRALASIA nor in India did the Clemenses manage without a servant. A maid accompanied them through Australia and New Zealand. When the family arrived at a station, she would take charge of the trunks and bags and ensure their safe arrival at the hotel. She would help with the constant packing and unpacking. Before a performance, she would brush and lay out Clemens’s evening clothes, and place the buttons and studs in his clean shirt. The Clemenses did not take her to India because of the expense.
Even if you were not an international celebrity on tour, it was essential to hire a servant in India. Clemens wrote that “you hire him as soon as you touch Indian soil; for no matter what your sex is, you cannot do without him. He is messenger, valet, chambermaid, table-waiter, lady’s maid, courier — he is everything.” All three Clemenses commented on the custom of being waited on, at a hotel dining room, by one’s own servants. British residents in India were accustomed to seeing at a dinner party not only their own household waiters but also their own crockery. Their host’s steward would have organized both in advance.
Your servant, Clemens asserted, should be hired with care “because as long as he is in your employ he will be about as near to you as your clothes.” The Clemens party of four traveled throughout India with two servants, who slept on the floor outside the party’s rooms unless they were on a train, when the servants would find space in the third-class carriages.
According to Clemens’s account in Following the Equator, the first servant they engaged proved to be slow, forgetful, inefficient, unskilled as a waiter, and incomprehensible and uncomprehending in English, so they dismissed him after a week’s trial. His successor was fast, efficient, and bright. “All my heart, all my affection, all my admiration, went out spontaneously to this frisky little forked black thing, this compact and compressed incarnation of energy and force and promptness and celerity and confidence, this smart, smily, engaging, shiny-eyed little devil, feruled on his upper end by a gleaming fire-coal of a fez with a red-hot tassel dangling from it.” Clemens considered the servant’s name, Mousa, as “out of character; it was too soft, too quiet, too conservative; it didn’t fit his splendid style.” Clemens referred to him in his journal as Mousa or Mouza, although if we are to believe his account in Following the Equator, Clemens asked and received permission to call him “Satan.” “He was always busy,” Clemens reported in Following the Equator, “kept the rooms tidied up, the boots polished, the clothes brushed, the wash-basin full of clean water, my dress-clothes laid out and ready for the lecture-hall an hour ahead of time; and he dressed me from head to heel in spite of my determination to do it myself, according to my life-long custom.”
He served them at table with great style, “in a swell hotel or in a private house — snow-white muslin from his chin to his bare feet, a crimson sash embroidered with gold thread around his waist, and on his head a great sea-green turban like to the turban of the Grand Turk.”
At the railway terminal he would command the train of coolies who carried the Clemenses’ luggage, and, once arrived at the sleeping car, would quickly arrange their belongings, make their beds, “then put his head out at a window and have a restful good time abusing his gang of coolies and disputing their bill until we arrived and made him pay them and stop his noise.”
Clemens claimed that he loved Satan for his noise, “but the family detested him for it… As a rule, when we got within six hundred yards of one of those big railway-stations, a mighty racket of screaming and shrieking and shouting and storming would break upon us, and I would be happy to myself, and the family would say, with shame: ‘There — that’s Satan. Why do you keep him?’ “
Finally, following a series of misadventures — the most serious of which was Satan’s turning up drunk while they were guests in a private home — they dismissed him. “I loved him; I couldn’t help it… To this day I regret his loss, and wish I had him back.” His successor, who spoke with a low voice and moved about noiselessly, was “competent and satisfactory. But where he was, it seemed always Sunday. It was not so in Satan’s time.”
Early in Satan’s tenure, he announced a visitor to Clemens: “God want to see you.” Although Clemens may have invented the announcement, he did indeed receive a personage viewed by millions as a god. This was His Highness, Aga Khan III, spiritual leader of the Ismaili Muslims, a descendant of the Prophet, and a grandson of the Shah of Persia.
Clemens’s visitor had received a religious education by Muslim clerics and a modern secular education by English tutors, who introduced him to English literature, in which he read widely and from which he could recite whole passages by heart. Also well read in the classical Persian poets, he knew French, German, Urdu, and Hindustani in addition to English and modern Persian. He became Imam when he was eight years old. By ten he was arbitrating religious disputes. By sixteen he had taken over the Imamate’s practical administration. He was only eighteen when he called on Clemens, but such was his gravitas that Clemens remembered him as “not forty, perhaps not above thirty-five years old.”
The Aga Khan became a pro-British mediating force between Muslims and Hindus, president of the All-India Muslim League, an important player in the London Round Table Conferences on Indian constitutional reform in the early 1930s, and president of the League of Nations. Today those of the general public old enough to remember him recall a stout, stupendously rich owner and breeder of racehorses (he won the Derby five times) and a religious leader whose followers weighed him in public, once on his golden jubilee (1936), when they gave him his weight in gold, and once on his diamond jubilee (1946), when they gave him his weight in diamonds. (He presented both gifts to charitable and public works.)
Clemens described him as “a most courteous and charming gentleman,” who “wears his immense honors with tranquil grace, and with a dignity proper to his awful calling.” His Highness, Clemens reported, mentioned the philosophy of Huck Finn and then “went luminously on with the construction of a compact and nicely discriminated literary verdict.” He remained, Clemens recalled, a half hour.
Writing more than half a century later, the Aga Khan remembered spending a whole afternoon with Clemens and then dining with him at Watson’s Hotel. “He had a pleasant, utterly unassuming charm,” wrote the Aga Khan, “and a friendliness of manner which captivated the serious-minded lad that I was … He seemed to me dear, gentle and saintly, sad and immensely modest for so great and famous a genius. He reminded me of one of those delicate white flowers, so sensitive that when you touch them they recoil and fold their clear, waxen petals, as if too shy and retiring to tolerate the slightest probe.”
Among the fictions in Following the Equator is probably the question Clemens placed in his servant’s mouth at the conclusion of the Aga Khan’s visit: “Satan see God out?” To this question, “reverently” posed, Clemens allegedly answered “yes,” and then “these mis-mated Beings passed from view — Satan in the lead and The Other following after.”
The Clemenses paid Satan forty rupees a month, then about twelve dollars, today about $220. Because the employment was transient, he received far more than he would have earned from British residents, who paid only twenty rupees for servants such as butlers, cooks, and valets, and as little as four to seven rupees for menials such as sweepers and garden hands. On these stipends, servants were expected to keep themselves and their families. The Clemenses, who did not need to house or feed their Indian servants, paid in addition to salaries only the servants’ transportation.
Clemens, appalled by the population’s low per capita income, wrote that a farmhand supported his family on little more than one dollar a month, about eighteen dollars in today’s terms. The farm family “live in a mud hut, hand-made, and, doubtless, rent-free,” he said, “and they wear no clothes; at least nothing more than a rag. And not much of a rag at that, in the case of the males.” Consider what these facts mean, Clemens asked his readers. India’s “stupendous population consists of farm-laborers… India is one vast farm — one almost interminable stretch of fields with mud fences between. Think of the above facts; and consider what an incredible aggregate of poverty they place before you.”
Although India during the past one hundred years has increased its average life expectancy, reduced its fertility rate, and improved its ability to feed itself, it is still a country of extreme poverty One hundred dollars per month is a middle-class salary. Almost one-third of the population are classified as “food-insecure,” only one failed monsoon away from starvation, and a great number are hungry, always hungry, hungry every day. People live on the streets, die from starvation on the streets, send their children — sometimes intentionally maimed — to beg on the streets.
Clemens did not need to leave Bombay to sample India’s poverty On Monday, January 27, he drove late at night to an opulent Hindu betrothal ceremony He had already performed an At Home that evening, then spoken at the Bombay Club, whose members had conferred an honorary membership upon him and entertained him at supper, and finally had picked up Mrs. Clemens and Clara from a ball at the Royal Bombay Yacht Club, now the Atomic Energy Agency. After the Clemenses “had pierced deep into the native quarter and were threading its narrow dim lanes,” the driver had to take care not to run over the hundreds of sleeping forms, wrapped in blankets and stretched out upon the ground. Occasionally, swarms of rats scurried across the horses’ path. At both sides of the lane, petty merchants and their families slept motionless on the counters of their open booths or sheds, faintly lit by flickering oil lamps. The scene reminded Clemens of corpses, sepulchers, and death-lamps, “a prophetic dream, as it were,” of the rat-borne plague that would soon devastate Bombay.
After driving along dim, narrow lanes strewn with sleeping forms, the Clemenses, according to Following the Equator, finally rounded a corner to find the home of a rich Hindu cotton merchant who had invited them to a marriage celebration. The house was “wrapped in a perfect conflagration of illuminations — mainly gas-work designs, gotten up specially for the occasion. Within was abundance of brilliancy — flames, costumes, colors, decorations, mirrors — it was another Aladdin show.”
Clara remembered their traveling first to the bridegroom’s house, where they were garlanded with flowers before walking in procession to the party for the bride. According to Clara, the bride was twelve years old and the groom, already a widower, was twenty. The bride’s grandmother was only thirty-eight. Clemens was moved, reported his daughter, by the helplessness of the tiny bride.
Before the Clemenses left the festivities, they were approached by “a turbaned giant,” who invited Clemens, on behalf of the Gaekwar of Baroda, to perform for His Highness. The Gaekwar, wrote Clemens in his journal, “is the stunningest of the Indian Princes except the Nizam.”
The Arabian Nights splendor that captivated Clemens can still be glimpsed in Bombay. Many of the superb structures survive, including the prodigiously ornate Victoria Terminus, whose entrance is still guarded by a lion and a tiger. Women’s garments still create “perfect flower-beds of brilliant color”; great crowds still form a “shining and shifting spectacle”; and burlap-shrouded figures still stretch out upon the sidewalks of the night.