Sylhet

“ The other six thanas comprising a population of over 5,30,000 people stretch in a continuous line along part of the southern border of Sylhet District. They are divided between two sub-divisions, of which, one, South Sylhet, comprising a population of over 5,15,000 people, has in fact a non-Muslim majority of some 40,000; while the other, Karimganj, with a population of over 5,68,000 people, has a Muslim majority that is a little larger. ”

“ In August 1949, some villages under Bianibazar and Barlekha P.S. of Sylhet district were raided by large band of Muslim villagers in company with the police and Ansars. Houses were looted, broken and burnt. Hindu villagers were murdered and assaulted in large number. Women were assaulted and raped even by policemen. ”

“ We did not take long to get over the four miles to Sylhet, where I bade farewell to the planter and Mr. A⸺, who returned with him to the garden.
I had the pleasure of lying down on a bed with no bedding, and waiting until my coolies and baggage should arrive, with part of my muddy habit rolled up to serve for a pillow; and very well I slept for three good hours, when at two o’clock in the morning my goods and chattels commenced dropping in, and I was able to go to bed in real, sober earnest. ”

“ A pretty place, more beautiful than many of the show-places of the world; beautiful in its habitable parts, but more beautiful in those tracts covered with forest jungle where the foot of man seldom treads, and the stillness of which is only broken by the weird cry of the hooluck [1] or the scream of a night-bird hunting its prey.
We had not been in India many months when my husband was offered the post of political agent at Manipur. We were at the time in a very junior position in Sylhet, a place which had not fascinated either of us in our short stay there ”

“ A⸺ had fallen [113] into a horribly wet, slushy rice-field, and needed my help to extricate him. Having given him the necessary aid, and hauled him out, we decided that any more searching for the road up to the house would be a futile waste of energy, and were preparing to make the best of our way into Sylhet, when a coolie woman came by, and we rushed at her and asked if she could show us the way to the Sahib’s bungalow. She seemed very much alarmed at our sudden appearance, as we were then only dimly visible by the light of the rising moon. ”

“ According to official version in Sylhet town itself there were 50 to 60 cases of stabbing of which six proved fatal. In this town some ten or twelve houses are reported to have been looted and burnt. Almost simultaneously the troubles started in the rural areas within P.S. Sadar, Biswanath, Chatak, Fenchuganj, Balaganj and Gopalganj. In all these places a large number of Hindu villages were attacked and have been completely destroyed and some Hindu girls were abducted and raped. Reports of mass conversion of Hindus of several villages have also been received. ”

“ I left Shillong early in November, 1889, travelling part of the way towards Manipur quite alone, and had a terrible experience too. I had arranged to journey a distance of thirty-eight miles in one day. I sent one of my horses on the day before, and started in a ‘Khasia Thoppa’ down the last hill of the range upon which Shillong is situated, which brings you down into the plain of Sylhet. A Thoppa is a very curious mode of locomotion. ”

“ To Sylvia the sudden change into brightness and bustle occasioned by the entrance of her father and the specksioneer was like that which you may effect any winter's night, when you come into a room where a great lump of coal lies hot and slumbering on the fire; just break it up with a judicious blow from the poker, and the room, late so dark, and dusk, and lone, is full of life, and light, and warmth. ”

“ Sylvia, standing opposite, not looking at Hester, but gazing at the ribbons in the shop window, as if hardly conscious that any one awaited the expression of her wishes, was a great contrast; ready to smile or to pout, or to show her feelings in any way, with a character as undeveloped as a child's, affectionate, wilful, naughty, tiresome, charming, anything, in fact, at present that the chances of an hour called out. ”

“ But Sylvia was too highly strung for banter. If she had not been one of those who went to mock, but remained to pray, she had gone to church with the thought of the cloak-that-was-to-be uppermost in her mind, and she had come down the long church stair with life and death suddenly become real to her mind, the enduring sea and hills forming a contrasting background to the vanishing away of man. ”

“ Her mother gave her another of the severe looks that, quiet woman as she was, she could occasionally bestow upon the refractory, and Sylvia took her book and glanced down the column Philip pointed out to her; but, as she justly considered, one man might point out the task, but twenty could not make her learn it, if she did not choose; and she sat herself down on the edge of the dresser, and idly gazed into the fire. ”

“ Now the very change in Sylvia's whole manner and ways, which grieved and vexed Philip, made his wife the more attractive to Hester. Brought up among Quakers, although not one herself, she admired and respected the staidness and outward peacefulness common amongst the young women of that sect. Sylvia, whom she had expected to find volatile, talkative, vain, and wilful, was quiet and still, as if she had been born a Friend: she seemed to have no will of her own; she served her mother and child for love; she obeyed her husband in all things, and never appeared to pine after gaiety or pleasure. ”

“ So Sylvia contrived to get her baby as much as possible to herself, in spite of the nursemaid; and, above all, she would carry it out, softly cradled in her arms, warm pillowed on her breast, and bear it to the freedom and solitude of the sea-shore on the west side of the town where the cliffs were not so high, and there was a good space of sand and shingle at all low tides. ”

“ Hansen says not this, but the neighboring Reisehoog, was the residence of Finn; but in a matter of this kind even the wisest may err, and we prefer to believe that we have stood where Ekke told his love-woes to the king, and have seen the heath where the queen sang the weird baby-song which Dorret Bundis heard as she lay crouching above.
Sylt is very nearly the paradise of an archæologist. Lift your eyes where you will on all that fragrant plain, remains of long-vanished races meet them in those most permanent of all historical monuments, mounds and barrows. Each has its tale. ”

“ The morning succeeding the day on which Sylvia had engaged herself to Kinraid, the Fosters seemed unusually anxious to obtain their letters. Several times Jeremiah came out of the parlour in which his brother John was sitting in expectant silence, and, passing through the shop, looked up and down the market-place in search of the old lame woman, who was charitably employed to deliver letters, and who must have been lamer than ever this morning, to judge from the lateness of her coming. ”

“ It was generally a woman with a child in her arms who so employed herself. As the strain upon the cable became greater, and the ground on which they strove more uneven, every hand was needed to hold and push, and all those women who were unencumbered held by the dear rope on which so many lives were depending. On they came, a long line of human beings, black against the ruddy sunset sky. As they came near Sylvia, a woman cried out,—
'Dunnot stand idle, lass, but houd on wi' us; there's many a bonny life at stake, and many a mother's heart a-hangin' on this bit o' hemp. ”

“ Sylvia pondered it more deeply still; the causes for her disbelief, or, at any rate, for her wonder, were unknown to Hester! Many a time she sank to sleep with the picture of the event narrated by Mrs. Kinraid as present to her mind as her imagination or experience could make it: first one figure prominent, then another. Many a morning she wakened up, her heart beating wildly, why, she knew not, till she shuddered at the remembrance of the scenes that had passed in her dreams: scenes that might be acted in reality that very day; for Philip might come back, and then? ”

“ Bell went on, stroking her head,
'The Lord is like a tender nurse as weans a child to look on and to like what it lothed once. He has sent me dreams as has prepared me for this, if so be it comes to pass.
'Philip is hopeful,' said Sylvia, raising her head and looking through her tears at her mother.
'Ay, he is. And I cannot tell, but I think it's not for nought as the Lord has ta'en away all fear o' death out o' my heart. I think He means as Daniel and me is to go hand-in-hand through the valley--like as we walked up to our wedding in Crosthwaite Church. ”

“ Meantime while she thus wrestled with the angel of her best self, Sylvia accepted the situation with characteristic lightness. Her life in this vast world and wide had been of short duration, but during its brief span she had learned a surprising amount about the earth and the human beings that peopled it.
She knew more already about men than did Marcia—much more. Long ago they had ceased to be gods to her. ”

“ And then,' said Sylvia, as if she was put out by the suggestion, 'she bid me ask cousin Philip for his opinion. I hate a man as has getten an opinion on such-like things.'
'Well! we shall niver get to Monkshaven this day, either for to sell our eggs and stuff, or to buy thy cloak, if we're sittin' here much longer. T' sun's for slanting low, so come along, lass, and let's be going.'
'But if I put on my stockings and shoon here, and jump back into yon wet gravel, I 'se not be fit to be seen,' said Sylvia, in a pathetic tone of bewilderment, that was funnily childlike. ”

“ This acquiescence, which was perfectly honest on Jeremiah's part, almost took Sylvia by surprise. Why might she not hate one who had been both cruel and base in his treatment of her? And yet she recoiled from the application of such hard terms by another to Philip, by a cool-judging and indifferent person, as she esteemed Jeremiah to be. ”

“ It was curious, said Sylvia, but nobody was free from this kind of vanity. There was dear old Uncle Basil, a more godly bishop never lived, and yet he had a foible for carving! In his opinion the one certain test of a gentleman was the ease with which he found the joints of all kinds of meat, and he was in arms against the modern tendency to turn such accomplishments over to butlers. He would hold forth on the subject, illustrating his theories with an elegant knife, and Sylvia remembered how her father and the Chilton boys had wired up the joints of a duck for the bishop to work on. ”

“ Sylvia had not known how to live, but now she proved that she did know how to die. So beautifully were the two made one, the winning girl, the deep-hearted woman, that she seemed the same beloved Sylvia, yet Sylvia strengthened, purified, and perfected by the hard past, the solemn present. Those about her felt and owned the unconscious power, which we call the influence of character, and which is the noblest that gives sovereignty to man or woman. ”

“ While he spoke this, he had again taken my hand, and pressed it with rapture to his bosom, which, beating with violence, I own caused no small emotion in mine. I gently withdrew my hand, and said, with as composed a voice as I could command, "Yes, my Sylph, I do most readily resign myself to your protection, and shall never feel a wish to put any restriction on it, while I am enabled to judge of you from your own criterion; while virtue presides over your lessons; while your instructions are calculated to make me a good and respectable character, I can form no wish to depart from them." ”

“ Sylvia’s was the true aristocratic attitude towards the rest of the world. It could never have occurred to her to imagine that anywhere upon the whole earth there were people superior to the Castlemans of Castleman County. If you had been ignorant enough to suggest such an idea, you would have seen her eyes flash and her nostrils quiver; you would have been enveloped in a net of bewilderment and transfixed with a trident of mockery and scorn. That was what she had done in her husband-hunt. ”

“ But Sylvia understood her better than Daniel did as it appeared.
'Hou'd thy tongue, mother. She niver spoke a pretext at all.'
He did not rightly know what a 'pretext' was: Bell was a touch better educated than her husband, but he did not acknowledge this, and made a particular point of differing from her whenever she used a word beyond his comprehension.
'She's a good lass at times; and if she liked to wear a yellow-orange cloak she should have it. Here's Philip here, as stands up for laws and press-gangs, I'll set him to find us a law again pleasing our lass; and she our only one. ”

“ Before it was light on Tuesday morning, Bell was astir.
'It's very early, mother,' said weary, sleepy Sylvia, dreading returning consciousness.
'Ay, lass!' said Bell, in a brisk, cheerful tone; 'but he'll, maybe, be home to-night, and I'se bound to have all things ready for him.'
'Anyhow,' said Sylvia, sitting up in bed, 'he couldn't come home to-night.'
'Tut, lass! thou doesn't know how quick a man comes home to wife and child. ”

“ Sylvia, with all her apparent frankness, kept her deep sorrows to herself. She never mentioned her father's name, though he was continually present to her mind. Nor did she speak of Kinraid to human being, though, for his sake, her voice softened when, by chance, she spoke to a passing sailor; and for his sake her eyes lingered on such men longer than on others, trying to discover in them something of the old familiar gait ”

“ Sylvia uttered the exclamation as she stepped out upon the great ledge of rock from which she could see the sun's gold rim just dipping behind the crest of the topmost purple peak leaving a sea of tulip colors in its wake.
For a moment neither spoke again. A mood of complete serenity was upon them that forbade speech, a sense of nearness, each to the other, and to some high other Presence which might have been God or Nature or Love or a mystic commingling of all three. Were the three, indeed, a new Trinity, perfect and indivisible? ”