Gharry

“I shall stand, always with that mauve and white ‘cloud’ over my head, while the wet soaks into my dear, old, venerable feet and Tom swears and shouts for the mem-sahib's gharri.”

A ramshackle gharry, all dust and venetian blinds, pulled up short opposite the group, and the driver, throwing up his right foot over his knee, gave himself up to the critical examination of his toes.

He thought of Rosa McFee, the Eurasian girl he had seduced in Mandalay in 1913. The way he used to sneak down to the house in a gharry with the shutters down […]

There were ranks of gharries that appeared to do no serious business, although occasionally a group of Shans would wake up a driver, bundle into one and go for a quick spin round the bazaar, much as in the old days one took a five shilling flip around the aerodrome in a plane.

My British friends saw me in a gharry, a little horse-drawn cab used mainly for ephemeral trysts in transit, and offered me the kindly advice that a consul should never use these vehicles for any purpose.

Once, during the last campaign we were in a great strait, to get up to Lahore from Allahabad, and, on applying one afternoon at the Post Office for a horsed palkee-garee we were informed... "Well, then, when ever can we have it," we rather angrily asked—"Oh!" said the dear Baboo, "on Saturday next" (that day being Wednesday) "if a lady and gentleman, at Mr. Berrill's hotel, do not take it..." Even in these "piping times of peace," we hear of people having to wait two or three days to get a public garee, along the main road of India.