Word: lascars
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...Ghosh also knows that there's no easy harmony when peoples and cultures mix. While writing Sea of Poppies, he scoured old dictionaries and almanacs and filled the novel with dizzying dialogues incorporating bastardized Hindustani and lascar words that he claims entered common English parlance in the 19th century. Each character talks with his or her own particular style and peculiar vocabulary. ("Just eat the bish, you gudda," one sailor scolds another. "He was only foozlowing.") The book offers no glossary and Ghosh offers no apology for the difficulties some readers may have. "The first aspect of India's reality...
...China. Not until last week did the State Department belatedly drop its total prohibition against such imports and declare that returning tourists may bring back $100 worth of Chinese merchandise (see THE NATION). The dispensation delighted shopkeepers in Singapore and along Hong Kong's sleazy Upper and Lower Lascar Row ("Cat Street"). In some of the larger Peking-controlled emporiums in Hong Kong, English-speaking shopgirls stood like smiling spring flowers beneath red banners and Mao portraits, waiting to take some of the capital out of the capitalist...
Died. Frank E. ("Pappy") Noel, 61, Associated Press war photographer since 1937, who was torpedoed after escaping the fall of Singapore in 1942 (got a classic shot of a Lascar seaman in a lifeboat begging for water), covered Malaya, Burma, the Middle East, Europe and finally Korea, where he was captured, imprisoned for three years, somehow acquired a camera, and even conned his Chinese captors into letting him send pictures back to the U.S.; of a stroke; in Gainesville...
...Aboard the S.S. Caliban, bound out of Liverpool for Rangoon, things get worse. The lascar stewards curse foully-yet only Pinfold seems to hear. Something, he thinks, is wrong with the ship's ventilating gear; by some acoustic or electrical freak, he hears conversations, snatches of music, and a dog snuffling in the night. Then he somehow listens to an obscene lecture on sex by some evangelical clergyman (though none appears on the passenger list). New voices make themselves heard. They become menacing and are well-informed on Pinfold's private affairs...
Kala-azar is found in the Mediterranean basin, in India (where it got its name, meaning black disease), China and Brazil. Prewar cases in the U.S. were mostly Lascar seamen or visitors from the Orient. Then scores of U.S. servicemen caught the disease. Many cases may still be lurking in veterans' bloodstreams as "undiagnosed fever." U.S. doctors have been alerted against...