Page 55 - English Reader - 7

powder is also used for medicinal purposes and mustard oil in which runi berries have been boiled
is used for rheumatism.

Interspersed with the shisham saplings and runi trees, are feathery-leaved khair trees. These khair
trees in addition to providing the foothill villages with plowshares provide a cottage industry for
tens of thousands of poor people in the United Provinces. The industry, which is a winter one and is
carried on day and night for a period of four months produces a commodity known locally as kach
and to commerce as catechu. It also produces—as a by-product-the dye known as khaki used for
dyeing cloth hand fishing nets.

A friend of mine, a man by the name of Mirza, was, I believe,
the first to discover khaki dye, and the discovery was accidental.
Mirza was one day leaning over an iron pan in which khair chips
were being boiled to make kach, when a white handkerchief
he was carrying fell into the pan. Fishing the handkerchief out
with a stick Mirza sent it to the wash. When the handkerchief

was brought back Mirza found it had not lost any of its colour,
so reprimanding the washerman, he told him to take it away
and clean it. Returning with the handkerchief the washerman
said he had tried every method known to his trade of removing
stains, but he could not take the colour out of the small square
of linen. It was thus that Mirza found he had discovered a
fast dye, which is now produced in the flourishing factory he
erected at Izatnagar.

Mingled with the many shades of green—for each tree has its own individual colour—are vivid
splashes of orange, gold, lilac, pink, and red. The trees with orange-coloured flowers are dhak (Butea
giondosa) which produces a ruby-coloured gum used for dyeing silk of the finest quality. The trees
with the three-foot-long cylindrical seedpods of this tree are amaltas (Cassia fistula). The two-feet-
long cylindrical seedpods of this tree contain a sweet jelly like substance which is used throughout
Kumaon as a laxative.

The trees with the big lilac-coloured flowers
are kachanar (Bauhinia). The pink are kusum
trees and the mass of pink shading from
delicate shell to deep rose are not flowers,
but tender young leaves. The red are semul
(Salamalia malabarica) trees, the flowers of
which are loved by all birds that drink nectar
and by paroquets (parakeets) and monkeys
that eat the fleshy flowers and by deer and
pigs that eat them when they fall to the
ground.

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