"From your Da, I'd go so far as to guess. Thon ol' bugger's got a mouth on him like the crack o' a sailor's arse."

"Your fanny" says Nancy. "He's sayin' no C-word and that's all's to it."

"Cunt" coos wee Abraham, afore falling asleep.

Gujarat, 1869

The grand diwan of Porbandar, Karamchand Ghandi, sweeps o'er the crystalline ballroom with a crowd of near three-dozen doting lads and lassies bounding about him for to gaze upon the child held there in his silk-adorned arms.

"By God" says Ghandi, "Look at this, young Mohandas, the whole o' India's hoppin' like a bollock in stew for to look upon your tiny wrinkled mug."

Throwing himself at the feet of the diwan, a young monk beats his hands off of the floor and wails with incredible ecstasy.

"Oh, what a blessing is this child, as beautiful and saintly a lad as e'er the land's done puked o'er the dusts!"

"He's that if he's anything" says a young heiress swanning about the periphery of the crowd. "And tell me this, Karamchand, is he yet fit for to recognise himself in the reflection 'pon the still of the river?"

"Oh" says Karamchand, "He'll recognise himself gazing back from even the most turbulent, most disarrayed of surfaces."

"And is he sittin' upright of his own will?"

"He is, and he's as sturdy and as straight as the staff o' Fáelán held aloft by God's own paws."

"And what of the talkin'?" says a politician from the West of the country. "Boys-o it gives me a right pinch to hear a wain babblin' and bletherin' on like they do."

"Sad to say" says Karamchand, "Young Mohandas has yet to grace us with a sensible word. A garrumph o' nonsense, a great spiel o' shite, such is as much as you'll get from thon tongue."

As if by way of demonstration, the youngster babbles thus; "Merde skide cazzate."

Those gathered laugh heartily at this recital of the most curious gibberish.

"Oh he's a terrible man for the prattlin'."

"Follar oootthah".

"Listen to him there now! Mother of God, will he ever say a thing worth an ear, I wonder?"

Clonakilty, 1890

Michael and Marianne Collins wander through the marketplace with the latter pushing Michael Junior afore her in a navy blue pram. Michael Senior, a man well into his dotage (although not so much that he hadn't the sense about him to wed a lass forty years younger), he splutters into a silk hanky and snorts back great clods o' throat-muck as the three o' them pass the stalls and the racks, the braying vendors and the bustling crowds.