The Autobiography Of The Transparent Ironist : Chapter 1

The following is Chapter 1 of the autobiography of The Transparent Ironist to be published in a serialised form in this blog as My Experiments With Irony. To circumvent a possible misunderstanding over what he is trying to do here, the Ironist wishes to make it clear to his readers at the outset how he is going to deploy the term 'autobiography'. He understands this term to mean primarily not a sequential recounting of historical data (this is something only journalists do) but an imaginative narrative of possible events, a narrative which seeks to highlight some of the ironies of our day-to-day existence in the present. In this chapter, for example, he shall freely mix 'fact' with 'fantasy', the 'fact' of the uneasy (though politically-incorrect) fascination that he has for British India with the 'fantasy' of his being born in London.

I was born in London in the 1960s just as the immigrants were beginning to pour into Britain from the different ends of the erstwhile Empire. I went to school in an area with a significant proportion of Indians and Pakistanis, and there I established a life-long friendship with an Indian friend called Homi Bhaskar. Through this association, I had already developed an interest in the history of the Indian subcontinent when I was in high school, and later when it was time for me to go to University I decided to take up South Asian studies at Cambridge. After Cambridge, I joined an international firm dealing in telecommunications in London, though I still tried my best, partly with the help of Homi, to keep up with the latest literature on Indian affairs.

It was in the middle of the sultry summer of 1998 that I had a terrible dream that would shake me to the bottomest depths of my being. I dreamt that I was in the heartlands of colonial India as a young colonel in His Majesty's Army in the dusty plains of the Oudh. I had been ordered by my superior Sir Havelock Nicholson to take a company of my men and march into the neighbouring village from where we had received some reports of the natives rebelling against the local officers. On the way to the village, however, I heard a series of earth-shattering screams pouring out into the sky from a thick jungle, and I directed three of my junior officers to investigate the matter. They promptly moved into the jungle and returned to tell me that it was a deranged native woman who was shrieking in some strange fit of agony. I went in along with them, and saw a woman with dishevelled hair clawing the air around her with her fingers while two men were trying to beat with her a stick. I jumped down from my horse and was about to move towards her when my junior officer Archdale Ferguson warned me that she was possessed and that I should not interfere with the men who were trying to cure her. I hesitated for a few moments and stood motionless watching her, but soon I could not endure her tormented screeches anymore. I slowly walked towards her, and she suddenly charged at me like a wild beast and nearly chopped off the middle finger on my right hand with her savage and brilliantly-white teeth.

I woke up in a cold sweat, and one glance at the morning sun told me that I was already very late for work. I rushed downstairs, forced myself into the Tube, and reached my office just as my secretary was laying out some yellow papers on my green desk.

'You have to sign these papers before the meeting at 11.'

'What papers?'

'Surely you haven't forgotten? We are out-sourcing half of our business to India next month, and those are the papers you need to sign.'

She gave me a shining silver pen, and I struggled with it to put my signatures below the dotted lines.

'Is something wrong with your middle finger? Your signature is so shaky today.'

'My middle finger? No, nothing, nothing. I mean nothing is wrong with it.'

Later that evening when I returned home, I took out a white sheet of paper and tried my signature on it. My secretary was right : there was indeed something wrong with my middle finger that was preventing me from signing my name the way I was used to doing. Indeed, I have never been able to sign it properly since that midsummer night's dream in 1998. Once I even thought of going to my doctor about it. But what would I tell my doctor : that a native woman from colonial India had bitten my middle finger and I could not sign my name properly as a consequence?