Under Oriental Skies

August 10, 1875

'Unsex me!', how loudly and forcefully do these words echo and re-echo in my ears now as I write these words. We have just returned from a staging of Macbeth at King George's Hall behind the Mall, and more than the bright lights of Simla, the gaudy dresses from Saville Row and the reeking perfumes from Calcutta, it is these words that keep on reverberating within me.

Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts,

Unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty!

Make thick my blood

Come to my woman's breasts,

And take my milk for gall,

You murdering ministers!

Lady Macbeth was played by Victoria, the Hardinge's youngest daughter and she did rise to the occasion, staring into the cold darknesses in front of her, rooted to the spot as she beckoned to the sinister spirits that lurk in the depths of every man to come and release her from her much-maligned sex, and put steel into her resolve to vanquish King Duncan and become Queen of Scotland. With a voice resonating with fierceness, she resolutely pressed onwards with her brave naked will, a will as cold as the blade of her flashing dagger, to condemn the vacillating Macbeth, her weakling of a husband, for his unmanly cowardice.

Yes, I do wish I could become Lady Macbeth some day. Even if just for once. But who would then be my Macbeth? James? No. He would rather plunge a dagger into a patient's ulcer than one into... Into... I do not know. And who would be King Duncan? David? The white face in the window? The Viceroy himself? Ah no, I must forthwith stop these terrible thoughts. The evil witches are all around me. Hark! I can hear them whispering these poisoned words to me now, dragging me away gently into their demoniac realms.

David was around for a little while after we came back, talking to the mali about his planned expedition to the lower Himalayas next Spring. He came in after we had finished coffee and sat down on his favourite chair beside the dark window as I was beginning to read The Romance of the Shangri La. He seemed rather amused for some reason and kept on smiling at the windows, but when I asked him what was amusing him so much he did not seem to have even heard my question. I returned to my book. Yes, I do think David can be a trifle impolite at times.

James came in with another one of his thick volumes of The Harvard Medical Review. He is going down to Delhi tomorrow for a meeting with Lord Halliday, the Viceroy's personal secretary. I was absorbed in my book when Ramu rushed in and announced that one of the kitchen-maids had been possessed by a witch. James threw a long sneering glance at Ramu but the news electrified David who bolted out of the room along with Ramu. The witches of Macbeth were all around me, and I made a move to follow David when James cast a disapproving look in my direction. I struggled to go back to my Shangri La but I could not. There were reports recently in the local newspapers that there had been an increase in the number of the Natives who had become possessed by evil spirits, and I so terribly wanted to see what happens to these pour souls when the devillish forces that lie sleeping within all of us suddenly break forth onto the surface.

After about fifteen minutes, David came back. For a man so gullible as him, so ready to believe any bizarre story that the gleeful Natives would spin around him, he was surprisingly scientific today : 'Oh, just another case of hysteria. The women around these parts are particularly prone to this.'

He paused for a moment. Then he smiled again at himself and added : 'But then I guess we men must be susceptible to hysteria too. How otherwise would we recognise it in the women around us?'

James spoke for the first time in the evening. With a voice heavy with scorn, he asked : 'And I take it that is your scientific theory? That the doctor must be infected with the same disease that he discovers in his patient?'

'Well, I suppose so. Say, you are a Christian aren't you?'

'I will be damned if I am not.'

A cry of horror rose to my mouth at his words, and I managed just in time to clasp my hands over my lips.

'Ah, pretty good language, James. Wonder what the Reverend Johnston will have to say about this damnation. Now if you are a Christian, surely you believe in the dogma of Original Sin? Surely you know that all human beings are infected with a most debilitating disease that we have inherited from our common parents, Adam and Eve? So there, that is your proof.'

James stroked his beard for a few moments, gave me another cold withering look (I do not know why he never does this to David though), and returned to his medicine. David slumped into his chair once again, and I went back to my Shangri La.

As the clock began to strike eleven, David rose to go.

He came up to me and said : 'By the way, or shall I say, on my way out, I did hear your question earlier about why I was smiling. I was smiling because I wanted to see if you would notice that I was. And when you did, I started smiling all the more.'

The massive brown doors shut softly after him.

A cold wind swept in. The first intimation of the Simla winter.