Under Oriental Skies

August 14, 1875

It has been three days now since James left for Delhi, and an eerie silence reigns throughout the house. Not quite the silence of absence, for even when James is around he is often too lost in the medical reports from Leipzig, Paris, Bologna, London, and Harvard to talk to me. But it has rather been the silence of presence, as if it is precisely by going away to Delhi that James has come closer to me.

David was around the whole day. He spent the greater part of the morning poring over some of James' books, emitting every now and then a short cry of surprise. I have often pondered in my heart the strange relationship that these two brothers share, perhaps even unknown to each other. James I have known for the last five years now. But David? Well, in a sense I have known him too for just these five years. And yet in another I oftentimes feel that I have always known him, and even been with him for centuries and centuries before I even first set my eyes on him.

Last year I was staring at a giant clock in the gardens with its polished clock hands slowly moving past the four o'clock hour when I started thinking about James and David. James is the man who resolutely lives within the circle, or even at the heart of it at its very centre. And yet, though he would never confess this to me, every now and then he feels suffocated within its boundaries. He, I suspect, harbours a most secret admiration of David, the very David he believes at other times has been an utter failure in his life, for the light-hearted manner in which David lives on the circumference of this circle. And as for David himself? David, I believe, for all his contempt, though this is always kept very carefully disguised by him, for human beings like me who live day in and day out inside this circle, yes, David too suffers at times from momentary pangs of nostalgia for this very life. Why else would he take such an avid interest in the lives of the common-place people that surround him, so much so that he has often startled me with his most intimate knowledge of the affairs of human beings whose existence I did not know he was even aware of?

And yet I know that none of the two brothers will ever admit their hidden fascination for each other's life. James would be horrified if I were even to suggest to him that, unknown to himself, he sometimes approves of David's irreverent and playful attitude towards our untiring efforts to civilise the Natives of this great Empire. And David the bitter iconoclast whose life I seem to think sometimes is an unflagging monomaniacal crusade against anyone or anything that would attempt to bring him within the circle of society, what about him? David, if I were to tell him that at times he too, for all his cynical iconoclasm, yearns for the warmth and the cosiness of a home, I fear that my statement would go so much close to the truth that he would never talk to me again.

Thus these two brothers live on, each passionately hating the other in the very moment of unknowingly loving and respecting each other.

Never have I seen two men who are so closely bound to each other by their irreconciliable differences.

And perhaps it takes the depths of a woman's heart to be able to experience, though somewhat from a distance, something of the elusiveness of such an intangible bond. A bond not so much between two brothers, James and David, but between two fragments that wage a most bitter war with each other in the icy silence of every human soul.