Under Oriental Skies

Simla : 21 July, 1875

And then it arrived without a warning, indeed, without even a trifling hint of one. We were standing at the edge of the Mall, I, James, Sir Major-General John Malcolm of the Central Provinces, Lord Endsleigh, recently returned from England, his wife, Lady Endsleigh, and her daughter Maud with her ayah Mirsabai, looking down into the abyss of the sleeping valley dotted with the miniscule brown huts of the Natives. A great clasp of black thunder rent the sleepy skies into two and the heavens, brimming over with sorrow, began to pour down upon us torrentially. James dragged me after him towards the new bungalow beside George's Hall and the rest of our company scurried for shelter after us. There I sat down in the large visitors' room warmed by a sprightly log-fire, staring through the afternoon at the gentle mist enveloping the Mall like an ominous beast covering its hapless prey in a vice-like grip.

At the other end, ripples of ribald laughter and snatches of muffled conversation.

'It is a bloody hell of a business in the Provinces. The heat is stifling and does funny things to you. The Natives are rising against the landlords just next door in Berar.'

' I am getting my three month's leave next month. We are going down to Malta for the winter.'

'I am rather worried about leaving Maud with her ayah though. Lady Ronaldshay told me a horrific story just the other day about an ayah and this newly-arrived family in Cawnpore. The Lansdownes, I think, it was.'

'Gladstone seems to be getting rather edgy in Parliament recently. Do you think the Liberals are going the right way in the Sudan?'

'Say, have you read Sir John McKenzie's article on the Doabs in last's weeks The Indian Review?'

I sat numb, partly with the cold and partly with their talk, on my green chair. Those who worry about the physical storms that inflict the body, this tattered fragment that we wear on ourselves, what indeed shall they know about the greater ones that ruffle the oceans that lurk deep within it? James indeed thinks that the heat was sinking into me this terrible summer in Faizabad. 'Getting to my head', that is the phrase that was ever on his lips during those horrible weeks. He is constantly worried that I might contract the Indian disease of fatalism. The miasma of fatalism, he never tires of telling me, floats in the very Indian air, and that the more I breathe it unwaringly the more I might acquire that peculiar Indian laxity and apathy in all matters, moral, physical and spiritual, that has reduced the effeminate Natives to a state of such abject servility.

James is desperate for a promotion in the Viceroy's office as the Viceroy's official Physician, and is trying all means at his hand. Indeed, I am to meet Her Ladyship Dufferin when she comes up to Simla next week. Oh dear, I wonder what poor Mamma must be doing in Cornwall these days. And Iris, and Edwina, and Georgina, and all the children!

I suppose I do not know why I am writing all this sitting down in the middle of this horrible racket. Perhaps, if I were a bit more happy, just a bit more, I would have never felt this impulsive need to write at odd times. I could then just have breathed the air around me, aye, even this air poisoned, according to dear James, with fatalism, and allowed myself to flow downstream until I dissolved into its arms in a passionate frenzy. But unhappiness is not the same as insanity, and the more I sink into the warm embrace of my misery the more determined I become to find some meaning to my existence here, in the great heights of the heart of the Empire.

I wonder too sometimes what the Natives think of me. What about my driver Chotta Ram when he took me and James to the edge of the mountains at Kasauli last week? Perhaps I am unwanted in this place, even despised as one whose hands are steeped in the blood and destruction that the foreign invader has left behind in his trail. And yet, at times when I stand at my window looking at the tired red sun sinking into the heart of the great Himalayas, I wonder if it really makes a difference. I find myself talking to the sky, 'Perhaps I should not be asking the question, 'Should I live in the East or the West?'. No, that is beside the point. What I really need to ask is this, 'Why was I, a woman, born at all?''

Not that I would ever dream of asking James this question. I wonder though what he would say. Perhaps stare at me with a cold horror in his eyes, perhaps distort his upper-lip into that sinister smile when he mocks himself, or perhaps shrug it off with his shoulders. He has this great fear that deep behind my composed face there is a little child that is perennially tottering on the verge of dissolution.

I saw the sunrise this morning. For a moment I felt that I was absolutely alone under the gigantic spaces of the Oriental skies, witnessing the terrible moment of the very birth of the world. For a few moments, a sharp pain ran through my hands as if someone was trying to wring them off my body, as if the very birth-pangs of the universe were searing through me.

Perhaps I fainted. When I woke up, James was peering into my eyes. Behind him, the sun had started his slow ascent into the heart of darkness.