August 25, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

I spent the morning in the garden with all the fallen leaves strewn around me. There was a deep silence everywhere, one so noisy that it reverberated angrily in the hollow of my ears. I opened a volume of Lord Tennyson's poems, and as the gentle breeze rustled through the thin pages my thoughts went back to my dear grandfather. As a young student, he had lived next door to Lord Tennyson in the Great Court of Trinity College, Cambridge, and it was he who had instilled in me a most passionate love of Tennyson's poetry.

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.

Ah, Lord Tennyson, when I read these words today after so many years, I felt as if there was a vast ocean of grief slumbering within my bosom waiting to burst out from its bounds. You should have been here with me in our Simla garden overlooking the sleeping valley with its primeval woods shedding their summer leaves. How much you would have loved it here! How much, how much indeed!

Me only cruel immortality
Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

I experienced a sudden surge of bitterness against James. How would he ever feel, lost in the dustiness of his medical books, the haunting beauty that Tennyson evokes through these immortal words! No, not just James. I felt that any man in this world who has not drunk deep from the wells of Tennyson's charm must be banished to some farthest corner of the planet and not allowed to return until he has thoroughly soaked himself in his poetry.

Oh, how dearly I wished I was in England this morning! To be in England in Autumn, to breathe the heavy air of the approaching winter, to see the white clouds dot the brilliant sky exclaiming with the radiant joy of the undying sun, to lie down in the brown meadows amidst the blue lilies and the yellow daffodils, to play with the little children near the babbling brooks, to sing to my heart's content the ancient Song of the Rose, and perhaps, just perhaps, to catch a glimpse of Keat's love-lorn Knight roaming through the desolate countryside under a heart-broken sky in an agonised search for La Belle Dame Sans Merci ...

A sudden sorrow overwhelmed me and I burst out in a flood of tears as I saw the faces of dear Mamma, Edwina, Georgina, Pauline, Iris, Christine, ... and Ralph ... flit in and out before my eyes. Ah, Ralph, Ralph, I must stop writing about you on these pages, I simply must!

In the afternoon, I strolled down a few houses down our lane to the monthly meeting of the Simla Englishwomen's Association at Mrs. Montagu's where I found the atmosphere bubbling over with good cheer in every corner of the vast living room. We were to welcome the newly arrived Mrs. Irwin and her three daughters, Irene, Ivy, and Imogen who were still struggling with the ways and the customs of our little British enclaves in the vast expanses of the unexplored hinterlands of India.

A flurry of speeches followed as I seated myself near one of the windows overlooking the valley now covered in thick mist after one of the sudden showers for which Simla is so famous. Mrs. Linlithglow proposed that the embroidery classes for the young English ladies be started once again in November, Mrs. Buchanan cautioned us with some disturbing reports from Madras about the Native ayahs that Englishwomen in this country are fain to employ to look after their little ones, Mrs. McKenzie urged us to contribute more generously to the Viceroy's Fund for the welfare of native women, and Mrs. Lawrence made an appeal that we send more letters to the Simla Gazette requesting the Government to take up more seriously the cause of the education of native women in Behar and Bengal.

'Mrs. Elphinstone, would you like to speak a few words? Perhaps to the newly arrived Mrs. Irwin and these three lovely young ladies?'

I was shaken out of my reverie by these crisp words which seemed to have come floating to my ears from a distance of several thousands of miles away. I hesitatingly rose to my feet but was mercifully spared the effort of having to make a speech when Mrs. Montagu announced from the other end of the room that it was time for tea.

I went back home to find David so deeply immersed in one of his books of Bengali grammar that he did not notice my entrance. I picked up Hernando Pierez's Journeys through the Mystical Lands of the Incas and started reading it somewhere from the middle.

David came up to me after a while with a strange look on his face that seemed to express both an immense emptiness and a profound abundance.

'I say, I must thank Mr. Bose for that speech of his that day. I daresay I now understand the religion of the Hindoos much better. It is not all about the fakirs and that rope trick of theirs, you know? I have been reading this Bengali gentleman, Mr. Gokul Behari Dey, and he explains it all so clearly. The Hindoos have four aims of human existence, Pleasure, Wealth, Religious Duty, and Liberation, and you are supposed to arrive at the mountain peak of the last only after you have traversed the treacherous terrain of the first three.'

'And are you following all these four?'

'Oh no, not at all, not at all. Now don't get me wrong on this. They won't make a Hindoo out of me, no not yet. To their famous quadrangle, I propose my own. Here, according to me, are the four aims of human existence, Gaiety, Sensitivity, Mystery, and Irony, and though Irony is surely the highest of these, you have to move through the first three of them before arriving at Irony's summit.'

'And have you arrived there, at the peak of this Irony that you speak of?'

Perhaps David did not understand my question, and stared at me for a few moments. Then a gentle smile lit up his face, and he burst out uncontrollably into spasms of laughter.

I was startled for that was the first time I have seen David laugh in all the years that I have known him. And yet how many years would that be? Five? No. A hundred. No. Perhaps a million?...

'Have I attained the Holy Grail of Irony? Have I? Oh, how could I possibly answer that question!'

Then he sank back into his chair, and a look of the gravest seriousness descended upon his face. He did not speak a word for the rest of the evening.

I returned to my land of the Incas, and soon disappeared into the mists of a forgotten place and time.