September 1, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

Oh, I have been so happy the whole day! James's letter came in just after breakfast as I was savouring the taste of the freshly scrambled eggs.

I am arriving in Simla in two days. The meetings I have had with the honourable members of the Viceroy's Council in Delhi have been very fruitful.

Olivia came in after lunch, and we both sat down at the piano opposite the western window. We sang songs from Puccini, Tallis, and Schubert, and talked and laughed a lot. How cheerful the whole world seemed to be as the autumn's golden sun came streaming in through the western windows!

Towards dinner, I was reading Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing when for some reason that I cannot comprehend I started thinking about my dear father. It has been five years now since he died, and yet it feels oftentimes that it was just the other evening when he invited me to his bedside and stared into my eyes with a look of the most beautiful sadness. It seemed to me at that time that some grand Alchemist had distilled the agony of this entire world and poured it out into the pair of his warm Irish eyes. Perhaps he knew at that time that he would never see me again. He raised his cold right hand, criss-crossed by long rivers of blue veins, and laid it on my cheek.

My father came from a village near Limerick in Ireland, and arriving in London at the young age of twenty-one rose steadily through the legal profession, soon establishing a firm with an English friend in the East End. Five years later, he married my mother, a lady much above his own class, and perhaps from that day, he completely renounced everything Irish about him. Little did we know, as children, how much of a struggle he went through to thoroughly Anglicize himself in every possible way. I remember that when we were growing up we were never told about our paternal grandparents, and it was only after he died that I discovered his true roots. I remember one night when as a young girl I was woken up by some sharp voices in the living room. I carefully trotted up to the door, and peered through the opening to see my father talking to an old woman.

'You must never come here again, mother. I shall keep on sending you money, as I have been doing all these years. But I am not Irish anymore.'

'How can you say that, Euan? Life is not a slate that you can simply rub off and start from scratch. The past is not past, don't you realise, the past is still flowing past you?'

'Yes, indeed, mother, how right you are. I am still groaning under the burden of my past.'

'What have I done to deserve this?'

'Nothing. Nothing, really. And that is just the point. If you had done something, things might have been different.'

'What could I have done?'

'Oh, many things. Many. I do not want to go over all that now.'

The old woman sank down into the nearest chair. Between them, the clock began to strike eleven, one by one. Painfully and slowly.

My father was away from home either at his office or at the Lower Temple most of the time. As I grew older, I began to feel more and more that there were in fact two men housed inside the same body of his. One man was the charming and affectionate father that I adored with all my heart, the father who got me chocolates for Christmas, the father who showered me with toys at my birthdays, the father who had an amazing knack for knowing what I was going to ask even before I opened my mouth, and the father who could on occasion sit down beside me for hours on end without speaking a word. And yet, there was another man inside him, a man so distant that I hardly recognised him as the same father who was so full of warmth and grace towards me at other times, that I did not even know if I should call him my father during those unbearable moments.

But that evening there was something unfamiliar about him, and this was a father who

was different from even the two men I had become so well-acquainted with.

'You know Victoria, I wish I had some more time. I wonder what it is like in Limerick these days. Perhaps the Irish sun is gleaming through the ripe corn fields, and gracing the tall Church spires.'

With a heart heavy with sadness, I was inattentively turning the pages of my book when I saw David come in at the other end of the room, perhaps with another of his Bengali grammars.

I suddenly remembered the dream that I had about Mr. Bose writing his own views and thoughts through me in my diary, and a cold chill once again ran through my spine. An hour later when David walked past me, I blurted out a question to him.

'Do you think there shall really come a time when an native of this land will understand us so completely that his grasp of our thoughts and emotions will equal that of ours?'

A gleam ran through David's eyes, and he stopped in his tracks.

'But do we understand ourselves? Really? Are our thoughts and emotions transparent to ourselves? If a native came up to me and said, 'Mr. Elphinstone, this is what your motive really is', how would I know if he was right or wrong? For how could I be sure what my motive behind any action is? But yes, perhaps that is not what you ask. Perhaps what you want to know is what sort of a native he must be to love our England and to love us as we love ourselves.'

David sat down on the green chair to my right, and remained silent for a long while.

'That native who believes India to be his homeland is just a beginner in this respect. But that native who loves England as his homeland is even below the beginner, for both these natives are, if I may so, just two sides of the same coin. That native for whom this entire world is a foreign land so that his homeless mind feels equally at home in Delhi or Durham, Peru or Perth, only that homeless mind can become domesticated wherever it lives.'

I looked out through the window. It was full moon, and her distant light, so cold and yet so intimate, began to sink into my heavy soul.