September 5, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

James is back. He is very excited about developments in Delhi and plans to go back next Spring. And yet somewhere in the recesses of his mind a nagging doubt lurks. Will I recover from my sudden fits by then? Will I be able to demonstrate my ability as a doctor's wife to the natives?

I was gazing at the late crocuses this morning after breakfast, sitting on my favourite green chair. A gentle apathy slowly swept over me, and I wanted to remain that way for the rest of eternity, allowing the world, its dots, its squares, its circles, its blooming and buzzing confusion, to swarm round my head while I simply took notice of it with no desire of immersing myself in it. I wanted the sun's warm rays to sink into me, welding together the disparate fragments of my innermost being into a rounded whole. And yet, leave me just at the moment when that whole was to be completed. For no, in another sense, I do not want to become whole. This great fear of wholeness, of perfection, and of completeness is perhaps one that I have inherited from my uncle Timothy.

When I was sixteen, my father fell seriously ill, and dear Mama took him to a sanatorium near Lake Como while I was sent away to Uncle Timothy in Aberdeen where he was a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University. I spent six months there, a time mixed with confusion, wonder, fear, anxiety, joy, and exultation.

Uncle Timothy lived a rather secluded life, lost in a world that he had created for himself over the years with his books, his encyclopedias, his biographies, and his journals, and he gradually instilled into me as well his deep love for books. Since then books have never been just a dead mass of printed letters on white sheets of paper : books are warm, real, living, glowing entities with hearts that beat, they talk to me, and I talk back to them. I was slowly introduced into a gigantic inter-connected web where each node leads onto another in a never-ending spiral.

I enjoyed a certain freedom when being with Uncle Timothy that I had never experienced at home. For the first month, in fact, he hardly spoke to me, sitting at his table, utterly indifferent to my existence, while I tried to busy myself with various things in the living room. It was only after a few months that I began to realise, much to my horror, that unknown to myself he had been observing me so minutely that he had somehow, in a manner I know not how, assimilated me into his world of books. Every now and then, he would throw at me a casual question or a remark, 'Now this is how you feel in this matter, is it not?', or, 'But then I am sure you would not agree with this aristocratic gentleman, would you?', or 'Yes, of course, you would rightly reject this opinion as old-fashioned nonsense of a bunch of over-fed men', and when I would look into myself I would be stunned to discover that though he had not completely grasped the truth of how I felt or what I believed he had nevertheless come unnervingly close to it.

It was only after those first three months that I felt he was gradually opening himself up to me, and we would often have long conversations after tea. Sometimes we would go out on Sundays for long walks into the countryside just as the first leaves of Spring were appearing on the austere trees. Often, he was very quiet during these walks, but I clearly remember that Sunday morning when he talked a lot about me.

'Silence is the best prelude to all forms of understanding, and not just the prelude, but also the interlude and the postlude, so that after word that has been spoken or written you must attempt the impossible task of hearing the silence that breathes through it.'

Startled by this sudden outburst, I remained silent for a while, wondering if that was what he was asking me to do.

'Have I understood you? God forbid! For why, if indeed I did, there would be nothing left of you. You would be reduced to just a reflection of who I am. Do you know why I was silent during those weeks? Well, I know who you are and where you come from. You inhabit a world that I left a long time ago, but whose subtle traces, disguised echoes, transformed voices, and hidden presences live on within me every day and torment me every night. And yet, you are not just another one of them, are you? You are who you are, and that is how I talk to you. But that demands an initial painful process of self-emptying, so that I might seek to become more aware of whatever views I might hold about you before talking to you, and that is a task that demands a regime of silence.'

A pair of blue birds came floating down from the heavens and sat down on a branch on the tree just in front of us. The North-westerlies swept in from the emptiness of the Highlands and I desperately grasped my scarf fluttering wildly in the wind.

'Perhaps someday where you are in a place far away from here, perhaps in a time when I shall be dead, you shall remember this morning with me. You shall then recount what I am telling you today, perhaps with joy, perhaps with sadness, perhaps with bitterness, perhaps with all of them.'

He stared at the beautiful purple moors stretched out for miles and miles in front of us.

'Victoria, you are not my niece. No, that is not how I see you, nor is that the reason why I accepted your mother's request that you spend some months with me while she looks after your father. You are more than anything else a potential source of a never-ending conversation, and it was to prepare the ground for it that I had to remain silent.'

As I recall these words today after so many years sitting in the utter stilness of my Simla room, so many thousands of miles away from the wild Highlands of ethereal Scotland, I still remember how terribly and vehemently they angered me. I found Uncle Timothy a repulsive hideous creature, bent over double by his age and his bookishness, cold and indifferent, for refusing to acknowledge and accept me as his one and only niece. And yet, how greatly have things changed during the times since then, how much of a transformed woman I myself have become through the experiences that Life (oh, how wonderful You are!) has thrown in my direction! I seem to think today that through his refusal to be my Uncle and his wish instead to be a partner for a mutual conversation, which he hoped would never end, he was pointing the way towards a much more intimate bond than I have shared with any man since then, be it James, David ... or even, yes, even Ralph ...

As the months progressed, I gradually realised in my Uncle Timothy's absent presence a fact of singular importance, one that I have never forgotten since then, that the road to understanding oneself is through understanding another, and that it is only by taking this long and tortuous path through the other that I can hope, someday at least, to come closer to myself. Even if only to realise that at the end of this journey, with all its agonies and ecstasies, I am no longer standing where I had been when I had ventured out on this journey.

And conversely, as it happens to me on the pages of this very diary, the deeper that I go into myself, and the harder that I try to plumb the interior depths of my untouched being, the more that I open myself to the world outside, by including all its voices, some of them real, some of them imagined, even without knowing sometimes the precise difference between these two.

Many years later, two weeks before I was to be married to James, I received this letter from Uncle Timothy.

My dearest Niece,

I am indeed a man of powerful contradictions, for today I cannot help thinking of you as my one and only niece as I picture you in your white bridal dress at the Church (St. Patrick's at Britstol, I am told) standing next to Mr. Elphinstone. He is a fine young lad, so I have heard, and I am sure you will be greatly happy with him in India.

As a matter, of fact, I happen to be going in that direction too, though our paths will perhaps not cross again. I am giving up my Professorship at Aberdeen and going to the heartlands of India in search of God. Why God at this late stage of my life? Have I grown weak in my knees, and need that notorious divine crutch to stand up?

No, my niece, I have finally realised, after so many false starts, that only God can give me that blessed peace, that peace that surpasseth all understanding, that peace that I have hankered for, that peace that sleeps in the very heart of the cauldron of seething anarchy. God, if I may make bold to say so, is Anarchy. For if God is Omniscient, God must know everything. No sooner does God know about one view that God immediately knows its counter-view, and just as immediately the counter to that counter-view, as well as the counter to this last counter-counter-view and so on in an infinite spiral that knows no end. Thus, if God is Infinite, God is at that very moment Anarchy as well, and God's life is one that is riddled by the agonising Anarchy of Thought.

This God, I readily submit, is one that I have made in my own image, but do we not all do that, do we not all make a God that we like the most? And yet, think not that this God that I have imagined is one whose life is rapt in utter bliss, for the dreadful Anarchy that I speak of, the demoniac Anarchy that torments my mind, constantly driving me to discover counter-arguments to my own arguments before I have even enunciated them, is a most fiendish spirit that gives me no peace. It is this thought that there exists somewhere a God whose spiritual affliction is just like mine, whose transcendent Mind knows no rest, Victoria, my darling, it is indeed this thought that has been the solace of my life, and will be the solace of my death. That God who is Anarchy will be my fellow-sufferer who understands that I understand Him not, and will hopefully forgive me for this very failure.

Your dearest Uncle,

Timothy

The night wind, pregnant with oneiric whispers, now blows in stealthily through the delicately carved arches of the cold verandah. James is asleep.

Outside, a few footsteps, as if the moon has descended to me from her empyrean heights and decided to give me company for the night in the present absence of Uncle Timothy.