Under Oriental Skies

September 2, 1875

These pages that I write on, these stretches of vacant whiteness onto which I inscribe some of the deepest thoughts that emanate from the unplumbed reaches of my being, do these pages stop at the margin of my diary? Or do they not rather extend from the edges and pour out onto the world beyond so that my entire life, all the men and the women whom I know, all the experiences I have undergone --- all of these, like my diary itself, is a grand Text? Is this not the reason why we sometimes talk about being able to read a man like a book, because in some sense every individual is himself a text to be dissected, pored upon, investigated, and understood in the very moment of being misunderstood?

Oh, heavens, why do I sometimes release myself into a frenzy of such dire contemplation? Perhaps this is the influence of my grandfather in whose company I spent so much time as a child. He was a Canon at the Cathedral of Ely, and every Sunday he would talk to me about three mediaeval saints, St. Augustine, St. Anselm, and St. Aquinas. I sometimes believe that I owe much more to my dear grandfather than I shall ever be able to acknowledge on these pages. It is his words of wisdom that sustain me as I find myself surrounded by two men, who for all their mutual differences, utterly fail to understand me. James, of course, would stare blankly at me if I were to talk to him about these matters, and with some hasty excuse struggle to return to his medical books.

Nor would David respond warmly to me, for I have never been able to overcome the feeling that there is a deep contempt that he hides within himself for the fairer sex, one that he would never reveal to anyone, believing that our perennial weakness is manifested in our remaining bound to the norms of social existence. Little does he realise, for all his magnaminous flourishes in our direction and his cynical swipes at the world of men, that we women try in our unique ways to confound and the confute the dominance that men seek over us, keeping inviolate to ourselves a part of our being that no man can fathom. If David were to have his way, I think he would wish all women on this planet to abandon all the warmth they have received from their families, and take the final plunge into the abyss of nothingness from the edge of the precipice, while he himself sat pondering at the edge, nagged by bouts of self-doubt, self-hatred, and anxiety over his lack of resolve. No, I dare not point out this contradiction to him, for his response would only irritate me all the more.

And yet, I wonder if this contradiction is more apparent than real. Perhaps, he deliberately behaves in this manner because he wishes to test my acuity in observing his inconsistencies. Oh, how often I have started using the word 'perhaps'!

But to return to my three saints, St. Augustine's immortal words echo in my ears as I sit down today beside my window staring at the falling leaves of the Simla autumn, 'Noverim me, noverim Te'. It was from St. Augustine that I learnt that beyond the phenomenal fears that we mortals live through lies sleeping a most abominable Terror, and that all our fears are just ephemeral manifestations of this Terror. As we pass through the different stages of our life, these fears change their form, their intensity, and their nature, but this Terror, alas, never leaves us. What, then, is this Terror? I think if we are honest to ourselves we all have experienced something of It, and yet, I know not what It is for me.

Yes, indeed I know not. St Augustine believed that this Terror plagues us because we have now been exiled from our true home, the eternal Fatherland where we may hope someday to become one in each other's company, bound eternally by the sweet violence of love.

But what is the Terror that sleeps within me? I cannot say I have been a good Christian all my life. Yes, oftentimes I do read my King James's Bible, and go to Sunday Church when James is around.

I often wonder whether we women and men experience the same emotions when we survey the wonderful Cross. When I look at the broken body of our Saviour clinging from the piece of wood, I feel this tremendous urge to hold and comfort Him, yes, even with my fragile mortal hands to grasp the emaciated frame of eternity, to touch His earthly wounds, and ease, if I could, something of His horrific suffering. I oftentimes wish I could clasp Him so dearly to my heart, so dearly indeed, not letting Him go until I had taken away every iota of pain from His crushed limbs, and wiped away every bitter tear from his eyes filled with the agony of eternity. At such times, I feel sweeping through my heart all the pain and the misery that must have overwhelmed his mother Mary as she knelt at the foot of her son's Cross, forlorn and forsaken.

And men? I cannot help believing that men look at the Cross only to feel empowered to go and crucify their fellow-men, to bring as many as possible under their suzerainty ... And then there are those men who feel overwhelmed by the suffering of our Saviour, but forget the pangs of grief that must have shot through the heart of His mother.

Perhaps that is the way it is. Perhaps if James belongs to the first group, my father and David to the second.

I think I must stop now. These pages seem to grow weightier every day with my own heaviness, and I wonder if my diary can bear this burden of the centuries.

Am I true to myself on these pages? Can I read myself truly here? Is the Victoria who exists outside these pages the same as the one who writes these words? Or, more ominously, though I do not know why this thought suddenly springs from me, am I a man outside them and a woman in here? And if we are indeed not the same inside and outside these pages, how deep are the discontinuities? Have we become two people within the same body, a man for the world and a woman for this diary? If James were to read these pages, would he recognise his wife here?

I do not like writing the last word to anything, but I must stop for today. I can only wish that if some day, God forbid!, someone were to read my diary, he should take every full stop on these pages as a colon, a colon that keeps open the space for a conversation that shall end only with my last breath :