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.

The Genesis of Civilization (And Related Maladies)

In the days of yore now lost in the mists of time
A horde of brooding males wrote in poetry sublime
Noble words pregnant with a silence eternal
The fruit of centuries of penance transcendental.

Breathing the Himalayas's idyllic peace
Those frigid men in efforts without cease
Mapped the structure of the great universe
By smoothing out every trace of a crease.

Then they taught that the immortal Ariadne's thread
For all those who through this ailing world tread
Is by withdrawing from Woman's seductive charm
The source of all ignorance, of every conceivable harm.

Those who meditate on the rhythmic sacred Utterance
And real-ise the world brimming over with Its resonance
Are liberated at once from the sinister power of Her wiles
No longer are they in the twilight zone of such guiles.

This unfailing talisman to traverse the world of plurality
And ascend unto the ineffable peace of the now lost unity
This inexplicable hold of the allure of such abstract beauty
Surely must be the very El Dorado of universal masculinity.

But alas! in the course of time's destructive sway
And much to their descendants' utter dismay
This message dissolved into the vortices of memory
Like Woman herself, ever so fragile, ever so finicky.

And then there arose from the indomitable East
Like the morning sun's awakening for his feast
On the night's feminine forces of abject darkness
Which he gobbles at a trice with his brightness.

There emerged this fellow in passionate search for divinity
Having indwelt the grieving earth's forsaken misery
Resolved to go straight to the heart of the ponderous matter
And arise from the masses' feminine and inane chatter.

For years he searched but recovered not the light he sought
Found no solace in the arts and sciences he had been taught
With the great eclipse of the human heart he valiantly fought
And yet his Herculean labours all sadly came to nought.

Until one day straying off from the path beaten
He stumbled over a hermitage ancient and earthen
Where an emaciated figure in contemplation reposed
With a saintly face in utter peace blissfully composed.

'Teach me, Light of the World, in Thou I seek refuge!
Of fashionable knowledge I have by now a pastiche
My mind is overcrowded with billion a billboard
But give Thou unto me true knowledge's sword!'

'With that I shall forthwith cut through this hoard!
That groans in my mind, this despicable smorgasbord
And freed from all nagging doubt and devillish delusion
I shall penetrate through this veil of feminine illusion!'

The old man opened an eye and looked upon him
August saints are, after all, allowed such a whim
With a faint smile on his lips broken and chapped
With his arms outstretched towards him beckoned.

And the two became from that auspicious moment
The pair of the obedient child and the benevolent parent
'I have taken you under my wing', he lovingly proclaimed
'Listening to anyone else is hereby strongly condemned!'

Thus the Master started the long surgical process
Of trimming off his disciple's mind the earthly excess
That he had imbibed from the world's pretentious schools
Full of students pragmatically wise, but spiritually fools.

After twelve's arduous years of rigorous instruction
Almost an eternity's duration of spiritual deconstruction
The Master declared in a voice that for a matter so grave
Was not only palpably placid but also strikingly suave.

'Our forefathers established over the inscrutable Chaos
With solemn invocations to the heaven of Deos
In a Language they had received as a divine gift
Laced with metaphors melodious and similies swift.

'The blessed tranquility of the reign of cosmic Order
Though the beneficence of Speech, the divine M/other
Victorious over worldly transgressions which it does smother
Against the looming spectre of Woman, the perennial Other.

'On this great day, my long-suffering and patient disciple
I teach you this : Language is truly a feminine principle
So if it is Her frivolous touch that you seek to conquer
It is this Language that you must definitely master.

'Not knowing this Language, the words of the heavenly gods
Men become Woman-and-Gold seeking servile sods
Drinking life to the lees they lie prostrate on the road-side
Pretending to be cool, they indeed become hollow in-side.

'But you know now my loyal and worthy disciple
Like the ephemeral nature of everything edible
Woman's outer material shell too is frangible
Such is the impermanence of everything tangible.

'But Woman rises above such carnal triviality
To the rarified heights of unsullied spirituality
When she attains the beatific state of Maternity
The nearest she will ever get to touching Divinity.

'Our eminent Indian women in the days before the British
Did not bother whether their complexion was wheatish
To those ephemeral Westerners I hasten to add perforce
Our celestial Language has no synonym for their 'divorce'.

'If as the Mother incarnate you look upon every woman
There shall soon be none left for her plight to bemoan
Though I confess that pushing this argument to its extremity
Will also imply the ultimate disappearance of humanity.

'A veritable model of concord, amity and harmony
That is indeed the bliss of the classical Indian family
With the father the over-fed King, the mother the Queen
And the demure wife as the what-could-have-been'.

That evening the disciple was immersed in reflection
And just as he reached the end of his intense cogitation
He slowly fell into the serene lull of a dreamful sleep
As the frosty stars their warm tears began to weep.

Then through the hazy clouds of the sky aquamarine
He thought he saw the lineaments of a figure feminine
Who from afar mocked him with a smile shimmering
And then launched into a speech bold and blistering.

'Oh, dear deluded disciple, what can I say unto thee?
I know not where to begin and even if I did know not
How to talk to you, you poor little parrot-like swot
How can I liberate you from your self-inflicted misery?

'I am Language, indeed the very one you garrulous men
In a grandiose moment of world-renouncing megalomania
Have appropriated from me through your juvenile dementia
Speak, write, read, or hear my own words now I cannot even.

'When I begin to speak my Language is already stolen
And washed with the blood of your everpresent violence
How can I excavate my forgotten words that express no vehemence?
How can I recover from you my wealth, now so ill-gotten?

'So I cry out to you in these laments that are contrapuntal
That mimic the facile cadences of your elegiac songs
But I subvert them using the very intrument of your wrongs
This Language you have utterly defaced to a state dismal.

'Even when I am nostalgic I have nothing to go back to
There are no pristine origins uncorrupted by your touch
It is your own words that I must use, though they ouch
And subtly dissolve them through my ironic play too.

'It is indeed Language, O' misled disciple, you have been taught
That is the alpha and the omega of every perishing thing
No matter which way the fates of men may swing
It is for the right to speak that revolutions are fought.

'Countless is the number of men who repeat glibly
To their wives and daughters in a solemn beatitude
'You know, I really am doing this for your own good!'
These masters of using Language so patronisingly.

'What an irony, these self-apppointed Lord Protectors
Are viewed by women as veritable Grand Inquisitors
When they indulge in such rhetoric that borders on falsehood
What becomes of this question, 'Whose Language? Which Good?'

'What a tragedy, these self-styled Moral Guardians
Who for 'women's sake' pitifully endure great burdens
Do they know that their task which they take to be cosmic
Appears in fact so plainly risible and absurdly comic?

'Little do they pause to reflect when they declare
"Women need to be saved from their own devices
And cannot walk without men as their crutches"
Who it was who invented this grand imposture!'

When the disciple woke up it was early morning
And all the chirpy yellow birds were just stirring
He saw his ancient master at a distance reading
And breathlessly under his tired breath mumbling.

'You from this day I do earnestly renounce
And all your teachings too do I utterly denounce
Today I set forth into the world I once left
In whose intricate ways I was then so deft.

'But in repudiating you I must by necessity
Abjure much that constitutes my own identity
I cannot henceforth write any longer with a valiant 'I'
And when I speak I must do with a smile wry.'

Thus the disciple came into the world's sight
Rejecting much of his past as a beastly blight
He now emerged as an unmitigated anarchist
To undermine Language, as the transparent ironist.