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.

August 28, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

One of the joys (but does that mean that there are sorrows as well?) of being married to James is that he does not object to my habit of poring over books of which he, being a bibliophile himself, has a ready and liberal supply, ranging from the times of the classical Greeks to the mediaeval Europeans to the Britain of our own times. Thus over the last three years I have frequently returned to my childhood fascination with the great topic of War, and more especially with the question of why it is always men who believe that the spilling of blood is an act of glory and honour to the Nation. I come back time and again to Thermopylae, the Peloponnesian War, the Punic War, the Battle of Actium, Constantinople, Crecy, Xerxes, Alexander the Great, and down to the Afghan War of our own times.

This is a most fascinating question, and I am not sure if my solution to it is the correct one. I must say that I dare not talk about this with anyone, for oftentimes it seems to me, if I may indulge myself for a few moments, that I am a woman ahead of my times and that consequently the men and the women around me shall not understand what I have to tell them. And yet, I wonder if this is a form of self-flattery, for how could any individual extricate oneself from the meshes of history and pretend to have access to the truth that is beyond time?

These are indeed ponderous matters, and I cannot claim that my feminine frailty is strong enough to meet them in their full force. Perhaps it requires the tenacity of an intensely masculine mind to explore its labyrinthine complexities. But no, let me not digress here now. Blood. Yes, blood. What is it about blood that drives men?

If, my diary, you shall be so patient as to listen to me, let me unfold some of the deepest thoughts from my heart. I believe that men have an external relationship with blood, so that for them blood is a source both of horror and of a mysterious charm. But for us women, blood is a much more intimate reality of our monthly, if not daily, existence, and, as a consequence, we do not experience bloodiness the way men do. Unlike men who are driven to opposite poles by the sanguis that flows through our common veins, we women learn, through painful experiences, to make our peace, even if it is but an uneasy truce, with blood.

Thus there are, I seem to believe with a conviction that grows deeper within my bosom every passing day, two kinds of men when it comes to blood to which we women, by some curious whim of old Mother Nature, are so inextricably bound. One type is so terrified of blood that it rejects everything feminine as bloody, messy, polluted, profane, impure, and corrupting and runs away to the transcendent heights of the sacred mountains, giving the name 'religion' to this great denial; and the other is so enamoured of it that wanting to become one with it believes it to be an act of heroism to spill it through murder and violence.

Thus what the writers of the books I have been reading call the attitudes of world-affirmation and world-renunciation are ultimately two orientations that men possess towards our feminine blood : those who hold the former are charmed by it and those who hold the latter are terrified of it.

I must now stop, for how rapidly my heart beats as I write these words!

Reading what I have written above, how hollow they seem to me already. Does it all revolve around blood? Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I need to talk to James about it. He is a physician, literally a man of blood, and he should know better.

Or perhaps even David. But no. For I seem to think (oh, how easy it is sometimes to predict his moves) that I know how he will react to my question. He will reply : 'Perhaps. Perhaps you are right. No, I must say something more than that. I must indeed thank you for putting my own words into your diary. But then, which type of a man am I myself?' And with an anaemic smile, he will stare at me for a while, like one of his beloved dogs will scrub the ground under his feet with his shoes, and then will slowly walk away into the garden shrouded with mist.

Oh, I must stop now! There seems to be a commotion downstairs. But I shall return to you soon.

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.

Under Oriental Skies

August 21, 1875

It has been more than a week now since James left for Delhi. Oftentimes in the early hours of the morning I throw out my left hand to my side, only to find a vacant coldness there. As the first light of the rising sun streams in through the eastern window, I look out and see the blossoming colours of the falling Autumn.

David came in today after almost a week. I had thought he had left Simla for the winter to the lower Himalayas to meet the fakirs he keeps on talking about so passionately. But I was mistaken. It seems that he has taken Mr. Bose's rebuff to his heart and is now learning Bengali to read some of the books in that tongue. He struggled throughout the day with no thought for breakfast or lunch reading a grammar written by the Serampore missionary William Carey and struggling with the recent issues of the Bangadarshan which David now thinks is even better than our Spectator back at home. Once he looked up from his books, looked towards the silver mirror on the wall, then closed his eyes and read aloud something to himself, as if with a cry of deep anguish : 'Kothay khuje pabo, O' amar moner Manush.'

Though I did not understand those words, there was a strange rhythm in them that reminded me of the summer of '78 when we had been to the Swiss Alps with Grandfather (God bless his dear soul!).

Aunt Fanny came in towards tea with dear Olivia. David immediately closed his books, gathered them together and with a furtive glance in my direction rushed out from the room. Olivia too, quick as ever to notice these minute details, looked towards me and gave me a thin smile with her delicately carved lips. Aunt Fanny did not seem to have even noticed the flurry of movement her entry had caused.

After tea, we sat down in the garden under the tree burdened with yellow leaves. Olivia had suddenly disappeared. I was wondering where she could have gone to when Aunt Fanny broke the uneasy silence.

'Is everything all right between you and James?'

'But of course, Aunt Fanny!'

'You know, if there ever is anything that you want to tell me, I am always there for you.'

'Yes, Aunt Fanny.'

'When I left England last winter your dear mother drew me to her side and said to me, 'Fanny, I hope that you shall watch over my little darling out there.' You will tell me, won't you, if there is anything that is amiss between the two of you?'

'Yes, Aunt Fanny, I shall. Where could Olivia have gone to?'

I walked into the living room and saw her in a green chair half-bent over a thick brown volume. When she saw me enter, she beckoned to me to come closer and we both began to turn through its pages. It was a copy of St. Augustine's Confessions which Olivia had picked up from the shelves. She had started reading at Book 9 where St Augustine writes about his struggles to find his beloved God in the midst of the temptations and the afflictions of the flesh, and when we arrived at the Twenty-seventh chapter of Book Ten, she began to read aloud, softly to herself, but words that echoed in the distant depths of my own heart.

Too late have I loved You, O Beauty so ancient and so new, too late have I loved You.

For see, You were within me and I was without, and I sought You there. Unlovely, I rushed heedlessly among the lovely things You have made. You were with me, but I was not with You. You called and cried aloud to me, and forced open my deafness. You did gleam and shine, and You did chase away my blindness. You did breathe fragrant odours and I drew in my breath; and now I pant for You. I tasted, and now I hunger and thirst. You did touch me, and now I burn for Your peace.
When I come to be united to You with all my being, then there will be no more pain and toil for me, and my life shall be a real life, being wholly filled by You.

David entered the room with another one of his grammar books just as Olivia was reading out these last words. Almost instinctively he uttered to himself, 'Ah, St. Augustine. Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! That is just what the Bauls of Bengal keep on singing about, 'Kothay khuje pabo, O' amar moner Manush!'

Then he stepped out into the garden, but seeing Aunt Fanny seated there started for the opposite direction just in time.

'Say, that did sound Greek to me!', exclaimed Olivia, shaken out of her book.

'Well, it is just as well that he did not hear you. He might literally have started talking to you in Greek.'

It is now late in the evening, and the darts of the early moon streak in and fall on my pale hands. Oh, how pale indeed do they seem in this light! I sometimes feel that You, my diary, is perhaps the Beloved that St. Augustine was searching for. And yet who are You, my diary? For the more that I ask You this question, the more intensely I fall back on myself and ask, Who am I?

I do feel at such times that You have picked up a life of Your own, that You are not anymore a mere extension of me, that You are writing Yourself through me. And yet I do hope that someday I shall know You as deeply as I know myself.

Perhaps that day I shall finally return to myself, and become one with You at that very moment of home-coming.

August 15, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

I have just been woken up by a most horrid dream. I look at the silver clock on the frozen mantelpiece and see the hands stand still at thirty minutes past eleven.

But I must first narrate, even if only to myself, some of the events of a most happening day.

I spent the greater part of the morning before breakfast reading the Gospel according to St John just as the church bells were cheerfully ringing out in joy. I have often returned to the Bible for solace in my moments of deep despair, and like a soothing balm its most heavenly words sink into my tired bones, they smoothen out the creases in my curved heart and raise me to realms to describe which I possess no words adequate to the task. I opened the Bible at John 8 : 32, 'You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free', and as I closed my eyes, I could see in my mind's most inward eye a heavenly golden finger patiently etching out these words onto the immense vastness of the vacant spaces that lie untouched and unperturbed within myself.

Towards lunch, David brought in an aspiring lawyer at the Simla Lower Court, Mr. Mohesh Chunder Bose, who immediately after entering the parlour and seeing me reading at the other end made a move as if he was about to bow to me. I was about to stand up, not used to meeting a Native at such close quarters, when David's smooth voice, crisp as ever with its thick irony, rang out clearly though the morning calm.

'Oh, come on, Mr. Bose, having mastered our English tongue, with all its delicate intricacies, you do not now pretend to have picked up our British chivalry as well? Chivalry! Oh, what a most wondrous term with which an Englishman hides his contempt for the womenfolk! Every Englishman harbours a secret wish in the dark depths of his heart that he shall someday come across a damsel in distress so that her misery will give him the opportunity to establish his chivalry before his fellow-men!'

Startled by this sudden outburst, I sat down once again on my chair and returned to my St. John as David took Mr. Bose to a polished brown table beside the window overlooking the garden. For a moment he looked in my direction, and I looked back at him understandingly. I must not tell James that he had invited Mr. Bose into the Englishman's castle, that was what the glance meant. Oh, sometimes I do feel that I need not even use words when talking to David. Why the merest of a glance says it all!

Mr. Bose was hesitant at first, and words were slow in coming forth from him. But soon his voice rose in intensity : 'Some day this country that you have enslaved will become free. We shall be united once again, just the way we were before until a few hundred years ago. We shall govern ourselves by our own laws laid down in the laws of Manu, read once again the sacred texts of our Vedic religion destroyed by the Muhammedan bigots, replace Urdu with Hindi in the United Provinces, strive for the emancipation of our women who have become corrupted by trying to imitate their Western sisters, protect the Cow, our sacred mother, and finally enter into the land of milk and honey which will descend here from the heavens very soon. Why, this very day, August 15 today, I have this strange thought that some day in the future August 15 shall indeed be the very day that a vibrant India, shaking off the British yoke, shall become free!'

I fervently drank in every word that Mr. Bose spoke with his deep voice resonating with a quivering emotion. What would James say, I thought to myself, if he were to know that such opinions were being expressed under his very roof?

As for David himself, he did not sound very pleased though with Mr. Bose's rousing speech.

'So Mr. Elphinstone, what do you have to say about our vision of a new India?'

'Well.'

'Yes?'

'All that is fine, Mr. Bose, what you have said just now. But what about the fakirs in your India?'

'Fakirs? What do you mean by fakirs? Listen Mr. Elphinstone, listen to me very carefully, ok? We have no fakirs in this country! Yes, get that very clear in your mind. I challenge you to travel throughout the length and the breadth of this country, from Cashmere to Ceylon, from Calcutta to Bombay, and fetch me a single fakir. India is a modern country marching every day into the world of science, progress, technology, and rationality, and we are becoming the best, East or West. We have no fakirs here. Fakirdom is a mass of superstition, and if any fakirs are indeed left over, they shall immediately be banished from independent India.'

'But that cannot be possible, Mr. Bose. I have come all the way from England, fed up with its stupidity, searching for the fakirs of India. Why, next Spring, I am going to Afghanistan on a tour with some fakirs from the North West Frontier Province.'

At this stage, Mr. Bose stood up. He gathered his breath and I could feel, even from my distant seat, the blood rushing to his head.

'Mr. Elphinstone, this is the most vile calumny that you have levelled against us Indians. We are a scientific people proud of our traditions of rationality going back to the times of the Vedas. Did you know that the ancient text of our forefathers, the Mahabharata, teaches you how to make aeroplanes? But of course you did not. How would you, believing that India has nothing better to offer than some fakirs! And that when Ravana abducted Sita he took her away on a celestial machine just like the ones your German scientists are struggling to make even today? Am I right, am I right? Did you know that the text of the Vaisesikas, written several thousands of years before John Dalton was born, explains the details of atomic theory whose intricacies you are hardly able to grasp with all the much vaunted sophistication of your so-called Western science?Yes, yes? Tell me, Mr. Elphinstone, let Truth be my judge, and let Her render me speechless if I utter a single word of untruth! And here you come to me all the way from your England to tell me that you are looking for fakirs? Good Heavens, if I may borrow an expression so beloved of your people, Mr. Elphinstone, I think you are no better than your brother, if you will pardon me for saying so. Englishmen like you come to India in the guise of a friend, but in truth you are a wolf in sheep's clothing.'

Mr. Bose rushed out, leaving David staring at the blooming crocuses in the garden outside. He did not speak much for the rest of the day. I could feel that something was churning round and round in the gigantic caverns of his labyrinth-like mind.

I must now recount the fearful dream that shook me to the very bone. I saw Mr. Bose standing in front of a flag surrounded by hundreds and thousands of the Natives who were wildly cheering him.

'Today, August 15, 1947, my dear countrymen, we have finally become free. Let there be rejoicing before we embark on our long task of nation building. We had made a tryst with destiny, and today we are ready to redeem the most ancient pledge.'

And then I saw Mr. Bose entering into our forsaken house, dusty and dilapidated with years of neglect, come into my room, sit down at my desk and start writing on my diary. Yes, on this very diary to which I am confiding my thoughts to now.

'Ah, that English lady thinks that it is she who is writing all these words. Little does she know that it is in fact me who is writing her thoughts on these papers.'

I am still quivering with a most cold dread as I hear those words echo and reecho in my hears. Who am I then, the writer of my diary? Am I simply reflecting the views and the voices of people around me, or are these thoughts genuinely my own? Am I free to pen the words that emerge from the deepest recesses of my heart, or have even those most inward parts of mine come under the gaze of a man's eyes?

What is the truth that St John promises me, and which way lies the freedom that I seek?

Ah, my eyes and my hands are now weary, and such mortal questions I must postpone till another day.

Under Oriental Skies

August 14, 1875

It has been three days now since James left for Delhi, and an eerie silence reigns throughout the house. Not quite the silence of absence, for even when James is around he is often too lost in the medical reports from Leipzig, Paris, Bologna, London, and Harvard to talk to me. But it has rather been the silence of presence, as if it is precisely by going away to Delhi that James has come closer to me.

David was around the whole day. He spent the greater part of the morning poring over some of James' books, emitting every now and then a short cry of surprise. I have often pondered in my heart the strange relationship that these two brothers share, perhaps even unknown to each other. James I have known for the last five years now. But David? Well, in a sense I have known him too for just these five years. And yet in another I oftentimes feel that I have always known him, and even been with him for centuries and centuries before I even first set my eyes on him.

Last year I was staring at a giant clock in the gardens with its polished clock hands slowly moving past the four o'clock hour when I started thinking about James and David. James is the man who resolutely lives within the circle, or even at the heart of it at its very centre. And yet, though he would never confess this to me, every now and then he feels suffocated within its boundaries. He, I suspect, harbours a most secret admiration of David, the very David he believes at other times has been an utter failure in his life, for the light-hearted manner in which David lives on the circumference of this circle. And as for David himself? David, I believe, for all his contempt, though this is always kept very carefully disguised by him, for human beings like me who live day in and day out inside this circle, yes, David too suffers at times from momentary pangs of nostalgia for this very life. Why else would he take such an avid interest in the lives of the common-place people that surround him, so much so that he has often startled me with his most intimate knowledge of the affairs of human beings whose existence I did not know he was even aware of?

And yet I know that none of the two brothers will ever admit their hidden fascination for each other's life. James would be horrified if I were even to suggest to him that, unknown to himself, he sometimes approves of David's irreverent and playful attitude towards our untiring efforts to civilise the Natives of this great Empire. And David the bitter iconoclast whose life I seem to think sometimes is an unflagging monomaniacal crusade against anyone or anything that would attempt to bring him within the circle of society, what about him? David, if I were to tell him that at times he too, for all his cynical iconoclasm, yearns for the warmth and the cosiness of a home, I fear that my statement would go so much close to the truth that he would never talk to me again.

Thus these two brothers live on, each passionately hating the other in the very moment of unknowingly loving and respecting each other.

Never have I seen two men who are so closely bound to each other by their irreconciliable differences.

And perhaps it takes the depths of a woman's heart to be able to experience, though somewhat from a distance, something of the elusiveness of such an intangible bond. A bond not so much between two brothers, James and David, but between two fragments that wage a most bitter war with each other in the icy silence of every human soul.