September 10, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

James made the most preposterous of declarations this morning after breakfast. (Why does everything have to happen just after breakfast?) Oh, the very thought of it sends a shiver down me!

'Victoria, have you been writing on your diary recently?'

'Yes, I have.'

'Well, you know there are times when I fill in my vacant moments by writing a diary myself. But they are not my thoughts. Well, they are, and yet they are not. Though I must say that I do not quite know the difference between these two. I write on my diary pretending to be a woman. It has been an overwhelming experience at times, you know? The more I realise how different I am from you, the deeper it sinks into me how estranged I am from myself.'

I was too startled to speak out for a long time. I must say that I still do not understand what James meant. Say, could I start writing on these pages from tomorrow pretending to be a man? Oh, the arrogant pretence of it! Only a man could rise, or should I say sink, to such shameful depths of megalomania. Are we so malleable, plastic, and unencumbered that we can pick up and throw away ourselves with every passing wind?

And what would it even mean for me to write as a man? Would I have to see the world through a man's eyes, feel it through his heart, and understand it through his mind (and, I must hasten to add, eat the dinner cooked for him through his stomach)?

I find myself going back to St. Augustine once again : Quaestio mihi factus sum. Indeed, I have become a question to myself.

No, I must stop now, for my head seems to swim round and round in circles. I distantly remember my cousin, now Lord Munro, speaking to me on this matter years ago.

'Victoria', he said, when I was asking him about what would happen if I were to reach the end of the sky and put my hand through it, 'A full-scale assault of the human reason on itself, that the Ancients used to call Philosophy. And Philosophy, my dear Victoria, is a skill suitable only for the robust minds of men.'

Perhaps Lord D'Acre was right. Only I wish he would someday read this diary and see for himself how this full-scale assault takes place every day on its pages.

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.

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 :