November 22, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

I am still recovering. Oh, the horror of it! Every time I remember that fearsome face I wish I could obliterate it from the vacant spaces of my memory into which it comes flooding with no warning. Early last month, James and I had been to the medieval fort where the Queeen of Jhansi had led, not too long ago, the mutinous soldiers against Her Majesty's armies. Oh, the horror, the dear little children and the innocent young women they ravaged like a pack of hungry wolves who had set upon innocent lambs!

I stood on the ramparts towards dusk gazing at the distant horizon just as the sun was setting. There was an unearthly peace in the very air I breathed. A few stars were sparkling in the cold skies above me. I am certain that two of them twinkled at me when I glanced at them.

I was about to fall asleep, so intense was the silence, when I heard a horrific rumbling noise in the green woods across the plains. Thousands and thousands of soldiers draped in bright red and yellow came charging, their horses neighing wildly, their white sabres flashing in the growing dark.

I think I fainted and slumped to the moist earth. When I recovered, a fearful apparition hung low over me. A native woman burdened with regalia was standing beside me, glancing at my face with a cold contempt. Across her face was a thin red line, dripping blood, as if someone had slashed her face with a pointed dagger.

'Foolish woman', she cried to me, 'Do you think that you can escape my cruel fate by living on the other side of the fence? Do you not know that it matters not for us women which land we inhabit, the white, the brown or the black? Here or there, woman is everywhere she who is crucified.'

I did not eat or sleep for several days on end. Her terrible words echo and reecho down the empty verandahs and the hollow corridors of my mind.

So vast indeed are my mindscapes that sometimes I do not know if I am re-inventing myself or if I am re-discovering something buried deep within me every time I write on this diary. What would happen if a later day historian, like our magnificent Carlyle, were to someday sieze upon my diary as an archaeological find stacked away in someone's dusty attic? Would he slash through it like the knife across the Queen of Jhansi's face, trying to extricate the myth from the reality, the fact from the fantasy?

Perhaps so. But perhaps he will not know that it is because I cannot bear the truth of the myth that I am forced to seek refuge in reality, that it is because I live on the border line between the two that my greatest fantasies have become my most wholesome facts.

Perhaps that is rank nonsense. Yes, I can see Uncle Timothy now in my mind's inner eye sadly shaking his head, getting ready to wield the proverbial Occam's razor on what I have just said. That Uncle Timothy is me too.

I am so many people in one life. Perhaps that freedom to choose is my greatest condemnation.