Exiled at ‘Home’ : the perplexities of an engaged self

It was sometime in the January of this year that I first understood or, to put it a bit prosaically, gathered into my inner being, (at least) something of what (some) women mean when they say that they find the ‘male gaze’ threatening and perceive it to be laden with ominous significations. I had returned from the UK after seven years, and had so thoroughly internalised the un/spoken rule that you do not stare at someone unless you wish to enter into some sort of conversation that the curious gawks of people eye-ing me made me feel uneasy, nervous and edgy. When I would step into a grocery, a cyber-café, a chemist, a milk-booth or cellphone-recharge outlet, the shopkeeper would, with uncanny regularity, stare at me and wait for a while, almost as if he were mulling over my question, searching for hidden contradictions in it. Matters were made worse by the fact that it was only after a few weeks that I ‘remembered’ that I am not supposed to ‘wait for my turn’ at Indian shops; I once waited at a grocery for half an hour on the assumption that I was standing in a (non-existent) queue. As time passed by, I gradually began to be made aware, through numerous subtle signals that dart through the dense criss-crossing chains that constitute the social matrix, that I was some sort of an ‘Outsider’. The owner of a cyber-café that I frequent once showed me a 20 $ note and asked me what its worth would be in Indian rupees; when I asked him why he thought that I would be capable of answering his question, he replied, ‘Oh, you are not from these parts.’ The slander (or the benediction?) that I was not ‘from these parts’ stuck on to my mind’s eye as the months rolled on. I suddenly realised for the first time that all the shopkeepers near my place never spoke to me in Hindi, and would try to match my circuitous Hindi with an equally tortuous English. When I would go to Connaught Place (a.k.a. Rajiv Chowk) in the evenings, tourist guides would walk up to me asking if me if I wanted to be shown into some five-star hotel or taken on a trip to Agra, and travel agents would press upon me to get my dollars exchanged at the ‘best market rates’.

Such experiences filled (and continue to fill) me with a curious ambivalence : simultaneously with dread, with irritation, and with ‘homelessness at home’. First, the dread. Though I suppose some people think that my ‘knowledge of the world’ is somewhat ‘bookish’, I would instead say that it is quite ‘filmish’. Over the last seven years, I have waded my way through such a deluge of movies based on the Crusades, World War I, World War II, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, Vichy France, the French Resistance, Stalinist Russia, Algeria, Cuba, Panama, Indo-China and Vietnam that there are times, especially when I am in a bus, a market-place or the Underground (!), when I cannot help asking myself if the person sitting next to or in front of me is a CIA, MI5 or Mossad agent in plainclothes. In its dispensation of the spy-genre, Hollywood has cast such an enticing spell over me that I seem to ‘see’ schemes, intrigues, stratagems, ruses, machinations and conspiracies everywhere : to echo Shakespeare, the whole world is one gigantic Plot and I am but a Secret Agent (even if not quite of the 007 variety). Indeed, students, Ph.D. or otherwise, who wish to investigate the role that the media or info-entertainment plays in ‘constructing consciousnesses’ or in ‘in-forming subjectivities’ might do well to have a chat with me on these matters. I have absorbed so much from these war-movies that I feel at times that I am now capable, (somewhat in the manner of Sherlock Holmes’ lesser-known brother, Mycroft Holmes), of fighting an entire World War right from my laptop, matching strategy with counter-strategy, and wonder, in fact, why I am not yet in the Indian Ministry of Defence’s counter-intelligence wing. Indeed, I believe it is extremely juvenile, not to say ridiculous, to wage wars with ‘real’ guns, tanks and soldiers; wars should be fought ‘in the mind’ as a ‘hyper-real’ means of exercising the grey cells. Be that as it may, when people are able to mark me out as non-Indian, or at least, as one who is not from their parts, a cold dread, almost as a reflex-(re)action, runs through my spine at once. I have to force myself to be ‘sensible’ and to remind myself that if those around me were indeed secret agents they would have never asked me such questions and broken ‘radio-silence’.

Second, the irritation : for all my rationalising away, and implicit condoning, of people’s inquisitive stares in this way, I cannot help feel irritated when I (am forced to) become the focus of their attention or, to use a delicate word, their ‘interest’. I suppose the greatest dilemma that faces me is that of becoming as anonymous as possible while living at the volatile interstices of the social world, and the knowledge that I am being observed or scrutinised by someone threatens to rend the protective veil of comforting obscurity with which I wish to be perpetually enveloped. It is at these moments that I sorely and desperately miss the anonymity that I enjoyed (and relished) during my time in the UK; I could, if (an important qualifier) I so wished, hide almost everything about myself from even the proverbial girl-next-door. A popular argument that runs through the Indian social fabric is that the ‘West’ is a land of abstract, individualistic, and egomaniac atoms that flit through empty space with no sense of community, kinship, cohesion, or affinity. High rates of divorce, broken marriages, substance abuse, drug addiction, and teenage pregnancies are the instances that comprise the well-worn artillery of those Indians who direct their fiery wrath (read : self-righteous indignation) at the allegedly tottering citadel of the ‘West’. To fully engage with the whole gamut of issues that these ‘East-West’ culture-wars throw up will require several pages, if not volumes; for the moment, I shall simply retort, even if somewhat obliquely, that ‘those who live in glass houses should not throw stones at others’. I have seen and experienced enough of what happens to individuals within the sanitised zone of authentic ‘Indian values’ to regard the straightforward equation, in the manner of an ‘essentialisation’, of the ‘West’ as a land of perverse, deracinated and asocial individuals, as anything more than a school-boy subterfuge intended to camouflage the violence, implicit as well as explicit, that runs through the skeins of the ‘Indian family’. This, in turn, is connected to the reason why I never watch Bollywood movies except in ‘exceptional’ circumstances. I am not temperamentally a ‘reductionistic’ person, but when it comes to Bollywood I cannot help declaring in a reductionistic tone that the singular message that rings out clearly (even if there are notable exceptions to this rule, and may their tribe multiply!) through the morass of the movies that it churns out is this : ‘Such is the doom that awaits you if you fail to get your daughter married off, or at least ‘engaged’, by the age of twenty-five’. The Indian family-values that Bollywood dotes on, patronises as a gesture of ‘social service’ to the nation, and exalts to the skies are precisely the ones that I find extremely didactic, moralistic, paternalistic, vapid, insidious, invasive and intrusive; and its sickening success is perhaps a menacing reminder of how deeply-rooted these values must be in the swooning audiences that it commands, manipulates and controls with such frightening regularity, across all religions, all castes and all classes. Thus I can say unhesitatingly that, given a choice, I would rather watch a company of fifty French and German soldiers shooting one another to death in some God-forsaken valley on the Somme, the Rhone or the Rhine than endure a three-hour long saga where an Indian woman is painfully battered to a slow, lingering death as a kaleidoscopic host of so-called Indian values are drilled into her, in a gruelling moralising narrative ranging from her childhood through her ‘marriageable years’ up to her old age.

These family-values assault you on every side with the weight of Normative assumptions, if only you pause for a while to examine the ones that saturate practically everything that is handed out to you. Here is one from ‘personal experience’ : some months ago, I was informed by a ‘well-meaning’ aunt that she had found an Assamese ‘marriageable’ girl for me. As many as three Normative suppositions are condensed into this terse statement, and, as it so happens, they are ones that I find extremely hideous. First, she assumed that I am heterosexual, thereby replicating the view that heterosexuality is the Norm and homosexuality an aberration; second, she assumed that I would be ‘interested’ in marriage in the first place, thus strengthening the standpoint that institutionalised marriage is the Norm; and, third, she assumed that I would be drawn to an Assamese girl merely because she is Assamese, in the process furthering cultural/linguistic chauvinism or jingoism as a Norm.

But to return from the digression, the irritation at being denied this ‘right to anonymity’ is, of course, not simply a matter of being compelled to become willy-nilly the locus of curiosity, for this denial has implications that I can only categorise as sinister. One of the first questions that I am asked by those who want to ‘make conversation’ or ‘get to know me’ is about my father, and it is one that I find deeply odious, repulsive, and distasteful, for it is surely an indication of the pervasiveness of patriarchal values and notions in the Indian milieu that one believes that an individual’s identity, distinctiveness or personality is connected with Issues (no pun intended) of Paternity. Here are, by way of suggestion for those who just may wish, for whatever inexplicable reasons, to ‘make conversation’ with me, as many as ten non-odious questions they could ask me : ‘Would you rather watch baseball or football on TV?’, ‘Have you ever journeyed to somewhere within the Arctic Circle?’, ‘If you were living in 1918 Russia, would you have joined the Tsarists, the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks?’, ‘Who do you think are the greater racists, the Indians or the Europeans?’, ‘Have you watched the latest movie of Almodovar?’, ‘Who do you think was a greater composer, Schubert or Sibelius?’, ‘Is your mind one that is never at rest?’, ‘Who do you think sells better milk --- Mother Dairy or Amul?’, ‘Do you think Eva Longoria is over-rated?’ and ‘Have you ever been to the fort at Fatehpur Sikri?’ This pervasive obsession with the Family (and especially with the Sign of the Father), this all-encompassing perception that you have not ‘identified’ an individual unless and until you have ‘located’ him or her within some familial context is also associated with the omnipresence of the hierarchical notions of stratification that cut across the overlapping manifolds of the Indian social matrix.

Which brings me to the third type of ‘irritating’ experience, that of being addressed with the that most despicable honorific ‘Sir’. Looking back over the years, I can now see that the sole reason why I did not appear for the Indian Administrative Service or go into the medical, engineering, judicial or technical ‘streams’ was my horror that some so-called junior officer would, sooner rather than later, speak to me as ‘Sir’. The only time I came close to ragging a student during my college days in Delhi was when in my third year a freshman persistently addressed me as ‘Sir’ even after my repeated warnings to my contrary. So deep, in fact, is my distaste for such terms laden and permeated through and through with inegalitarian presuppositions and implications that it is with some degree of uneasiness that I speak Indian languages which make a distinction between the ‘personal you’ (Hindi : tum, Bengali : tumi) and the ‘honorific you’ (Hindi : aap, Bengali : aapni). (If I were some sort of a linguistic dictator, I would like to erase all traces of the ‘honorific you’ from Indian languages, thank you very much.) I once flipped through an examination text-book in a second-hand bookshop that declared on its cover, ‘50 Letters For Examinations’ and came across a letter written to a Bank Manager that went as, ‘Sir, I humbly beg [italics mine] to state that I am Mr.___’ A paradigmatic instance precisely of that servile ‘Sir-dom’ mentalite that is perhaps a lasting colonial hangover, one that I find so nauseating in so much around me.

A month ago, I was roaming through the vacant deserted places of Connaught Place at nine in the morning on a Sunday morning when a young boy walked up to me with the question, ‘What is your name, Sir?’ It was bad enough that he had ventured to ask me for my name, but to top it with a ‘Sir’ was infinitely more repulsive. I furtively glanced at the thick wad of tourist guides in his right hand, and could immediately see that he had taken me (not yet again!) for an ‘Outsider’, but not wishing to get drawn into another frustrating conversation over hotel-rooms, dollar-bills and Agra-trips, I walked straight into the underground market at Palika without answering his question. He tenaciously followed me in, and after a while I too gave in, trying to give evasive replies to a long set of questions that he began to hurl at me, until he came to this one, ‘Where are you from and what is your name, Sir?’ Swallowing my exasperation for once, I replied, ‘I am Pablo, from Spain’. What followed was a long-winded conversation in the course of which he told me that he was from Allahabad ‘only’, that he did not want any money from me ‘only’, and that he was trying to practise his English ‘only’. When we came out into the sunlight, he asked me for a 10$ bill for having ‘shown me around’, to which I could only reply that I had no such thing on me. Then he launched a Parthian shot at me packed with a crescendos of ‘Sirs’ : ‘Not worry, Sir. Anytime you need me, I am here, Sir. And I noticed you never asked me for my name. I am Ankur. You are not like the other tourists who come here, Sir. Although you are foreign, I think you are very Indian.’

So I walked back through the still-vacant spaces of Connaught Place, feeling curiously unsettled and yet at ‘at home’. The words of Jawaharlal Nehru, a much-maligned figure at present in some circles, came floating to me, and despite the jarring note struck by their gendered invocation of India as ‘feminine’, they resonated ‘somewhere’ deep within me : ‘India was in my blood and there was much in her [sic] that instinctively thrilled me. And yet, I approached her [sic] almost as an alien critic, full of dislike for the present as well as for many of the relics of the past that I saw. To some extent I came to her [sic] via the West and looked at her as a friendly Westerner might have done.’ In some respects, I have perhaps become that much-hated figure of the R.S.S. and parallel formations, a Nehruvian pseudo-secular Indian alienated from the wellsprings of the cultural heritage. And yet, if it is ‘secularism’ and ‘Hinduism’ (incidentally, two extremely slippery terms) that are stake, I am certainly in a highly ambivalent position, for if ‘Hinduism’ constitutes, whether in part or in totality (and this is an extremely disputable point), the ‘wellsprings of the cultural heritage’, I have by now been engaged for seven years with the plurality of socio-cultural traditions that go under the umbrella-term of ‘Hinduism’. That is, far from having studied too little of ‘Hinduism’, I have perhaps studied too much of it! Which is why the statement ‘Exiled at ‘Home’’ is not quite a helpless lament, though it is not quite a jubilant exultation either; it is rather an expression of my perplexity at finding myself so out-of-place in a space that I recognise to be my ‘home’.

Elsewhere, Nehru, struck perhaps by a somewhat similar perplexity, asked : ‘Which of the two Englands came to India? The England of Shakespeare and Milton, of noble speech and writing and brave deed, of political revolution and the struggle for freedom … or the England of the savage penal code and brutal behaviour, of entrenched feudalism and reaction? For there were two Englands … The two Englands live side by side, influencing each other, and cannot be separated; nor could one of them come to India forgetting completely the other.’ Perhaps there are likewise (at least) two ‘Indias’, and these two are so densely intertwined with and imbricated in each other that they cannot easily be taken apart, and my own bafflement emerges from the fact that while I know which ‘India’ I wish to go to, I cannot disentangle myself from the other ‘India’ in which I am rooted. The former is a ‘India’ that somehow manages to keep alive the sense of a yearning, a longing or a hankering after a primordial Silence that slumbers not beyond but in the midst of the racket that ineluctably stamps itself on the valences, ambiguities and uncertainties of quotidian existence, and the latter is a ‘India’ that is propelled by a mindless Noise that is believed to be the motor of a self-propagating automaton hurtling away to a so-called shining future. Like Nehru’s ‘two Englands’, the ‘two Indias’ that I have outlined here (even if in some ideal-typical fashion) have, in fact, co-existed throughout the historical record; and finding myself immersed in the latter ‘India’ while craving for a fleeting foretaste of the former ‘India’, I often find myself ‘homeless’ even when I know I am at ‘home’. Thus living on the fault-lines (even if not always clearly discernible) of these two ‘Indias’, life has become, so to speak, an experiment in being amphibian, with one foot in the one and another foot in the other. Or, perhaps it is precisely this experience of a separation, of a rupture or of a drifting apart from my ‘deepest roots’ that is the truest homecoming, even if that homecoming is only the temporary interlude before yet another estrangement, and so on ad infinitum before death mercifully intervenes to terminate this painful dialectic of partition, reconciliation, partition, reconciliation ...

Perceptions of Otherness

About ten years ago, I was walking with a school-friend along a narrow lane in the city of my birth (a less circuitous way of putting this last phrase would simply be to say ‘my home-city’, but for the fact that the word ‘home’ has always had ominous connotations for me) when I blurted out, ‘This must be a Muslim area.’ To his question, ‘What makes you think so?’, I replied instantaneously, ‘I don’t think so, I feel so’. A few weeks later, I was on the North-East Express bound for Delhi when it got delayed for several hours at the rail-junction of Mugalsarai in the United Provinces (now, of course, called Uttar Pradesh; but I prefer the British term since it helps to further the illusion of unity). I was walking up and down the noisy platform for several hours when this brief conversation suddenly flashed across my mind, and I began to ponder over it. By the time the train moved into Delhi, I had begun to understand something of why I had felt that the locality had to be a ‘Muslim’ one. One of my mother’s closest friends was a Muslim lady who used to live in a highly congested part of the city criss-crossed with noisy long-winding alleys, and when I was in junior school, my mother often took me to her house which was itself rather dimly-lit (dimly-lit, that is, from the ‘normal’ perspective; given my ‘abnormalcy’, of course, I prefer to live in precisely such rooms). Unknown to myself, I had grown up with the perception that congested, shabby and dimly-lit areas are ‘Muslim’ ones, such that these socio-economic markers had become for me the identifying characteristics of a ‘Muslim’ zone. (This many years before I came across the word ‘ghetto’ or read about the Jewish ghettos in Europe.)

I was then in my second year of college at Delhi, and began, in an introspective turn, to turn my inner gaze onto whatever perceptions of otherness I might be harbouring within myself. I became acutely conscious of the various types of markers, socio-religious, socio-economic, and/or socio-cultural that are available as labels to ‘cut out’ the social world (what in technical terms is called the ‘social ontology’), or freeze its intractable messiness, into (ostensibly) neat (and usually binary) categories. To carry on with the ‘Muslim’ case, for example, during my time in the UK, quite often Muslim men passing me by on the street would greet me as ‘Brother!’, and this presumably because of my long beard. I would immediately return the greeting, though I would, at the same time, feel uneasy about the ‘reason’ why I had been marked out as ‘Muslim’. For these Muslim Brothers, keeping a long beard is apparently a distinctive (and supposedly decisive) mark of being a ‘Muslim’. (I suppose that my paternal grandmother, who is, for all practical purposes, an Islamophobe, would be horrified that her grandson has been perceived, and welcomed, as one of the Enemy.) Not only this, I always get into a spot of trouble at international airports : because of my ‘looks’ (an American friend at Cambridge once told me that I look somewhat like a starving Afghan refugee) and, in particular, my beard, I am subject to a special scrutiny, and on one occasion an intense interrogation was conducted at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi regarding why I was ‘re-entering’ India. (The passport official on that occasion should thank her stars that I saved her, and her ‘superiors’, a lot of trouble by forcefully keeping to myself the barrage of ironical replies I could have thrown at her. I really wanted to ask her if she would have put this question to Indira Gandhi herself when she was returning from Somerville College, Oxford.)

There are, of course, various types of historical ‘reasons’ for this perception of Muslims as the ‘others’, and this is not quite the place to rehearse them. Suffice it to say that the notion of Muslims as the descendants of marauders and invaders has descended (no pun intended) so deep into, or, to invert the spatial metaphor, ascended so high in, some forms of the ‘Hindu psyche’ that even Hindus who do not even know precisely where the Turks, the Huns, the Scythians or the Mughals came from are unanimous in their perception of Muslims as cherishing, deep under their skins, barbaric, ravenous and rapacious intentions. (As for myself, I would rather regard my presently-living paternal grandmother as a far more hostile and belligerent being than a Muslim friend simply because the latter’s remote ancestor six centuries ago happened to wield a sword in his hands.) Then, of course, there is the stock socio-cultural marker of food : the Muslims are the paradigmatic beef-eaters. The first time that I realised that Hindus do not eat beef was, in fact, as late (or as early?) as my tenth class in school when one of my aunts (who, perplexingly enough, is otherwise, to all intents and purposes, on quite friendly terms with the Muslim lady I referred to above) asked me not to date, or, to put it in less Americanised and more orthodox ‘Indian’ vocabulary, not to marry, a Muslim girl. On asking her the ‘reason’ for this interdict (for at that time, all girls somehow looked the same to me, and I was intrigued by the implication that it was possible, according to my aunt at least, to identify some of them as ‘Muslim’), I was told that Muslims are the ones who eat beef. For some reason, this spurred me on to find out more about Islam, and I was amazed to discover that what from an internal (what social anthropologists call emic) perspective is almost inconsequential to the self-understanding of Muslims themselves (for I myself soon encountered some Muslim friends who found beef tasteless) had been highlighted, from the external Hindu (etic in social anthropological terms) one, as the identifying marker of a ‘Muslim’. I began to ask practically every Hindu I knew precisely who s/he thought a Muslim was, and my irritation began to mount when I began to receive ad nauseam the same reply in the manner of an old gramophone record that had got stuck on one groove : ‘a beef-eater’. As moronic, I began to think, as ‘defining’ a Hindu as ‘a cow-worshipper’ : I would put down myself as ‘Hindu’ on a census report (even though I would actually prefer the Government of India not to ‘report’ my existence at all), but I can state in unequivocal terms that I am no worshipper of cows; indeed, to put the point bluntly, I have believed for a long time now that cows are some of the most superfluous entities on this planet and that instead of starving themselves to death on the Indian roads, in their attempt perhaps to emulate a Hindu ascetic, they should rather fill the bellies of emaciated men and women starving in the slums and elsewhere.

Another indicator of perceptual difference among Indians seems to be that of ‘colour’ : while I take it that not many Indians, because of the centuries of colonial experience, will be frank enough to admit this, ‘colour’ does play a vital role in ordering, classifying and evaluating the objects that constitute their social ontology. One of my earliest memories is, in fact, one of my paternal aunts commenting to another one : ‘We went to see a girl for him [that is, a cousin]. She is very fair-skinned, unlike the other one who was dark.’ This, of course, is no isolated incident, as anyone who reads the Times Matrimonials will know : almost every girl in its columns is either ‘fair-skinned’ or has a ‘wheatish complexion’. (Though I wonder if, for the rice-belt of India at least, the last phrase should instead be ‘ricish complexion’. It was, in fact, in these matrimonials, which as I always say, should be renamed patrimonials, that I first encountered the word ‘complexion’. On asking a friend in my college what sort of a complexion she thought I had, I had to satisfy myself with the somewhat obscure reply : ‘I think you have many complexes, yes, but otherwise you are rather complexion-less.’ Perhaps I was not ‘mature’ enough to understand that remark.) Again, it is symptomatic that millions seem to buy a so-called beauty cream that sells itself as ‘Fair and Lovely’ : apparently, it is not possible for an Indian woman to be the latter without being the former. Now, the perceptions of white as related to purity, innocence and spotlessness, and of black as signifying impurity, maliciousness and offensiveness are, of course, rooted in the classical (post-Vedic) Sanskritic literature. Sattva, the guna representing the ‘saintly’ qualities is associated with the white colour, and tamas which stands for the ‘hellish’ attributes is connected with the black colour. One can go off into all sorts of tangents from here, but I shall indicate only one, without entering into an extensive discussion on the matter. The term varna has been hotly debated by various scholars, and, in particular, by Dalit writers who argue that it should be translated as ‘colour’ such that the classical Hindu varna-asrama system is to be regarded as a ‘racist’ one. (Hence the notorious ‘fair-skinned’ Aryan versus ‘dark-complexioned’ Dravidian debate.) Whether or not this claim is valid, it does at least underscore the prevalence of various typologies of colour-association in the mental architecture of classical, and arguably ‘modern’, Hindu thought. Here are two instances. Some months ago, when I was in the ‘city of my birth’, one of my uncles put this question to me : ‘Are the Negros thieves and scoundrels?’ It took me several moments to recover from this question. For one, it was, as it so happens, the first time that I had encountered the word ‘Negro’ outside a novel, a documentary or a movie. And, for another, I was struck to realise how the White perception of Blacks as inherently aggressive, mendacious and violent had been transferred, through the invisible links that facilitate such cultural transfers of social perceptions, to my uncle far away in a corner of India. Perhaps he was unaware that his perception of the ‘Negros’ as hostile beings was, in fact, a neat (neo-colonial) replication of the British perception (though one with several outstanding exceptions) of the ‘Indian natives’ as such. (I wonder sometimes how the Kenyans and the Nigerians who study in the University of Delhi and elsewhere in India are ‘received’ by their landlords and classmates. I will not be surprised if the latter fear that the Motherland is being polluted by the presence of these ‘Negros’.) Again, some weeks ago, a cousin of mine sent me a text message on my cell which was a ‘SMS joke’ beginning with the question : ‘What did God say when he [a pronoun that was sufficient in itself to raise my indignation] created the first Negro?’ Perhaps for my cousin, this was an ‘innocent’ joke, and I too swallowed my indignation and took it in that ‘spirit’. At the same time, however, this led to me reflect on how certain perceptions are, depending variously on your lived experiences, are no ‘laughing matter’.

It was no laughing matter, for example, for some of the ‘Russians’ (I am using the umbrella-term here for the sake of convenience) at Cambridge who had gone, out of curiosity, to a musical called ‘Stalin’ at the Cambridge Arts Theatre which was, in some ways at least, a rather hilarious enactment of some of Stalin’s foibles. For me, who have access to only second-hand reports from books and documentaries about the spectre and the terrors of Stalinism, the musical was in some ways an ‘innocent’ jibe at Stalin. (And indeed, I am not sure that I was able to grasp all the allusions that it threw at the audience.) For the ‘Russians’, on the other hand, the events parodied in it were too close to their memories, and hence too direct and too painful, and were perhaps reminiscent of atrocities committed on their own near ones in the not too recent past. In other words, though we all have certain perceptions of otherness --- for such is necessarily the case unless we believe in the lazy slogan, ‘We are all the same in absolutely every way’, a slogan which, at first sight, seems to be very ‘inclusive’ but can rapidly turn out to possess ‘totalitarian’ implications by seeking to flatten out all distinctiveness into one homogenous ‘lump’ --- the perceptions that are acceptable to us depend vitally on what I have referred to here as the content and the nature of our ‘lived experience.’

For instance, one my greatest passions is watching World War II movies and documentaries (especially ones relating to the so-called Jewish Question), and I have, over the last eight years, absorbed such a voluminous amount of material relating to the Holocaust that today whenever I see the Hindu Swastika in a home, a hotel sign-board, a text-book, a taxi, an auto, or a T-shirt, a shiver of horror runs through my spine even though I am aware of its distinctive significance within the highly specific context of the Hindu socio-religious order. I am even more horrified when I see, every now and then, a young college-boy or college-girl sporting, apparently in the attempt to be ‘cool’, a T-shirt with the slanted, that is, the one slanted slightly towards the right, (Nazi) Swastika. What is even more ironic is that some of these students are from the North-Eastern part of India, and are what in the mainstream sociological literature are referred to (rather glibly) as the ‘tribals’. (Which itself is another perception of difference, this one between the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘margins.’ For who has delineated these ‘margins’? And where precisely is this ‘mainstream’?) As the ‘marginalized’ peoples of India, for such is often their self-understanding, surely they should be the last ones to brandish a symbol that stood for the marginalization, to the point of annihilation, of almost a third of European Jewry.

That leads me on to register another signifier of otherness : the rather mysterious category of the ‘tribal’. I do not remember precisely when but at some ‘point in time’ I did become vaguely aware that almost all the maid-servants who were employed in the house (note again that I do not say ‘home’; English is such a beautiful language which it comes to these subtleties) were ‘tribals’. (Now, of course, it is a bit clearer to me today than it was earlier why this was so : to put it concisely, ‘tribal labour’ is cheaper and more readily available than ‘mainstream labour’.) They all had, in the truly immortal words of one of my paternal aunts, the ‘tribal cut’, which, when translated into anthropological jargon, would read as : ‘possessing Mongoloid or Tibeto-Burman features’. I was rather intrigued that in the social perception of those in the ‘mainstream’, the tribals were supposed to simultaneously harbour contradictory features : on the one hand, they were supposed to be docile, shy, coy, quiet, pliant and pliable, but, on the other, they were also feared as dark, sinister, irascible, petulant, and hostile beings. Thus, as for the maid-servants, they were, on the one hand, praised (and prized) as hard-working, dutiful, respectful and obedient, but were also, on the other, viewed rather suspiciously as irresponsible, unreliable, vicious and resentful. Much later I was to realise that there are significant parallels between the perceptions of the Whites concerning the Blacks, of the colonial masters regarding the natives, and of the ‘mainstream’ relating to the ‘tribals’ : in each of these cases, the former re-present the latter as possessing contradictory characteristics, such that the Whites, the colonialists and the ‘mainstream’ respectively believe the Blacks, the natives and the ‘tribals’ respectively to be simultaneously docile and timid, on the one hand, and hostile and aggressive, on the other. Not that, I guess, many in the ‘mainstream’, especially the ‘educated’ ones among them, would be willing to admit their perception of the ‘tribals’ as people with split identities. Nevertheless, this ‘tribalism’ continues to be one of the most significant signifiers of difference, as exemplified in the delightfully precise remark of one of these aunts as to why she did not like the girl that one of her relations was ‘dating’ : ‘Everything is OK with her. But, then, she has the tribal cut.’

Some months ago, I went to visit my mother’s Muslim friend. The old house was gone, and two floors had been raised over it. The dimly-lit room too had disappeared, and all the rooms were now bright, well-lit, and freshly painted. Her (only) daughter had married a Hindu in the meantime. Had that not, to put it mildly, raised some eyebrows? In return, I was offered a most intriguing story about her ‘roots’ : one of her ancestors had been a disciple of the Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti at Ajmere. ‘We believe’, she went on to say, ‘that all these categories that we apply pertain only to the flesh, to the masks we wear, to these fragile structures that we carry around ourselves. But deep down, we are all the same.’ I would not quite phrase the matter in these precise terms (for, as I have noted above, the argument that we are ‘all ultimately the same’ has been used to justify totalitarian regimes which have denied, and suppressed, alterity and heterogeneity); I would rather say that there are no inherent marks or attributes that allow us to evaluate human beings in terms of the categories of ‘superior’ or ‘inferior’. Nevertheless, after a long time in my life, I felt, even if for a short while, that I not just in a building with four walls (a ‘house’), but also breathing an atmosphere that was neither hostile to genuine difference nor inhospitable to the search for a common humanity (a ‘home’) even in the midst of our seemingly radical dissimilarities.

Then, of course, after dinner at her place, I walked out into the streets of the city of my birth : the city whose roads are apparently filled with Muslims, Muslim girls, Negros and people with the ‘tribal cut’.

The Summer of '06

I got my first real six-string

Bought it at the five-and-dime

Played it till my fingers bled

It was the summer of 69

Me and some guys from school

Had a band and we tried real hard

Jimmy quit and Jody got married

I shoulda known wed never get far

Oh when I look back now

That summer seemed to last forever

And if I had the choice

Ya - Id always wanna be there

Those were the best days of my life

Aint no use in complainin

When you got a job to do

Spent my evenins down at the drive-in

And thats when I met you

Standin on your mamas porch

You told me that youd wait forever

Oh and when you held my hand

I knew that it was now or never

Those were the best days of my life

Back in the summer of 69

Man we were killin time

We were young and restless

We needed to unwindI guess

nothin can last forever - forever

And now the times are changin

Look at everything thats come and gone

Sometimes when I play that old six-string

I think about ya wonder what went wrong

Standin on your mamas porch

You told me it would last forever

Oh the way you held my hand

I knew that it was now or never

Those were the best days of my life

Back in the summer of 69

I still remember the first time I heard (bits of) this song : the evening of July 14, 1995. I was walking down one of the empty corridors of Mukherjee West in St Stephen’s, Delhi the night before the opening of college for the autumn semester, 1995, when some of these words came floating through a half-empty door. Suddenly, the music was turned off and instead a question was barked out to me from a distance : ‘Are you a fresher?’ The door was now flung wide open and I was asked to come in. A flurry of some introductory questions followed in quick succession with the music turned back on : When did I move in? What course would I pursue in college? Where did I complete my schooling?

The lights went out around this time, one of the many unpredictable power cuts that I would get used to during the next few years, and I was taken out on to the balcony facing the noisy basketball court.

‘Why did you choose to study physics?’
‘Well, it has something to do about power.’
‘What about power? What does that have to do with physics?’
‘You can want to have power either over other people or over yourself. Those who seek the former become engineers, architects, town planners, business executives, diplomats, psychiatrists, and I.A.S. officers. Those who want the latter could try studying physics.’
‘And what makes you think that studying physics will give you power over yourself?’
‘If you want to study physics, it could be because you have a certain faith in reality. A faith that lying under the apparent chaos, indeterminacies, puzzles and disorders which strike your eyes, there is a deep, cosmic order that you have to find out through the formal beauty of mathematical equations. A faith that ultimately, at some level or the other, everything is interconnected, symmetrical and harmonious, and that consequently there is no genuine randomness or discord in the world. Everything absolutely follows some pattern, even if that elusive pattern cannot be discerned by the physical eye. Once you have this faith, and nurture it everyday, and let it grow in strength, you begin to gain power over yourself.’

Even today I often find myself returning to this somewhat surreal conversation. Those were the days when I was in love in numbers, especially with the abstract symmetry of mathematics which I believed (and, in fact, still believe) to be truly timeless, far removed from the messiness and the muddledness of the world around me. Today it is instead words, their delightful playfulnesses, their passionate absences, their hidden presences, their silent yearnings, and their intractable obscurities, that I am in love with, and yet I still remember the exhilaration I would feel on solving a partial differential equation and knowing why the so-called natural world ‘behaves’ (and, more strongly, has to ‘behave’) the way that it does. The conviction, that there is a deep mysterious order underlying the universe, an order that human beings did not simply ‘invent’ but which pre-exists them, is, in fact, one that has never left me. And yet, there is much in what I believed at that time which makes me queasy in my reflective moments.. I would today not make the sharp dichotomy that I proposed to that senior in the summer of 1995 about seeking power over others versus seeking power over oneself. To begin with, the word ‘power’ and its cognates have become deeply distasteful to me for I now view power and domination as co-terminous; and, for a second, I realised somewhere along the line that seeking power over oneself can often, and does, become a subtly disguised way of seeking power over others. The ponderous dilemma, then, is how to attain the former, in however fragmentary and incomplete a manner, in such a way that it does not lead to the latter. And, third, I believe today that the very attempt to search for a complete explanation for anything, perhaps in the form of a grand theory of everything, will, sooner or later, inevitably lead to (implicit or explicit) forms of violence.

Nevertheless, as I moved through my years at St Stephen’s, I met an increasing number of people who seemed to be devoted, almost fanatically, to this song, until in my third year I finally began to live in a ‘shady’ corridor in Mukherjee West with four other Stephanians who played it at full volume every now and then, and especially in the hour before dinner when three hundred ravenous wolves readied themselves for the descent on the mess chicken. One of them was Vineet who listened to it religiously (almost) every midnight. I always told him that the song was ‘bad poetry with good noise, or perhaps the other way round’, but, perhaps unknown to me, it began to grow upon me, and I would often catch myself humming the tune. On the night after the last exam in third year, Vineet took me on his bike to the restaurant Karim’s, nestled in one of the narrow lanes near the Jama Masjid bustling with countless traders, passers-by, veiled women and shop-keepers living inside the rather ominously-termed ‘walled city’. After dinner, we went for a long ride along the Yamuna, and sometime around midnight sat down under a massive oak tree near the quiet river. The silence, however, was soon shattered by a silver-painted Maruti Suzuki that whizzed past on the empty road above us, its car-radio screaming out the ‘Summer of ‘69’.That was, in fact, the last time that I listened to that song alongside Vineet. He died in a motor-bike accident three weeks later on the road to Jaipur. Apparently, he had been listening to Bryan Adams at full volume on his ear-phones and had failed to hear the loud honking of a truck trying to overtake him.

After some months, in the autumn of 1998, I found myself on a plane bound for Trinity College, Cambridge. I had just moved into my small room in Angel Court when someone with a shock of green hair knocked on my door.
‘Did you arrive today? I am Mark Ingram. Care for some coffee?’
Mark had moved in a few days earlier and his room was dotted with odds and ends, including a gigantic poster of Simone de Beauvoir. At that time, I had only the vaguest of notions who she was (indeed, I was under the somewhat mistaken impression that a ‘feminist’ was a woman who was trying her best to be ‘feminine’), and seeing me staring at her, Mark immediately proceeded to put in a disclaimer. (I soon realised that he apparently found it impossible to say anything at all without loading his remarks with a series of disclaimers.)
‘Oh, don’t get me wrong now. I don’t like her at all.’
‘Why have you put up her poster in that case?’
‘Precisely because I don’t like her at all. You see, imitation is the best form of dislike. Hold on, let me put on some music as the water boils.’
It was the ‘Summer of ‘69’ all over again.
‘Do you like this song? Bryan Adams at his best, eh?’
‘Well, I have been made to like it.’
‘Have you ever thought about the number ‘69?’
‘What about it?’
‘Well, why is this guy singing about 1969? Why not 1847, 1914, 1949, 1959 or 1984? What is so special about the summer of 1969 that he needs to go on shouting at the top of his voice about it?’

It would take me another two or three years before something of the range of significances of the year 1969 would begin to dawn upon me : Vietnam and the cloud of anti-war protests, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, the counter-culture movements, the ‘sense of an ending’, Jimmy Hendrix, transcendental meditation and the Beatles, free love, gurus, psychedelic experience and so on and on. However, as I look back on those years, I now realise that that question put to me by Mark Ingram on my very first day in Cambridge taught me an enduring lesson. I clearly remember feeling extremely stupid on reflecting that I had been listening to the song for three years or so without ever enquiring into why Bryan Adams was singing about 1969 and not just any other ‘damn year’. In his own way, and perhaps even unknown to himself, Mark taught me to question precisely that which I had ‘taken for granted’. As the years passed on, and I was meticulously groomed by some of Cambridge’s finest dons into the subtle art of writing essays for the somewhat daunting tutorials, I constantly kept in mind the question, ‘Why 1969?’ every time I would begin to write an essay, in order to remind myself that I must question precisely that which I thought was obvious to me. It might sound somewhat bizarre to put the matter in this way, but it was a ‘pop’ song that made me start ‘thinking’ in a manner that I had never done before, by diligently and unswervingly pushing a single line of enquiry until the very ‘limits of thought’ (though whether such limits exist at all is another, very interesting, question).

Except on another occasion, I never heard this song during my days in Cambridge. This was during the Christmas vacations in the winter of 2000 when Cambridge was clothed with a fine layer of the whitest snow. Walking through Neville’s Court towards the Backs on the night of Christmas Eve in near-freezing conditions, I stood for a while in the darkness on the stone bridge over the Cam. At that moment, the words of the ‘Summer of ’69’ came floating to my ears through an open window on the second floor facing the river. It was only then that I became vaguely aware of someone standing behind me. I turned around and saw a middle-aged woman, dressed in heavy woollens, staring at me.

‘Yes, those were my best days too. I was nineteen in the summer of 1969, you know? Oh, those mad days! That was the year that I met Tim. We were protesting against the Americans in Vietnam in front of the American Embassy in London. It looks so far away today, and yet lives on in me every day of my life.’
‘Well, I have learnt a lot too from this song. Friends I have lost, and new ones I have met, all lie hidden somewhere along its lines.’
‘Do you study here in Trinity? You did not go home for Christmas?’
‘You think I need a home?’
‘Oh, come on now, I did not say that! But did your mother not ask you to come home?’
‘Well, she died some years ago.’

There was a long silence between us, one that cut through the cold wintry air.

‘Will you walk down the Avenue with me?’

We walked along the bare winter-struck leafless trees in silence. All around us was the beautiful bleakness of the harsh English winter. When we reached Queen’s Road, she paused, turned towards me and looked into my eyes.

‘In the winter of 1975, I lost my baby boy. He died of meningitis, barely three months old. If he were alive today, I guess he would have been of your age. Since then, I have lived largely on the kindness of strangers. Thank you.’

She turned around, and slowly began to walk away towards Grange Road. Her feet left silent prints in the fresh snow.

As I moved through my Ph.D. years, I almost forgot this song, though some of its words would keep on coming back to me once in a while. The only other time I heard it during my time in England was, in fact, on December 30, 2005 when I was travelling to Heathrow in a Stagecoach bus. I could not help reflecting then on how it had, in a sense, welcomed me to Cambridge in 1998 and was, in a manner of speaking, bidding me goodbye in 2005.

Since then the song has never quite left me. On February 10 this year, one day before my birthday, four of my ‘Summer of ’69’ friends who had lived in 1998 on the same corridor in Mukherjee West, St Stephen’s happened, by a series of most extraordinary coincidences, to be in Delhi on the same night, and we all ‘met up’ in a restaurant in South Delhi. It so turned out that all four of them had got married in the intervening period, and I was rather taciturn for a while, not wishing to bring up anything that would, without my realising it, be viewed as ‘politically incorrect’ in such an august company of four women.

Thankfully, one of them broke the ice : ‘I have a heard a lot about you from Vishal. You love to ask a lot of questions, don’t you?’
‘Do I?’
‘So you do! And why is that?’
‘It has something to do with Bryan Adams.’
‘Bryan Adams? Who is he?’

Vishal now turned towards me from across the table, his mouth half-filled with a chicken burger, and growled at me : ‘Man, you still listen to that song? What was it called?’
‘The summer of ‘69?’
‘Yes, yes. It’s been ages since I heard it.’
‘Well, in a way that’s just right. Your summer days are over now.’
‘You mean I have reached my autumn?’
‘Perhaps. But then this is not quite the right company to admit it, right?’

And then the main course arrived, and Bryan Adams was buried under the weight of the chicken and the mutton kebabs.

Some days ago, I went back to Mukherjee West on the final day of submission of forms for admission to St Stephen’s, 2006 - 2007. The corridors were deserted once again, as they had been on that day ten years ago in the summer of 1995. I waited for a while in front of the brown door of my old room, vaguely remembering the indistinct echoes of the ‘Summer of ‘69’ floating down the brightly-lit corridor as hungry hordes had once rushed down the stairs for their dinner.

I walked through the college towards Andrew’s Gate, past the cricket field where a pack of dogs were having a ‘field-day’ and finally onto the main road. A silver-painted Maruti Suzuki glided by, loudly honking at the rickshaw pullers, stopped beside the bus stand, and a young girl with delicately cropped hair and a pair of black goggles stepped out from it. Her garish red T-shirt sported an image of Che Guevara which screamed out : ‘The revolution is in you!’ She walked back towards the car and snarled at the boy sitting at the wheel : ‘For heaven’s sake, Vineet, don’t put on that horrible ‘Summer of ‘69’ again. You are going to go deaf with that noise in your ears. And make me deaf as well.’ I was desperately hoping to hear the retort, ‘What makes you think that you are not already deaf?’, but the poor boy was perhaps too peeved for that. As they say, no man is a hero to his valet, especially when the valet happens to be a ‘liberated woman’.

In any case, I slowly walked past the car, a gentle sadness sinking to my bones. I had lost one Vineet to the ‘Summer of ’69’ many years ago. But the song was living on in and through another Vineet.

The Birth of Irony : Or, the life of a ‘social anthropologist’

Looking back over the years, I realise that I can say, if with some diffidence, that I became an ironist, almost overnight, one cold misty winter afternoon in 1990 during my grandfather’s funeral. His children (or, to be precise, most of them) who had gathered for the funeral feast (itself an irony, when you think of people feasting over a dead man’s body, if not his soul), were caught up in a dense network of intrigue and scheming over the division of his property. To this day I have never been able to overcome the instinctive horror that runs through me whenever I hear of brothers and sisters settling property issues on legal documents. This ruthless incursion of the juridical-legal complex into the life-world of familial relations implies, to me at least, that brothers and sisters do not genuinely trust one another; indeed, that they suspect one another of being thieves or brigands waiting to pounce upon one another unless their assets are clearly enumerated and declared on paper stamped with the aura of the law. What was so ironical about what goes on, possibly in every family with two (or more) siblings when it comes to the question of the division or distribution of parental/ancestral property? This very fact that for all the ‘tribalistic’ claims that brothers and sisters keep on repeating ad nauseam that blood is thicker than water, surely it seems to be ‘liquid money’ that is much thicker than both of the former! If they do not have sincere faith in one another’s honesty, integrity, and goodness, why not make it clear at the very beginning instead of having to wait for the morning when the grim bespectacled estate lawyer will arrive on the scene?

That, however, was only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Though I was probably unaware of the word ‘irony’ and its cognates at that time, I realise now that I have spent the greater part of my adolescent life as an ironist, constantly shuttling back and forth between two allegedly fixed and clearly identifiable poles, not waiting for too long at either. I have thereby become a ‘man who refuses to be moulded into a myth’, though it is not always easy to communicate the pain, the isolation, and the loneliness that is also associated with this persistent refusal. I shall mention three such groups of poles here, ‘Assamese’ and/or ‘Bengali’; ‘Hindu’ and/or ‘Catholic’; and, finally, ‘Indian’ and/or ‘European’ : whereas people around me have sometimes forced me to accept one of each of these binaries, I have constantly attempted complex negotiations through the broken, and uneasy, middle across each of them. And this was possible only if I were to live as an ironist; if I were constantly aware of my contextualised ‘location’ in deep socio-cultural matrices; if I were to remind myself incessantly that the views I hold and the beliefs I practice are, to a significant extent, a ‘product’ of my childhood upbringing and adolescent experiences, which cannot therefore be ‘universalisable’ or superimposed on others without further ado.

First, then, the binary of ‘Assamese’ and/or ‘Bengali’. I once horrified an elderly Assamese gentleman with my comment, stemming ultimately from a conviction whose intensity has not dimmed down the years, that I am essentially ‘Bengali’ and only accidentally ‘Assamese’. Or to put it a bit more gnomically, this is the conviction that a wo/man is not born as, but becomes, a ‘Bengali’. (Which is an extension of Simone de Beavouir’s celebrated dictum : ‘One is not born as, but becomes, a woman’.) What, however, is it about ‘Bengali-ness’ that drew me, and continues to entice me, so deeply and powerfully towards a tongue and a set of cultural patterns which are, at least in the opinion of some of the ‘Assamese’, alien, forbidding, and strange? In attempting to answer this question, I have always sought to avoid the misreading associated with what has come to be known (and, rightly maligned) as ‘essentialization’, that is, the fallacy that is committed when an ‘interested onlooker’ picks out one strand out from a complex matrix that characterises ‘another culture’, and puts this forth as its ‘quintessence’. Such was the misreading perpetrated by several writers during the colonial period when India was stereotyped as an ‘essentially’ spiritual land of everlasting mystical truths, thereby ignoring the rich traditions of atheistic, sceptical, ‘humanistic’, and agnostic thought in the classical heritage. They were, of course, not utterly off course (no pun intended) in discerning the occurrence of certain ‘spiritual’ components in Indian civilization, but they overlooked the presence of other quite ‘anti-spiritual’ (or what we might today call ‘secular’) aspects, and thereby constructed an homogenous entity called ‘Spiritual India’ which even today does the rounds not only within the country but also in various Western circles.

Over the years, I have become extremely sensitive to this issue of subsuming entire patterns of socio-cultural existence under ‘globalising’ umbrellas which forcefully (indeed, violently) wipe out or discard those which cannot somehow be squeezed into its cover. And given the fact that I regard myself as essentially Bengali, does this self-understanding not make me particularly guilty of a similar act of picking out some constituents of ‘Bengali life’ out of their total complex in specific settings, and raising them to the timeless status of ‘Bengali-ness’? This is a question that has bothered me off and on during my interactions with ‘native’ speakers of the Bengali language (this, incidentally, is my ‘definition’ of a ‘Bengali’, and a parallel definition holds, for that matter, for an ‘Assamese’), and in the process of such relations I have found myself time and again in the role of a ‘social anthropologist’ who is at once almost completely immersed in the life-styles that she is trying to indwell from the within, and yet feels a certain degree of ‘conceptual distance’ or ‘alienation’ or ‘cognitive dissonance’ from the ‘tribe’ that she has consciously made her second (and sometimes only) home.

I entered the multifaceted world of what I have here tentatively called ‘Bengali-ness’ through the Ariadne’s thread of the two specific pieces of Rabindranath Tagore and the songs of the late mediaeval wandering minstrels or troubadours, the Bauls (and, as it turns out, the two pieces are, as we say, of one piece, for Tagore himself was strongly influenced by some of the themes in Baul music). Thus every time I meet a ‘Bengali’ (note the definition above) I unwittingly find myself trying to shift, or at least, orient the conversation, however subtly, towards either Tagore or the Bauls. Great indeed is my joy, akin to a sense of ‘home-coming’ (even if a ‘home-coming’ in the reverse), when it turns out that my interlocutor him/herself is immersed or rooted in these two, and it is always a certain dejection that overcomes me when I meet a ‘Bengali’ who is apathetic, or even antipathetic, towards them. This, however, only raises the ponderous question of whether I am guilty of a certain form of ‘interpretive violence’ in trying to see ‘Bengali-ness’ through these two components : in expecting, or hoping, that every ‘Bengali’ that I meet or talk to should be grounded in Tagore and the Bauls, am I not culpable of the very same gross ‘cultural stereotyping’ that I have warned against in the preceding? Or, in other words, have I not ‘reduced’ the rich complexity and diversity of ‘Bengali-ness’ into two signifiers that I have set up as its ‘essential’ markers? What about the Bengal of Anglicized Calcutta, the Bengal of the C.P.I. and Naxalbari, the Bengal of Suman Chatterji and Mohinir Ghuraguli, the Bengal of the interminable adda on the road-sides, the Bengal of Durga Puja and Kalibari, and the Bengal of the rapidly vanishing quaint exotica of North Calcutta?

It was a long engagement with this painful question that gradually brought home to me that though it was/is a constitutive part of my self-understanding that I am essentially Bengali, in approaching ‘Bengali-ness’ I remain nevertheless a ‘social anthropologist’ as a person who is highly conscious that he is an ‘eclectic’ figure. That is, I pick and choose certain elements (but not all) that lure me, and seek to combine these with other elements that go to form my self-identity (which itself is not a static entity but a dynamic process). And when I go back to the world of ‘Assamese-ness’, I try, almost unconsciously, to see or unearth these very same elements, and call myself an ‘Assamese’ only to the extent, which is usually very limited, that I actually find their parallels there. Consequently, I am a ‘social anthropologist’ even with regard to the ‘Assamese’ : in some genuine cases, I think I ‘know’ them, but I cannot truly ‘understand’ them, and this lack of ‘understanding’ precisely because they have not stepped into the world of ‘Bengali-ness’ to the extent, and in the specific ways, that I have.

Hence, when it comes to the ‘binary’ of ‘Assamese’ and/or ‘Bengali’ I have to live as an ironist. With the ‘Assamese’, I desperately seek, usually in vain, to find elements of ‘Bengali-ness’ in their lives, and craftily pretend to be an ‘Assamese’ for the rest of the time (for their sanity, not mine), even when carefully hiding my bitter disappointment at my failure. With the ‘Bengalis’, on the other hand, I have to remain conscious of committing yet again the fallacy of stereotyping an extremely vibrant and multifaceted world with the stamp of Tagore and the Bauls, while yet hoping for that encounter with that ‘Bengali’ (who is, after all, thankfully not that hard to come by) who shares my passion for the former. Consequently, the hard-nosed and exasperated Census official who might tell me someday, ‘But you have to be either Assamese or Bengali, you can’t be both!’, I can only reply, ‘I am neither ‘Assamese’ nor ‘Bengali’ because I am something of both at the same time!’

An ironist is thus a ‘hybrid’ person, and is a threat in some ways to those who seek to maintain the social fabric by inscribing onto it the distinct silhouettes of clearly-defined, stabilized and secure identities. Consequently, an ironist lives on the fractured middle where s/he is exposed to fire from both sides. From the (orthodox) ‘Assamese’, I have to bear the brunt of having ‘diluted’ the ‘validity’ of ‘Assamese’ culture by ‘mixing’ it with the ‘contaminated’ and ‘alien’ elements of ‘Bengali-ness’. For some of the (orthodox) ‘Bengalis’, on the other hand, I would be at the end of the day a ‘freak’, a sort of ‘cultural tourist’ who selectively appropriates whatever suits his fancy without wanting to participate in the minutiae of the life-worlds of ‘Bengali-ness’. On both sides, then, I could be accused of a lack of ‘authenticity’, of ‘loyalty’, of ‘allegiance’ and of ‘steadfastness’. Why, indeed, trust someone who is ultimately neither here nor there, who is (apparently) free from all cultural fastenings or roots?

Is this alleged deficiency of ‘cultural moorings’ a source of ‘liberation’ or of ‘condemnation’ for the ironist? Probably both. To take the latter first, some form of ‘condemnation’ because it involves a certain amount of ‘loneliness’, associated particularly with the cold realisation that it is not everyday that I will meet someone who will be able to genuinely appreciate my ongoing experiments with ‘hybridity’, someone who will not wave away with a scornful gesture my ‘lack of authenticity’; and yet at the same time of ‘liberation’ because it infuses me with the hope that there are indeed some ‘hybrid’ people such as me whom I might run into round the next street-corner.

Some of these complicated cultural dynamics are also manifest in my ongoing negotiations between the two dense life-worlds of ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Roman Catholicism’, but I shall necessarily be somewhat brief in this matter. (Ultimately these are also reflected in my Ph.D. thesis.) It was in class six that I first came across this text from the New Testament, ‘Foxes have their holes, and birds of the air have their nests, but the Son of Man [i.e. Jesus] has no place to rest his head’. As it turns out, this text fell upon me with something of the gravity of a Upanisadic mahavakya (‘great saying’), and I found myself returning to it, mesmerised by the notion of the deity who ‘had no place to rest his head’. I was even more impressed by the rather austere lives of the Catholic Brothers and Sisters in my school who were trying to ‘imitate’ the Son of Man by dedicating themselves (however imperfectly) to the ideal of a human community with no internal divisions while seemingly not having any place to rest their own heads. Thus, just as I entered ‘Bengali-ness’ through Tagore and the Bauls and began thereafter to look backwards at ‘Assamese-ness’ in the light of the former, I stepped into the intricate socio-religious patterns of Roman Catholicism (and, more broadly, of Christianity) with this text, and then started to cast a backward glance at ‘Hinduism’ through it, looking specifically for those elements in ‘Hinduism’ wherein I could hear its echoes or see parallels to it.

A set of questions, similar to the ones raised above, however, have again haunted me here : have I not ‘reduced’ the sheer complexity of the beliefs, the conceptual frameworks and the liturgical practices of Roman Catholicism by picking out just one text out of a hundred others? and, surely there is much more to the lived worlds of ‘Hinduism’ than a motley band of ascetics and so-called world renouncers? And, similarly, I find myself immersed in a different sort of a ‘hybridity’, this time with respect to these two religious patterns : to the (orthodox) ‘Roman Catholics’, I am, at best, an agnostic (for ‘agnosticism’ is the most accurate description of myself in ‘religious matters’) and, at worst, a dilly-dallying indecisive ‘heretic’; whereas to the (orthodox) Hindu (though it is by no means easy to delineate the contours of ‘Hindu orthodoxy’), I have muddied the clear and pristine waters of ‘timeless Hinduism’ by importing the (‘foreign’) contagion of Roman Catholicism. And yet, if the Census official were to indignantly protest to me, ‘But you can’t be both Hindu and Roman Catholic!’, I can only repeat with somewhat tiring consistency, ‘I am neither ‘Roman Catholic’ nor ‘Hindu’ because I am something of both of them at the same time!’

Thirdly, am I ‘Indian’ or ‘European’? A straightforward response, in keeping with the foregoing discussion, would simply be to interrogate my easy assumption, implicit in this question, that there exist two neatly identifiable, and hermetically sealed, entities, one called ‘Indian’ and the other ‘European’. But how could I, a person who, on the one hand, not only speaks but also thinks in English all the time, but who, on the other hand, firmly believes, rather ‘parochially’, that there is no language as spontaneous and beautiful as Bengali, regard myself as either ‘Indian’ or ‘European’? Surely this dichotomy between ‘Indian’ and/or ‘Europe’ completely breaks down in my case? Nevertheless, as a personal confession, until I went to the United Kingdom in 1998, I did believe that ‘attachment to the family’ was a distinctively ‘Indian’ trait; and having absorbed some portions of home-spun ‘second-hand’ literature about ‘Europe’ was under the (false) impression that ‘detachment from the family’ was a distinctive ‘European’ trend. After a few years of my ‘sojourn in the West’ I realised that there indeed was a significant grain of truth in this popular re-presentation of the ‘West’ as a land composed of decontextualised freely-floating social atoms, uncoupled from their familial milieus. This perception, which I was able to ‘verify’ or substantiate on several occasions, then became my point of departure for approaching the ‘West’, and in the presence of such ‘detached atoms’ I felt for the first time in my life very much, and indeed truly, ‘at home’, for all the paradoxical ring of this statement. And yet, I was only too aware that I was engaging in yet another type of crude ‘cultural stereotyping’, this time of the ‘West’, for there are vast swathes, spreading over the Mediterranean, Southern Europe, and the Great Plains of the United States, where family bonds remain vital, powerful, and strong (though, in my more uncharitable description, ‘totalitarian’). And having ‘entered’ the West with this ‘hermeneutical’ key, I once again began to bend over backwards (perhaps somewhat in the manner of my predecessor at Trinity College, Jawaharlal Nehru) for my personal ‘Discovery of India’; and I indeed ‘discovered’ that the rejection of (or expression of distaste towards) the family was by no means unknown to the classical traditions of India, that Buddhism, Jainism, and (to a lesser degree) the occasional bhakti ‘revivals’ viewed (though in their highly distinctive ways) the family as an inward-looking ‘tribalistic’ system, somewhat in the manner of a remorseless octopus that drags individuals willy-nilly towards its insatiable cavernous maws.

Thus I found myself once again moving back and forth between ‘India’ and ‘Europe’. The more I ‘discovered’ in European writers, thinkers, poets, iconoclasts, feminists, nihilists, novelists, and theorists confirmation of my (almost) life-long ‘prejudice’ that the family is ‘an insidious institution created by men to dominate (‘their’) women and to punish (‘their’) children’, the more I ‘discovered’ side by side elements in ‘Indian’ civilization certain resonances and parallels of this view. And yet, questions similar to the ones that I have flagged in the foregoing, are not far behind me : is rejection of the family the only aspect of ‘European’ civilization? and, have I disregarded the existence of the so-called extended Indian family?

Thus I have become, over the years, a complex and highly unstable ‘product’ of uncompleted and fragmentary mediations between ‘Assamese-ness’ and ‘Bengali-ness’; between ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Roman Catholicism’; and between ‘Indian-ness’ and ‘European-ness’; and I carry around within and on my person the ‘effects’ or the traces, some perhaps hidden to my own introspective gaze, of these provisional and partial experimentations. I keep on moving dialectically between the two bounds of each of these ‘dualities’, and feel somewhat apprehensive and distressed in the presence of those whom I feel have got ‘stuck’ to either of them. Thus, a person who describes him/herself to me as an ‘orthodox Roman Catholic’ makes me as uneasy as someone who resolutely insists on something called ‘orthodox Hinduism’; and someone who maintains that there is an ‘Indian mind’ which is absolutely different from, and alien to, a putative ‘European mind’ makes me highly uncomfortable.

And yet, for all that, I am marked by a profound ambivalence in that I do at certain times envy such people. For they enjoy a certain stability and security that is denied to me, the self-assurance of knowing where their ‘roots’ are, the certainty of remaining clear about where they ‘belong to’; whereas ‘home’ for me is an interim construct built out of makeshift scraps that I have collected from here and there, crumbs whose ‘authenticity’ I cannot guarantee to those ‘purists’ who may wish to examine them. Slightly altering the words of Salman Rushdie in a similar context, ‘home’ for the ironist is an ‘edifice we build of out scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved.’ To be forever ‘on the move’ in this way might seem a welcome style of living to those who believe that they are trapped within some structure (whatever this might be). But to the ironist himself, he can be never sure whether his ‘hybridity’ is ultimately a font of ‘liberation’ or of ‘condemnation’.

Perhaps it is neither of them, because it is something of both at the same time!

February 11, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

I had a horrible dream last night that I must now recount to you, that is, to you, my diary, my other self. As I sit here beside my window looking out into the snow-swept Simla highlands, I begin to feel that my soul is but a loose unity woven out of various bits, pieces, and fragments forever threating to break loose from its centre. A centre for which it desperately yearns but which it can never possess, for the very moment that it has attained it this centre has already moved away. Thus I have become the site of many a battle within myself, some past ones which have left me permanently scarred and whose memories linger on within me even when I do not seem to be able to accept them as my own, and some present ones which bring to me the dread of forgotten stories as well as the promises of a future redemption.

I dreamt that I was in an India that I somehow did not re-cognise. Gone was the dark, melancholy and comforting greys and blacks of Simla, I was now in the midst of the heat and the dust of an Indian town in the stifling summer of the sun-baked plains. An old man in a red turban beckoned towards me to enter his house, and I gingerly approached him. He smiled at me, suddenly grasped both my hands, shook them warmly, and led me into the first room. There on its bright yellow walls I saw a Swastika painted in a gaudy red. I felt that I had stepped into a sizzling cauldron of fire, and I shrieked out in utter panic. I desperately wanted to wake up from my maddening dream, but try hard as I did I could not break free from the coils of sleep. I ran out of the house into the sun-scorched village-square where a group of thirsty people were buying lime-juice from a young boy. I waited for a long while for my turn, hoping that he would soon turn towards me and serve me. An old woman walked up to me and told me that if I kept on waiting in that manner I would have to stand there for the rest of eternity. And as I stood there contemplating the meaning of 'eternity', three loud voices shouted at me to move on or stand out of the queue.

Since this morning I have wondering about my dream. The India of this dream is so different, so unfamiliar, so elusive from the one than I have known and grown up with these past few years that in my dream I found myself returning to her as a stranger who approaches her from the outside for the first time. India is a strange beguiling woman who entraces you from afar with the promises of exotic wealth, only to shroud herself at the final moment with a thick veil of impenetrable Otherness. I felt that I had become exiled at home, separated from my own countrymen and countrywomen across a great chasm of incomprehension.

In the garden there was a trail of black messy footprints carved into the beautiful virgin snow. The trail suddenly stopped near the winter-struck speechless trees, as if the person had been suddenly lifted up into the sky by some strange celestial, or perhaps demoniac, power.

January 1,1876

Under Oriental Skies

I have been rather quiet these days. Or to be more precise, and keeping in mind the grammatical rule that Mamma once drilled into me as a child, I should instead say quite. So, then, I have been quite quiet.

Today, however, I must write something about James I have been neglecting him for far too long. He had some remarkable company over dinner last night.

The Revds. H.T.Blackett, G.A.Lefroy and Edward Bickersteth from the Cambridge Mission to Delhi were around in Simla visiting the Viceroy during Christmas. Making their acquaintance during a meeting with his Lordship's under secretary, Mr Richard Stapleton, I.C.S., James invited them over to dinner at our home. Among them there was a certain Samuel Scott Allnutt, a very tall thin man fired with a dream. A dream that he calls St.Stephen's College, Cashmere Gate, Delhi. Though a dream that hardly ought to be called by that name. For it seems to me that the Rev. Allnutt breathes, thinks, eats, drinks, sleeps and lives that dream as if what seems like a mirage to some of us here is the most immediate, the most passionate, the most intense, and the most interior reality in his mortal existence.

It is to be a college, he informed us over dinner, bending low over his food and peering into our eyes through his black spectacles, that would become one of the finest flowers of British India in the years to come. So loving and so intimate would be the bond between Cambridge and St.Stephen's, he declared in his deep resonating voice, that the umbilical cord between the two would never be severed, and that even after we, the British, have left this fair land of Hindosthan and have departed to the rest of our forefathers, and thousands will have risen from this earth to condemn us for our iniquities and heap infamies over our heads, millions from among the natives would continue to move through its portals into the hallowed corridors of Cambridge, and yet millions of us Englishmen and Englishwomen would continue to view it as the most precious gift that we ever bequeathed to this land of ancient learning.

I looked towards James. There was a gentle smile on his lips. David could hardly conceal his laughter, and abruptly excused himself from the table and rushed into the living room. I felt a sudden surge of anger at his impudence. But there was no time for me to linger on this, for Allnutt went on talking, almost as if he were a teacher speaking to his attentive students.

It was now the Revd.Lefroy's turn to speak. He would teach Psychology and History at the college, the Revd. Carlyon would instruct the natives in Mathematics, and as for Allnutt, it would be Logic and Literature.

Around this time, David returned.

'Sir, if I may make bold to ask, do you really believe in what you have said? The most precious gift? If you shall permit me to use a colloqualism that is making the rounds in London these days, surely you must be joking, Mr. Allnutt?'

'Oh, yes, I am very serious', replied Allnutt, standing up spontaneously, somewhat in the manner of a deeply wounded man who had been cut to the quick. 'Indeed, very serious. Someday if the sun were to set on Her Majesty's Empire, God forbid, but God is no respecter of persons, nay, that He is not, what shall be left of our presence here? St. Stephen's shall outlive us as the living embodiment of our tireless and unceasing efforts to bring a ray of civilization to these benighted natives. St. Stephen's, I assure you, sir, is not to be a mere building of red bricks and black mortar, like just any gaudy and pompous edifice across the street. Somewhat in the manner that an old Scotsman returning from the war sees from afar his house, lovingly named Red Roofs, and feels a gentle peace streaming through his veins, generations of these natives, long after we are dead and long after this very dinner, unrecorded in any newspaper, is forgotten, will continue to return to St. Stephen's to find a home which they never left.'

Somehow that reply seemed to have silenced David.

For the moment, at least. There was now a sombre look on his long face, and he stared at the candle next to him, gently weeping its warm waxy tears.

Around the table, a deathly silence descended upon us. There was only the occasional sound of knives and forks clashing against each other.

I do not know why, but I felt over the dinner table in my very bosom that I had been a witness to the birth-pangs of something truly glorious, truly resplendent, truly inspiring, something to describe which the frail mortal words of a fragile woman are inadequate to the task.

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.

September 21, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

I have become a woman of many selves who in search of her-self arrives home either too early or too late, but never in time. Too early when I do not know what the questions are that hover around my mind, and too late when I find that they have already been answered for me. How wonderful it would be when I am at that stage when I can ask my own questions and provide my own answers. And yet, how would I know that they are mine? And not that someone has subtly, unknown to myself, inserted them into my soul?

I must therefore perform the impossible task of erasing whatever I am writing.

To grasp the splintered fragments of my being and bind them together around a unitary centre, ah the effort is so tiring, so frustrating, so riddled with our anxieties, hopes and fears! Even now as I write these very words I can feel myself inflicting a great violence on myself, trying to make them sound coherent to myself, when I know only too well that just below the surface there lies sleeping a desire to attempt the final dissolution of all words, all significance, and all meaning. But in having thus understood my intense wish, have I not defeated my claim that I do not comprehend my inner essence? Ah the conundrums of our existence!
How I remember Uncle Timothy at these times. Yes, he should have been living at this hour in my damp room in the hills of Simla. I would perhaps have sat down beside him, not to speak anything, for I have nothing left to say but to gaze on his gentle face as he smoked his pipe beside the window looking down into the valley. Never has a man taught me so much in my life precisely by adamantly refusing to accept that he had anything to teach me.
Someday I must also write to you about my other Uncle Aaron, God rest his soul, who committed suicide five years ago. Looking back at those times when I spent a month at his decrepit house in Cheltenham, I can

[Editor's note : 'I' has left an absence in between these paragraphs. It is not known whether this silence is deliberate.]
[Meta-Editor's note : [The Editor cannot conceal an impish delight in interpolating these parabolic inscriptions.]]
The older I grow I become convinced that it was the presence of men like Uncle Timothy and Aaron around me when I was a child that injected into the very core of my being a most profound melancholy and at the same time gave me a vision into things that are denied to most men and women around me.

I had a most beautiful dream last night, and the more I think about it the heavier that my heart grows with an inexplicable terror. Oh, am I really growing insane? Was James right after all?
I dreamt that I was on the banks of a lake just before dawn as the early birds were beginning to whisper. The waters were shrouded in semi-darkness as I spotted a mass of white floating in front of me. As I strained my eyes I saw a white swan swimming away from me towards the distant mountains. Slowly and slowly she sank deeper into the darkness until she became a tiny dot on the horizon.
From a great distance the

[Editor's note : 'I' breaks off suddenly at this point.]

[Meta-Editor's note : [The Editor is inflicting a sinister violence on a woman's text by pretending to understand her presences and absences.]]

Suddenly the sun rose into the blue sky, and a ray of warm light came shooting through the distance and pierced the very heart of the white swan. With a cry of the most fearful agony, the swan flapped its wings, rose into the air once, and then collapsed into the waters. I felt that it was not the swan but my own bosom that the ray had shattered into a thousand pieces.

Oh, the horror of the dream! Perhaps I have been listening too much to Sibelius and his Swan of Tuonela. Yes, that must be it.

I need Uncle Timothy today. Only he can understand me, these dilemmas that my pour twisted soul is racked with. Seek nothing else but the highest form of perfection, he once told me, but never forget for one moment that this seeking itself is the greatest futility any man can attempt.

My thoughts are becoming so tortuous every morning. In this agony, perhaps lies my liberation. And yet perhaps the memory of Uncle Aaron tells me that I am damned to be free.

My words are like an asymptotic curve that, at best, never reaches the limiting point it so passionately desires, and, at worst, a degenerate exercise in ironic narcissism. I have no occupation but my preoccupation with myself, and yet it is precisely this act of sinking into myself that, by reminding me of my utter finitude, drags me outwards.

On Monday mornings, I am an atheist despising the masses who bow down to the idols of the marketplace and yet in the evenings, I become a devout Anglican who piously kneels before her Lord, the Redeemer and the Saviour. On Tuesday evenings, I am a great lover of Beethoven and all the French, the Flemish and the Dutch masters, but on Wednesday mornings I wake up to find myself pouring scorn on all lovers of such high art. I spend the Thursdays poring over dusty volumes under whose weight the shelves of my living room groan, and Fridays laughing at the futility of the task I have attempted. Saturdays I sneer at those tiny little people cooped up in their narrow homes drinking tea and honey, but on Sundays I rebuke myself for such cynicism and want to run away to my dear Mama.

Oh, who shall deliver me from this body of contradictions? The truth that I seek I do not will, but the one that I scorn, I find myself running towards.

Let this diary be a record of my growing insanity.

Of my painful realisation that self-reflexivity is the highest blessing and the greatest curse.

Of my nostalgia for an age of unfragmented humanity where perhaps human beings used to live with all their inner tensions reconciled into a most wholesome harmony with the order of Mother Nature.

And above all, above all, a record of how powerful a tool language is, dissolving itself in the very moment of producing itself, embodying a most painful tension that only death can resolve.

And if this be insanity, ah for its blissful torments!

September 11, 1875

Under Oriental Skies

Yesterday evening I and James walked down to the Mall where we watched the crimson sun sinking into the distant blue hills setting the parchment of the sky alight with streaks of fiery orange. As I stood there, the cold wind blowing in from the west, my thoughts went back to my Uncle Aaron. It is only today as I grow older and older that I begin to realise how deep an influence, even unknown to myself, my two uncles, Timothy and Aaron, have subtly exercised on myself. About Uncle Timothy I have written about elsewhere on these pages, and is to Uncle Aaron that I turn today.
And yet why do I bother writing about them? I do not really know. Perhaps it is with a sense of gratitude for what they have taught me in the very attempt to unteach me of what I had absorbed. For it is indeed the case that such is the nature of the views of men like Uncle Timothy and Uncle Aaron that they cannot, without contradicting themselves, express their own thoughts in the first person. They need must enlist the help of a third person who shall struggle, even if only to fail in the attempt, to throw some light on minds that are impenetrable, first and foremost to themselves.
Dear Mama was of course devoted to both her elder brothers, but I fancy that it was always towards my eldest Uncle Aaron that she always directed her fondest affections. I remember Uncle Aaron from the four months that he came and lived with us when we were in the East End. He had a face so austere that it seemed to me that it was like a mask that the wind of a thousand years had hewn out of a solid granite cliff. And yet oftentimes when I would talk to him I would feel that that wall was about to dissolve into the thousand pieces out of which it had been painfully wrought.
Uncle Aaron spent almost the whole day reading, starting immediately after breakfast. He started with the newspapers, firstly the London Times and some others which came in from Scotland, and would then move on to the newspapers from Paris and Berlin. There was no shortage of newspapers in my father's house and Uncle Aaron relished the mornings with us meticulously reading each newspaper from the first page to the last in between cups of coffee. He would then pick up books from the bygone ages, starting with the seventeenth century, moving on to the eighteenth and coming down to our own times, to the very decade and the very year. In the evenings, he would go out for his long walks, in the same black coat that he always wore, even when it had started to stink mildly.
Once I was sitting in the living room as he was going out in the evening.
'Victoria', he said in his smile that somehow always reminded me of Uncle Timothy, 'if this whole world is a Text, I am but a reader. In the mornings, I read the Texts of my newspapers and books, and in the evenings the Texts of people's faces, their gestures, their silences, their erasures, and their words.'
Thus he spent his days with us, waking up at the exact hour and going up to bed just as the clock began to strike twelve.
'Efficiency', he once declared to us,'What marks us out, we the British nation, over the other races, is our attention to detail and our craving for order. A handful of British soldiers can rule over a thousand natives. No, not because we have the gunpowder. Even they can buy it from us, if they wanted to. We are superior because we are efficient. But there is something else to be said in this matter, of course. Something much more ominous. Something about how this dream for self-mastery is the perfect illusion that men suffer from.'
That was a habit of Uncle Aaron that always irritated me, breaking off a train of thought just when you thought he was finally reaching at something.

[Editor's note : 'I' abruptly breaks off the narrative at this point.]

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.