A Life Apart Read online

  In Hindu belief, the navel is indestructible, left behind in the furnace as the whole body is converted to a fistful of ash. The last act of the cremation was the retrieval of this undestroyed navel from the maws of the furnace. There was a short walk to the Ganga, which ran right behind the crematorium, to set the ‘navel’ afloat (or whatever lump of rock or charcoal the panda, the crematorium tout, had handed you) following the guidelines of yet another priest or hanger-on hoping for a few rupees.

  Aritra’s face was flushed, as if one of the walls of the furnace that held their mother’s corpse had suddenly slid from its fixed position and the contained fire had licked and blazed too close to the boy’s face. A purification, an extinguishing. The dark of his pupils seemed to have welled and inked out in circles under his eyes. He made Ritwik a generous offer, ‘Look, if you don’t feel up to it, I can do this last bit.’

  ‘No, it’s all right; I’ve done it so far, let me see it to the end.’ He paused for a second, then added, ‘Besides, I’m the elder son . . .’ his voice trailed off to make space for the excuse.

  The pandas, who ferreted through the ashes with long sticks after the body was fully incinerated, handed him what passed for his mother’s navel in a flimsy earthen bowl. They had heaped it with ash and cinder out of an odd sense of decorum. There was a small procession – he, Aritra, Tabbu, a couple of Aritra’s friends, Pratik-mama, and a few others – to the dark slurry of putrefying matter which was the Ganga, the holy river, not running but stagnant and stench-bound behind the crematorium. On the way, he was seized by an urge to root through the ashes and earth in the little bowl in his hands (surprisingly heavy) and see if it really contained his mother’s rubbery navel and the stump of her umbilical cord untouched by fire.

  They reached the slopes of the bank and as he was asked to step closer, almost into that seething shit, he was once again overcome by nausea, afraid that any physical contact with the river would cause some repulsive illness. He stepped forward a few inches, gingerly, steeling himself to disobey any orders to stand ankle-deep in it. There were emaciated dogs moving around the place, materializing in and out of the thick darkness everywhere, sniffing for, he supposed, human limbs and charred flesh. He tried to take his mind off the marauding creatures and perform all that was asked of him. From the slums on the other side of the river, random feathers of Hindi film songs kept getting blown in with the intermittent breeze: Slowly, slowly we must increase our love, O magician, who has cast a spell on my virgin heart. The weak electric bulbs, dotted here and there among the huts, looked like static tapers.

  The brothers flinched when the priest sprinkled everyone with holy water from the river: for a few moments they were acutely conscious of the exact spots on their bodies where the contaminated water had landed. They must remember to wash with Dettol when they returned home. Ritwik was asked to set the ‘navel’ afloat. But there wasn’t very much water in the river and instead of floating away, as it was picturesquely supposed to do, towards salvation on the other side, the bowl landed with the squelching splash of a hard object hitting clay.

  Here, all ends and begins.

  PART ONE

  I.

  Miss Gilby finally succeeds in uniting the name of the man who has written to her with a face and a context. She picks up the coarse handmade paper, with its elegant and educated copperplate in royal blue, from her desk. The red shellac is impressed with the seal of the zamindar of Nawabgunj. Or so she supposes. She reads the letter again.

  ‘Dighi Bari’,

  Nawabgunj,

  Bengal.

  28th March 1902

  Dear Miss Gilby,

  I do not presume you remember me after nearly three years but we met at the Tea Party generously hosted by your Respected Brother, District Collector James Gilby, at his Summer retreat in Ootacamund in June 1899, and to which I was so kindly invited by him. I trust and pray that you are in good health & high spirits.

  Since that gathering, I have had the good fortune to find myself a Wife & a Helpmeet & it is my express desire that she be educated in the most Beautiful & Useful English Language & the ways of Ladies of your Progressive Nation. I would wish her to be able to converse in the English Language, read your Great Writers, play the piano, & otherwise inculcate all the desirable Virtues & Practices of English Ladies such as are practised in both the home & outside. For it is also my great wish that, unlike most Indian Women, my Wife, Bimala, should step outside from the Inner Courtyard to which Women of our Country have been confined for Centuries & see the World at large. True Education consists in Experience & without it, I am afraid, most remain in the dark or the partially lit.

  To these ends, I am emboldened to request you to take up the position of Governess & Teacher to my Wife. I have heard, along with Laudatory Reports of your Success as Governess, that you are resident in Calcutta now & therefore I am made hopeful that you can be approached with this suit of mine. You shall, of course, have your lodgings here with us in ‘Dighi Bari’. Anything else you might desire, it is yours to command. I shall consider myself fortunate in the extreme if you look on this petition with consideration.

  I remain,

  Yours faithfully,

  Nikhilesh Roy Chowdhury

  James’s Summer Season tea party in Ooty three years ago. Of course, she remembers it, remembers the subtle rivalry between the wife of the Police Superintendent, the Colonel’s Lady and herself, but then, as James’s sister, she didn’t quite have the airs that the wives of officials gave themselves. Yet, she was the sister of the highest ranking man in Madras Presidency, and the memsahibs’ behaviour had been an oddly balanced mixture of deference and hauteur, one of the many things about the English community here which irritated her so much that it usually brought on a headache and then the obligatory afternoon retirement with drawn curtains and a bottle of eau de cologne.

  James’s tea party that summer – that great annual event for the Anglo-Indians and those selected natives who thought it was the greatest honour to be included – had gone exactly the way she had thought it would. Mrs Egerton-Smith had preened and frowned; Anthony Sykes’s wife had been so nervous that she kept spilling her gin on her dress, at least ten years out of fashion, and then on Mrs Egerton-Smith’s; Miss Carlisle wouldn’t talk to anyone or come out from the marquee in the fear the sun would ruin her make-up and her yards and yards of taffeta and silk, all watery blue, straight out of the Whiteaway and Laidlaw catalogue from three Seasons ago but almost certainly made by the darzees in Madras from the catalogue picture. Mrs Ripon and Lady Headley-Dent, the wife of the Superintendent of Police and the Colonel, respectively, had stood by, all crinoline, parasol, hats with stuffed birds on them and smiles of the most perfectly chiselled indifference; they wouldn’t even talk to the other wives but that was normal, even expected, in this community of exiles. The party had divided into the usual six sections: the men; the wives of the three burrasahibs; the other wives; the single women, usually from the ‘fishing fleet’ of that year, who had come over from home to look for husbands in India and who were well-connected enough to be invited to the District Collector’s Summer Season party; the native men; and their wives. Six small castles, moated, granged and walled almost completely from each other. Each deemed the British Empire a grand success.

  When Miss Gilby had first arrived in India, in 1891, she had been silently expected to fall into this hierarchy but her very situation had challenged it from the beginning. For a start, she had come to Madras because James’s wife, Henrietta, never the most robust of women, had been struck down by a particularly nasty sunstroke from which she never recovered. James had needed someone to look after him and having always been close to his elder sister, somewhat unusually so, he had begged her to come and see to things (it must be admitted, there were things a man couldn’t be expected to do, they needed a woman’s presence, the feminine touch). Who would organize the household, engage the cook, the cleaner, the other khansamas and chaprassis, arrange
the parties, see to the social life, deal with the little cogs and ratchets of the everyday which kept life ticking along so silently, so imperceptibly, that you didn’t notice it till it was gone, like the air you breathe in?

  So Maud Gilby had sailed to India in a P&O ship from Portsmouth in the autumn of 1891. She had been advised to sail at a time that would allow her to arrive in India in the cooler winter months, otherwise the first experience of the Hot Weather in India, straight after landing, would be just overwhelming, indeed dangerous. But Madras had been no cooler than the hottest of English summers, certainly not as hot as it got in June or July, but not cool, definitely not cool. And then there had been the landing, her first touching of Indian soil, or rather, water, the choppy, turbulent waves of the Bay of Bengal which, in a crucial and inexplicable way, had done something to her, what, she cannot name or even put a finger on, but it had given her a sense of freedom, of dissidence even.

  Madras didn’t have a natural harbour so incoming ships just stopped a few miles from the shore, dinghies were let down and the passengers ferried across to the sand. Often dinghies rowed by the natives met the ship offshore and rowed the passengers in. Ladies and children disembarked first, but only with the bare minimum of luggage – the remaining stuff was brought in after all the passengers had been rowed across. The waves were unruly and high and the flimsy boats swayed with such abandon that it struck fear into the hearts of these ladies who had never ventured beyond the calm of the Norfolk Broads or the mostly well-behaved Thames. To be rowed by a group of night-black natives, who grinned away, not a word of English between them, not a care for the awesome tossing of the bark, would have turned the bravest of souls queasy with terror. On top of this, there were large groups of natives who thronged the beach, some to watch the drama of landing, others to wade out and lift, actually lift, the dinghies and carry them and set them down on the sands, as if they weren’t boats but palanquins. Miss Gilby, with the intuitive wisdom of women, realized then, while being borne aloft in a shell of a boat with fearful English ladies, that all her English manners and notions and ideas would have to be thrown out into the heart of the Bay of Bengal because this country was like no other, because it was not like anything she had ever encountered or even dreamed of, regardless of all the stories that circulated in the Ladies’ Club of Colchester and the parties in High Season; it was a country where she was going to have to learn all over again. So she set about doing exactly that.

  Like every other Raj party, James’s party was one where nobody mingled; after all, parties were thrown to show who stood where, immovable, the possibility of mobility a dangerous mirage. Stuck, stuck, stuck, Miss Gilby, defiant and different, had always thought. In her eight years in India, she had attracted a lot of attention and opprobrium – she had been called various things: ‘dangerous’, ‘unwomanly’, ‘unladylike’, ‘monstrous’, ‘unruly’, ‘unpatriotic’, ‘traitorous’, ‘unnatural’. If it bothered her slightly in the beginning, it didn’t now. She had refused to play their game, she had refused to live in a little England of these little people’s making in the heart of such a big, baffling, incomprehensible country. It didn’t come as a surprise that she was punished for breaking the rules, especially that central rule of the Raj – you didn’t treat the natives as equals. Of course, you were friendly with them, you worked with them (well, you had to), you invited them to certain parties, although not all, but you most certainly didn’t treat them as equals, not after 1857, not after Cawnpore. The natives inhabited a different world from their masters and governors and the space in between was, should be, unbridgeable. Rule set in stone, cast in iron. There was no deflection from that. If you swayed from it, you had to pay.

  Miss Gilby made sure that she moved around, talking to as many people as she could manage, especially the Indians and their wives, at every party. James’s were no exceptions. She cast her mind back to the Ooty party of 1899 to place Nikhilesh Roy Chowdhury. He had been one of the men who had turned up not in the obligatory black tie but in his dhoti-kurta and a beautiful shawl, the colour of a young fawn, embroidered so delicately that she had wanted to run her hands over the stitches and the fabric. He had been talking to the Major General, or someone from the Indian Army. When she asked James who the Indian gentleman was, he said, ‘Oh, that’s Nik, Nikilesh. He’s a minor zamindar in Bengal. Jolly nice chap. Knows the Mertons and the Leigh-Fermors. Some sort of Harrow connection, I think, but I’m not sure. Jolly good sort, you know. Not a drunken idiot like the rest of the nawabs around here. Here, let me introduce you.’

  Miss Gilby’s first impression of Nikhilesh was of gentleness and refinement. He spoke English beautifully, with none of the low louting and fawning and other affectations, which so afflicted the natives, and he spoke it in a soft, gentle voice. Miss Gilby was of the firm opinion that behind all the servile tics, the deep bowing and the ingratiating attitudes of most of the natives, they were mocking the Anglos all the time, in fact using the very customs of the English and distorting them in such a way that it could only be a type of insolent sarcasm. She had first had this feeling when the natives had carried the dinghies of English passengers over the unceasingly crashing breakers on to the beach in Madras, laughing all the time, as if they were having the time of their life, while the seasick, frightened and tired Englishwomen screeched, cried and prayed. She was convinced the men were enjoying their discomfort and behind their ‘haan, memsa’b’, ‘na, memsa’b’, their begging and their over-eagerness, they were tilting the boats and making it that much more turbulent for the English ladies.

  The exchange of greetings was barely over when Miss Gilby had the unshakeable feeling that this was one Indian man, possibly the first in her eight years in this country, who was not secretly mocking her and her countrymen while keeping up an outward show of courteous, even flattering, behaviour. This may have had something to do with the fact that the nice gentleman did not have any of the twitches of false obeisance and ridiculously exaggerated manners the natives were so given to, thinking this would be of advantage to them. Not a trace of that in this calm, refined man: he held his head high when he spoke, enunciated clearly, balanced the teacup in his hand with poise.

  Miss Gilby can only guess how Nikhilesh Roy Chowdhury knows of her move up north to Calcutta from Madras, hardly more than a year ago. For the last year, she has been attached to the household of the Nawab of Motibagh, in the capacity of governess to the Begum – funny how the upper class Indians seemed to call ‘companions’ to their wives ‘governesses’, as if they were little children in need of basic education in manners, speech and writing – and it would be surprising if that news did not travel fast in the enclosed world of minor Bengal royalty. An event such as having an Anglo-Indian in the household was like throwing a stone in a tiny pond – the ripples were bound to reach the edge.

  If she is to take up this offer of being ‘governess’ to Bimala – she’s sure he means English Teacher and Companion – she will have to give up her position with the Nawab of Motibagh. It will have to be done with delicacy and tact so that the Nawab doesn’t think she is leaving them for the employ of a man he is certain to consider his inferior in terms of rank or title. She has not been making enormous progress with Saira Begum. Besides, Miss Gilby has the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that her presence in that household had caused not a few ruffled feathers, that she had been asked to join them in the first place because having a European in your employment was such a mark of distinction. In the face of such petty machinations, Miss Gilby feels soiled, her noble aim of enlightening native women compromised. She would like to make clear her aims and purposes in seeking positions in native Indian families as a teacher but that would only make the men even more suspicious than her race already did. In this, the English and the Indian men were alike and in complete agreement – women didn’t need to be taught vast amounts of things. If she were to outline her ideals about how the native womenfolk should interact with their English counterpart
s, there would be a minor revolt amongst the men, both Indian and English. And then she wouldn’t be able to do the very little on which she thinks she has just embarked. Best to keep quiet and get on with things, even give out the impression that she has no purpose other than employment in mind. Miss Gilby has learnt this lesson the hardway: if you want to get your own way, give away nothing, draw attention to nothing, indeed create smokescreens behind which you can hide while moving secretly, silently towards your destination.

  She catches herself thinking about that old chestnut again and stops; she cannot dwell on it if things are to move forward. And move forward they will, if Nikhilesh Roy Chowdhury’s letter is anything to go by. Here is a different man, here is a peer, a fellow thinker, a friend, Miss Gilby dares to dream. Her decision is made.

  She takes pen and paper and writes:

  Dear Mr Roy Chowdhury,

  How kind of you to remember me from James’s Summer Season Party in Ooty three years ago. And congratulations – very belated though they may be – on your marriage. I feel honoured that you should have thought of me in regard to Bimala’s Education in English. I shall be very happy to take up the position of Teacher and Companion to Bimala as soon as it is mutually convenient.

  I look forward to meeting you soon.

  Yours sincerely,

  Miss Maud Gilby

  She blows on the paper, puts it in an envelope, seals it and then writes his address on the front. She gets up from her desk, goes to the door, puts her head out and calls, ‘Koi hain? Mahesh! Mahesh! Yahaan aao!’ No answer. No sound of movement either. Where has that man disappeared yet again?