A Life Apart (4 page)

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
chaprassi
s, 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 counterparts, 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:

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?

Miss Gilby descends the stairs and decides to take matters in hand. The envelope is held securely between her fingers.

R
itwik raises the lower sash of the window and leans out, almost to his waist, letting the English rain fall on him on a darkening afternoon. His
tiny room is on the top floor of a house on the corner of two cobbled streets. One of them is called Logic Lane; something out of Pope, he had thought on his first day in England, dragging his two
heavy suitcases over random cobbles designed to defeat any movement on them except the one for which they were initially made. They ream through the thin soles of his Indian shoes. Walking on them
is like wearing acupressure sandals, which have textured soles made of hundreds of raised points, except that
these
raised points are little mounds, and uneven, on top of that.