She will ask him to get the chairs from the verandah, especially her favourite planter’s long sleever, a present from James, in to the drawing room, remove all the cane chairs and tables, and let down the rattan shades so that the rains don’t flood her verandah every day. And then there will be the fraught business of packing up, storage, removal and relocation.
Mr Roy Chowdhury had kindly offered to come down to Calcutta in his motorcar and drive her to Nawabgunj, which, of course, will save her a long, bone-rattling journey, for at least part of the way on a palkee. But some of her possessions are going to have to go by train and then by God knows what, in all probability a bullock cart; she is sure most of them are never going to arrive in one piece, jolted and shaken as they are certainly going to be on the atrocious Indian roads and the mud and kunkur tracks. The very thought makes her feel weak so she sits down and starts making lists. There is great comfort to be derived from lists: they organize life, bring order and method, cut the amorphous business of a messy life into manageable and sizeable chunks.
She leaves at the end of the month to take up her position in the Roy Chowdhury family. She is excited at the prospect of making friends with an Indian woman who has so far been kept in the andarmahal but, thanks to her progressive husband, has been brought out of it and given a new world to move around in. Would she have been excited if she had been in Bimala’s shoes? Or just plain afraid? Is Bimala enjoying her new freedom, the huge expansion of her world? Mr Roy Chowdhury, in the course of their correspondence, had mentioned that she was literate, and competent in reading, writing, even arithmetic, but almost wholly in her own language, Bengali. She read voraciously, she even knew some English, which he had started her on but now didn’t find the time or the regularity that a new student needed. So Miss Gilby wasn’t really inheriting a tabula rasa — his term — but a compliant and intelligent student, he hoped, except that her problem was chronic shyness, indeed, fear at meeting an English lady and having to converse with her, eventually, in English; she was convinced she would not be able to cross the first hurdle, she would be a tongue-tied and hopeless student, Miss Gilby would give up in despair and leave etc etc.
Miss Gilby knows all these symptoms. They are not just the classic signs of nerves and a sense of inferiority but also so much more. Imagine a woman, kept confined to the andarmahal, socializing only with the other women in the household, rarely coming across men, even her own father, imagine growing up with this great sense of awe and fear of men, nay, this sense of the great unknown, of the alien race that the male is to her, imagine whiling away an entire girlhood in games and housework and feminine chores till she gets married one day, without any consultation or involvement, to one of those very creatures she has seldom met in her life, creatures she has only seen during jaatra performances in her house through a chink in the curtains or the tatti which separates the women’s section of the audience from the men’s, imagine growing up in a society where on those very rare occasions when a woman suddenly comes across a man other than her husband she draws her veil instantly to cover her face and hastily leaves the room. Imagine all that. Then imagine her being catapulted into the big, wide, open world. It would be something akin to being thrown into an ocean when all you know is your little enamel bath. Miss Gilby herself would be very nervous in Bimala’s situation. She had seen with her very eyes Hindu women from wealthy, privileged families taking their annual dip in the holy Ganges by having their entire palanquin, shut and enclosed, lowered into the waters while they remained inside, and then being carried off back home on the shoulders of the bearers. Because the waters teemed with bathing men, it was an act that managed ingeniously to observe a sacred ritual without endangering any of the sanctions against women being seen in public.
She remembers those painful visits with Miss Shepherd, Colonel Campbell’s wife and Mr Fearfield’s wife — all members of the Madras Ladies’ Club — to the Maharani of Mysore a few years ago. The process leading up to those visits itself comprised a story. For months she had importuned James and Sir George to do something about the Indian women of the Presidency: where were they? why didn’t they come, along with their husbands, to any of the events to which they were invited? why did only the men turn up? why were they so rigidly secluded? could the Anglos not do anything to break this down? James had patiently explained to her the status of women in Indian society. Well, then, if men posed so many threats and problems to them, surely the English ladies could do something? Send out an invitation for a ‘Ladies Only’ at the Club? Once again, James had explained to her, in his very patient and forbearing way, the problems Indian men had exposing their wives to foreigners. But surely they wouldn’t have problems ‘exposing’ them to foreign women? At which point James had thrown up his hands in despair and said if she wanted to so much, why didn’t she try, along with the other ladies of the Presidency, and see where they got. There was a stiff little lecture on how damnedest the Raj had tried to do away with barbaric Indian customs like suttee, purdah, the evils of zenana, the way Indian men treated their women as chattel, and if the bloody obstinate men were not going to allow them to meet their wives, he was damned if he was going to allow them to meet English ladies.
Ah.
So Miss Gilby, accompanied by the more stalwart and interested ladies, had set about getting to know these invisible Indian women. As sister of the District Collector, she sent out invitations for an ‘At Home’. Nearly no one bothered to reply. The chicken galantine with aspic jelly, cucumber sandwiches, anchovy and salad sandwiches, rout cakes, the proud madeira cake, petits fours, mango and custard apple ices — all the lovely things she and Iris Shepherd had planned so excitedly from their new Mrs Beeton had come to nothing. The most articulate of the refusals was sent to James. ‘Dear Sir,’ it said, ‘as my wife does not know English, she desires me to write this to you, regarding the “At Home” this evening. My wife is extremely thankful to Mr’ — and then an ‘s’ added in ink after the typewritten ‘Mr’ — ‘Gilby for graciously extending the invitation to her, but regrets very much that as according to the prevailing custom of the country, no Hindu lady is likely to attend the party, she is afraid to be the solitary exception to it. Moreover, she will feel herself completely stranded in the midst of strangers, and would, I am afraid, make an awkward nuisance of herself as she has never attended a party in all her life, least of all one hosted by English gentlemen and ladies. She, therefore, sincerely regrets that she is unable to oblige and sends her heartfelt apologies etc etc.’
Miss Gilby’s first thought was, God, if we haven’t given them anything else, we certainly have given them our language of evasiveness, and then, ashamed of this uncharitable and unusual flare-up in her generally kind soul, she began to comprehend the real problems the letter had expressed. How would the English and the native ladies communicate, how would she go about in her crusade of breaking down barriers, if they did not share a common tongue? It was of utmost importance that Indian ladies be educated in English. From there everything would follow, as the night the day.
The goal proved much more elusive than Miss Gilby had initially reckoned it to be. Like a mirage, it kept receding further and further, not just out of her reach but, it seemed, almost a thousand miles away. The problem was this: how did you go about educating Indian women if you didn’t get to see them in the first place? But what would be the purpose of access if the two sides couldn’t talk to each other? She felt she was being whirled around in a giant cartwheel that had no beginning, no end, only a frustrating, endless going around in circles. James just grunted his ‘See, I told you so’ grunt and said things were best left as they stood; these Indian women were never going to be let out of their prison by their men. They played by very different rules here and why didn’t Maud just leave these things well alone and concentrate instead on other things.