In the balance of things, her lessons with Ali-miyan, enjoyable and challenging though they were, and her unfolding relationship with her old teacher proved wonderfully that James, and along with him every single servant of the Empire in India and all the Anglo-Indian community, was wrong wrong wrong about the impossibility of a true, trustful friendship between the natives and the Anglos; the lessons had had to be sacrificed but she had made certain that her continuing friendship with Ali-miyan didn’t suffer. To this effect, she had visited him for tea — an institution to which she had slowly converted the all-too-willing teacher by speaking gloriously of the ways in which her people in England practised it daily — every first Sunday of the month during her time with the Motibaghs.
For her now, there is a valedictory air to everything in this messy city of lanes and by-lanes and road repairs and road building. It tinges her beloved tramcar journeys, which she has taken at least once every week during her time here. She goes down her favourite routes again and again: first, from Sealdah Station through Circular Road, Bowbazaar Street, Dalhousie Square, through Customs House and Strand Road — which, Ali-miyan tells her, was under water until 1823 or so — to Armenian Ghat on the banks of the Ganges. Seated in her first class carriage, she wills herself not to think of James’s words beating themselves out to the titup-titup-titup of the horses’ hooves on the cobbles as houses, temples, churches, people, buildings gently pass by, leaving her desiring the wide open space of the Maidan or the muddy brown water of the river, the sky low over it, and on its broad surface, boats and dinghies, ramshackle things barely held together with bamboos and tattered cloth. She likes the stillness of these boats; they seem to ply the waters in so leisurely a manner that it is difficult to believe they’re going anywhere or transporting people on them. It is the very rhythm of the country, this apparent lack of movement, of any forward motion altogether. Time means an altogether different thing to them.
In the autumns, during the Durga Puja celebrations, there are steam engines drawing the tramcar carriages on Chowringhee Road, carrying pilgrims from and to the temple in Kalighat. These ghats are something which Miss Gilby had never seen before coming to Calcutta. They had grown on her so much that in the autumns and winters she and Ali-miyan, sometimes with Mrs. Cameron, used to take the air in the early afternoons on the banks of the Hooghly, with Ali-miyan keeping up a running commentary about the history and names of the scores of ghats which dot the stretch of the river.
Ali-miyan guided the coachman as the brougham made its way from Kashipur in the north to Hastings on the Ganges estuary in the south, pointed out the ghats — steps leading down to the water, sometimes half submerged, made of marble or bricks, at other times docks really, for landing, anchoring and hauling of goods — and reeled off their names and explanations that awed Miss Gilby: ‘Look, Miss Gilby, that’s Ahiritolla Ghat, named so because this was the area where cowherds and milkmen lived’; ‘That’s Nimtolla Ghat, where Hindus cremate their dead’. Miss Gilby had been disturbed much more by this social ritual of people burning their dead on the banks of a river than by the odd practice of people bathing outdoors. She found the funeral practices primitive and didn’t encourage Ali-miyan to elaborate on this, quickly diverting him to give her a prolix history of another ghat, Huzurimal Ghat, or the ones with English names — Jackson sahib’s Ghat, Colvin Ghat, Foreman sahib’s Ghat. Miss Gilby has always found it amazing that the ghats are used for bathing, cremating, as docking and landing points of goods to be transported either inland or on the river. Even though each ghat is given over to only one of these functions, Miss Gilby is still struck by this unusual commingling of cleansing, commerce and ritual as if life, living and death were interchangeable, or all one.
She keeps repeating to herself that she will return to this city, that the appointment in Nawabgunj is only for a few years, but something deeper and unnameable, both inside and outside her, impels her to traverse the lengths and breadths of Calcutta in her brougham or in tramcars as if she were breathing in her last of the place, etching it solidly in her mind in a way only people who know they are never going to return do.
There are letters to write — polite‘thank you’ notes, more intimate ones to one or two of her friends here, slightly more formal ones letting acquaintances know of her new address and residence, a more general one to the members of the Anglo-Indian community she knows through Clubs, that sort of thing. These she usually keeps for the mornings. Afternoons are taken up with visiting or, in those rare spare hours, travelling through the city, mostly on her own. It is a little adventure, partly thrilling, partly fearsome, she rations to herself as a treat.
The evenings are mostly taken up, although reluctantly and with much misgiving, by the Club. This is on the insistence of Mrs Cameron, her only true friend in Calcutta. A widow who had been married to the Lieutenant-Governor of Allahabad, she had moved down east shortly after her husband’s death. Her ten-year-old daughter, Jane, was in London and her younger son, Christopher, at Summerfield. Sending her children, both born in India, to be educated back Home was the only sign of conformity to Raj society she had shown. Fiercely independent and unconventional, she had cocked a snook at Calcutta’s ossified Anglo-Indian society: ignoring the listings in the Warrant of Precedence; setting up schools for the education of Indian women in her own backyard and, in the winter months, in her garden; campaigning for the end of the moorgi khana in Clubs — her sins were so numerous that she was practically on the verge of ostracism by the unforgiving Anglo-Indian community. But she was one of life’s great irrepressibles, a true free spirit, and Miss Gilby knew that she enjoyed every bit of the controversy attaching to her, down to her outcast status, her lack of invitations to the Governor’s balls or the Viceroy’s Winter Dances: these were things that didn’t matter to her. She laughed at them, laughed at the choreographed dance of folly, which her countrymen indulged in, and held their snobbery in deep contempt. It was she who had recognized a kindred spirit in Miss Gilby and, on her arrival in Calcutta, had tested the newcomer by throwing to the winds the whole mad business of calling cards and appearing on her doorstep to invite Miss Gilby to afternoon tea; Miss Gilby had been utterly delighted. Mrs Cameron had warned her, ‘If you are intelligent, try and hide it if you can: a clever woman is not a very popular item in this jolly place.’
Miss Gilby and Mrs Cameron had taken on the might of the Club with glee. While most considered that they had lost, the two women knew they had nothing to lose. Besides, they were financially independent and sufficiently high up the ladder for any of the mutterings and whisperings to really bite. Despite a lot of coldshoulders andfrosty behaviourat the Club, theyhadpersisted in socializing there in the evenings when there was nothing to be done — ‘Maud, we cannot stop going to the Club, it will be a victory for them, don’t you see? If they think they can make things difficult for us there, don’t you think we can do exactly the same for them? They are far more uncomfortable with our presence than we are with theirs. We don’t care, they do, that’s our trump card’ — and had even ended up earning a sort of grudging respect.