Gimlets or pegs of whisky and soda on the lawns, a spot of tennis very early in the morning, even swimming sometimes, the endless rounds of gossip and talking about the intransigence of servants: it was amusing how she who had suffered all these obligatory things should now feel herself poised on the brink of missing them, trying to fit them in in her final days so that they were fixed in some future memory.
One advantage Mrs Cameron certainly had over the outraged little Anglo-Indians was the quality of her dinner parties. Here, she was nonpareil, an unqualified social success. And here, too, she broke all the rules. She tore up the Warrant of Precedence and seated guests wherever her fancy or mood took her. At one such party in the early days of her stay in Calcutta, she had seated an army officer in the wrong place, at which the incensed guest had informed her that he was a full colonel; she had chirpily replied, ‘Are you really? Well, I do so hope that when dinner is over you will be fuller still.’
Miss Gilby had found in the older woman a soulmate, a mentor who exposed in her the nervous steel to do things about which she would either have thought twice before or, having done it, would have felt lonely in the isolation that committing such a deed would have almost certainly brought her.
Suddenly Miss Gilby feels a pang of sorrow for her impending separation from Violet Cameron. Mrs Cameron is a little surprised at Miss Gilby’s insistence on strolling in the Eden Gardens or walking down the Strand as the bands played, two or sometimes three times a week, even during the wet, squally afternoons. Could it possibly be because Miss Gilby is trying to hold on to her company in these last few days left to her? Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris, but could not the same be said of happy people in the joy they took of each other? They will write to each other regularly and, yes, this communication is going to take a lot longer than the scores of chits circulated around the community and carried by the servants to and fro, and it will not have the immediacy and urgency of a chit written half an hour before its delivery to the addressee by a hot-footed servant, but it will have to do.
During one of their dinners — informal, just the two of them, but neither of them forgets to dress up — Mrs Cameron asks, ‘So do you have any idea what this woman Bimala is like?’
Miss Gilby says, ‘No, what I know of her is what I have gleaned from her husband’s letters. He is very well educated: a recent MA from Calcutta University.’
‘But Maud, she’s not one of those girl brides, is she?’
‘No, no, I don’t think so. She can’t be any older than twenty or so but she is no girl. Or at least that’s not the impression I get from his letters.’
There is a pause for a few minutes as the servants remove the empty plates of consommé and bring in the curried prawns.
‘Are you not somewhat anxious about living with an Indian family?’ Mrs Cameron asks.
‘To tell you the truth,’ Miss Gilby replies, ‘yes, I am, a little.’
‘Will they have an untouchable European put in a separate wing of the house, give you servants who will not be allowed to touch or do any work for the other members of the household, that sort of thing?’
‘Oh, Violet, I’ve thought and thought about these practical arrangements and even mentioned one or two of them to Mr Roy Chowdhury. It appears they are a very progressive family. He has two widowed sisters-in-law who live with them and I’m assuming they observe strict religious rules or whatever the norms and mores are in these cases, but I’ve been asking around about rules and etiquette in Hindu families. One thing I’m sure of is that he doesn’t have much truck with the caste system.’
There is another clearing of plates before the leg of mutton is brought to the table. Miss Gilby asks, ‘Are you going to carry on with the school?’
‘Yes, of course, Maud, of course. It will be difficult without you. God knows, you’ve been such a great help and I don’t know what I’m going to do without you. Miss Hailey — you know her, don’t you, Grant Hailey’s sister — is showing an interest but she is the timid sort and one harsh word from her brother, or, indeed, anyone, would be enough to make her cower into subservience.’
‘You know, Violet, don’t you, I really wish I could stay on but. .’ she says, an askance glance picking up the burden of the unsaid.
‘No, Maud, you must go where your heart takes you. And if you don’t manage to get into all these families and familiarize yourself with their running, get to know their women, your book is going to be a little thin. Have you started it yet?’
‘No, I haven’t, not yet, but I’m hoping to begin once I’ve settled in in Nawabgunj. I’m so glad you understand, Violet. Mr Roy Chowdhury says he’s very interested in your school. If you need any help from him — talking to people, funds, anything — you just have to ask. He seems to be a very enlightened young man.’
‘You are lucky. You could have got yourself into a family that locked the women away in dark rooms and allowed them to do nothing but play with dolls and gossip and bear children.’
‘In that case, I don’t think I would have been asked for in the first place.’
Mrs Cameron gives orders for the table to be cleared. They have both had somewhat more than their usual amount of claret. Lightheaded, they move to the drawing room. It has started raining again and there are all sorts of flying insects making a beeline for the candles in the room; something drifts down, too slow to be an insect. Miss Gilby realizes it’s a feather from somewhere, maybe a wet bird outside, or a pillow. She blows on it and instead of falling down it changes its course and gets wafted in the direction of Mrs Cameron.
Mrs Cameron exclaims, ‘Oh, look, a feather.’ There’s a childish delight in her voice. She moves her head forward and lets out a puff of breath from lips protruding in an O; the breath catches the swaying, falling feather and it swerves towards Miss Gilby. But before it can reach Miss Gilby’s blowing range, it loses momentum and starts gravitating downwards again. Miss Gilby gets up, goes down on her knees and before the feather can reach the chairs, she blows on it very hard.
‘Quick, Violet, quick, blow it up to the level of the table. Go on, lie down and blow it up, up,’ she squeals with urgency.
Mrs Cameron does exactly that — she crouches very low on the floor and, with her neck pointed upward, blows up, moving her head like a cat that has seen a flying insect or bird above it. She tries several bursts to get the feather right in the current.
‘You’ve got it, you’ve got it,’ Miss Gilby shouts and raises herself up to meet the ascending feather.
‘Maud, Maud, try and raise it higher so we can do it standing up. No, higher, higher,’ Mrs Cameron shouts.
The two women shuffle and parry in an odd, staccato dance while the feather, which gets tossed between them, never seems to lose its light grace.
THREE
Paper covers stone. Stone breaks scissors. Scissors cut paper. Paper cuts him, has always done. Not just those occasional cuts when he is impatiently opening the rare envelope in his pigeon-hole, no, not those. It cuts him into new shapes, new forms, until there is no he anymore, but a cipher, a shadow, dependent on other things for his very existence. Sometimes while papers and their resident words slip and slide into him, drowning him under so that he can’t take so much life in its burning bright rush inside him, he casually looks up to catch the face of someone in the window opposite his desk. For the space of something not calibrated in human time, only registered by the sudden sway of his heart towards his throat, he does not recognize that the unmoored face looking back at him is his own. He is goosepimpled by his own presence, or a deferred version of himself, as if he is not really there. He chances upon Edmund Spenser’s dedicatory epistle to Lady Carey: ‘Therefore I have determined to give my selfe wholy to you, as quite abandoned from my selfe. .’ His eyes stop at quite abandoned from my selfe. Yes, this is it; he has found confirmation in another page, in other words, of what happens to him. But there is no he left when he reads. So who is it that looks at him from the impressionable glass? Words for him are like the sporing rust on metal — they eat away at him until there is only an unidentifiable husk. He has become nothing.