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.