1886: Calcutta to Sussex
Your last letter found me in one of those curious moods that Calcutta so easily provokes—half languor, half reflection. The city teems with life, sound and colour and yet, for all that abundance, I find myself scarcely part of it at all. The truth is that my entire life here is built upon an intricate web of hierarchy. From dawn until dusk, I exist within the tight circle of the English conclave: calls, dinners, small entertainments and the predictable gossip that binds the European colony together. I am, in every sense, enclosed—living in India but not of it.
With the exception of speaking to my servants, I know no Indians in any intimate or human way. Their names appear in my household books—the cook, the ayah, the gardener—but only as entries in service of my comfort. It occurred to me, almost shamefully, that I have never written an Indian name except in command or payment. Their faces pass daily before me, deferential, alert and silent, while I remain blind to their lives. Ours is a curious blindness, cultivated by habit as though seeing were too costly a luxury.
I read lately of cousin Alice in Simla—how she has taken to learning the Indian tongues, exploring local customs, even studying their philosophies with apparent delight. There are whispers, of course, that she has gone “native”, but I confess to a sort of envy. She seems to inhabit this country rather than merely occupy it, while I, for all my experience, remain an echo of Brighton—a foreigner even in my own perception. It makes me wonder whether her courage is mistaken for impropriety because she refuses the comfort of ignorance.
Have I made a social mistake in all this invisible living? Perhaps propriety demands such seclusion; perhaps there is safety in it. Yet I cannot help but feel that I am missing something essential, that my Englishness has become its own confinement. How is one meant to escape being English when one understands so little of the world around her, when every rule of society insists that seeing too much would be perilous?
Sometimes, as I sit on the veranda at twilight, hearing the chants drift faintly over the river, I imagine how vast life must be beyond the pale of our colony—and how small our lives appear against it. To be invisible among so many visible souls is, I think, the real solitude of this place.
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