1863: Alice Mallard
Simla
From my writing‑table, which overlooks a landscape so improbable that I must repeatedly assure myself of its existence, I send you certain reflections upon a word that has preoccupied me of late—illusion. You will forgive my zeal: the mountain vapours and the curious half‑light of the rains here make one particularly conscious of the border between what appears and what is.
Yesterday’s heat yielded by evening to a silver fog that hung over the slopes like a suspended veil, and I recalled the entry for illusion from that precious Etymologia Ludica I carried from London. You may remember it: the one bound in green calf, its margins written over by its anonymous previous owner, whose notations seem to waver between scholarship and grief.
The Latin ludere, “to play,” appears there as the root of every species of deception. Illudere—to play against—gives us illusion; deludere, to play deceitfully, yields delusion; even collusion, elusion, allusion, all are but rearrangements of play. The cheerful ludus—school, game, jest—has fathered a family of deceits. I cannot decide if that is comic or tragic.
The lexicographer notes, with some weariness, that “in illusion, play becomes injury.” Yet the sense of movement persists—there is always motion, a circling of sight around what cannot quite be grasped. The spectator’s dance.
Simla itself seems constructed on such etymological uncertainty. One may stand upon the Mall at noon, gazing into a valley so steep one could imagine it a drop into the underworld, while behind, in the bazaar, a conjurer (they call him a jadugar) makes coins appear within folded cloths. “Dekho, memsahib—illusion!” he said, smiling, though in his Hindustani the word still carries the flavour of maya, the sacred unreality of all things. His is a learned art, though no one here grants it that dignity.
I wondered—perhaps aloud, for my companion laughed—whether the British Empire itself does not belong grammatically within the same verb. A grand act of illudere, a vast play against. We perform permanence upon a precarious stage of borrowed hillsides.
But such remarks are best kept for letters, and family ones at that.
In the evenings I entertain myself by investigating what the Europeans here call native games of chance, which are in fact devotional plays. There is one with painted shells tossed upon a board in marked squares. The women told me it commemorates a goddess who disappeared mid‑game to test her devotees’ patience. The play stops at her vanishing; the winner is the first to admit she was never truly there. They play against the divine, and the loss is holy. It reminded me uncannily of our own word’s structure—against as an approach, not an opposition. Illusion was always a kind of invitation, never merely deceit.
Thus the colonial view—ours, that is—may itself be the coarsest possible misreading: we call deception what they venerate as revelation. The fog thickens; the ridge and the illusion are the same thing.
Among my much‑handled papers is a tiny pamphlet printed at Serampore in 1812, On Certain Optical Delusions Observed in the Air of Bengal, by an army surgeon named Dr. Lysander Copp. He describes mirages over the Hooghly, attributing them to “vapours of deceit,” and closes with a Latin epigram: Ludus naturae, sed nobis injuria—“Nature’s play, but to us, a wound.” Strange how persistently the English mind will treat every jest of the world as an insult.
Do you remember Cousin Arthur’s insistence that “ladies should not study deceit”? He meant etymology, of course, though his phrasing unintentionally surpassed his wit. Here, I find the very air instructive. Light itself practices illusion—polyglot, democratic. Mountains shift their margins hourly. The mist plays upon the cedar tips as if proposing some half‑forgotten game of chance. We, meanwhile, stand solemnly deceived, mistaking spectacle for empire.
A new scandal—of no consequence but ample amusement—concerns Major Beresford of the Rifles, who reported to the Gazette that he had seen the apparition of a white goddess among the deodars. He insists upon his sanity. The missionaries insist upon hers. The local servants nod politely and call it “evening fog.” Yet the entire episode might be footnoted in the Etymologia Ludica: interludium—a play between acts, a respite in the drama of order. The mountain offers its prelusive entertainment; we misinterpret it as miracle.
I confess a treasonous sympathy for the goddess. She, too, may have grown weary of the endless seriousness of administrators. An illusion, perhaps, but better an illusion of her own devising.
Do not think my tone cynical, dear Aunt. There is comfort in knowing that every deception preserves a trace of joy from which it descended. The Latin ludus was also school, after all. Even our mistakes instruct. When the mist clears and the hills disclose their improbable distances—it is as if the world itself indulged a small pun for our education: revelation as reversal.
My companion, Mrs. Delane—whose companionship, I may add, has become necessary both for translation and for temper—remarked this morning that perhaps illusion is not the opposite of truth but its rehearsal, its prelude. (She has a musical way of thinking which I, being dry as sand, admire.) The lexicon agrees: prae‑ludere, to play before. The world tries out a semblance of itself before granting us the definitive performance. We may live our entire lives in that rehearsal and never know.
So when next you read in the Illustrated London News of the high entertainments of Simla—its theatricals and races and courtly masques—imagine, instead of diversions, experiments in reality. We are all illusionists here, unwilling students of ludus.
Forgive this long letter; the light here stretches my thoughts. It is past nine; outside, a party of hill men are chanting—something about the snows pretending to sleep while watching us. If ever a phrase deserved a Latin cousin, that one does. Perhaps illudere again: the mountains play against our certainty.
I remain, with affection and a steady (if possibly deluded) devotion,
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