A Life Apart Read Online Free PDF Page A

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