A Life Apart Read Online Free PDF

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 chaprassi s, 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.
    Like every other Raj party, James’s party was one where nobody mingled; after all, parties were thrown to show who stood where, immovable, the possibility of mobility a dangerous
mirage. Stuck, stuck, stuck, Miss Gilby, defiant and different, had always thought. In her eight years in India, she had attracted a lot of attention and opprobrium – she had been called
various things: ‘dangerous’, ‘unwomanly’, ‘unladylike’, ‘monstrous’, ‘unruly’, ‘unpatriotic’, ‘traitorous’,
‘unnatural’. If it bothered her slightly in the beginning, it didn’t now. She had refused to play their game, she had refused to live in a little England of these little
people’s making in the heart of such a big, baffling, incomprehensible country. It didn’t come as a surprise that she was punished for breaking the rules,