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young Strachey goes home. Needs a bit of a change . . . ” Obediently, Jack Strachey, in the end unaffected by the Bengali beauties, the malaria, and the microbes, picked Myrna. Sharp’s congratulated itself when he returned from that furlough with his young bride leaning with him over the rails of a steamer.

    The Stracheys had decided to stay on after Independence, a minority among the British. Why should the proponents of the colonial power subject themselves to their country’s erstwhile subjects? Yet some, a few, did, unwilling to give up the ineffable qualities built up over the centuries. Like the Stracheys, they “stayed on,” as some well-known writers have expressed through their fiction. The best in that fiction is exhibited in the reality of old age, of British people who grew old in India after Independence. And of such were the tragic Stracheys . . . not understanding of the Indian ethos, sympathetic but with no understanding. However much Jack Strachey may admire charming Indian women, or Myrna have sensual Indian lovers, or both enjoy the rhythm of the seasons, they couldn’t encompassingly talk with Indians.
    â€œWhat rapport?” you may ask. “Isn’t it a bit too much to expect of a couple who stayed on just because they felt like it? Why all this sermonizing about chatting?” Rebuke accepted. It is in the nature of things that such lack of understanding must be. And for that matter, most Indians, whether from one extreme of urban, upper-class, and westernized or the other of rural poor, have their binoculars turned in on themselves. Apart from knowing little about the larger country, they can rarely talk with anyone outside their own confined groupings. So let’s not waste time on all this and go on to the dilemma or situation of Jack and Myrna Strachey as among the few British who stayed on till the end.
    When it came to lovers Myrna could talk with white and colored, European and Indian without discrimination. She was the mistress of men in an outré sense, having, by the time she had reached fifty, slept with almost any man who took her fancy.
    And once, a visiting and elderly Ohri, long before Surjeet Shona came back to settle in the Rajmahal, who stayed for a time in the ground floor apartment belonging to his family. “I wonder if all Sikhs carry the ‘five k’s’,” Myrna had always wanted to know. And when she saw the handsome Ohri downstairs she had smiled to herself. Apart from the kesh , the kanga , the karrha , the kirpan and the kacchha , the five k’s, she also longed to know if true Sikhs were forbidden from “interfering” with Christian women, white Christian women, just as they were instructed against Muslim
women. Some of the older Sikh ghosts could have enlightened her, but they couldn’t read Myrna’s thoughts.
    â€œOh Myrna,” her long-suffering and adoring Jack had thought, “why do you need so badly to explore everything in the world to its very core, why are you so curious about life you big, beautiful, thoughtless woman? Where does he keep his dagger, Myrna? Did you find it pinning his under shorts together? Or tucked into his uncut pubic hair?” He reprimanded himself for this uncharacteristic outburst. He knew he was lucky to be exempt from jealousy. “And no,” he thought smiling to himself when by the end of the millennium everyone was racing to wash their dirty linen in public water tanks, “I’m not like Mountbatten.” He referred to the assumption that the last viceroy must be homosexual because he didn’t have jealous tantrums at his lady wife’s allegedly wild love life, including her affair, platonic or otherwise, with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Jack couldn’t remember if the insinuations included Lord Mountbatten himself being in love with Nehru, in which case he ought at least to have been jealous of Edwina for having smitten the one he was