piled high with pots and pans and a kitchen table groaning with crisp, earthy vegetables and the sharpest of knives, her hands moving as she dreams of peeling apples with insides like half-frozen snow, of slicing onions whose rubbery skin catches her knife before letting it crackle through the layers, of the gentle fizz of a simmering stew, its heat prickling her face as she breathes in its vapor to see whether it is done. And then the images flicker and vanish, leaving her staring out of a small window at a brown-gray sky, the stench of the gutter making her cough.
Lilla’s days stretched emptily ahead of her. Some people might have been happy to idle away the hours reading the newspapers or strolling in Calcutta’s botanical gardens, but Lilla loathed to waste time. She felt that she always needed to be improving something, creating something from scratch, something useful, or something that would last. Up until the final years of her life, when she came to believe that heaven was her next stop, Lilla wasn’t terribly religious. Agnostic at best. But if anything was a sin in her book, it was idleness.
Yet without a home to decorate and a kitchen to run, and missing the twinly competitiveness that used to drive her through the day, Lilla was at a loss as to how to fill her time. Even wandering along the shopping streets must have been frustrating. The flip side of Ernie’s great passions for life was a tendency to blow his top at the slightest provocation, and often in the direction of Lilla. Each time she bought anything at all he would erupt, saying that they couldn’t afford it. Lilla found herself sidestepping an ever-increasing list of activities that provoked him, staring longingly through the windows at all sorts of delights—cushions, lampshades, silks, and dresses—that back in China she would have bought without hesitating. Lilla hadn’t even been four years old when Alice married Andrew. She cannot have remembered money ever being an issue before.
Nor did she have any real friends to visit. The wives of some of Ernie’s colleagues came by, but Lilla had so little in common with the older, more India-entrenched army wives that the conversation soon ran dry. For all Calcutta’s superficial similarities to Shanghai—the incessant shouting, the spicy smells, the scuttling pace at which everybody rushed around—Lilla would have been beginning to realize that British India was a very different place from China. Even though, of all the cities in India, Calcutta was the most cosmopolitan, the most business-oriented, it was still governed by layers of terribly British officialdom in a way that China simply wasn’t.
For a start, there were the armed forces, the Indian army and Indian navy, in which Ernie and Toby served. At first, it appeared strange that they were Indian in name when they were so British in nature—the three thousand most senior officers were British. But it rapidly became clear that, unlike in China, where the foreigners lived perched on the edge of the continent in treaty ports while the rest of the country was left to carry on more or less as usual, in India it was quite the reverse. The British Raj—as Britain’s rule of India was known—had attempted to permeate every pore of Indian life, every village.
Like the treaty ports, the Raj had its own civil service. Yet again, whereas Chinese Customs concerned itself only with China’s muddy harbors and convoluted trading terms, the Indian Civil Service— known as the ICS—aspired to regulate nearly every aspect of what the British saw as Indian life. Chinese Customs ignored, insofar as it could, Chinese life outside the treaty ports, and, in any case, it reported to the Chinese government in Peking. The ICS, on the other hand, piloted education systems and ran courts of law throughout the entire country. It reported to Whitehall, in London. It was so busy monitoring, regulating, and reporting that governing the region—supposedly
Lilla’s days stretched emptily ahead of her. Some people might have been happy to idle away the hours reading the newspapers or strolling in Calcutta’s botanical gardens, but Lilla loathed to waste time. She felt that she always needed to be improving something, creating something from scratch, something useful, or something that would last. Up until the final years of her life, when she came to believe that heaven was her next stop, Lilla wasn’t terribly religious. Agnostic at best. But if anything was a sin in her book, it was idleness.
Yet without a home to decorate and a kitchen to run, and missing the twinly competitiveness that used to drive her through the day, Lilla was at a loss as to how to fill her time. Even wandering along the shopping streets must have been frustrating. The flip side of Ernie’s great passions for life was a tendency to blow his top at the slightest provocation, and often in the direction of Lilla. Each time she bought anything at all he would erupt, saying that they couldn’t afford it. Lilla found herself sidestepping an ever-increasing list of activities that provoked him, staring longingly through the windows at all sorts of delights—cushions, lampshades, silks, and dresses—that back in China she would have bought without hesitating. Lilla hadn’t even been four years old when Alice married Andrew. She cannot have remembered money ever being an issue before.
Nor did she have any real friends to visit. The wives of some of Ernie’s colleagues came by, but Lilla had so little in common with the older, more India-entrenched army wives that the conversation soon ran dry. For all Calcutta’s superficial similarities to Shanghai—the incessant shouting, the spicy smells, the scuttling pace at which everybody rushed around—Lilla would have been beginning to realize that British India was a very different place from China. Even though, of all the cities in India, Calcutta was the most cosmopolitan, the most business-oriented, it was still governed by layers of terribly British officialdom in a way that China simply wasn’t.
For a start, there were the armed forces, the Indian army and Indian navy, in which Ernie and Toby served. At first, it appeared strange that they were Indian in name when they were so British in nature—the three thousand most senior officers were British. But it rapidly became clear that, unlike in China, where the foreigners lived perched on the edge of the continent in treaty ports while the rest of the country was left to carry on more or less as usual, in India it was quite the reverse. The British Raj—as Britain’s rule of India was known—had attempted to permeate every pore of Indian life, every village.
Like the treaty ports, the Raj had its own civil service. Yet again, whereas Chinese Customs concerned itself only with China’s muddy harbors and convoluted trading terms, the Indian Civil Service— known as the ICS—aspired to regulate nearly every aspect of what the British saw as Indian life. Chinese Customs ignored, insofar as it could, Chinese life outside the treaty ports, and, in any case, it reported to the Chinese government in Peking. The ICS, on the other hand, piloted education systems and ran courts of law throughout the entire country. It reported to Whitehall, in London. It was so busy monitoring, regulating, and reporting that governing the region—supposedly
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