Tilbury's Ghost

I phoned Jeremy in response to his letter. The moment I told him that I had held the same position as his grandfather had done a long time ago, and that I had lived in the same house for years, he was most eager to see me, and we met in a pub near Oxford the following Sunday.

Jeremy exuded warmth, wit, and scholarship. He had studied at Oxford, and had retired to his farm near Cotswold after brief stints as publisher and public school teacher. He was married in a manner, he told me. His wife had left him to live with somebody else without legal termination of marriage, and he was now happy co-habiting with his ex-maidservant. She had begotten him a son, but Jeremy refused to lend his surname to this offspring because of the child's total negation of a spirit of adventure and intellectual enquiry that had characterized ten generations of the Tilburrys. But he told me in his typically self-deprecating manner that he wasn't sure if this surname had such a long history, or the heritage of valour and brains that was claimed any authenticity. Jeremy was, nevertheless, providing for the child's upbringing and would eventually bequeath his estate to him. That, he said, was part of an expiation process, which he did not explain, at least not immediately, despite my prodding.

I told him about the ghost, and he said that he was not surprised that there was indeed a ghost of his grandfather haunting his favourite places in India. He added that it was all the more plausible because of the state of utter melancholy in which he had died. It wasn't necessary for me to probe as Jeremy seemed quite willing to take the wraps off himself. He had in fact been thinking of writing a novel based on his grandfather's life.

It was Mr. Tilburry's almost total boredom with the English society and a desire to seek a new meaning to existence that had taken him eastwards. He had lost his father as an infant; and his mother raised him, educated him at Rugby and Oxford, and wanted him to either enter politics or join the Indian Civil Service. The son wavered on the edge of an intellectual life for a few years, had an unhappy love affair, and then, without much deliberation, joined the army to go to India. The army life disenchanted him as well, and he went home on completion of his five years of short service commission. But he had not forgotten India, and, when his mother died, he joined the Assam provincial civil service, met and hurriedly married a divorcee to alleviate his loneliness as the Sub-Divisional Officer of Lungleh, his first posting.

But he had unfortunately married a woman without love, and her romantic ideas about India, which were no more than epidermal, were shattered by the initial mortifications. First there was the two hundred miles of walk from Chittagong to Lungleh, through hills and jungles replete with leeches, tigers, bears, elephants and snakes more vivid and animated than the ones she had seen in the London zoo or the picture books back home. Then there were the Chakma coolies who had not bathed for months and whose body smells, emanating from clothes shriveled and discoloured by months of dried sweat, made her sick.

Finally, it was Lungleh that had provided the lethal blow to her romanticism. The lonely hamlet was a far cry from the fancied Indian empire where ladies lounged in white-washed palatial bungalows set in the midst of fragrant lawns and gardens, served by liveried bearers; or whizzed past the exotic scents of Indian bazaars in horse-drawn carriages, and hailed by cheering crowds of half-naked subjects.

She had misunderstood Mr. Tilburry's promises. He had talked about adventure, and not splendour, that awaited them on the frontiers of the empire. But the wrong note had been struck, and they began their life with serious differences about almost everything. He took to extensive touring in the hills alone so as to keep out of disagreeable situations. Eighteen months later she left for England. Mr. Tilburry had kept his wife's aversions and the private discord so assiduously hidden from his personal staff and his superiors in the government that nobody seemed to know the reasons why he left for England so suddenly six months after his wife’s departure.