No Country: A Novel by Kalyan Ray

Author:Kalyan Ray
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2014-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

Padraig

Calcutta, India

1848

To my Respected Mentor and Dear Friend,

Doorgadass-Babu,

I send my greetings to you, almost a year after my last letter bidding you goodbye. It was with great trepidation of mind that I left India, and you and yours, to find if a dreadful rumour about my family in Ireland was true. I found, contrary to my hope, that the direct appearance of disaster was harsher than my abstract dread of it. I had thought that I had seen and understood enough of life’s strange stratagems. Now those seemed mere caprices.

You, sir, had stood between me and the East India Company’s soldiers, when I believed that my life hung by a thread. It is only now that we can smile, remembering how they had come to your palace to have me hanged. But you did tell them that I was not Alexander Blackburn, the escaped English clerk, but your employee Padraig Aherne, come by your private boat from Calcutta. Do you recall how that officer McMillan and I spoke on, he about County Down, while I expanded fluently on how I’d taken ship from Sligo Harbour to Liverpool, and thence to Calcutta to seek my fortune?

“And do you like your job as clerk with this brown merchant?” the captain asked me with casual insolence.

“Better than serving the English,” I had thought to myself, but Doorgadass-babu, I needed to save my skin, so I pretended nonchalance. Had he known the truth, he would have hoisted me on my petard—an expression my old schoolmaster favoured. McMillan could not think why an Indian merchant of Calcutta with a great country-house would risk a lie to the great East India Company itself. And I was finally rid of Alexander Blackburn.

You, kind sir, believed that I rescued your only son, Ramkumar, from certain death. True it is that you were away when he took so sorely ill, but what strange custom of your religious kin to convey him in his last moments to the riverside! The end of life, its length, is a mystery to man, and it is troublesome for me to think of anyone aiding Fate. It needs no human help, I say. Fate it was that directed me, so I could succor Ramkumar, put him by my fire, and give him watchful comfort and the simple nourishment of coconut water. That alone revived him—and his fate—no skill of mine.

You befriended me, became my generous mentor; more indeed, for you proved a father to me, I say without let or hindrance, for my father was dead before I was born.

But in my own filial duty, I have been sore amiss, and in my common sense to boot. Therefore I must confess to you and relieve my torment.

I do not expect anyone else to understand or condone my stupidity and arrogance. I can scarcely believe it myself. It is a damnable thing that I did not write home when I arrived in India. At first I thought I would earn enough, rapidly, for my passage back home—in about the same time it would take a letter to reach my family.

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