A Suitable Boy(236)

They walked through a wrought-iron gate. The cemetery was laid out in a grid with narrow avenues between clusters of tombs. A few soggy palm trees stood here and there in clumps, and the cawing of crows interspersed with thunder and the noise of rain. It was a melancholy place. Founded in 1767, it had filled up quickly with European dead. Young and old alike – mostly victims of the feverish climate – lay buried here, compacted under great slabs and pyramids, mausolea and cenotaphs, urns and columns, all decayed and greyed now by ten generations of Calcutta heat and rain. So densely packed were the tombs that it was in places difficult to walk between them. Rich, rain-fed grass grew between the graves, and the rain poured down ceaselessly over it all. Compared to Brahmpur or Banaras, Allahabad or Agra, Lucknow or Delhi, Calcutta could hardly be considered to have a history, but the climate had bestowed on its comparative recency a desolate and unromantic sense of slow ruin.

‘Why have you brought me here?’ asked Lata. ‘Do you know Landor?’

‘Landor? No.’

‘You’ve never heard of Walter Savage Landor?’ asked Amit, disappointed. ‘Oh yes. Walter Savage Landor. Of course. “Rose Aylmer, whom these watchful eyes.” ’

‘Wakeful. Well, she lies buried here. As does Thackeray’s father and one of Dickens’ sons, and the original for Byron’s Don Juan,’ said Amit, with a proper Calcuttan pride.

‘Really?’ said Lata. ‘Here? Here in Calcutta?’ It was as if she had suddenly heard that Hamlet was the Prince of Delhi. ‘Ah, what avails the sceptred race!’

‘Ah, what the form divine!’ continued Amit. ‘What every virtue, every grace!’ cried Lata with sudden enthusiasm.

‘Rose Aylmer, all were thine.’

A roll of thunder punctuated the two stanzas.

‘Rose Aylmer, whom these watchful eyes –’ continued Lata.

‘Wakeful.’

‘Sorry, wakeful. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes –’

‘May weep, but never see,’ said Amit, brandishing his umbrella.

‘A night of memories and sighs,’

‘I consecrate to thee.’ Amit paused. ‘Ah, lovely poem, lovely poem,’ he said, looking delightedly at Lata. He paused again, then said: ‘Actually, it’s “A night of memories and of sighs”.’

‘Isn’t that what I said?’ asked Lata, thinking of nights – or parts of nights – that she herself had recently spent in a similar fashion. ‘No. You left out the second “of ”.’

‘A night of memories and sighs. Of memories and of sighs. I see what you mean. But does it make such a difference?’

‘Yes, it makes a difference. Not all the difference in the world but, well, a difference. A mere “of ”; conventionally permitted to rhyme with “love”. But she is in her grave, and oh, the difference to him.’

They walked on. Walking two abreast was not possible, and their umbrellas complicated matters among the cluttered monuments. Not that her tomb was so far away – it was at the first intersection – but Amit had chosen a circuitous route. It was a small tomb capped by a conical pillar with swirling lines; Landor’s poem was inscribed on a plaque on one side beneath her name and age and a few lines of pedestrian pentameter:

What was her fate? Long, long before her hour,

Death called her tender soul by break of bliss

From the first blossoms, from the buds of joy;

Those few our noxious fate unblasted leaves

In this inclement clime of human life.



Lata looked at the tomb and then at Amit, who appeared to be deep in thought. She thought to herself: he has a comfortable sort of face.

‘So she was twenty when she died?’ said Lata.

‘Yes. Just about your age. They met in the Swansea Circulating Library. And then her parents took her out to India. Poor Landor. Noble Savage. Go, lovely Rose.’

‘What did she die of? The sorrow of parting?’

‘A surfeit of pineapples.’

Lata looked shocked.

‘I can see you don’t believe me, but oh, ’tis true, ’tis true,’ said Amit. ‘We’d better go back,’ he continued. ‘They will not wait for us – and who can wonder? You’re drenched.’

‘And so are you.’

‘Her tomb,’ continued Amit, ‘looks like an upside-down ice-cream cone.’

Lata said nothing. She was rather annoyed with Amit.

After Dipankar had been dropped off at the Asiatic Society, Amit asked the driver to take them down Chowringhee to the Presidency Hospital.

As they passed the Victoria Memorial he said: ‘So the Victoria Memorial and Howrah Bridge is all you know and all you need to know of Calcutta?’