"My father had carried around a piece of the mirror with him all his adult life. My mother gave it to me during her last days. She told me to look after myself and her family. When your father asked me about it, I finally told him. He was horrified but still curious, he saw it as a way out." She said Palming the metal case.
"But where did he get it ?"
"Can I have it Ajji?"
"KRISHNA! No"
"This has nothing in it anymore Krishu. He got it from the British man. It was in his house, growing on the ceiling."
"How does a mirror grow ?"
"I do not know. But I know where Mr.Elymus got it from" she said pulling the old paper out.
"He wrote entries during the end of his life. Here let me read it" she said pulling her hanging glasses up to her eyes and adjusting the chain.
##########################################################################
Diary entry : 21/5/1912
The only excuse for God is that he does not exist
- Stendhal
My teacher often advised me to walk when I felt the curtain of death enclosing my thoughts, to feel the bloom of the new and ash of the old. I live alone, a kilometer from any neighbor, the villagers don't understand me more than these trees. The rain and slush mud ground remind me of my boarding school in Exeter. I lived with blind grandmother in another lonely home on a hill. She took guests in the house while I was told to remain out of sight. If I was summoned, then to excuse myself soon after the pleasantries. I felt like a bastard growing up, and for all I knew I was one, Joanna speculated that was what attracted me seas and warmer lands. So when the riots started in the 30s I ran province of Mysore, bought this land from the government to settle for the last of my years. I could not return to Britain, I had nothing left there, or Malta.
I left for Malta with a letter in my hand in 1881. My grandmother's will directed that I had to meet her acquittance Mrs.Gelifici. During the first two days of my journey I fell sick, Captain Aslan assigned a cabin boy named Vamer to look after me. I had paid for only half the journey after all, his master, a Jewish trader from Malta was a friend of my grandmother.
My head swaying, my lungs burning and my throat parched I coughed till I could not inhale anymore. Aslan told me he was sure by the time we reached shore the pneumonia, he assumed I had, would infect everybody. I remember praying for a quick death then staring into the ceiling chipped brown with time. The Mediterranean wasn't kind to me so we docked at Algiers to find a doctor.
I do not remember his face anymore, I just feel his rough cool hands. The doctor was Tunisian born, is all I know at least from the way Aslan spoke to him. I drank nothing he gave me, Aslan docked us at Malta few weeks later.
My time at Malta was mostly uneventful, I filed up accounts and kept the crown's machine moving. The rumors were plenty, the recent protests that had 'definite hints of Anarchy' as the officers put it. Many soldiers from India were deployed in the island as well. Malta was in the middle of a escalating tensions of the west and the cries for independence of the east.
"We are investing a lot of Crown's money for them to be this prone to discontent" said Joanna Gelifici. The woman had come seeking warmer lands for her deteriorating health, she was an initial investor in the bank. She lived in these vast government funded mansions. She was also interested in newly translated versions of the stories of the Orient. She was building as she called it, 'The Brain for the East' referring to her house library.
I rode the caleche during the early years. It was barely a pound for the entire evening. But after modernity caught up with island, the visitors wanted a larger vehicle without the rider wearing a red cap running next to the mule. I miss those bumpy rides, it gave me an opportunity to talk to the riders, ask about the new businesses in Strade Reale, or new vessels in the Grand Harbor.
The villa itself was part of the increasingly dense three villages. Gardens and slush was below while the gentry lived above. Long terraces and windows to keep a look at the world below. The weren't British of course, the original architect Mrs.Gelfici said was a Tuscan exile who never went back after the unification. The sand colored walls and vestibules. The sharp designs of carpets and halls. It was uniquely European while holding onto it's local aesthetics as well.
She rarely had visitors, so she often spoke about the material she read with anybody. Mostly me, because unlike the rest I was able to hold conversation with her about almost anything. We discussed about the new banks and railways being built next door to news from India. She had lost her husband to an accident in the Suez a few years ago.
" The people cannot understand a need for civility. We cannot and should not live in constant dispute. The Crown invests too much in its colonies, yet they choose to be American about it. Freedom they earned has been at a cost of culture. Goodness, the uncivilized will be the end of us all."
I would read the descriptions of these distant lands with a carnal joy. It would transport me, the visions were thick enough for my heart to wish I could step into them ,I was right by her newlywed side, being escorted from the ports. Those dense cities, the warm and alive streets, the oily steam of roadside stalls. It was an antidote to this silence. The silence that haunted me. This why I stayed in Malta till the end of the century as well. It wasn't big but it was alive.
The days of sitting and sweating on dusty chairs with a musk of strange flowery and oily scents were weighing on my soul. My quarters on the East wing felt communal with the thin walls with often loud noise seeping through even at midnight. Hence I pried on her desire for company and met her often. I do not remember much now about all the discussions we had but the one that led me to India and here is still crystal clear to me.It was about a story that she was penning at the time. The life disappeared from her eyes, it was a grim stare with a low tone response "A dream I often crave to relive. It feels safe. I am prince in an old kingdom, I have nation behind me yet the courage to face the future. It is a world with gods still mysterious, doctrines still being etched". The story itself sounds mythical and filled with empty morals of ancient. It has magic, magical men, fabled heroes and even a prophecy. But It bothers me to this day. Mostly because I have found a piece of magic. Now I cannot sleep anymore. But that day I sat and read on the diwan in her library.
"Tell me if you ever find yourself in that dream"