Bengal Nights/La Nuit Bengali

1

If I hesitate in beginning, it is because I still have not managed to remember the exact date of my first meeting with Maitreyi. I have not found anything in my notes of that year. Her name does not appear until very much later - until after I had left the sanatorium and was living with Narendra Sen in Bhowani­ pore. But that was in 1929 and I had already seen Maitreyi, at least ten months earlier. As I begin, I feel somewhat pained that I cannot evoke an image of her at that time or re-live the surprise, uncertainty or confusion that I experienced at our fi rst meetings.
I have a very vague memory: Maitreyi waiting in a motor-car opposite the Oxford Book Stationery store. Her father and I were each choosing some books for Christmas. On catching sight of her, a strange tremor went through me, accompanied by a curious feeling of contempt. I thought her ugly, with eyes that were too large and too black, thick and curling lips and the powerful chest of a Bengali maiden who had developed too quickly.

We were introduced. She put the joined palms of her hands to her forehead in greeting and all at once I saw her bare arm.

The colour of her skin struck me - it was a shade I had never seen before: matt brown, an alloy of clay and wax.
I was living at that time at Ripon Mansions, in Wellesley Street. One Harold Carr, an employee of the Army and Navy Stores, had the room next to mine. We were good friends. He knew many families in Calcutta, and we spent our evenings with these people. Once a week we tcnk girls dancing.

I wanted to describe to Harold - to see it more clearly formyself rather than to inf orm him - Maitreyi's naked ar m and the strange quality of that sombre brown, so disturbing and so unfeminine; it was the flesh of a goddess or a painted image rather than of a human. Harold was shaving in f ront of a mirror, his f oot propped up on a low table. I can picture the scene now:
the tea-cups, his wax-stained purple pyjamas (he had beaten his servant bloody f or that, but it was he who had made the mess himself, returning home drunk one night from the YMCA ball), some nickel coins on the unmade bed - and me, trying in vain to unblock my pipe with a piece of paper that I had rolled as thinly as a matchstick.

"Really, Alain, how could you fall f or a Bengali? They're disgusting. I was born here, I know these women better than you do. They are dirty - and there's nothing doing, believe me, no question of love! That girl will never look at you." Because I had obligingly described a girl's arm to him, he was already imagining that my mind was on love. Like all the Anglo­ Indians, Harold was an idiot and a fanatic, but his inane diatribe against Bengali women made a curious impression on me. I had the vague f eeling that the memory of Maitreyi was already connected in some way to my most fugitive thoughts and desires ... The idea both amused and disturbed me. I walked back to my room, still trying, mechanically, to unblock my pipe.

I noted nothing in my diary at the time. It was only very much later - the night I received the little sprig of jasmine -that I revived those first impressions.
I was just beginning my career in India. I had arrived full of superstitions: a member of the Rotary Club, very proud of my nationality and my continental origins. I devoured books on mathematical physics (although as a child I had wanted to become a missionary) and devoted much attention to my pri­vate journal. At first, I worked as a sales representative for the Noel and Noel factories, but soon afterwards I joined the new delta canalization project as a draughtsman. That was how I met Narendra Sen, Maitreyi's father, a man who enjoyed great renown in Calcutta - he was the first Bengali engineer to have won an award from Edinburgh University. My life changed. I earned less but the work pleased me. I no longer had to simmer away dutifully in the Clive Street of fi ces, to sign or wade through an infinity of documents or get drunk every night to obliterate my depression.

I was responsible for the works at Tamluk and I went away every two or three weeks. Each time I arrived at the site, my heart would fill with satisfaction at the sight of the dykes growing ever higher.