1914
“YOU MUST EXPECT TO BE disappointed,” the other passengers told Sophie. Taking refuge in India was sensible now that Europe was at war, but nonetheless it was an experience to be suffered and endured. “The Taj Mahal by moonlight, pale hands beside the Shalimar — romantic balderdash,” pronounced a bronzed and leathery colonel who was on his way back to the Frontier. India, everyone agreed, meant dirt and poverty, smothering heat, bad smells and indigestible food. “Not to mention revolting heathen practices,” added the colonel’s memsahib, declining to elaborate.
Of all this, Sophie was well aware. She had not much patience with romantic novels. She’d prepared for this journey, in her usual methodical way, by reading histories of the Raj and the Moghul Empire, and Himalayan travellers’ tales. Though even those held out the promise of exotic splendours — minarets and gilded palaces, gardens in Kashmir.
In any event, whatever horrors awaited her in Calcutta, it would be a huge relief to disembark. Perhaps, out of reach of English newspapers, she would no longer be an object of such fascination. Just today she had come up on deck to overhear a snatch of conversation, hastily broken off.
“The poor lamb, to have lived through such an ordeal. To have both her parents drown when she was — how old? Fourteen? And now to be packed off to this godforsaken country, to live with relatives she’s never met . . . ” For two years now Sophie had been made to feel like public property — the survivor of a famous disaster, a name miraculously entered on the right side of a list, a curiosity to be interviewed and photographed and discussed. She yearned to be once again plain Sophie Pritchard, whose life was nobody’s business but her own.
“Merciful heavens, the heat!” said Aunt Constance, fanning her damp face with a dog-eared Cornhill Magazine. She stood with Sophie on the steamer’s foredeck as it made its way up the Hooghly past Garden Reach. “I fear it’s bringing on a migraine. Will Delhi be cooler, do you think?” Even now, at the end of October, with the monsoon rains over and winter not far ahead, the air felt like a hot, wet blanket, thick with the swampy smell of the Ganges delta.
“I expect it will,” said Sophie, without much conviction. She and her aunt were soon to part company. Once Sophie had been safely delivered to her relatives, Aunt Constance would continue on to Delhi for a visit with her sister, who was married to a civil servant.
And as for these Calcutta relations — how little Sophie really knew about them! Tom Grenville-Smith was a zoologist, working at the Indian Museum. Jean, his wife, was an author — quite a successful one, Aunt Constance said. Privately, Sophie hoped that her books were not the kind of popular romance that Aunt Constance preferred.
The river was crowded with every sort of craft — paddle steamers, big, solid square-sailed vessels and little fishing boats with upturned bows, barges and launches and bamboo rafts. Along the near bank were factories and warehouses, temples and walled riverside gardens, burning-ghats and derelict mansions, weed-covered skeletons of boats, and crowds of people standing knee-deep, waist-deep in the murky water of the bathing ghats, dressed in long robes, or loin-cloths, or nothing at all.
Now they were through the Floating Bridge, and here at last was Calcutta. India, Sophie suspected, was every bit as noisy, and chaotic, and bad-smelling, and bewildering as the colonel had described; but what mattered was that she would soon set foot on solid ground.
The wheel turns, and turns again. That, thought Sophie, is what Hindus believed. Her old life had ended on that disastrous April night in the North Atlantic. Now, for better or worse, as their ship ploughed its way up this swarming, clamorous Indian river, a new one was about to begin.