It is true that another reason Sovereign Father stayed for long spells in Shillong was for the medical treatment of his daughter Tombiyaima. But he had to go back and forth to Manipur for he had his duties as a king. We were amused to see that many people who did not get to approach or meet Sovereign Father at the palace in Manipur would come to Shillong and wait their turn to speak with him there. As children, we loved the arrival of all these new faces. A select few from amongst the visitors were put up at Lake House, a secluded spot a little way off on our grounds.
Among the visitors that arrived one day was the Englishwoman known to all as Jolly Mem71, a much-loved friend of my mother the Lady Ngangbam. Word would surely have been sent that she was arriving. My mother had the Lake House opened up and cleaned thoroughly.
Who was Jolly Mem? I have mentioned her briefly earlier. People may have heard of her but I really feel I ought to explain who Mrs. E.M. Jolly was and what she did for Manipur. All of us adored her. She was very close to us. Our Ibungo, my adopted brother Joy, and I used to call her ‘Granny’. What also attracted us to her was her small dog. I do not recall what breed it was. When she lived in Manipur we always saw her with a dog. Mrs. Jolly and Mr. Jeffery were two English people who lived in Manipur and India for a long span of time.
When Mrs. Jolly first arrived, they say, her husband Mr. E.M. Jolly was the Chief Engineer of Manipur. Later, Mr. Jeffery succeeded him in this post. We did not really know how long Mrs. Jolly’s husband stayed in Manipur or why she remained behind after he returned. We still do not know today. But it looks as if she stayed back to be a tutor to my sisters and a companion to my mother the Maharani. The State paid for her room and board – that’s really all we knew about her.
One day when I was grown up, my mother mentioned Jolly Mem when she was telling one of her stories. When her husband was about to be sent to India as an engineer and was to be posted to Manipur, Jolly Mem went to meet the elderly Major Maxwell, the retired Political Agent of Manipur who was living in London at the time, to get some information. She recalled that Major Maxwell was in constant touch by telegraph with Churachand, the king of Manipur, over the serious illness of someone he had left behind in Manipur and who was nearing her final days. I believe that this ailing woman must surely have been Princess Sanatombi.72
But I have not yet fathomed the reason why Mrs. Jolly stayed on after Mr. Jolly left Manipur. I believe that the people of Manipur will surely look into this one day. Mrs. Jolly loved Manipur and she contributed greatly towards helping preserve Manipur’s rich legacy of crafts, and we saw even when we were young, how she researched the embroidery designs woven by the women, and established a large office of arts and crafts. She was greatly assisted in this endeavour by our uncle Keisam Tombi. We called him uncle as his sister Keisam Ibemcha was my mother’s closest friend. The Keisam clan lives in a colony in Yaiskul to this day. Those interested in the contemporary arts and crafts of Manipur should look at the work done by uncle Keisam Tombi and Jolly Mem; I believe this has perhaps begun already. I remember too from when I was still a child, a young woman weaver who Mrs. Jolly and uncle Keisam Tombi were very fond of. Her name was Thoibi. They thought very highly of her.
It strikes me now, in addition to this, that the day the British Empire annexed Manipur heralded a new direction in the history of our Meitei homeland. How we were taken over and were subjugated is known by all. But what fascinates me are the people called the British. True, they came to colonize and, it is said, to trade. But many of them who came as servants of the Empire and as its officers recognized the essence of Manipur; they were eager to know her. Not only that, it would be wrong on our part to forget the people of Britain who committed themselves to Manipur. Starting from Colonel McCulloch, for instance, many left behind writings on various aspects of Manipur. They also left many generous gifts. Mr. Jeffery, the British engineer who lived in Manipur for a long period of time, bequeathed a large sum of money at the time of his departure to establish a trust for technical education and turned it over to two sons of Manipur – one was PB and the other was Major Khathing73. Besides this, there were many other gifts and documents that are still part of Manipur’s coffers even today. A British missionary called Pettigrew74 took priceless photographs and later sent them to PB. It would not be right for us to forget them. So Mrs. E. M. Jolly was only one such person. I heard that Mr. Gimson, the last Political Agent75, even donated a sum of ten thousand rupees to print the court chronicle. We do not know what happened to the money.
After Mrs. Jolly started living at Lake House, we children were able to visit her and play there. Her small dog was the main reason for us going there to play. We explored and played in all the rooms at Lake House. The house was such fun. And with Mrs. Jolly’s arrival, the rooms started to be maintained really well. All the rooms – the dining room, the living room – were now used. It seems that she lived there for a long time. ‘Granny’ lived by herself. The house had glass everywhere – the windows, the main doors, all were paned with glass. It was very appealing, that thatched-roofed house.
The moon was out that night. Shillong’s moonlit nights were lovely. How beautiful the pine leaves were as they rustled in the moonlight! The wind soughed. We huddled near a blazing fire in the fireplace in Mrs. Jolly’s warm and cosy room. It was at a time when Sovereign Father was away in Manipur. Mrs. Jolly told us a story about one night when she was sitting alone by the fire after her dinner. She had not gone to bed. She heard somebody knocking at the door. She had not locked up yet, so she said, ‘Come in’. But nobody came in. The knocking also stopped. When Mrs. Jolly looked out through the glass panes of the main door to see who was there, she saw no one. Then, she said, she saw a woman dressed in white walking down to the lake. It was the figure of someone who had just come out of a church wedding, dressed in a beautiful wedding gown. The woman slowly walked down the steep incline towards Shillong Lake and vanished into the mist. We had heard that Mrs. Jolly had told this story to our mother and my elder sisters. How scared we all were. We learned that a long time ago, a newlywed English lady had committed suicide on her wedding night by hanging herself in this very room.
Ought I to believe the story? It is not possible that Mrs. Jolly had made it up. Is the Lake House preserved today? When I led a cultural troupe from the Dance Academy to Shillong a long time later, I asked if the house was still standing. If one can believe that there is some truth in the ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Mrs. Jolly’s eyewitness account of ‘The Lady in White on her Wedding Night’ surely has some truth in it.
But who knows what the truth really is?