The Bleak Banks of the Hooghly

By Antonio Sanz Oliva

In the 19th century, in Calcutta, a land of opportunity where the forging of an empire is being built on scientific advances, progress, wars and painful diseases. After an unhappy life, a young Irish man, victim of poverty and chance, will see his life change when he becomes the new Dr. Miller, a prestigious physician who will fight to keep his “secret” and become a respectable member of the society of the so-called “White City”. When he meets the dazzling Mrs. Wilson, a wealthy lady married to an opium-trafficking crook, his whole life will turn upside down until he goes crazy with desire. When she finally manages to overcome all the obstacles, she must face the harsh reality and a wild nature that threatens to devour them all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Jun 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781071548837

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Calcutta, summer 1874

The umbrellas had begun to stand out like mushrooms with the onset of the monsoon, while the mud took over the streets, staining the edges of the saris with orange ochre. The month of August was unusually quiet in a city as stifling and bustling as Calcutta, where amidst riots and mutinies there was always the threat of an epidemic. The calm was the prelude to something that no one dared mention, but which punctually visited the banks of the Hooghly.

Ranjit, the widow Wilson’s servant, began to shout at Dr. Miller’s office until he finally opened the door, and little Mary, lying on the bed, was writhing in vomit and intense decomposition. With no time to lose, she put in her bag what was needed; it was the moment she had been preparing for.

It was pouring down on Calcutta and the umbrella which Ranjit was holding was so barely able to contain the water that it slipped down the doctor’s cape, so they took a rickshaw to Chowringhee Road, a few blocks away.

On the way he recalled his frequent visits to treat little Mary, a delirious girl suffering from strange ills which kept her away from the rest of society, and her mother, whom he had repeatedly tempted with insistent marriage proposals, reluctantly rejected because of the grief she was determined to keep up. That spoiled flirtation allowed him to enter the select salons of the colony, turning the doctor into the parsley of all sauces.

Violet Wilson waited behind the half-opened door of her house; a beautiful mansion with a white façade and an elegant porch, which supported a wide terrace protected by exquisite lattices. On their arrival, they only crossed an indiscreet glance. Concerned, she hurried to the doctor, taking him to her daughter’s room. At his side stood guard James Birdwhistle, an old retired colonel of the British East India Company, who was only too eager to see his granddaughter, the last of the family, burn out.

Birdwhistle had managed to carve out a niche for himself in the exclusive society of the White City, after marrying his daughter Violet to an unscrupulous hustler, who made an incredible fortune from the opium trade. After Adam Wilson died, unblessed by a man, Mary and her money were the only comfort in that house.

Jonathan Miller sat on the edge of the bed. The stench of it made the room unbreathable, yet he listened to the girl, who was already gasping for breath. He was convinced that she did not have much life left, yet he brought her a spoonful of laudanum, which Mary threw up as soon as she swallowed it; it was the end.

Violet, who could not even silence the whispers of the servants, knelt at the foot of the bed. Tears welled up in her eyes, and she began to pray more earnestly that she would not faint. Mary’s chest was barely strong enough to fill her lungs, and on her livid face, her eyes began to sink into their sockets. It was not long before, after a slight groan, the little girl of the Wilsons stopped breathing.

He died? asked the Colonel shakily.

Violet pounced on her child, but Jonathan stopped her.

Don’t come any closer! It’s cholera.

That cursed word, so long deferred, could not prevent her from embracing the inert body of her daughter; she no longer cared.

It is not possible, here, in our house... Misfortune has befallen us. Birdwhistle muttered as he left the room, holding on to the walls.

Jonathan got Mrs. Wilson out of bed as best he could, and she sobbed and said it couldn’t be, Mary wasn’t dead. The doctor called to Ranjit for a mirror which he could not fog up, and for a loaf of hot bread which he placed on the sole of the little girl’s feet, without the feet moving in the least.

After certifying her death, he asked Violet to leave the room to arrange a funeral which was to be verified as soon as possible. He was in charge of washing the body; no one else was to remain there to prevent contagion.

As the clocks in the house stopped, Priya and Anjali covered the mirrors with thick black cloth, drew the curtains and removed the flowers from the vases. Then the Colonel sent them to the Hogan’s Store to get simple black dresses without any adornments. For quite a time everyone in that house would be dressed in strict mourning, like the one his own daughter had long worn.

Ranjit, at his master’s suggestion, went to the house of the French daguerreotype, Monsieur Lambert, famous for his memento mori, who was to record the traffic. Dr. Miller himself prepared everything very carefully: he dressed the girl in a bright white suit, emphasizing her innocence, and took care to recreate a bed of flowers so that the photographer could immortalize that virginal angel. Then, aware of the risk he was taking, he cleaned himself up very carefully.

There was no time to summon friends and acquaintances, so there was no need to panic. Reverend Whitaker arrived at the same time as the funeral service. Mary was placed in the hall in a fine mahogany coffin lined with white crepe, among four bronze candlesticks with thick, half-worn candles. The response was quickened and the lid closed to avoid any further damage.

He would never have wanted to go that far, but the events were precipitated by the circumstances. In spite of his prestige, he knew himself to be a common swindler, with no other knowledge than that acquired from his mentor, a specialist in the recesses of the mind and a devoted mesmerist, whom he supplanted when, dying of a fever, he bequeathed to him his meagre possessions and a small but interesting medical library.

He was in love with Violet or the widow Wilson as she was known. After his incomprehensible reticence, he hoped that she would now beg him to take her away from there, perhaps to Europe, far from that country where the humidity was eating away at the spirit.

The whinnying sound of the hearse indicated to them that they could now leave. Four splendid jet mares, touched by white plumes, led Mary on her last journey. Soon she would accompany her father in the fabulous mausoleum that was erected in South Park Cemetery. It was practically the last to be built there, when most of its pantheons and sculptures had succumbed to the poisonous jungle that devoured everything, under thick vines and a deep green, almost black, undergrowth.

A brief courtship followed: The Reverend Whitaker with his eyes fixed on his missal, followed by the grief-stricken Violet and her father, dressed in a dress uniform and full of undeserved decorations from butchers’ shops disguised as colonial war. Dr. Miller and the rest of the servants closed the entourage.

Their feet, sunk behind the trail left by the wheels of the car, struggled to get out of the sea of mud that threatened to swallow them. The Colonel took the key from his chest and went to the family tomb, a neoclassical tholos nestled among the aerial roots of a magnolia tree of titanic proportions. As the thick bronze doors creaked, two salamanders crawled out, mute custodians of the desecrated peace, while with his staff he tried to undo what the spiders had worked so hard to weave, leaving the entrance open.

The employees of the funeral ceremony introduced the coffin at the rhythm of the psalm that the reverend recited with a pounding cadence. The maids burst into tears, beating their breasts and pulling their hair out as part of the liturgy. Violet, leaning on the doctor’s arm, asked for the box to be opened to say goodbye to her daughter; she needed to see her one last time.

She couldn’t help but fall on Mary, trying to hold her little body in her arms. After wiping away her tears, she placed a rose in her hands and came over to kiss her on the forehead.

No, she’s not dead... Mary, no... She’s not dead... she repeated in a piercing voice to the disbelief of those present.

It was necessary to take her aside to allow the coffin to be closed, but she resisted, intuiting that the breath of life had not yet left the body of her little girl; she did not exhale the sweet smell of death, nor had her face been transformed into a macabre mask of waxy appearance. They carefully placed her on a shelf and rushed out before Violet suffered one of her acute nervous breakdowns, which caused her to faint when the door was closed after a loud bang.

Jonathan, as he lifted her from the damp floor, evoked his own existence, a tortuous journey into the impossible. Much of her soul had been left behind, sacrificed for the sake of someone who was only a façade, a golden mask that hid the true face of a lonely being in search of happiness.

CHAPTER 2

Calcutta, a few years earlier.

When Jonathan O’Malley, now the prestigious Dr. Miller, first saw the banks of the Hooghly, with the main buildings of the colony shining in the sun like precious gems, he thought it was a miracle. From the shore, he raised his head to travel with his eyes as far as he could see. The magnificent river, of a shade similar to jade, snaked kissing the feet of that goddess made city and she was acclaimed to receive it benevolently. He never had the feeling of having belonged to anything or anyone and fervently wished that this was the last station of his pilgrimage in search of himself.

He had come a long way to get there and, as in the important things in life, it was simply by chance. He was only seventeen when he stowed away on the first ship to dock in the Irish port of Cork, running from the police for stealing food from a grocery store. The old Constellation brigantine had left Liverpool a few days earlier for Bombay, loaded with goods and some passengers who wanted to seek their fortune in India.

Until they arrived in Sierra Leone to get supplies, on the west coast of Africa, Jonathan was feeding himself thanks to the cookies and salted meat of the crew, crouched between the barrels that kept the water and the food. Before setting sail from Freetown, the purser of the Constellation discovered him in the hold when the last of the supplies had been loaded. Only the intercession of Dr. Liebault allowed the boy not to end up hanging from the main mast, paying his passage and adopting him into his service as an assistant.

Jonathan O’Malley only scribbled his name indolently, although he could read thanks to the fact that his mother, hidden from the drunkard of his father, taught him to spell with missal and devotionals. He rarely thought about her; it made him very sad to remember her now that she was dead. He was the only person on earth who had given her any affection, and when he felt downhearted, he pressed hard on the cross of St. Patrick that he had hung around her neck as soon as she was born, so that she would never be helpless, just as he did with the rest of his brothers. That pendant and a small picture of Saint Bridget, which he always carried in his pocket, were his only possessions in the world.

Life smiled on him again after he crossed the path of that compassionate doctor; he treated him with dignity and strove to instruct him. After a four-month journey, his hunger to learn made him read in a hurry the strange books that his protector brought as his only baggage. He did not understand anything they said, but he listened eagerly to the stories the doctor told him as he carefully scrutinized the pictures of the human body that illustrated the anatomy treatises. He even helped the doctor as an impromptu nurse in several dental extractions and the amputation of a sailor’s gangrenous leg without his pulse quivering or hesitation. By the time they arrived in Bombay, he had become so familiar with medical science that he remained linked with Liebault in his adventure to Tibet.

Hypolite Liebault was a French doctor who mastered certain hypnotic techniques learned in Paris from the Viennese Franz Anton Mesmer. Together they travelled through different principalities on their way to their destination, where Hypolite intended to receive, from the hands of Buddhist monks, all the wisdom he lacked to understand the disorders of the mind that were already so in vogue in Europe at that time. Along the way, they were employed as dentists and witch doctor in different areas where no doctor had been seen for years. In Jammu, they even enlisted in the ranks of their Maharajah, to serve as field surgeons in a skirmish against a rival prince. Hypolite spared him no secret of his science, as he watched the boy, thirsting for knowledge, fall more and more in love with that knowledge which was so vocational. The reality was that he had seen in Jonathan the son that providence had denied him and he became so attached to him that he never again presented him as his assistant, but as his son, even though no adoption role had been mediated.

The arrival in Tibet had a strong impact on Jonathan. Those slant-eyed, strangely dressed beings were the most exotic things he had ever seen. Their temples and golden stupas, almost always perched on the top of inaccessible cliffs, reeked of a mixture of incense and sandalwood, and those repetitive sounds recited by their monks were annoying and soporific to him, but the worst thing was the endless steppes of the Tibetan highlands. The desert, in the broadest sense of the word, occupied everything. There were no meadows, no trees, and those bare mountains which seemed in the distance to be a wasteland of bare rivers, making their way through rocky places without the support of any vegetation.

What a horror, he thought repeatedly, as they wandered across that barren plateau on their way to Lasha. Instead, his mentor was enthusiastically trying to make himself understood with mimicry and clumsy onomatopoeia to the few countrymen he met along the way, until he came across a drunken old man who was squandering a rather pedestrian English after having worked for the British East India Company. He taught them their first phrases in Tibetan until they reached the capital city.

When they saw the Potala from afar, it looked like paradise itself. Jonathan had never seen a palace, at least not one like it, which seemed to rise up to a sky which, at that height was within reach. A myriad of windows opened to a brightly painted exterior, like eyes scrutinizing from above, dwarfing even further the insignificance of the pilgrims who came in search of enlightenment.

In Lasha it was not difficult for them to find accommodation; a graceful wooden house perched on a strong stone foundation. The whole town seemed to be drenched in the smoke of hundreds of homes, preparing those vegetable soups which they were offered as soon as they settled down, and which they accompanied with a salty-flavored tea which they mixed with yak butter, that woolly bull whose smell permeated all the streets.

Soon, thanks to their European origins, they made the necessary contacts to be presented to Kalu Jigme Rinpoche, one of the Dalai Lama’s ministers, who was busy welcoming all the respectable foreigners who were dropping in on Tibet. Despite this, it took more than a month for them to be received since the doctor requested an audience.

Hypolite’s affable character and gift of tongues granted