Smoke and Ashes

And suddenly a wave of something – guilt or self-loathing possibly, but more a sense of weariness – swept over me. I was tired of it all. Tired of the deception and the constant need to maintain the charade of normality in front of the natives: the need to maintain a stiff upper lip at all bloody times, that unwritten rule that decreed it an indignity to share one’s weaknesses with someone because of the colour of their skin, that to me was the real white man’s burden, not whatever nonsense that fool Kipling might have penned in one his doggerel poems.

‘Cholbé nã.’ It meant ‘unacceptable’, or ‘we won’t stand for it’. Bengalis used that particular expression a lot. Indeed, if there was one phrase that expressed the recalcitrance that characterised them as a people, it was ‘cholbé nã’. Sometimes it felt as if pretty much everything was unacceptable to them, as though they were defined by their antagonism to every bloody thing. But like the speaker on the stage, you always had the feeling that their rage was theatrical – manufactured for the benefit of those looking on – and it was never much of a surprise to soon find them merrily doing something which only moments earlier they’d decried as cholbé nã.