Well - Aunty. My very own Aunty...

My own introduction to Aunty has come just a few days ago, and quite by chance – although knowing what I know about her now, she would of course always dispute that. ‘There are no co-incidences in India’ she’d say, puffing out through her lipstick-bled lips, her earrings shaking, ‘anything is possible... and everything is likely…’

I told you they had put me to live in government accommodation, at Park Street in Taltala district, quiet an attractive little area if you had to live there – central, the rather dusty minutiae of ruling empire accommodated in the same street – police, civil serve etc. etc.

I haven’t discovered whether this was for their benefit or for mine – to keep an eye on me or to let my eye train up under the auspices of these men. But it has meant that I’ve been in the thick of local gossip, sharing my meals in the canteen, occasionally going out with them on sorties around the city – really under the pretext of research but I must also admit too that I felt safe with them, for the city in that first week was overwhelming and I was glad of their company. It was

certainly being chucked into the deep end all right - they see the darker aspects of Calcutta, the opium dens, the whores in European clothes, the insurgents, the marketeers. I have on several occasions got chatting to some of the sergeants.

They are not always pleased about recent developments in the war on this front and they can feel Calcutta slipping from under them, but oddly what gets their goat more than anything is the number of Americans in the city. They are these swanky flash types; even the lowest American private can afford a good Indian servant, not like our lads. And they throw there money around too – literally sometimes, getting smashed on imported beer, then driving round the local street strewing paper rupees from an open truck like ticker tape. It’s quite a sight but of course it’s our lads who have to go in and sort out the local frenzy afterwards. Sympathising with them in the canteen yesterday, I fell into a more natural conversation with them, and in passing one of them happened to mention a strange woman he was looking after – although not so much looking after, he explained, more like an unorthodox house arrest – she was half German he said, and half mad, although charming with it, trying to convert him to Buddhism on the days when she wasn’t converting him to Hinduism.