A Very English Chattel – ebook

Excerpt

Balliol College

It was in the autumn of 2009, well into the calamity that had rocked the world’s financial institutions and sent economies reeling, that I rented a house in Oxford that was a leisurely stroll to my Alma Mater of Balliol and – more importantly for my research into the life of the undeservedly neglected composer and 18th Century musician, Giovanni Battista Viotti – the various Bodleian Libraries; that I came across the script you are about to read.

It was while exploring the, in common with Viotti, neglected attic of the old but spacious three-bedroom terraced house I had taken for the duration of my stay – this with the intention of setting up my study to take advantage of the view comprising various dreaming spires as I wrote – that I came across a battered tea-chest left by the former occupiers.

Naturally curious (almost to the point of prurience, I confess), I soon found myself rifling through the various documentation of bills and letters in English until I came across a manuscript around halfway down the box.

It was written in Hindi and, having spent my formative years with my Foreign Office father and long-suffering mother in Northern India’s Haryana before leaving to study in England, I remained fluent in both the speaking and the reading of the tongue.

In possession of the Trust from my late-parent’s estate and with no pressing money problems – even in such parlous times – it was perhaps understandable I should have been tempted to take a break from my research of the neglected Viotti and devote my industry to a reading and then a translation of what, the writer protested, was an adventure from true-life.

A temptation proving too great to resist.

And especially after I had read the first few paragraphs of a manuscript titled:

“Dayamai and Her Chattel”.

It was, it turned out, written by the Indian woman who I discovered lived in the house with its English owner prior to my renting of it; much of my later knowledge derived from those benefitting from the owner’s passing.

More of which will become clear as you read on and will mostly be found in the Postscript supplied at story’s end.

The manuscript itself was handwritten in a novelistic style and, intrigued by its title, I immediately took it downstairs and set myself up with a pot of tea in the kitchen before seating myself at the table to begin a fuller exploration of its contents.

An exploration which immediately galvanised both my interest and my attention – Viotti completely forgotten at that point and still to be revisited in the passing of the years since – and would later turn out to be all the more compelling in a low and base way for the events of the script turning out to be of factual rather than fictional provenance.

If after reading those same contents you share my original scepticism on their behalf, then be assured, from the inquiries I made afterwards from various neighbours, friends and acquaintances of the deceased man himself, the narrative of its writer is of neither the fevered nor fanciful fictional variety and, I must confess, disturbed me in ways I found almost as surprising as I found them shaming.

The former explained in part by the coincidental but no less disturbing similarities between myself and the description of the man described in the narrative.

What questions remain – at least in regard of me – must remain the responsibility of your own imaginations to answer, as I have already revealed more of myself than I intended.

St John Wilson

Rye

Kent