Notes Out of Time: Irena in India

Irena is the name I wish to give her. Our paths crossed in time and space over 30 years ago at a cocktail party in Delhi. British India was long dead but the corpse still twitched in two or three of the hill stations and a few overgrown bungalows in Delhi and in the old presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. The first and even the second generation of India's new Indian rulers spoke a pukka English they had learned at Cambridge and the army was officered still by moustachioed gentlemen who dined in the reflected brilliance of regimental silver.

Irena and I shared an interest in architecture – I was fascinated by Le Corbusier’s attempt at urban fusion with Chandigarh and she had an interest in Luytens’ incredible New Delhi, last, mesmerizing gasp of a reactive, antediluvian imperialism. We spent days travelling to meet various architects or to museums and, for recreation, travelled to lesser, hidden buildings, nearly forgotten outposts of empire scattered about the North Indian plain. On these long trips we would fight the boredom, the heat and the dust by sharing not just our common passion in architecture but our personal lives. By some wordless agreement, however, there was a boundary between us that we both honoured. Our relationship was asexual, even when the anecdote (for that mostly was how we communicated) was breathlessly sexual. It was as if we were siblings, out of time, at peace with each other in a way not normally possible in the post-industrial world. We were genteel, decanted into the Indian subcontinent from Jane Austen.

We shared an interest and made common cause against modern India, we mourned the passage of time, not for any lost imperial Elysium but simply for the romance that was now, as the last embers of the raj passed away, tantalisingly just beyond our reach.

You couldn’t help liking Irena. She disarmed you first with the charming accent of Italian schoolgirl English. Physically she was angular, without discernable breasts but tall and the ideal hanger for haute couture; in fact, at some point she had been a model in Milan or Paris. Irena had a confidence whose origin baffled me, she was so far from what I found attractive. Beyond her character, I was immune to her charms; it was fascinating, though, to watch her weave a spell over a man or, even, to hear her talk about it of an evening as the sun settled and we still had many miles to cover before we would be back in Delhi.