A Journey to Disgrace

Entry One-1

Entry One

The Journal of Denton Burnside

To you, whoever you are, who may be about to read the pages of my journal; be it a man or woman of my own time or the produce of some later and, I hope, more forgiving and understanding age; I give the following warning:

If you are of a timorous or easily shocked temper when it comes to matters of s****l relations between a man and a woman – especially when those relations are disturbing in nature and take place between an adult Englishman and a young Indian girl many years his junior – an Indian girl and her mother, moreover, considered in most circles his social inferior – then you must close this journal, consign it back from whence it came, and not return to it.

Ever.

For I can state with some certainty that what you will find upon its pages is likely to disturb any cosy feelings residing in your breast for either the proper relation of man to woman or that of white to coloured.

The language in which my fall is related will also come as a shock to many of you. But I have no intention of telling my story in any but the language that occurs to me as I write. No flowery prose or unnaturally cosmetic language will attempt to gild a tale that is, anyhow, beyond the help of ornament and, in avoiding this, I trust belief – and perhaps sympathy – may be all the more readily instilled.

This, however uncomfortable I am with process, is my intention.

Should though, from curiosity or simple prurience, you decide to continue with my description of a particular time in my life then I ask only that you keep as much of your mind open as is within your power and to bear in mind the urgings of wise and holy men down the ages on the subject of Christian charity and the failings of others.

This I beg of you.

My fall is not an easy one of which to write and you will understand why when I describe the humiliations no proud Englishman should have had to endure at the hands of foreigners – and one young foreigner in particular.

But I buoy myself to do so in the hope my writing of it and the effort required to commit such a description to paper will be worth it.

I say this with a heartfelt prayer that, at some time after my death, the dire nature of my plight and the weakness that led me to it elicits some shred of understanding and, more importantly, compassion in the heart and soul of another.

For now, from my bed in the English Mission to which the daughter and her parent who decimated my life have consigned me, I know once more some small measure of peace and composure; enough at least to complete this journal.

This before the illness of which there is no cure consigns me to an oblivion that no longer seems so troubling and will bring to an end the sixteen years of purest misery I have endured since that fateful first meeting with the two malevolent females.

My consolation in the face of this termination being the certainty that my two Indian tormentors will not be accompanying me on this particular journey to continue taking their sadistic pleasure upon my disgraced and unresisting carcass.

I beg your indulgence.

And remain.

Denton Burnside

English Mission

Madras

1916

*****

Falling in love and, more especially, lust on a long sea voyage is no difficult feat when one is a single man of eight-and-thirty and in full command of both his looks and his powers. A time when masculine beauty is some years past its first bloom and has taken on the attraction of maturity and absent impetuosity. Some small compensation, one would think, for the departure of comely if callow youth by the introduction to the world of a wiser and more considered soul.

So much greater my shame then, that I, Denton Burnside, at exactly that age and in full possession of all its many boons, should have allowed myself to be taken to the depths of degradation and…

Profuse apologies.

I rush when I should be considered; so heightened is my sense of ignominy by the knowledge my fall into the pits of personal and s****l despair is about to be immortalised and made infamous for all to see after my death.

And this in my own words!

For you may be sure that it is my intention none of those who knew me prior to… them… should hear of my fall while I live.

Of all the vile indignities that have conspired to decimate my manhood this, by far, would be the hardest to keep countenance under.

So I must begin my story where it truly starts – though I sense the seeds of my downfall were planted in some congenitally weak and atavistic way long before and, indeed, the mother and demon I will shortly describe to you said as much.

For this reason, I go back to those days before the ignominy and tragedy of the White Star Line in the North Atlantic. Some eleven years before the sinking of Mr Ismay’s pride and joy took the tarnish from the glory days of the transatlantic liner. A tragic and avoidable event that did so much to detract from the grandeur and opulence available to those fortunate enough to purchase passage at the most rarefied of levels.

The keeper of your journal, you may have divined, having once been one of their number.

Once.

At the time of the my voyage and the story of it I am about to relate, I was two years from a seriously ill-advised marriage to a woman whose cunt was no more faithful than her heart and whose words one could trust no more than one could trust the aforementioned epicentre of her womanhood.

A union that had depleted – though not too seriously - the wealth I had inherited from my father and last surviving member of our line other than me.

Clement Burnside – or “Sir Clement” as he was popularly known.

The old man having been a decorated hero of the Punjab conflict who went on to own a string of factories the length of England. Factories that did so much to supply our great land with confectionary while at the same time, and for those who could afford it, also kept busy the growing number of practitioners following the relatively new and lucrative profession of dentistry. A pandering to the land’s many sweet-tooth’s that did not impact upon my father’s wealth in any wise whatsoever before he sold his interest and lived extremely comfortably upon the proceeds.

So, at the time of which I write, I was a wealthy man with a broken marriage behind me and an intention to never place myself in such a vulnerable emotional and financial position with a woman again.

Yes, you have it right,

Not just delusional, but a fool into the bargain.

No surprise then that a spell spent shipboard in luxurious surroundings would seem to me, at the time anyway, the ideal way to both pass time in company, if I so wished, and, if I did not, to keep to my stateroom with book or gramophone player until such time as I felt in need of human companionship again.

Thus it was that I found myself upon the SS Horatio on the grandest of my trips thus far.

To Sydney and then Melbourne and any number of exotic locations before and after.

The perfect solution for a man who was a loner by temperament and made more so by the wounds of a disastrous marriage that remained close to the surface still; yet not so much of the recluse that, from time to time, he would not seek out the temporary companionship of others.

Would, instead, that I had consigned myself to the most frugal and severe of holy orders and been consigned to the coldest and most inhospitable cell.

Could silence, s****l abstinence and an infested hair-shirt have been any worse than the daily tortures I have suffered not too long after having settled into my cabin on that fateful voyage?

Yet it all started in a way no different to the beginning of the four or five other similar, if of shorter duration, cruises I had taken since ridding my life, at great expense, of that woman.

I will not, throughout this journal dignify the hell’s spawn with a name – though I will add, that in comparison to the females I was about to experience, my thoughts towards her were to become somewhat more charitable.

Yet still it must be said that, though I have since been brought low by two versions of her s*x even more perfidious, it is to my former wife and her treacherous gash that I must give thanks for sending me on the voyage that prove to be my collision course with disaster.

A voyage, I must say, that started so promisingly.

At least for a few days.

There is, I confess, nothing quite like the departure of a great ocean-going liner from port and I am no more immune to it than others. But, with me at least, the euphoria of waving relatives and friends at quayside – none of whom were, or would ever be, mine I might add – soon gave way to a desire to set myself in a routine and avoid the pitfalls made by others who became too involved with their fellow passengers and, consequently, found themselves included in a great many activities and social pursuits they might otherwise have eschewed. A fate from which my natural and habitual taciturnity saved me on many an occasion.

So it was that, in the year of 1899, barely a year before the passing of our beloved and long reigning queen, I found myself upon the SS Horatio as we made headway upon a grey English Channel on route to Le Havre and the Atlantic.

I may add that I for my part had not the faintest intention of becoming involved with another of my wife’s s*x while on board; though I was – then at least – man enough still to not forswear completely the possibility of meaningless s*x.

Should, of course, such an opportunity occur.

But then I could hardly be expected to know of the presence on board of the young Indian woman and her mother who would alter my very existence.

And certainly not for the better.

Padma Choudhary was the young woman’s name, and she cannot have been more than nineteen years of age.

Perhaps, and quite conceivably, less.

To this day I still cannot be certain.

In fact, I remember her telling me just that when she joined me – uninvited – to promenade the deck. My own name, for the moment, was unknown to her - in an uncharacteristic and ungentlemanly way I had neglected to supply it after finding myself in receipt of her own – and yet she appeared utterly unfazed and led me, despite myself, to pay grudging compliment to her unabashed self-possession. The women and, indeed, the people of the sub-continent had never interested me in the same way as they had my father, you understand, and I could not help but feel a sense of superiority towards them to match what was, I must confess, a feeling of faint contempt.

Hence some of my first, forced and unwilling, words addressed to her:

“It is unusual to find a… A person of your… country… on such a cruise, hmm, Miss Choudhary,” I observed rather clumsily, recalling the name she had only just introduced herself with in the nick of time and not a moment before I started stammering.

“You mean an Indian,” she said, English transformed by the thickness of what turned out to be the accent of her Madras roots in the Tamil Nadu, the port located on the Coromandel Coast off the Bay of Bengal to which we would arrive at harbour some time into our voyage and where, presumably, she would disembark.

“I suppose I do,” I told her, unwilling to be fazed by her forthright look and the piercing brown eyes that held themselves upon mine so fixedly.

She was, after all, no more than a young Indian girl.

This I clearly remember telling myself.

She was, though, as I was to find to my cost, no ordinary young Indian girl and - I would discover this for myself soon enough – had seen in me the very essence of something she – and another -had long desired.