Thomas Hardy had just died when his admirers in Delhi decided to hold an evening gathering in his memory in 1928. The place chosen was near the Qudsia Lodge in the Civil Lines. Those present included Sir Malcolm Hailey, former Chief Commissioner of Delhi, and that time Governor of Punjab, incumbent Chief Commissioner Johnson, Sir Henry Gidney, members of the Skinner and Heatherley families, three or four Freemasons and, among the ladies, Leonara G’meiner, an Australian theosophist and principal of Indraprastha Girls’ School. Hardy’s “Mayor of Casterbridge” was particularly mentioned as a warning by some speakers over increasing alcoholism in the local firangi community.
Henchard, tragic hero of the novel, had sold his wife for booze and his daughter Elizabeth-Jane also went with the mother. Cocktails were ordered after most had had their say on the late author. George Heatherley’s father, fond of fishing at the weekends, had decided to give his angling trip a miss, not so much for Hardy’s sake as for the pleasure of the company he had anticipated. Sipping his drink he quoted Urdu verses from his ancestor Alexander Heatherley Azad’s diwan, which only a few understood, besides the Skinners, still enamoured of the Persian memoirs of their grandsire, Sikandar Sahib. But Leonara was more interested in tracing the Aussie connection with India to writer-cum-lawyer John Lang who had made his home in Mussoorie and had defended the Rani of Jhansi before the Privy Council in London. She pointed out that Hardy was just a few years older than Annie Besant, whose Home Rule movement had been espoused by her. She also reminded the gathering that the Lady Hailey Silver Medal had been won six times in a row by some student or the other of hers. Hailey was naturally delighted on hearing this.
As the evening wore on, it was decided that those present stage a scene from the “Mayor of Casterbridge”, with the part of the unfortunate wife being played by Miss James, fiancée of a civilian officer. The role of Elizabeth-Jane was assigned to Miss Prentice, assistant in the Deputy Commissioner’s Office. At one stage of her highly-strung delivery, she became as if possessed in a Delphic grove and blurted out a line from mystery story she had once read: “I am the goddess Astarte and I hold death in my hands.” Just then a gunshot was heard and a man standing close to her fell down wounded. Who had fired the shot nobody knew. But it was surmised that the assailant could be part of the revolutionaries inspired by Bhagat Singh and Raj Guru. A Lt. Franklin, however, doubted the assumption and was sure that it was someone from the Euro-Anglo community. He was eventually proved right as an anonymous message identified the culprit as a spurned suitor of Miss Prentice, who was actually the intended victim. But the suspect succumbed to a heart attack while trying to flee to Scotland. These happenings were disclosed by Gidney to his shikar-circuit nawab friend, F.K. Sherwani, whose son Farooq Mian used to talk about them till his death.
However, Gidney felt the weird event was partly induced by the lady’s propensity to psychic behaviour which made her a sort of poltergeist , drawing calamity not on herself but on somebody else. You can make what you like of this observation by an adventurous man who had hunted the Naga headhunters during a British expedition. He had also probed the Aeolian harp murder by proxy in the Cairo Museum by the curator’s daughter one night. The harp had a hidden poisoned dagger. It killed the guard when he tried to replace it in the rack, not knowing that the safer way to handle it was to hold it upside down, as the somnambulist girl had done. She had thus unknowingly thwarted a device by a crafty Greek king to settle scores with unsuspecting rivals. Thoughts of that 1928 evening sent a shiver down the spine when one visited Qudsia Bagh during a gloomy twilight last week.
As for the Mayor of Casterbridge, Nicholas Carlson about 150 years later has found “The Mayer of Sunnyvale” in Marissa Mayer, who was luckier in her struggle to save Yahoo than Mayor Henchard in his attempt to undo his folly.
