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Myrna’s aging reached an extreme of disharmony.
    Kuldip Chopra was the high flyer who did Jack Strachey out of the chairmanship of Sharp’s. This was the second turning point. Jack, though steady, just, and steely, was without brilliance, as everyone at Sharp’s regretfully noted. Regretfully, because he was popular and respected. But with Independence, the bosses, though still British, had to show their bona fides to the independent Indian government, and discrimination had to be seen as ended. Getting their own to come out to India was a vanishing option, and Indianization was unavoidable. So when the brilliant, flamboyant Kuldip Chopra created ripples, there was already a buzzing in the wings that if anyone was to signify the new order, it had to be him. Kuldip had shocked his white colleagues when he had first strolled into their offices, coolly plucked cigars from their humidors, sat back, and hiked his well-shod feet on to their desks. Before Independence. But this didn’t stop him from taking the company surging forward with inspired management. Until that stage, very few Indians had been accepted into the covenanted ranks, and Kuldip was one of those few. He had a genuine pukka accent after a long education at Harrow and Oxford, a fine dress sense, and a sophisticated wife and living style, easily equaling his most fastidious British associates. Jack was a grammar school boy and had trained at Dundee for the jute mill floor and factory management, risen “from the ranks.”

    Myrna was gnawing her nails and pouring herself too many whiskeys waiting for news on the expected day when the phone rang. She snatched at it eagerly, thinking, “He’s lost it, I’m sure he’s lost it.” She could feel her energy draining away while she listened to Jack’s laborious words. The ghosts were listening in too, eagerly, and they sighed collectively when they heard the news. “So it’s him after all, Kuldip Chopra!” she exclaimed when he came home. Jack’s mind lurched and he wondered for a nightmarish second if Kuldip had been one of her lovers. His eye met Myrna’s at the same moment and realizing what was going through his mind, she shook her head slightly, the first such acknowledgement between them. This was when the bell finally tolled for her illicit affairs. Her heart went out to Jack, the predictable, unpretentious husband, her life’s stable rock, so crushed by this blow. Indian policies and politics had to be transformed at this time of all times, just when it would hurt him most!
    â€œAt least he won’t be knighted,” said Jack.
    â€œHe can’t be,” said Myrna, her small triumph being that Kuldip was the loser somewhere for not being British.
    What, one might wonder, made Jack Strachey stay on? Was the ignominy of losing to the outstanding Kuldip Chopra, of not being knighted, of seeing his wife’s ex-lovers flitting around him till the end of his life, of living among subject people cocky with freedom, not enough to drive him away, join at least one of the later streams of returning Britons? And if the attractions of staying on, ineffable or otherwise, had been so overwhelming, why was it that most other Britons thought and decided otherwise? Demographers, sociologists, psychoanalysts, historians, and political scientists may have come to the conclusion that this was the inevitable pattern when colonialism was ending, when, usually, the approaching end of an alien rule braked the ruling expatriates’ ideas of putting down roots, turned their eyes homeward.
    It is difficult to say, except that going back depressed Jack unbearably. Not even the attraction of Martin’s nearness could turn that depression around. Underlying this choice was the memory of the cold, gray Skiddaw world, the formal distance between people in that small space. Here, there were all the other advantages, the automatic assumptions of the ones who