9058009401

192 M. K. NADC

and impressions then in vogue. Commenting upon the brown complexion of the Eurasian boy, Drew (Durroo), in Kullu of the Carts, John Eyton says, *11 was not the kind of brown that you could explain away lightly as sunbum or disguise as Spanish. It was far morę significant and dcep-seated... a tan... morę prized, he had noticed in inanimate objects, such as meerschaum pipes and amber beads and honey and old ale, than in human beings.¹⁷ Even whcn the Eurasian was not brown but fairly white in complexion, certain tale-tell marks always betrayed the shameful secret. Thus, Stephen explains to the Eurasian Rosa, in Rumer Godden ’s The Lady and the Unicom why he finds her to be different from the English: ‘you use hands so much for talking, and the way you speak, too ąuickly to be English and your eyes and hair, so dark and your skin so curiously white, not like a northem skin.’¹⁸ A character in Paul Scott ^łs The Alien Sky points out that the Eurasians*, ‘hands are usually small-boned, like Indians... Most of them talk a singsong like Welsh.¹⁹ In Brian Cooper’s A Touch of Thunder, we are lold that the Eurasian girl, Belly Rowlands has fingcrs which have, ‘the dark linie patch that Eurasians had just bclow the base of thcir nails.*²⁰ Alan Laurence, in Diver*s Candlcs in the Wind, marks how the Eurasian doctor Videlle has eycs ‘touched with mclancholy’, ‘eye-balls tinged with yellow’ and a ‘too brilliant flash of white (teeth) * — all supposely Indian trails.²¹ Morę discoveries of a similar naturę are madę about the poor doctor by Lyndsay : ‘ the sensuous indecision of the lips, the poor outline of chin, a jaw’.²² The belief that the Eurasian was in some cases somehow exceptional endowed with beauty is also echocd by somc novelists. Young George Garforth, the Eurasian in M. M. Kaye*s The Far Pavilions is blcssed with a ‘Grecian profile and Byronie curls*²³, which however prove to be the only plus point about him. And in Anthony Burgess *s The Long Day Wancs, Crabbe, the English man envies Ropcr, the Eurasian for his ‘inlcnse physical beauty, a beauty which was a mark of shame to its possessor. How complicated life was for the Eurasian. *²⁴

This ‘complicated life* of the Eurasian, freąuently leading to frustration and tragedy is ably chronicled in Anglo-Indian fiction. As a ‘child of no man’s land’²⁵, ‘pathetie half and half’²⁶, it was the dubious birthright of the Eurasian to be curscd right from his (mostly unwanted) entry into the world with a crippling identity crisis. The following dialogue in Henry Bruce *s The Eurasian underscores the idea:

‘He’s a Eurasian, a mixure. ’

‘What is the harm in a mitxure, Sir?’

‘Nonę at all, in a good one. But the Eurasian is a tamation bad mixure... The Eurasian as such is a man of streaks, all striped, like a barber's pole. He *s not a whole man... The only certainty about a Eurasian is his uncertainty.*²⁷