Pageant

"Have you read this?!" my brother-in-law asked, dropping a book onto the counter.

"No," I said, laughing at his expression. "I didn't know we owned that book." It was hard-bound, green, and had that mid-century look. My mother-in-law probably dropped it off one day after cleaning out her house; she stops by here on the way to Goodwill and I always grab the books, though I may not read them.

"I found it in the bathroom,"* he said, all astonishment, and then proceeded to read the opening paragraph.

"She was the daughter of Sonoo, a Hill-man of the Himalayas, and Jadeh his wife. One year their maize failed, and two bears spent the night in their only opium poppy-field just above the Sutlej Valley on the Kotgarh side; so, next season, they turned Christian, and brought their baby to the Mission to be baptized. The Kotgarh Chaplain christened her Elizabeth, and 'Lispeth' is the Hill or pahari pronunciation."

"What a beginning! Read it," my brother-in-law said, "and then tell us about it."

So I've read it.

Are you familiar with this story? It's one of Kipling's earliest short stories; it's from the collection Plain Tales From the Hills and reprinted in my book, a 1935 edition of A Kipling Pagent. It's set in Pakistan, I think. Lispeth, who grows up to be beautiful, falls in love with a white man. The white man doesn't love her back, but at the behest of the Chaplain's wife he pretends he does "to keep her quiet." He sails back to London. Lispeth despairs. She despairs. Finally the Chaplain's wife confesses, exasperated, that she lied, and the white man lied, and he's never coming back. Lispeth then denounces the wife, forsakes Christianity, returns to her old village and marries a man who beats her. The end.

What a story.

It intrigued me enough to google Kipling, though.

You know, a lot of "colonials" have a passion for England but I never have had. I considered England sort of dowdy and musty and old-fashioned and incomprehensible – which attitude I think I learned in high school; and the English people I met when I lived in Eastern Europe did not endear me to their country. Then, in my mid-30s, Robert Louis Stevenson's book Kidnapped captured my imagination; and all y'all's sighing over Mr. Darcy made me read Austen, which I've come to love, too; and from there I read some Horatio Hornblower and now I'm on the tenth Jane Austen Detective mystery, which is absolutely fabulous.

I still have no desire to visit England (Scotland, now – I do want to hike there) but I'm fascinated by Regency and Victorian England.

Anyway. What I wanted to say is this: my Kipling Pageant contains the story Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. I read it to the children last night. My daughter, who appreciates fierce animals, loved that mongoose. This afternoon we sat on the deck in the sun and I read it to her again. And then she watched the Orson Welles-narrated version three times through on YouTube.

And this (finally!) is what I meant to conclude with: another example of being platform-agnostic.

* We lack bookshelves in this house so many books are piled in the bathrooms. When guests leave I like to glance at how the piles have been reshuffled. My brother-in-law usually reads Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.