a white lamp in a sea of brass

You may recall me mentioning a book I was reading a few months ago; Sixty Lights by Gail Jones. It’s the story of a sister and brother growing up in the Victorian era. It starts out in Australia, migrates to England, then to India and back to England once more. Anyway, before I return the book to the friend who loaned it to me, I wanted once again to record another one of my favourite passages from it… so I can re-read it in the future, and so you can enjoy it too.

This is when Lucy, now a young woman, has travelled to India, where the Victorian age seems not to exist, and a whole new world like nothing she’s ever seen before has opened before her.

There were places Lucy would travel to where her own ignorance astounded her. She entered customs and buildings she knew nothing about. People around her spoke and she understood not a single word. She considered herself a crude cipher of the West, carrying her own culture as impeding knowledge. This territory she had entered was on the whole indifferent to her presence, and might well engulf or erase the speck of empire she accidentally represented. It was in the marketplace, where foreign women were never seen, that she felt most keenly her presumptuous misplacement. Local women of exceptional beauty brushed and slid alongside: she thought her own clothes a stiff and ridiculous dome against their fluent forms and loose clinging fabrics. She was, more over, pastel to their augmented hues; she had never before felt so bleached and so encased. There were merchants standing behind pyramids of many-coloured spices who hailed her and smiled; they waved their hands like magicians over their mini-geographies, enticing the stranger to inspect and buy. Lucy instructed Bashanti to acquire a few ounces of turmeric, for no reason other than its colour, and that it was something she could confidently name. There were men in saffron robes devoted to multiform gods, and children with kohl around their eyes and small grasping hands. Here were beggars with damaged limbs and whole families with fingers and faces eroded by leprosy. Lucy asked Bashanti to give them money, but her servant simply flung coins in their general direction, afraid of their touch. Flowers garlanded tiny shrines in nooks and crannies, and sewage and rubbish lay strewn beneath her feet. So many people and so prepossessed.

Lucy would have liked to announce that she was Australian, not English, but she knew that here the distinction was probably meaningless. Her face was a white lamp in a sea of brass. She wished herself dark. She wished herself Indian, part of this throng of purposeful, myth-saturated, interconnected people. Now and then she passed another foreigner, a man, inevitably, who would nod, or touch the rim of his hat, as if exchanging secret English messages in code. Lucy had no wish to communicate with these other lamps who felt – she could tell – that they shone more brightly and more importantly than anyone else, that they dispensed white light with a civilising purpose. In her imagination she flickered in the midst of the crowd, her face appearing here and there, inconstant and impermanent, a kind of fleeting figment, in a more general and self-sufficient sea of brown.


The storyline itself, although lovely and interesting, is not utterly brilliant, but the way it is written is. Man, I enjoyed reading this… can you tell? Ha.