Adela’s love song
There’s nothing much significant about Kotri. Situated on the right bank of Indus, a humble town relegated by its grand neighbor across the river, city of Hyderabad, the Capital of Sind during later years of Kalhora rule and Lower Sind during the reign of Talpurs. I remember Kotri as a whistle-stop during those summer vacation train journeys, from childhood years. Our train, Super Express usually it was, Chenab Express on other times, plying on the down tracks used to leave Hyderabad, the last stop before Karachi, onto a wide, very wide, multispan bridge over the mighty Indus. A vast floodplain, the river taking a wide turn as if preparing for a descend into Arabian sea, huge zig-zag iron pillars of the Kotri bridge whooping past the window of our economy class compartment, causing a shutter effect to the panoramic view of Indus, adding rhythmic, frighteningly loud thunks to the clickety clack of metallic wheels, terrifying yet fascinating to our thumping children hearts. With the bridge crossed, shutters and thunks coming to an abrupt halt, the view would open up to the line of sight, but our eyes would shift to watch the locomotive and front cars of our train in wonder as the railway tracks took a sharp turn to align with the platform of Kotri Junction. Rumbling past the converging and diverging maze of lines, switching tracks, the train would ease in for a brief stop, sometimes chug past the platform dead slow without a halt. The scene is vivid in my memory, crossing of Indus on Kotri Bridge, looking out for the platform signage announcing KOTRI JN, as if it was a gateway to another portal, back to our childhood home in Steel Town, Karachi, after a month long excursion in Punjab.
A recent video from YouTube that creatively captures Karakoram Express crossing over Kotri Bridge brings back the acoustics as I remember it from my childhood days
There’s nothing much significant about Kotri, yet it was significant to my joyful, enthusiastic heart, with the associated paraphernalia of a river, a bridge, the clickety clack of train wheels and a railway junction. Just like Arundhati Roy’s Ayemenem with its Meenachil River, the green waters, with blue skies and trees in it, and a broken yellow moon at night, and a squirrel. Mine was more grey than green and there was no squirrel, but there was river, and I loved it, all of it, with all my heart. I was no poet, otherwise would have composed sonnets or ballads in praise of this beloved land. But, dear reader, as it turns out, ages ago, there was one, a firangee poetess from the days of Raj, who of all the places on God’s earth, happened to be here, lovestruck by the glowing waters of Indus in the twilight of Kotri’s glimmering skies, and while standing by the river composed a poem of haunting beauty …
At Kotri, by the river, when the evening’s sun is low,
The waving palm trees quiver, the golden waters glow,
The shining ripples shiver, descending to the sea;
At Kotri, by the river, she used to wait for me…
Indus at Kotri
The view in this shot taken from the window of air conditioned compartment is much different than that from economy class coach, still it perfectly captures the aura of Indus at Kotri Bridge
photo credit @talha_yousaff_photography
Kotri, back in 1880s was indeed a ‘considerable town’ as David Ross puts it, who composed a fascinating travellers’ manual “The Land of the Five Rivers and Sindh”. It housed the headquarters of three government offices, those of the Deputy Collector, the Settlement Officer and the Conservator of Indus. The railway line was also there, leading all the way to Sukkur thanks to the opening of the Indus State Valley Railway (ISVR). The railway followed the alignment of the right bank of the river as the bridge on Indus was still a thing of future. Ross tells us that in a population of around 9000 there were about a hundred Europeans settled in Kotri. The European quarters were located north and west of the native town, and the area was well planted with trees. We also know that back in 1886, one Colonel Arthur Cory, stationed in Karachi edited Sind edition of Civil & Military Gazette assisted by two of his daughters working in the editorial office. Was it that her daughter, younger of the two, Adela Cory, then in her twenties, chanced upon a trip to Kotri, and there at European quarters while following the line of waving palm trees quivering in the gentle wind, with evening sun low on the horizon, caught a glimpse of golden waters of Indus, and there as if in requiem of a ‘young, slender love’, composed her beautiful poem on Kotri, the opening lines of which we just read in the previous paragraph.
So young, she was, and slender, so pale with wistful eyes
As luminous and tender as Kotri's twilight skies.
Her face broke into flowers, red flowers at the mouth,
Her voice,— she sang for hours like bulbuls in the south.
So our young ‘firangee poetess from the days of Raj’ now has a name, but whether this poem by Adela Cory was published in any of the issues of Civil & Military Gazette’s Sind Chapter, we don’t know. Any evidence, if there was one, now lies buried in a cemetery of old documents with the Sind Government Archives. What we do know is that this poem first appeared in The Garden of Kama and other Love Lyrics from India, the year was 1902 and the poet wasn’t Adela Cory but one Laurence Hope …. Mr. Laurence Hope.
Pale Hands of Shalimar & Twilight at Wular Lake
On St. George’s Day in 1924, Empire Stadium in Wembley, London buzzed with activity as King George V inaugurated the grand British Empire Exhibition. In what was ‘a miniature model of The Empire brought home to the Britons’ there were stalls and pavilions from more or less all colonies and dominions. There was one from India too, ‘The Crown Jewel of the Empire’. The walls of the Indian Pavilion, inspired in design by the Mughal architecture, resonated with a song. A song of pale hands, of love and the Shalimar Gardens of Kashmir.
Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar,
Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell?
Whom do you lead on Rapture's roadway, far,
Before you agonise them in farewell?
Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar,
Where are you now? Where are you now?
Included in Amy Woodforde-Finden’s composition of four songs under the title, “The Story of Indian Love Lyrics”, first published in 1902, this hauntingly beautiful melody was still popular after more than 20 years. Radio Times, in the same year of our British Empire Exhibition declared them as “the most popular songs ever published in the history of music”. These immortal lines of intimate, passionate to an extent of ‘forbidden’ love are attributed to one Laurence Hope. We, dear reader, shall come back to this name in a bit. Amy Woodforde-Finden further added an exotic touch to this poetic beauty through some bold musical notes, “bare piano octaves, modal melody and the fluid triplet rhythms” to quote A.B.Cooper in ‘Songs that Moved the World’. Ms Finden tells us how casually were these songs borrowed from Mr. Hope, much before the publication of his first book.
When Marion Doughty first published “Afoot Through the Kashmir Valleys” in 1901, ‘tourism in the valley’ wasn’t even a thing. Travels to Kashmir undertaken by the British were primarily for work and others, albeit very few, for the want of adventure. The train journey from the plains would drop these ‘enthusiasts’ at Pindi, the railway terminus for travels to Kashmir. The travellers would then hire a horse carriage paying Rs.95 for Salim Tanga (the entire carriage to themselves) or secure a seat therein for a sum of Rs.45. Tolls had to be paid at one or two booths upon entering the valley and other than paying the regular cost of bed and breakfast at the intermediary dak bungalows, upon reaching the destination one could hire a doonga along with the boatman for Rs. 35~40 a month. All this detail of course, comes to us from Marion Doughty’s fantastic book, but what really interests us are the excerpts from ‘native poems’ that Ms Doughty has craftily used as songs of love interspersed with her travel experiences across Kashmir.
Navigating the waters of Wular Lake, in the backdrop of snowy peaks of Pir Panjal, rays of a setting sun turning them to rosy pink, we find one Mrs Assiza singing, in full fresh voice, a Lover’s Lament:
There is an hour at twilight, too heavy for mem'ry.
There is a flower that I fear for your hair had its fragrance.
At camping ground of Kangan, under the shades of walnut trees, somewhere near a ‘Mahomedan’ burial ground, upon nightfall, we come across another character singing yet another native song …
Stars! from your skies so purple and so calm,
That through the centuries your secrets keep,
Send to this worn-out heart some soothing balm.
Send me, for many nights so sleepless, sleep.
Left: the original poem from Garden of Kama | Right: Included as native song in Afoot Through the Kashmir Valleys
Then there are more of these. Interestingly where each chapter in this Kashmir travelogue begins with a structured stanza by a renowned English poet of literary standing and is duly attributed, Marion altogether omits any credit to these ‘native songs’. There’s one page attribution though, in the beginning of the book, “I am indebted to the kindness of a friend for the metrical translations of some of the native songs quoted in this volume”. Who was that kind friend? to have composed these songs in such perfect blend with the climate and country, and a passionately oriental touch, one wonders. A present day reader through comparison can conveniently conclude that these songs of love and passion are the direct excerpts from Laurence Hope’s Garden of Kama, which back in 1901 was yet to find its way to publication.
Our Carefree Poet(ess) of Love & Passion
A March 1902 edition of Athenaeum, a London based literary Journal introduces us to The Garden of Kama and other Love Lyrics from India by one Mr. Laurence Hope published by Heinemann, London the previous year. The book through its ‘arrangement of verse’ brings to us some fascinating songs, laments, reveries and reminiscences from the very mouth of native characters like Mahomed Akram, Zahir-ud-Din, Valgovind and many others. The Athenaeum article is all praise for the ‘spontaneity’ with which our poet has captured the very pulse of India.
Mr. Hope leaves on one side a great deal, in particular the squalor and tawdriness of India as the average man sees it, and brings us into a region of native feeling and imagination never yet fully explored. His song is an expansion of Shelley’s ‘ Indian Serenade,’ with its “champak odours” and its swoon of spirit and sense.
The Athenaeum, Issue No. 3881, March 15, 1902
Now Amy Finden must have borrowed the Kashmiri Song and other poems much before the publication of Garden of Kama, probably around late 1880s and she mentions the fact that these poems were lent to her free of charge by our poet of interest Mr. Laurence Hope. The same generosity ‘he’ displayed in lending other selective verses to Marion Doughty for her Kashmir travelogue, which we now reference from the pages of Garden of Kama. It was much later, even after the publication of a second book of poems Stars of the Desert when it was revealed that Laurence Hope is a male pseudonym used by Adela Florence Nicolson, wife of General Nicolson the then commander of Mhow garrison in India. So our unconventional poet of exotic love lyrics from India was actually a memsahib of the raj, who composed these beauties drenched in Indian love and cared less in letting others to borrow her work even before it was formally published that too under the guise of a male pseudonym.
Introduction to Garden of Kama published in The Athenaeum
Much critique followed regarding the subject and unconventionality of these love lyrics composed by a colonial lady but that would fall beyond our scope of this story. What may be of interest to my readers is the fact that Adela Florence Nicolson before she became Mrs. Nicolson was Adela Cory. The same Adela who once roamed around and composed songs in love of Indus at Kotri and of the palm trees on Karachi beach. If Kotri, Karachi and Kashmir weren’t enough pain to a wanderer heart, the laments from Garden of Kama go beyond the hazy skyline of Hub mountains west of Sind crossing the forbidden North Western frontier of the Empire into the very heartland of Baluchistan and thence to the very neighbourhood of ‘pink almonds of Kandahar’.
We have left Gul Kach behind us,
Are marching on Apozai,
Where pleasure and rest are waiting
To welcome us by and by.
- Camp Followers Song - Gomal River, from The Garden of Kama and other Love Lyrics from India, Laurence Hope
Both pleasure and rest on the march from Gul Kach to Apozai refer to the valley of Gomal River in Baluchistan hinterland, and my dear reader, legend has it that our Adela Cory after she became Mrs. Violet Nicolson, discreetly followed her husband’s military entourage, The Zhob Field Force of 1890, guised as a Pathan boy!
Adela Florence Nicolson A.K.A Laurence Hope
The Vows at Karachi
Colonel Malcolm Hassels Nicolson, commanding 3 Baluch Regiment (30th Regiment Jacob’s Bombay Native Infantry) in Hyderabad, a frequent visitor to Corys in Karachi, was in no way an eligible bachelor, not in any way to Adela Cory, half her age, but the stars were to align in a remarkably absurd way, giving rise to an invisible yet strong chemistry that attracted the two. Adela was unorthodox in her own non colonial ways and friendliness with the natives, and our colonel wasn’t an ordinary customer either, seeking some traditional off-the-shelf English wife. Perhaps it was the chivalrous Afghan Campaign medal bearing Ahmed Khel clasp on colonel’s decorated chest or his mastery of tribal customs and native languages to include Pashto, Brahui and others (Adela, we are told had a native fluency in Urdu), or his build and features as remarked by Sir James Willcocks, ‘But for his colour and Saxon tongue you might easily have mistaken him for a Pathan’, that attracted the Cory girl and that was that.
‘Now, listen, darling,’ and his voice was serious. ‘Did you mean it when you said you needed no notice to get married?’
Fate Knows No Tears, Mary Talbot Cross, Shalimar Press, 1996
Adela met his gaze and nodded silently.
‘Good,’ said the colonel. ‘Is tomorrow too soon, then? I have a special license.’
‘What time tomorrow, and where?’
Away from the usual pomp and ceremony of a traditional English wedding in the grandeur of Karachi Gymkhana Club, our couple preferred to tie their love knot in the registry office taking their vows in front of the registrar clerk. Adela Cory thus became Adela Florence Nicolson and the couple now referred to as ‘Nicks’ moved to Hyderabad, Colonel’s duty station. Mesmerized by the depth of her deep blue eyes, our colonel out of compassion christened Adela as Violet Nicolson, a name she dearly carried after the marriage. Flora Annie Steel who was friends with Colonel Nicolson, in her autobiography mentions her meeting with Violet Nicolson in Bombay (present day Mumbai) and remembers the casual way in which the Colonel had informed her of the wedding at Karachi, ‘By the way, I was married the other day’.
In Bombay I saw Violet Nicholson, otherwise Laurence Hope, for the first time. She had lately married a very old friend of mine, who, a few months back, had put a postscript to a long letter saying curtly, “By the way, I was married the other day.” I remember my reply was equally brief. After the usual budget of news and airings of views, my postscript was: “By the way, I died the day before yesterday.”
The Garden Of Fidelity Being The Autobiography Of Flora Annie Steel 1847-1929
Lieutenant-General M. H. Nicolson (the medal on the far right is from Afghanistan Campaign of 1878-80. Note the clasp which is from the Battle of Ahmed Khel)
When I die, Just Give me Baluchistan
Lieutenant General Sir George Fletcher MacMunn who later became Colonel Commandant of the Royal Artillery, spent good about 25 years in India, which he claims was “partly by chance and largely by desire” the underlying reason of the ‘desire’ being romance of British India. When in India, a subaltern in late 1880s, the General put down his name for mountain artillery, primarily to see action in the frontiers and also because he was engaged to be married and needed some extra pay. The General in his memoir “Behind the Scenes in Many Wars” conspicuously mentions of the presence of ‘a lady in the camp’ in the Baluchistan passes. The year was 1891 and the then Lieutenant MacMunn was posted to No. 5 Bombay Mountain Battery further up on the Afghan Frontier.
On my way up at a rest-house in one of the passes, I was shown into the common room to find a lady with golden hair down her back, and her skirts rolled to her knees. I was invited in cheerily to share the log fire. Then came in Colonel Nicholson and formally presented his wife, no less a celebrity of later days to come then ‘Lawrence Hope’. She and the General, as he became later, were well-known characters of the old days, round whom many yarns centred. He was then raising a new Afghan battalion of proper young cut-throats.
‘Behind the Scenes in Many Wars’ being the Military Reminiscences of Lieutenant General Sir George MacMunn, 1930
This was quite a find! A lady wife, of all the places in India to be camping in Baluchistan while her husband was deployed on live action. What we do know from contemporary sources is that soon after the honeymoon period was over for Nicks at Hyderabad, Colonel Nicolson left with his battalion the 3rd Baluchis to command a section of the Zhob Field Force, a punitive expedition sent out in 1890 to put into submission wild tribes at the Baluchistan frontier. Legend has it, and the ‘legend’ here would classify as the oral tradition in the family or the regimental history of Baluchis, that Violet Nicolson travelled with the rolling stock of 3 Baluchis with an intention to bid farewell to her husband at the railway terminus of Harnai before heading back to Hyderabad. So she did, but exercising her discretionary powers over their orderly Sepoy Mahomed Akram, Lady Nicolson disguised as boy, assuming the role of latter’s son, both the memsahib and the orderly then rode on horseback through the mountains and gorges of the forbidden land, discretely following the trail of her husband, eventually breaking cover at the post of Tanishpa, where the section commanded by Colonel Nicolson camped. Mary Talbot Cross in her novel ‘Fate Knows no Tears’ which is a remarkable blend of fiction with fact, “faction” would be more suitable genre here, gives us a detailed account of this hazardous to an extent of gravely dangerous ‘adventure’. Over a hundred miles of narrow tracks or no track at all in a treacherous country. And when the news broke out of Lady Nicolson reaching the camp at Tanhishpa, it was Sir Robert Sandeman, the chief architect of the Zhob Expedition reigning in Colonel Nicolson.
When I was there (in England) three years ago, wives were busy running away from their husbands. Not after them, like yours! Now off you go and leave George White to me.
Fate Knows No Tears, Mary Talbot Cross, Shalimar Press, 1996
Sandeman’s assurance to Colonel Nicolson was indeed effective as there is no mention of a ‘lady in the camp’ by Field Marshal Sir George Stuart White, the then commandant of Zhob Field Force in his memoir. Another very comprehensive book ‘With the Zhob Field Force, 1890’ by Albert William Crawford McFall goes into great detail while describing the exploits of the section commanded by Colonel Nicolson but fails to mention the presence of Colonel’s darling wife in the expedition.
Violet was a companion of the Colonel as the force marched to Apozai and then onto Dhana Sar, an outpost on the border confluence of Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in present day Pakistan. It was from Dhana Sar that Adela sent a dispatch to her elder sister Isabella in Karachi, describing the location as a stony plateau surrounded by steep hills, olives and acacias, the cold nights in the camp, and other happenings including the talks with elders of Shirani tribe and more.
The postcard sent by Adela from Dhana Sar, Baluchistan to her sister Isabella in Karachi. The text is included by Mary Talbot Cross in 'Fate Knows No Tears'. The image is a pictorial processing of the original text.
So, my dear readers, the Nicks did manage a second honeymoon, the adventurous one. In Zhob valley from Tanishpa to Apozai, seeing active action along the Gomal River all the way up to the patrolling outpost of Gul Katch, Quetta, and then who knows may be somewhere up the highlands of Khorasan. Perhaps they rode across those ‘winter hills’, visiting the villages and their people, sitting on campfires listening to their songs and stories, or perhaps it was the Colonel who did this while capturing notes for her lovely wife back in the camp who then composed these fascinating poems. Mary Talbot Cross in Fate Knows No Tears claims that when it ended, Violet Nicolson had seen more of Baluchistan than any other European woman, probably any other Baluchi woman, too. No wonder Adela Florence, in some moment of sheer fulfillment, had uttered these magical words to Colonel Nicolson:
When I die, I shall come back here. They can keep their seven heavens of emerald, pearl and — oh, I forget the rest! Just give me Baluchistan …
Fate Knows No Tears, Mary Talbot Cross, Shalimar Press, 1996
The Female Kipling
A love affair at Karachi and another, a roller coaster ride of emotions and actions in Baluchistan hinterland, is enough to prove that our poet Larence Hope a.k.a Adela Florence Nicolson was possessed with this land and its people. A poet with organic experience who captured the native pulse in her poems like no other. In the words of Lesley Blanch, she “penetrated India with a sensuous understanding” and “lived a love affair with a land, striving to possess it, knowing herself possessed”. This shows in her poems. Adela composing the lines of Reverie of Mahomed Akram at the Tamarind Tank, has her sight and senses locked on the fading frescoes on the walls and roof of a desolate tomb, drawn by people long dead. Adela wonders why those fingers, long lost, once traced in this arid waste, “these rioting, twisted, figures of love and lust”. In another poem, she figuratively dwells on tribal emotions of an Afridi lover betrayed by his beloved, who having drawn a knife through a slender heart now awaits her kinsmen to arrive and exact vengeance on him.
When I have slowly drawn my knife across you,
Taking my pleasure as I see you swoon,
I shall sleep sound, worn out by love's last fervour,
And then, God grant your kinsmen kill me soon!
- Afridi Love from The Garden of Kama and other Love Lyrics from India by Laurence Hope
In ‘Lalla Radha and the Churel’ through a dialogue between the Priest and youthful Lalla Radha, in typical Shiv Kumar Batalvi style, Adela tells us of a Churel (a witch) who dwells on a Peepul tree yearning to feast on a delicate, tender, short lived youth. The origins of this Churel being equally interesting as narrated in the words of Priest, “When, with her child unborn, a woman dies, her spirit takes the form of a Churel.”
PRIEST
Ah, go not near the Peepul trees,
That shiver in the evening breeze,
A young Churel might hide in these!
LALLA RADHA
But who and what is this Churel,
Who loves in Peepul trees to dwell,
The Peepul, where the Koel sings
In frenzied songs, of amorous things?
CHUREL
So very brief Youth’s season is,
Ah, wherefore waste a single night?
Put up your lips for mine to kiss,
Take the first promise of delight.
- Lalla Radha and the Churel from Stars of the Desert by Laurence Hope
Fondly titled a female counterpart of Kipling (both lived in the same times but we know not of an actual meeting between the two), this infatuation with the sub-continent and its subjects by a Lady of the Raj was to come at a cost. The love language in her poems branded as erotic, that too native erotic, Kama Sutra style, scandalous love affairs cooked up between our poetess and some exotic Indian Prince, and ‘Nicks’ being branded by their English compatriots as a ‘not so very colonial couple’. This was the price paid by them for their love of India and natives.
Violet Jacob, the Scottish wife of a British Army officer was in Mhow and it’s through various entries in her diary for the years 1897-99 that we get a sketch of Major General Nicolson, who then commanded the Mhow Garrison, and who per Ms Jacob “knows such a lot of strange stories of the people in bygone that it makes a talk with him very amusing” and Mrs. Nicolson whom our writer finds rather interesting, “though of course everyone mocks at her and I can’t help doing it myself sometimes at the really absurd figure she makes.” A journal entry for Jan 12th, 1898 from Violet Jacob introduces to us a rather fascinating Mrs. Adela Florence Nicolson.
12th January
Diaries and Letters from India 1895 – 1900, Violet Jacob, Canongate Publishing, Edinburgh, 1900
Mrs. Nicolson came out and sat with me while I was painting and came back to dinner as both our husbands were dining in the Mess. I laughed the whole way through the meal. Her wits were at their best. Afterwards she walked up and down the room, a tiny figure with a cigarette in its mouth, giving magnificent descriptions of all sorts of ridiculous happenings and I lay in the long chair and shouted with laughter.
But that is the woman who, the General told me, was once in the garden and stepped on a krait. She had the presence of mind to keep her foot where it had lit on the krait’s neck, while she called to him to bring a pair of long scissors with which she cut the creature in two, holding it under her foot all the time.
Post retirement at the rank of Lieutenant General, the Nicks preferred a quiet life in scenic town of Feroke in Malabar district. Their stay, however, was going to be short lived as a calamity would befell soon, bringing our love story to a tragic end.
‘Nicolson of Baluchistan’ is Dead!
In present day Chennai there’s an artificially made river island, just inland from the estuary where Cooum river flows in to the Bay of Bengal. Often called Island, sometimes Island Grounds, it among other colonial era edifices, holds an overspill burial ground. A Gothic gateway leads to present day cemetery of St Mary’s Anglican Church where lies a somber grave with no obelisk or a tall cross, but a headstone parallel to ground partially lost to undergrowth. A recent photograph from 2024 on Find a Grave website shows a restored grave with a granite border and a small cross as the foot-stone meeting the exact description when Violet Nicolson, grieving widow of General Malcolm Nicolson had initially installed it in the August of 1904.
The grave was enclosed with a simple granite border and there was a plinth bearing a cross at its head. Not the usual cross, such as he could see all around them, but the heraldic cross patée, adopted by the most noble Order of the Bath. Only the initials MHN and a simple text marked the final resting place of Lieutenant General Malcolm Hassells Nicolson, BI, CB. The grave itself stood apart from the others .The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God. The words she had chosen were very fine, quite befitting the soldier and the man.
Fate Knows No Tears, Mary Talbot Cross, Shalimar Press, 1996
The ‘heraldic cross’ was later moved to be a foot-stone and at some point a simple white marble tablet was installed announcing that the grave is the resting place of Lieutenant General Malcolm Nicolson and his wife Adela Florence. The real shocker is the date of death of the latter, 4th October 1904 at the age of 39 years, exactly 58 days after the death of her husband Malcolm Nicolson.
Island Grounds in Chennai | Photo from Wikipedia
St Mary's Cemetery on Island Grounds, note the backside of old Gothic Gate on the left
Nicks' Grave in St Mary's Cemetery | A recent picture uploaded on Find a Grave Website
The Gravestone | This picture is from 2017, taken by sriramv and uploaded to their blog on Madras Heritage Website
Nicks had moved to Madras for the prostate treatment of the General. After what was supposed to be a routine surgical procedure, Malcolm did not wake up from anaesthesia and died on the operation table. Adela could not recover from this shock. The only time she spent after the death of Nicolson with some interest and energy was completing her third book of poems, something Malcolm would have loved his wife to finish. Adela under the pseudonym of Laurence Hope, dedicated the first poem of the book to her beloved now dead husband and ended the closing lines of the last with a deadly premonition.
I, who of lighter love wrote many a verse,
Made public never words inspired by thee,
Lest strangers’ lips should carelessly rehearse
Things that were sacred and too dear to me.
- Opening lines of 'Dedication to Malcolm Nicolson', Last Poems by Laurence Hope
And now I almost foresee the place and the hour
When I shall open my dying lips to thee
And receive a last cool kiss.
Afterwards, Wind, since I have always loved thee, —
Whirl my dust to the scented heart of a moghra flower,
His flower, but, ah, thou knowest, —
So often thy kisses have mingled with his and mine.
- Closing lines of 'Vayu the Wind', Last Poems by Laurence Hope
Having finished her last book in manuscript, on the day she was supposed to sail back to England, Adela, at Dunmore House in Madras took her own life by consuming sublimate of mercury. When medical help arrived, it was already too late. The agony of a painful death was lessened to some extent by doctor assisted dose of heavy morphine. She was buried in the same grave as of her husband on Island Grounds. Even two months haven’t completed since her husband’s passing.
Obituary of Laurence Hope published in October 29, 1904 issue of The Athenaeum
Back to Kotri and The River
Adela Florence Nicolson, gone to soon, but back in 1880s, when she was Adela Cory in her twenties, out on a youthful venture to Kotri, standing on the banks of Indus, had composed a poem of love. Written in the sublime of youth, the closing lines of this poem still draw an analogy of death, a river with all its vigour and roar left behind, calming down in the end to eventually embrace endless vastness of the sea.
At Kotri, by the river, maybe I too shall sleep
The sleep that lasts for ever, too deep for dreams; too deep.
Maybe among the shingle and sand of floods to be
Her dust and mine may mingle and float away to sea.
- Kotri by the River, from 'The Garden of Kama and other Love Lyrics from India' by Laurence Hope
There’s nothing much significant about Kotri, but dear reader, here once a firangee poetess, our Adela Cory from the days of the raj composed a poem of love, the lines of which still give me goosebumps. Having learnt ‘life and all its ways’, and having spent its ‘transient beauty’ when I return back to that childhood portal on the bridge over Indus, at Kotri, by the river, there’s the spot where, perhaps I too shall sleep.
Kotri by the River, The Garden of Kama, Laurence Hope
Books and Authors
Fate Knows No Tears, Mary Talbot Cross, Shalimar Press, 1996
Laurence Hope: A Shadow in the Sunlight, from
Far to go and many to love: people and places, Lesley Blanch, Quartet Books, London, 2017
Diaries and Letters from India 1895 - 1900, Violet Jacob, Canongate Publishing, Edinburgh, 1900
Behind the Scenes in Many Wars being the Military Reminiscences of Lieutenant General Sir George MacMunn, 1930
The Garden Of Fidelity Being The Autobiography Of Flora Annie Steel 1847-1929, Macmillan & Co Ltd, London, 1930
Afoot Through the Kashmir Valleys, Marion Daughty, Sands & Company, London, 1901
Indian Dust, Otto Rothfield, Oxford : Alden, 1909
The Bookman, R Garnett, Sep 1905, Hodder and Stoughton Ltd Mill Rd
The Edwardian Song Book : Drawing-room Ballads, 1900-1914, from the catalogue of Boosey & Co, London, 1982
Article by James Flecker published in The Monthly Review, Jun 1907, London
Letters from Malabar and on the way, Bruce Henry, London, G.Routledege & Sons Ltd, 1909
A True Indian Poet, H.Bruce, 2 episodes published in East and West Feb & Mar 1906
From Kabul to Kumassi, Twenty-Four Years of Soldiering and Sport, Brig Gen Sir James Willcocks, John Murray, London, 1904