Spring, 189*

So what is this anyway?

This is going to be my personal record of my travels, my thoughts, feelings and outlooks on the strange and wonderful things that I encounter.  This is simply for my own recollection and personal history, as I have not the coin to take into my employ a professional scribe, or even a cabin boy (oh, wouldn't the hoity-toitys in their stiff collars and outlandish hats be in such an uproar if I had).  So, if this volume should ever find its way into the hands of a good reader someday, let me just say that everything written here are all lies.  Figments of my imagination, and nothing more.  And if you're willing to indulge the ravings of a woman that is quite probably mad, such as myself, then you might just be willing to accept that only the sentences that start with 'F' or 'S' are  falsehood, and the rest was quite genuine... or perhaps it was 'A's, I forget.

First an introduction

Here is my bio/story thus far:
Born in the later portion of the 19^th Century—it is not polite to ask a woman’s age —Vibia Mystiere was born of an affluent British merchant family in the East Indies city of Bombay.  She was raised to become a good wife of an aristocrat, hopefully one of a higher station.  She spent her younger years learning the finer arts of high society from her nanny and her private tutors behind the high walls of her family’s estate.  Only later did she venture out into the quagmire that British ruled India had become, seeing for the first time the poor and exploited workers locked eternally in the bonds of the caste system strictly imposed under the Crown.  She became as involved as she could, trying to improve the plight of the Indian people, but her position kept her socially occupied after her coming out party, and the hum of civilized life caused her to forget her “childish” idealism, as other people saw it.