In the atmosphere created by the sun, the only escape is the shut eye and the recumbent posture, known as siesta. That is why I am always talking of either going to bed in the afternoon or of rising from it. And while I do not apologize for this frequent reference to an operation which resembles death, I want, nevertheless, to prove that it is life-giving, regenerating and renewing. The proof of this is that one feels very much dead, very much like an extra-planetary ghost, if one cannot sleep in the afternoon, if one cannot indulge in the siesta.
Usually, of course, I am able to sleep well, being a young healthy animal of the Punjab hills, except when I am specially worried about a patient. For instance, for the first six months after my return from London I made up for all the arrears of sleep which a medico has on the debit side of his ledger through living in a country where everyone takes it out of himself. But I have not had many overdoses of sleep, specially since I began to be actively associated with Maharaja Ashok Kumar as a consultant. Private Secretary, friend, or whatever my relations with him may be called. All my siestas have since then been disturbed, either by being prematurely broken by a sudden and peremptory order to attend His Highness’s presence, or by worrying about him and his mènage.
That afternoon, when I returned from the office by the long route of an aimless drive through which Victor wanted to reconnoitre the position and to get to know what his subjects in Sham Pur were feeling, we had an elaborate, soporific lunch and retired to our rooms. But while Victor probably succumbed to the slow fumes which rise to one’s eyes after overeating, I found no peace, in spite of the breezes set up by the powerful electric fan from the ceiling, specially cooled as these breezes were by the copious water which was sprinkled on the straw tatties outside the two doors of my bedroom. For, just before the midday meal, Ganga Dasi had appeared, dressed up to the nines in a colourful sari with bandhini work of white spots on red background, and casually announced that she was going out to eat the midday meal with a saheli, the wife of the rich merchant, Lalla Sadanand. I saw that there was a certain studied deliberation in her casualness, and her eyes were looking furtively this side and that, like two little birds hopping about in a cage. But though Victor seemed disappointed, because he preferred to eat the midday meal in the zenana with his mistress, he did not seem to notice the shifty look in her green eyes, believed her and let her go. I was, however, unfortunately poised near the window of the drawing-room which overlooked the courtyard, while Victor and Gangi were embracing each other, and saw that the car which was waiting for her had, seated by the chauffeur, a chaprasi from the office of Diwan Popatlal J. Shah, the new Prime Minister. And my suspicions were aroused.
Throughout the meal I had kept very solemn, until Victor divined my mood and said, ‘Are you worried about Gangi?’
I refrained from being honest for the reason that one is inclined to make superficial responses in conversation and also because I did not want to be serious and upset the Maharaja when he was already in the grip of so much inner and outer disruption.
But when I returned to my rooms and changed into a pair of shorts to go to sleep, the basic flaw in the relationship of His Highness and his mistress began to obsess me. There was no stabilization of his temperament, or his state affairs, possible, unless the cancer of doubt about a possible, or rather inevitable, betrayal of him by Gangi could be removed. And this cancer, beautiful like most real cancers, because of the element of masochism which was an important part of Victor’s make-up, could not be removed easily, because, apart from the difficulties of making the cancer worse before performing the major operation, one had to consider the fact that Ganga Dasi, the symbol of doubt, was herself the loveliest part of this cancer. Nothing short of her removal would end this disease. And that seemed, under present conditions, from my knowledge of the intricate way in which he was bound to his mistress, an impossible task for Victor to perform.
I rolled on my bed from side to side, first in an effort to see how the cancer of Victor’s suspicions, confirmed by my own prognostications, could be removed.
I had tried to analyse the couple’s actions and reactions, and found that she had no creative sense with which she could associate Victor, except the art of making love, which revenged itself on her through its excesses and wild-woodedness and which destroyed him by enslaving him to her.
And now I surmised that Victor was in danger again through the stirrings in her to go to Diwan Popatlal J. Shah, even though this affair would be merely an opportunistic manoeuvre to ward off harm from coming to Victor under the axe of the States Department in Delhi, so that she could get the necessary time to secure her own position in Sham Pur.
These and similar thoughts plagued me as I lay in bed, sometimes with my eyes shut and sometimes with them open. Like slow-burning phosphorus, they sizzled on the surface of my mind, sprouting like little globes of heat on my body, silent, half-expressed words, bandied from tongue to lips, rising to my mouth without being uttered. And they were stored up somewhere behind my ears, as though I had heard someone else tell me these things about Gangi by way of gossip and I had saved them for later use as rare and precious pieces of information, curios in the museum of knowledge about human affairs that I was building up, or, to put it in medical terms, an important case history for my files.
About half past four in the afternoon, I got up and soaked myself in the Roman bath which Francis always kept ready filled with cold water. I was relaxed from the tension somewhat and let my fingers trek on the map of my body, almost as though I was soothing an invisible itch.
Francis came and called out that His Highness had sent a message that Dr Shankar Sahib was to come to the polo ground pavilion, to pick him up before going for a drive in the evening, according to the arrangements made at the office this morning.
I came to, towelled myself and began to dress. I was irritated slightly with Francis, because there were no buttons on any of the four muslin tunics which had come from the dhobi.
‘Look, Francis, you might see that there is at least one kurta with buttons on in my wardrobe!’
‘Sorry, sir,’ Francis said. And he immediately went to look for thread and needle.
I was digging into the drawers and found a longcloth tunic. ‘You’d better get it done later,’ I said peevishly. ‘Now go and get the tea.’
And when he disappeared I began to ruminate on the extraordinary facts about Francis: that he was probably the laziest and the least hard-worked of bearers in the whole of Sham Pur; that nothing I could say to him, or do, had altered his easy-going, lackadaisical manner towards his work or myself; that he stole money, finding out all the new hiding-places where I tried to conceal my purse; and that if I could not, in spite of my analysis of him, change him, I could have no hopes of changing Victor or Gangi, or the state of affairs in Sham Pur, unless I could go out and help to smash the whole fabric of this feudal-cum-bourgeois society and get together with people who wanted to rebuild it.
Francis brought the tea-tray and, as a special concession, after my rebuke about the buttons, poured me a cup, letting the tea brim over into the saucer, a thing which he always did and which, he knew, irritated me, and about which I had always shouted at him.
I controlled my bad temper and proceeded to right the wrong done to me with my own hands, rationalizing Francis’s default by thinking that the relationship of a master and servant was the most humiliating and that the basic defect lay in me for employing a bearer on the modest pay of thirty rupees plus board and lodging, when the actual worth of Francis’s human personality was much higher, for he was intelligent and could probably learn and do a skilled job and get more money.
In this reflective mood, I walked out of the palace and, refusing a lift in the car, proceeded towards the polo ground.
I had hardly walked up to the main deohri, through the quadrangle of the garden, when Jai Singh and the hall chaprasis came running up to me with joined hands, asking whether I had forgotten that the car was waiting in the i
nner deohri. I told them that I preferred to walk. Unable to comprehend such an attitude in so exalted a person as the Maharaja’s physician, Jai Singh asked if I would like the durban to yoke the horses to the phaeton. And he and the others were rather disappointed when I merely waved my head in negation and walked off.
As I crossed the stretch of the deserted Sham Pur bazaar I realized that the hartal of the shopkeepers in the capital, which was partial this morning from the number of shops that were still open then, was now nearly complete. Congeries of people stood about under the arcades beyond the shops or on the shady portions of the pavement. They whispered, or I imagined they whispered, as they saw me walking along instead of riding in a car as usual. And I supposed that they thought I was mad. I knew that they had grave doubts about Victor’s sanity, and I had heard rumours that the people considered the Maharaja’s entourage equally affected. And, for a moment, I amused myself by giving the populace the benefit of the doubt in this regard; for, as a medical man, it was easy for me to believe that we were, indeed, all more or less affected. I realized that the classification of the varieties of mental illnesses is very unsatisfactory; that the classes overlap; that individual judgements vary too much in the use of these; and that they are largely based on symptoms observed after a breakdown rather than on the mental constitution of the patient. It seemed to me that not enough emphasis had been given by those concerned with minds and their illnesses, on analysing the characteristic traits which the patients show before mental illness, as is frequently done after the onset of the illness.
These professional speculations of mine were disturbed by the ringing bells of two tongas, which came galloping towards me in a neck-to-neck race, accelerated by the lifted straps with which their drivers lashed the horses. I jumped aside, irritated by the red dust kicked up by the chariot race, and wondered what was happening. I saw that the tongas were occupied by groups of policemen with uplifted rifles. And, before I knew where I was, they were firing over the heads of the stray groups of people, who sat around smoking the hubble-bubble, or getting shaved by the barbers, or douching their faces with copious sprinklings of cold water from the street pump after their siesta. Most of them scattered in a panic, shrieking and moaning as though they were dying; while some, with more presence of mind, lay down flat on the ground; and a few stood dumb-stricken, immobile and ghastly pale. The scourge passed quickly enough and I realized, for the first time in many days, what it meant to be a human being of the pedestrian variety in Sham Pur State. The grapeshot which had been sprinkled over the heads of the crowd yesterday had shocked me out of the complacency with which I had been accepting Sham Pur. Then I had thought that there was no way out of Victor’s predicament in facing the Praja Mandal crowd but to overawe it. Now this cold-blooded attempt of the police to spread terror among the people, who had struck work in protest against the previous day’s shooting and arrests, spread the darkness of confusion in my mind, already burdened with the weight of His Highness’s private life in which I was involved. My heart beat fast, involuntarily, and a queer rage filled me against the bestial, unhappy life in the whirl of which I was caught. And yet, even as I began to walk along towards Curzon Road, beyond which spread King George’s Gardens, on one side of which was the polo ground, I realized that there was no escape for me because of my debt-slavery. Especially if, realizing how ill Victor really was, I could restrain him from the high-handedness with which he was leading himself and his state to unforeseen disasters.
The arcades of the bazaar finished when I reached the Elephant Gate of Sham Pur in the old city wall, and I had to emerge into the still, hot sunshine. A strange nervous energy possessed me, born of revulsion against the stupid, brutal life which I lived, and my veins swelled with the heat and the anger. Mimic suns danced in the shimmering sheen before my eyes. And the varied emotions of the day concentrated in idiotic circles in my body.
I found some relief in the cool glades of King George’s Gardens, where two swans floated majestically on the small pool fed by the fountains, which punctuated the length of a waterbed, descending in tiers from a marble baradari, or air-houses, built by the grandfather of His Highness. I went up and stood by the pool, looking at the images cast upon the water by the swans, and I marvelled at the limpid grace of the birds which expressed itself in their lassitude.
I had to move on, however, for fear that the match might finish before I got to the grounds and Vicky might be upset at my lateness. I had hardly gone past the tennis lawns, with their faded blue curtains, when I saw pickets of policemen on the road leading to the polo ground. The one nearest to me, as I approached, came up to me and said:
‘No one is allowed to go this side.’
I was dumb in the face of this insolence, because I presumed that everyone in the state knew me as His Highness’s personal physician. And I impatiently tried to brush him aside. At this his eyes became bloodshot, his jaws hardened, and he thrust the strong arm of the law before me to bar my way. I lost my head and struggled, trying to push my way forward. And this roused the policeman’s ire. He pushed me back. I struck out, even as I prevented myself from falling. My palm more than brushed his head, and he retaliated now with his uplifted stick, which, however, I caught in my hands.
While we were struggling over the stick, two of the nearby policemen rushed to the scene and fell upon me, raining blow after blow, until my velvet cap fell away in the dust and I cowered and nearly collapsed, abusing the roughs and shouting.
The noise of the scuffle brought the head constable from the gateway of the polo maidan running towards us. He recognized me even a hundred yards away and shouted to the policemen to stop. But a sadistic joy in punishment had now got hold of the policemen. They were oblivious to his orders in their mad fury. At length he came and wrested me from their grip, and he began to abuse them at the top of his voice for showing such lack of discrimination.
Apart from the humiliation of receiving this treatment I was full of fear at my completely unpresentable appearance if I now ventured into His Highness’s presence. Fortunately, I was not bleeding anywhere and was sure I had received no black eye. So I brushed my hair with my hands and, arranging my clothes with nervous fingers, proceeded, escorted by the head constable and the now abjectly servile policemen, who were falling at my feet and asking for forgiveness and vying with each other in handing me back my cap.
I shook them off with a peremptory gesture and walked towards the pavilion.
The polo match had finished. His Highness, his cousin, the Commander-in-Chief, and the other eminent players and spectators were standing round the champagne table, being served drinks by the white-liveried khansamahs.
‘Hello, Mr Late Latif!’ His Highness greeted me. ‘And why are you looking so pale, as though your mother has died?’
I tried to smile, but I must have looked very sheepish, for I was badly shaken by the beating I had received.
‘Come and have a drink,’ His Highness said in a high-spirited voice. ‘Khansamah, give Doctor Sahib a drink.’
I readily accepted the tumbler of champagne which Bhagirath offered me. I knew that this would soothe my nerves and restore me to the illusory eminence and respectability from which the policemen had so rudely brought me down to earth. But, inside me, my confidence in this set-up was very badly shaken. For I realized that all this magnificence, the flash and pageantry of the gentry, the polo and the champagne, etc., was the decorative outer surface, the appearance, of a crude reality, underneath which all the decencies of life were symbolically or really crushed and ground in the dust.
Flushed as he was with champagne and boisterous to the point of a back-slapping bonhomie, it was difficult for me to detach His Highness from his friends by any signs or gestures I could make, such as moving my head to indicate that we should go. So that ultimately I had to pull him aside and remind him that we had to go and see the Tikyali Rani Indira. He liked the flattery and the adulation and the talk, and it was difficult to wean him awa
y from the crowd, even when he had decided to start off. My face began to twitch, waiting for him to cover the last lap of his conversation with Raja Sansar Chand, a young landlord and nobleman, who was pressing with an invitation for His Highness to come to dinner with him. My blood tingled with the sparks set up by the champagne and I was on edge, with the hangover of the resentment against being beaten up and insulted by the police.
At length Victor extricated himself from the somewhat abject Raja Sansar Chand, the pince-nez on whose nose were covered with the fumes and the sweat of the effort he had had to make to ask the favour of His Highness’s company, and we proceeded towards the silver Rolls-Royce.
‘I suppose I had better come as I am,’ he said. ‘I can’t go home and change now.’
‘You look very handsome,’ I assented, with the slightest strain of irony in my voice.
The sun had gone down and the sky was luminous as though we were going towards the regions of hell, where the blood of victims in the temple of Kali on Siva’s hill, and their shrieks were shooting up to the heavens, for the pink and orange streaks of pain limned the horizon.
I yielded to the five fingers of the night as I relaxed to lovely landscape of the small bare mountains into which we emerged after the railway level-crossing, half a mile away from the polo ground. There is an incredible mystery about the Indian evening, especially before the moon’s dawning, that absorbs one, body and soul, to the uneasy rhythm of the beetles which churr in the marshes. And the wonder of it all ties one’s tongue, making one hollow above the neck, so that one’s eyes stare out as though from an antique mask. The fumes of the drink inside both of us had also risen to our heads and for once we were silent as though in the temple of twilight.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 62