A pariah dog howled away as he was surprised by the sudden approach of the Rolls near the small village, which straggled below the giant walls of the Sham Pur Fort. And the shopkeepers and the peasants from nearby houses, who sat with indistinct, dark, mellow faces in the light of small earthen saucer lamps, all got up with joined hands and obsequiously bowed before the passing limousine.
The car swerved through the serpentine bazaar, up to the vast courtyard of the fort beyond the giant doorway of the hall, and made its way to the steps of the little red sandstone palaces and halls that crested the hill.
There was much bustle and activity and the chowkidars and attendants ran swift-footed in all directions to spread the news of His Highness’s arrival.
The semi-nude priests from the temple of Kali, which stood in the inner courtyard of the lower palace, came crowding round us with waving tuft-knots and begged His Highness to visit the temple. Victor pointed to his tall leather boots and they accepted that answer, for, much as they respected him and expected a bounteous gift, they could not allow the temple to be defiled by cow-hide.
‘The Raj Mata and the elder Rani are at prayers,’ one of the more impetuous priests said.
‘Also Rani Indira?’ Victor asked.
The priest silently waved his head in negation as though he thought Indira was a lost soul, because she did not attend the temple.
His Highness, whose attitude to his mother, as well as his two wives who lived here, was one of an ambivalent love and hatred, because he had resisted their possessiveness, was not particularly concerned with any of them but only wanted to get an assurance out of Indira that she would not prosecute her petition to the States Department at Delhi any further.
So we walked grimly up, past the magnificent pillared dewan hall, up some narrow steps, flanked by the loveliest jali work, into the inner sanctums of the old-world palace, with delicate frescoes on the walls and small mirrors studded on the ceiling in mosaics of the most haunting quality.
Impulsively, I went to sit at the window-seat, decorated with cow-tailed cushions from which the whole valley below the hill fort was visible, calm and placid in the oncoming evening after the murderous heat of the day.
Victor wanted to do the same, but his tall boots made it impossible for him to sit down on the floor and he went and occupied one of the plush chairs with which the room was vulgarly furnished.
‘Just like Indira to furnish this place in plush,’ Victor complained.
‘I don’t like her taste,’ I said. ‘In this old palace the old Indian furniture would look very appropriate.’
‘It is things like this that used to irritate me about Indira,’ Victor said, a tone of regret in his voice. ‘And we used to quarrel about these little things. And she was so self-righteous!’
At this juncture, Indira appeared, a demure, handsome young woman with chiselled, even features, marred by deep shadows of suffering under the eyes. She was clad in a simple white cotton sari and immediately created that feeling of uprightness and simplicity which was what Victor had in mind when he had spoken of her self-righteousness. She swept us both with a hurried glance and then, dipping her eyes coyly sat down on a low indigenous chair near her husband’s feet.
‘It is a very auspicious day for our household,’ she began. ‘Vicky, the moon seems to have risen.’
‘The moon is always about,’ Victor said.
‘No, to me every night seems a dark night,’ answered Indira sadly.
There was a pause brought about by the truth of this utterance. Then, aware of the congealing impact of her self-pity on Victor, Indira added in a brighter tone:
‘We were all talking about you—the Raj Mata was saying that you had not called to see her ever since you returned from Simla!’
I saw that Victor was feeling more uncomfortable than ever after this.
‘His Highness has been very busy with state matters ever since we came down,’ I put in hypocritically.
‘Yes, I have been working twelve to fourteen hours a day,’ Victor said.
I knew that this was Victor’s cover for the guilt of neglecting Indira; for, as long as she believed that he was immersed in statecraft, she would think that he was not paying any more attention to Gangi than to his wedded wife.
‘To a mere mother,’ said Indira, ‘each domestic detail appears so big that she tends to forget the business of the world. But you do exaggerate—twelve to fourteen hours a day!’
‘You are a leisured woman and cannot understand that my work never ceases,’ said Victor with a slight note of impatience in his voice.
‘I suppose polo is also work,’ Indira said with a smile.
‘Of course,’ said Victor priggishly. ‘I have to keep up the prestige of the state by producing as good a team for matches with outsiders as possible.’
‘That is very clever!’ I said humorously.
But, just at that moment, there came a maudlin, childish voice from the next room:
‘Indira—is that my Bapu who has come? And can I come and see him? I am not at all sleepy.’
‘Now see,’ said Indira. ‘My work never finishes.’
And she got up to go and attend to her son.
But the boy had not waited for permission to appear. He was already on the threshold, a rather cherubic little fellow with a fair face, modelled upon his mother’s, dressed in a muslin kurta and pyjama and without any slippers on his feet. And, recognizing his father, he ran towards Vicky and collapsed in his lap.
I saw that Vicky was as moved by the affection of his son for him as he was embarrassed that some servant might see him in this tender relation with his child by Indira and report to Gangi. But the paternal feelings triumphed and he stroked his son’s sleek hair as the boy buried his face in his father’s hands, seemingly through a pent-up feeling of love for Vicky, whom he saw so rarely.
‘Sit up and show me your face, Aji, son,’ Vicky said.
The boy felt inhibited more than ever at this show of affection.
‘Come, son, talk to your father,’ coaxed his mother. ‘You have been asking for your father all these days. Now that he is here, why don’t you say something?’
This irritated Vicky as it reminded him of his defaults. He pursed his lips and tried to lift his son up.
But the boy would not show his face.
At length Vicky forcibly held him up, hardening his jaw and his heart in the process.
Indarjit’s eyes were full of tears and he covered them with his hands.
This made Victor very impatient. And he shouted:
‘Be a man, don’t cry!’
‘Come, my son,’ Indira said, running towards the boy. And she rescued him from her husband, afraid that Victor might become harder towards the boy.
At this moment there were shuffling steps on the stairs, and the weary, whining voice of Raj Mata, Victor’s mother, percolated into the room.
Victor got up, furious that he had let himself in for all this.
‘What is this I hear,’ the Raj Mata was saying, ‘the moon has risen over our palace? Moon-face, Ashok, my love, where are you? The eyes of your old mother are tired of looking in the direction of the hills from which you come. . . . And . . . oh, I feel so hurt, my son, that you did not come all this time. . . .’ And the rest of her words were smothered in her sobs, as she came with tremendous vigour and put her arms around him.
The first Maharani, Uttami, a plain hill-woman, came in and stood self-effacingly with the edge of her dupatta drawn over her face to hide it from me, the stranger, as well as from her husband.
‘Don’t cry, Ma,’ Victor said as he stood, erect and unbending, towering over the old woman.
‘I am crying out of happiness, son,’ the Raj Mata whimpered, ‘not out of sorrow.’
And now the contagion of happiness had caught everyone. For Indira began to wipe the tears out of her eyes with the palla of her dupatta, and her son sobbed the more vociferously to see his grandma affected, and even the h
ill-woman, Uttami, hissed from behind the curtain of her dupatta, obviously convulsed.
‘I am not dead, I am alive! Why are you all crying?’ said Victor with suppressed rage.
The sentimental women shook themselves like hens at the cruel indifference of the cock, and, smoothing the ruffled feathers of their emotions, they sat back in a kind of decorative array by their hero.
‘What is your news, son?’ asked Raj Mata, making an effort to appear cheerful. ‘I hear they have appointed a new Diwan—Popatlal. What a name! . . . A bania, I hear! A Poorbia! They are not as kind as the Angrezi Sarkar, I am told. Is that true?’
‘Raj Mata,’ said Indira, ‘Sardar Patel was Gandhiji’s right-hand man. And they all went to jail for the country.’
‘But, my little one, they are mean, low people, sprung up from nowhere,’ said the Raj Mata, with the hauteur of her feudal contempt for mere commoners. ‘This Sardar—of what state was he a sardar? He looks like an angry bull from the pictures of him. And his dhoti is much too short for his legs!’
‘Raj Mataji!’ protested Indira.
‘Acha, mother, I must go. I have not even bathed and changed after polo.’
‘There is some sherbet coming,’ said Indira.
And, turning towards the inner chambers, she called, ‘Sudarshan!’
‘Ay a ji,’ came the obedient servant’s voice.
He was on the way and entered with a silver tray, decorated with seven silver tumblers, full of sherbet.
‘I want some sherbet, mother,’ Raj Kumar Indarjit announced eagerly.
‘Wait, son,’ his mother cautioned him. ‘Your father doesn’t come here every day.’
This faux pas on the part of Indira seemed to irritate Victor still more. Embroiled in guilt feelings by his neglect of his family, he was morbidly sensitive to any explicit or implicit reference to his defaults.
‘Give it to him, Indira,’ he said. ‘I don’t want any sherbet.’ Indira looked daggers at him, for she seemed to think he was contradicting her injunctions to the child. The latent hysteria discoloured her face. But she gave her son a tumbler full of sherbet.
‘Do have some, son,’ the Raj Mata said. ‘It is the sherbet of Khas with the arec of Keora in it. We get it specially made. For, in the hot weather here, it is the only cooling thing, because we cannot get any ice as you can in the town.’
‘Ma, I have had some sherbet of another kind,’ Victor teased her.
‘Oh, son,’ she said, shocked at his open avowal of the fact that he drank. ‘You must remember the fate of your father. I dread to think what will happen to you if you take after him. I can see with my dim eyes that you look more and more like him every day. And when I pray for his soul to the mother Kali, I always say, “Please Kali Mai, save my son from the habits which ruined his father.”’
‘Acha, Ma, I must go now,’ Victor said, oppressed by the whole atmosphere and the talk, with its insidious recriminations, moralizing and sentimentality.
‘Wait, son,’ the Raj Mata insisted. ‘At least wait till Doctor Hari Shankar has had some sherbet. Doctor Sahib, have a glass of sherbet. It has good medicinal properties, even though you were taught in Vilayat and perhaps despise our Indian things.’
I smiled sheepishly and took up a tumbler out of politeness.
I could see that Victor was perspiring profusely with anger and heat. I gulped the liquid down in order to keep myself in readiness for departure.
Victor got up as soon as I had put the tumbler back onto the tray and signalled me with a movement of his head.
‘Acha, Ma,’ he said, making a formal obeisance to her with joined hands.
‘Ishwar bless you, my son,’ said the Raj Mata resignedly. ‘May you live long.’
The two Maharanis kept a demure silence.
Indarjit let go his tumbler so that it fell and the sherbet spilt, even as he came and caught his father’s legs.
‘I won’t let him go, grandma,’ he said. ‘I won’t let my Bapu go.’
‘Come, child,’ coaxed Indira, ‘your Bapu has important work to do.’
The cutting bitterness of her utterance aroused Victor finally.
‘You have spoilt him utterly!’ he shouted. ‘He whines and sulks and is stubborn like a donkey!’
The tone of anger in his father’s voice suddenly frightened Indarjit and he began to howl.
All the three women fluttered around him, fussing with soft, coaxing words and remonstrances. Victor turned his back on them and proceeded towards the stairs. I followed him.
As he reached the doorway he turned to me and whispered:
‘You talk to her and ask her if she is prepared to withdraw her petition for a consideration—I will settle the income of some villages on her.’
And he hurtled down the stairs.
I retraced my steps and, embarrassedly, asked Indira if she could come down for a minute.
Indira seemed highly incensed at Victor’s behaviour, and was on the verge of tears, but, making a desperate effort to control herself, she nodded her head in assent and followed.
Strangely enough, Victor was waiting in the courtyard at the foot of the stairs, and, impetuous, impatient and downright, his hands on his waist and legs apart like a man playing at being a colossus, he began immediately:
‘Indira, I really came to discuss something very important with you. But mother won’t leave us alone and we can never talk. . . . Look, I want you to know that, though we are temperamentally so unsuited to each other that we can never live under the same roof, I have the deepest friendship for you. After all, it is better that we should not give Indarjit a background of scenes and recriminations. I don’t know how to say it . . . but you see, what I mean is—well . . . I am not such a worthy person as you. I believe, though, that we can rescue some understanding from all the muddle into which we have got ourselves. And we can be deeply united. I shall give you all the money and comfort you need. I don’t know, but I am trying hard to change myself; to transform this state into something stable and real. But I realize that I have started too late. And our marriage too—well, our downfall was not brought about by any deliberate desire on my part to break it, but through my weaknesses and your strength. Still, I want to assure you that I am not all that bad.’
There came a certain moving sincerity into Victor’s voice as he struggled towards the boundaries of truth from the chaos in which he had been plunged for months. And the quality of his soft voice reflected itself in Indira’s face, in a tenderness which moved from her silent mouth to the tear-blurred lines under her eyes. But the inexplicable despair of Victor did not reach into her, in spite of the struggle he had made to communicate with her at a higher level. And his plea scattered on the indifferent atmosphere, while Indira gazed uncomprehendingly as though she could only see the agony on her own face wherever she looked. His solicitude had touched her deeply, but she had so hardened herself against him for years that now when he was about to make a demand on her, the proud walls of her emotions were impenetrable even against her will.
‘What is it you want from me?’ she said.
‘I need support in my fight against the States Department,’ Victor said. ‘And you could relent and—’
‘Oh, you don’t know how I have suffered!’ she said. And her voice broke, and her face quivered in the effort to control the flood of tears. ‘I have been eating my heart out for you bit by bit, until there is no more of it left, even to give to you!’
‘I am sorry,’ Victor said.
At this one of the walls of her ego seemed to yield and she inclined towards him and put her head against his chest.
But he stiffened involuntarily with a jerk, though, realizing what he had done, he began to stroke her head. Only, for all his professions of friendship, he had cut himself off so completely from an organic sexual relationship with her that his recoil held him back in the very act of expressing his tenderness.
Indira realized this even as she lingered on his shoulder.
‘Do withdraw the petition you had lodged with the Sarkar, then,’ he said, taking advantage of her woman’s weakness.
‘I suppose I will do what you say,’ she said. But then added, ‘I will think about it.’
And she disengaged herself from him as soon as she realized that she must not yield and surrender and be used up completely, so that he could throw her on the scrap-heap afterwards under pressure from Gangi.
I stood by, the witness of this tense scene, with an unknown mouth that seemed never to have talked, and I swallowed my breath to calm the panic, the confusion and the embarrassment which the situation caused me.
‘You are right,’ Victor said to his wife. ‘You are quite right to guard yourself against me. I have given you no proof of my honesty in the past. So why should you believe me? And I am a very bad man. You are right not to trust me.’
‘Oh, Victor, I can’t, I can’t!’ she cried as the tears broke through her big brown eyes and her being flooded with the waters of sympathy for him, which had always been brim full in her. The conflict of joy in his humility and sorrow for herself was too intense, however, and she swayed to and fro till she could not even bear to be human and ran away up the stairs like a frightened little animal.
There was nothing for it but to move away, empty and blind in the face of a struggle that I felt could never be resolved in the mechanical way in which Victor had sought to resolve it.
About half past one that night, Victor strolled up to my room and called out from the veranda in a mock-respectful voice, ‘Doctor Hari Shankar, has your exalted self gone to sleep?’
‘No, no, I am not asleep,’ I lied as I woke up from the first slumber of the night and switched on my table lamp. And I shuffled about in an unnecessary panic of politeness and said, ‘Please come in, Highness.’
Victor was dressed in black silk pyjamas and looked very much like my idea of Mephistopheles with his pale, lean face, as he entered.
‘You know, Gangi has not appeared for the evening meal. I don’t know where she is. She went to eat the midday meal with the wife of Seth Sadanand, but I understand that she came back and went out again for the evening without leaving word about where she was going.’
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 63