I had a shrewd guess about where she had gone, but tried to bluff Victor by a hearty invitation for him to sit down and have a drink.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said boisterously, so that I knew he had been drinking already.
‘Will you have coffee?’
‘Coffee!—that is cheating.’ And he began to recite a hackneyed Hindustani verse: ‘O Saki, bring the cup of wine. . . .’
‘Francis!’ I shouted.
But there was no answer. My guide, friend and philosopher had apparently gone to his well-deserved rest for the night.
‘I know where the whisky is, though,’ I said. And I got up to fetch it.
For a while Victor sat silently with his right hand under his chin and stared emptily before him.
‘You look sad,’ I said as I handed him the tumbler of whisky.
‘Torn open by these women and—’ He did not finish his sentence.
‘Anguish, remorse, guilt—all these spring from the birth trauma and childhood,’ I said, waxing philosophical.
‘However they spring, they lead to misery,’ Victor said, impatient at my detachment. ‘The thing is that one suffers!’
‘It is the uncoiling of the ego from libido and mortido tensions,’ I said, persisting with my abstractions, half ironically.
‘In me it is the regrets of the past, of what might have been, that are causing the heartaches now.’
‘Why, have you been reading some old love letters?’
‘No, but seeing Indira this evening revived all the memories of the early days of my marriage with her. She was a good Hindu wife, in spite of the fact that she had passed BA. Especially when I was ill, she looked after me. And, after all, she bore me two sons. And she had a wonderful sense of humour.’
From the catholicity of Victor’s taste in women I had not expected this confession about the single-heartedness that possessed him at one time. But it was obviously due to the strong hereditary belief in the conception of the devoted Hindu wife that he felt this nostalgia for the few months during which he had lived as man and wife with Indira. And perhaps the note of regret in his voice was encouraged by the vague fear he had of Gangi’s inevitable betrayal.
‘You know,’ he continued, ‘I was so attached to Indira, until she began to be possessive and jealous of other women, that whatever I did, whoever else I had, I looked on her as my greatest friend. And often I felt that in this Rani I had found a twin soul to whom I could confess everything, reveal all my secrets. We used to lie in bed late into the night talking about life. She told me everything about her family and her childhood friends. And I told her of all my urges and desires, even of my wildest desires. And I believed at last that like a compassionate mother she would understand everything, so long as I delivered myself to her body and soul, with all my strengths and failings. But unfortunately she was too good for me, because I was so bad. And she was always self-righteous and indignant even when I looked at another woman. And she began to scold me and nag me and find fault with me till she made me ashamed of looking into her eyes and taking her into my arms. If only she had not been so jealous, I would never have gone away from her. But she was afraid that I would spend all the money on other women and there would be nothing left for her. And she began to spy on all my movements through the servants, and I hated the idea that I was being watched. It oppressed me to be enslaved like that. So I broke away from her in my mind and felt a great relief when I met Gangi, because she was as bad as I, and the two of us could perhaps make a good bad pair. . . .’
‘Until Gangi also began to be possessive.’
‘Yes, and worse, because she retained her habits while expecting me to remain faithful to her. And then she wanted marriage with me to legalize her two children, which the Sarkar would not allow. And she wanted more money than even Indira, and jewellery and also property.’
‘Poor Vicky!’ I said, with a sympathy disguised behind the irony. ‘It is your Calvary to suffer at the hands of women.’
‘I know I am a weak man. I am like pulp in their hands. They can do what they like with me.’
‘I think this weakness would be a good thing if it arose from understanding and not from defeat,’ I counselled. ‘The trouble is that you will not really accept. And as you like your conflicts, and your women want what you cannot give, all of you suffer. Each of you punishes his or her own self and those nearest to you.’
‘I don’t understand such subtleties.’
Now I was impatient with him because, somehow, I felt clarity in my thoughts about him in the middle of the night.
‘You are not so weak as you think, Vicky,’ I said, combining flattery and courtliness with truth. ‘You are the least neurotic of all the people in this tangle. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be talking to me about yourself and have me always by. At least you are aware of your difficulties. And your desires, which is the root of your troubles, are elemental. And Indira, too, is strong, because she has faced up to her own loneliness and conquered her fears enough to defy you. The only misfit is Queen Bee. She is not only helpless, but powerful and destructive. And there is no limit to her desires, even as there is no limit to her ignorance.’
‘You are talking like a sage. But I am caught, trapped! . . . Why does one have to marry or be attached to a woman?’
‘Of course you had to marry. Everyone has to marry. Only a puritan resents the vulgarity of the mundane experiences which occur in the daily life of a man and woman together. There is no such thing as being unbound, except for a split mind, which is incapable of forming any stable attachment and wanders from place to place, dreaming daydreams which have little or no contact with the realities of life. But in a wise marriage the ordinary life is transformed from the trivial detail to some exalted purpose which is the secret wish of both the partners. And then the couple see their reflection in the mirror of this higher personality to which they are always aspiring.’
‘Then there is really no escape?’ Vicky asked in a whisper.
‘No, we are all captured.’
‘What about the Buddha’s ideal of non-attachment?’
‘It remains an ideal. But where Buddhism failed Hinduism succeeded, because it made concessions to the weaknesses of man. “Live in action,” said Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita. Only, there has been some confusion in our minds, because Gandhi borrowed the European Christian belief in original sin and introduced an element of guilt into the Indian soul, thus emphasizing the old Indian idea of ascetic withdrawal from life, the denial of all sexual intercourse. And he exalted prohibition, penance, fasting and prayer. Whereas life in the pagan Hindu sense is immanent: truth is immanent: God is immanent. The whole universe is a kind of Lila, sport, in the expansive mind and heart of Brahman. The manifold world began when desire arose in the heart of the One Absolute, and now there is the constant desire on the part of mankind to break duality and attain absorption in the One. So that desire is an essential element in us and all our actions are motivated by it; and we feel that we can choose to do this or that freely; that is to say, we feel the illusion that our will is free. And thus we go on, until we realize that, though there is free will in a limited sense, we are really bound by responsibilities, duties, even as we have a certain number of rights—and then we are freed in a higher sense by the recognition of our responsibilities in a universe which is determined by the acts, thoughts and feelings of other peoples both in the past and the present.’
‘It is all very difficult,’ Victor said, his thoughts wandering with the congestion of ideas in my speech and resentful of my lecturing tone. ‘Surely, it is not all so logical. What about all these silly things that women do?’
‘All their capriciousness, all their failings, revenges, hates and loves are the index of their desire to grow,’ I explained. ‘But in many people the infantile pulls are too strong to allow all-round development and they remain helpless neurotics, selfish, vain, cruel, heartless, ungrateful wretches, immersed in their unhappiness and liking it, lyin
g on a sick-bed, and receiving sympathy and admiration, but really at heart not desirous of getting well at all!’
‘Do you believe in Darwin’s idea that we are all descended from the apes?’ Victor asked, suddenly going off at a tangent.
‘I suppose everyone believes in evolution of one kind or another, nowadays,’ I said, ‘except the nihilists, who think that humanity is so wicked and barbaric it ought to be wiped out and—’
There was a sound of footsteps in the veranda and a knock at the door.
We were both rather startled and breathless.
‘Maharaj,’ came the voice of Rupa, the old maidservant of Gangi. ‘Maharani Sahiba says, are you not coming to sleep?’
‘Acha, acha, I am coming,’ Victor said, startled. And, turning to me significantly, he added, ‘So she has come back wherever she has been!’
‘Please go, Vicky, otherwise she will be annoyed.’
Victor lingered in his chair, apparently in the grip of fear, ennui and drink. And I waited silently for him to move or say something.
‘My heart is thumping wildly,’ he said at last.
‘You love her and fear her,’ I said. ‘Go to her.’
He rose from the chair and, without looking me in the face, walked sheepishly away.
I could not sleep though I switched off the light and lay down on my bed. I was sure that Gangi was up to some trick to summon him like that into her presence. I was sure that she had drifted away from him for a while. Equally, I was convinced that like ‘the thief turning sheriff’ she would put the blame for everything on to him and humiliate him.
For it was obvious to me by now that this woman was at once sadist and masochist. She wanted to torment him and be tormented. A compulsion to conquer the members of the opposite sex and to change lovers dominates the nymphomaniac. And yet, as most men and women exhibit the same traits to some extent, no one noticed that she was a schizoid, or split personality.
What was the moment of her unhinging ? And where did the unending traces of the disturbances in her soul lead to? How far between the earth and the sky would one have to go to learn the truth of her being, the sources of the conflict in her? And how many gaps would there be in one’s understanding of her, if one did not know anything but bits gleaned from Victor’s revelations about her and from one’s own scanty observations? And how was one to measure the span through which she had come to despise him and yet have him constantly in mind? Did the secret lie in the undermost, entangled roots of sex, the concealed source of many things, which one never sees?
Perhaps there lay the trouble. Since every man had been a kind of cruel father to her, she loved and hated men in an ambivalence which resulted in the woman’s amazonian revenge against man.
How shocked and insulted she would be if all these questions were raised in her presence and she was told that her sufferings could perhaps be eased by a confession of her difficulties to me! But few people understand their sufferings. Nor has love been learned. And what remains in our lives are the husks of emotions and ideas, dimly perceived and allowed to fester in the cesspools of the hells beyond redemption, through a kind of liberal non-interventionism encouraged by the selfishness which prevents us from holding each other’s hands.
I was ruminating on these things when Victor returned and collapsed in the armchair by my bed in the dark. I put on the light, more startled by this visitation than I had been by his earlier entrance, because I saw that he was dishevelled.
‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘My legs feel weak under me and I don’t feel well. She has locked me out after a scene. She accused me of having gone back to Indira!’
‘That is the kind of justification she must give in order to go away from you herself,’ I said.
‘Oh, what are you saying?’ shrieked Victor. ‘Do you mean . . .?’
‘Yes, I think she is having an affair with Popatlal J. Shah,’ I said.
‘God!’ Victor said, beating the temples of his head with his palms. ‘Oh, my God! . . .’ And he began to weep like a child, his cries flying past any words I could speak to soothe him, till I had to close the doors to prevent the reverberations of his shrieks from penetrating into the thick night, dense with the sleep of the innocent and the guilty alike.
There is a wise saying of Leo Tolstoy that man gets over everything, everything except the tragedy of the bedchamber. Of course, the sage of Yasnya Polyana might have added that the well-known healing qualities of time make a difference though the scars of love remain.
Long-range considerations apart, however, there is the awful pain of the immediate hurt, which arises at frequent moments suddenly like shooting stars in the sky of one’s soul. And, in the soul of Victor, harrowed by his invidious position as a non-acceding, unpopular, autocratic ruler, other comets were also bursting, and whole planets were in a state of ferment. So the descendant of the Suraj Bansi clan, who were supposed to be descended from the sun, tried to seek out the sun and find comfort in the heart of nature.
He sent me a message early in the morning to get ready to go with him to inspect the hunting lodge in the forest and also to see if the army manoeuvres had started.
Victor looked very sombre and glum as he came up to the hall where I was waiting for him. He had ordered the Cadillac this morning and that meant he wanted to drive himself, for he always used this car when he was in the mood to take the wheel. The chauffeur, Haider Ali, opened the doors for His Highness and me to enter, and then went into the back seat past the small space behind me. Impetuously, Victor started the car and, with a sudden jerk, we were off.
As we drove across the main Sham Pur bazaar, which was still seemingly under the grip of the hartal, I reflected on the fact that Victor had not asked Captain Partap Singh, Munshi Mithan Lal or Mr Bool Chand to accompany us. Obviously, it was because I was privy to all the most intimate details of his relations with this woman. And a man with a broken heart seeks in such a friend the images, feelings, memories and anecdotes of his beloved. Almost instinctively I supplied the place of a woman in Victor’s life by becoming a kind of tabula rasa in which everything was mirrored.
This realization, though somewhat flattering, was also humiliating. But a medical man learns to bring those little mothering ways, those delicate attentions which may give the patient confidence in himself and in life. Nevertheless, I came to know a few things about myself which I had hitherto only vaguely glimmered: that I was weak, vain and timid; that I did not have the courage of my convictions and could not act in a crisis with the single-minded zeal of a good moral person; that, substituting psychology for morality, I had dissolved the values of my inheritance and was experimenting with the new and tentative hypothesis of liberal individualism which concedes free will to every person, even though that person may be determined by his or her own subjectivism.
But because I had been shifting the emphasis from value judgements to psychological understanding of the causes which led people to act in certain ways, I felt a curious affection, bordering upon compassion, for Victor, and an understanding of the process by which the violation of his genuine weakness and sensitivity by his bad upbringing had transformed decency in him into an evil and revengeful will.
The dusty roads of Sham Pur had already given place to the rutted, pitted paths, strewn with stones, that led to the jungle of Panna, where one of the many hunting lodges was situated, nearly at the foot of the lower Himalayan ranges. The thin, drawn face of Victor quivered with every big bump in the road, almost as though the Cadillac had become a substitute for his mistress, for whom he felt a tender sympathy. A creaking sisterhood of bullock carts, proceeding at a snail’s speed right in the middle of the narrow road, impervious to His Highness’s hooter, did not improve the Maharaja’s temper. Further up, there was a herd of goats, which displayed the manners of their own native hills and plains by fanning out in fear and terror in a half-circle between two hills. And when they were cleared by the wild lashing of the herdsmen, we soon came across a series of br
idges over small nullahs at the approaches of which the Public Works Department had put notices closing them to all motor traffic except state cars.
‘I wish they would strengthen the bridges,’ I said, just to break the monotony.
But it was an ill-considered remark. For, as the first bridge had creaked under our weight as we crossed it, Victor’s fear of a bridge collapsing turned into guilt at the neglect of his PWD. He said irritably:
‘You want modern luxuries in the heart of the jungle, don’t you?’
At the turn of a small hill, which the road was cresting as it reached out towards the slopes of the Terai, there was a veritable witches’ sabbath, because the Cadillac ran over one dog among a troupe of pariahs who had been squatting over their mangy hams. I turned and saw that the wounded dog did not die but dragged itself with shrill, sad yelps towards the wayside and collapsed. But Victor drove on with a hardened jaw and shut-mouth obstinacy, obviously controlling himself from feeling remorse for this murder. And the crunch crunch of the gravel beneath the car was the only sound between us during the next mile. At that stage, however, we had another fright because a young boy ran across the road from behind a hamlet and just missed being run over.
‘Doctor Sahib, you take over,’ His Highness whispered, obviously nerve-wracked and worn out by the strain. And he brought the car to a standstill under the shade of a tamarind tree. And, getting out of his door, he made room for me and came into my place from the left.
We drove peacefully enough for the next quarter of an hour along the circuitous, uneven road, more deeply rutted than ever, as it penetrated deeper into the forest. I took the car on to the dusty tracks by the edge of the road as long as these unpaved stretches lasted in the valleys which we traversed, but had perforce to swerve on to the gravel where the road was narrow. I kept a steady, slow pace and did not rush. And, after the first nervous twitches, Victor began to relax and have confidence in my driving.
‘What really happened last night?’ I asked him softly.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 64