Classic Mulk Raj Anand

by Mulk Raj Anand

  ‘You know, in a marriage of love, both the partners have entered more or less equal and free. Otherwise, the one who loves will be hurt and destroyed by the other who doesn’t love deeply. And resentments will set up curtains of bitterness and dissatisfaction, and the poison will seep through the partners. It is best in such a situation to let the promiscuous one run wild until the fascination of adultery is exhausted by misuse of body and mind and depth returns to the wild one.’

  ‘Soothing syrup!’ Victor said with a troubled smile.

  I thought I would now take the occasion to broach the matter of the détenues. And I paused to gather strength enough to begin.

  ‘Let us have a drink,’ Victor said impatiently, depriving me of my chance to say anything serious. And he shouted, ‘Koi hai?’

  At lunch that day the venison from the shikar of the previous night formed the main curried dish. And Victor dispensed hospitality with a warmth which was heightened by the half bottle of whisky he had consumed since our talk together. The meal was, therefore, a somewhat raucous farce. Fortunately, the ladies were all absent, because they preferred to dine with Gangi in the zenana.

  ‘Ohe!’ he shouted on seeing the chamberlain, Chottu Ram, taking a third helping of the venison curry, ‘we should have remembered your appetite and let off the second cheetah to get some more buck! Look at him! Look at him!’

  The white guests turned to look at Chottu Ram. His cheeks were, indeed, puffed up like balls with the morsels he was swallowing.

  ‘I don’t know how he can do it!’ said Mr Watkins. ‘I find it very hot.’

  ‘Yes, a real hot curry this, for once!’ opined Mr Bell with a knowing air. He was red in the face, though he pretended to like the curry.

  Mr Lane’s glasses were dim with the steam of the perspiration from his face as he looked up.

  ‘Gosh!’ said Kurt Landauer.

  ‘We have a large variety of dishes in India,’ said Srijut Popatlal J. Shah. ‘Only today, His Highness preferred to treat us to an English-style lunch on china plates, with forks and knives, and not in thalis, as is our usual custom.’

  ‘Ohe!’ said Captain Partap Singh to Chottu Ram, who was now sweeping portions of meat with each chapati and devouring huge morsels. ‘Ohe, your stomach is your own, even though the food which you are eating has been provided by His Highness!’

  Everyone laughed at this, because Partap Singh’s mode of speech was as crude as Chottu Ram’s appetite.

  Chottu knew he would be the butt of all jokes now, so he dramatized his absorption in the meal. He took bigger morsels still and satisfied his greed and amused the guests at the same time.

  ‘I wish for Chottu’s sake,’ repeated His Highness, ‘that we had let the other cheetah do the work, because we should have been able to provide more game to our chamberlain.’

  ‘One buck was enough, Maharaj,’ said Chottu, ‘if only Bhagirath had put more chillies into the meat.’

  The foreign guests smiled at the reference to them, because they were, indeed, taking good helpings.

  ‘You wouldn’t think that such a little person as Chottu Ram could have such an enormous capacity,’ said Munshi Mithan Lal, to wipe out the effect of Chottu’s tactless remark.

  ‘The exact size of a stomach is about the contracted fist of a hand,’ I said, to contribute my quota of conversation to drown the possible ill effects of Chottu’s vulgarity.

  ‘If a tall man like myself ate so much,’ said Captain Partap Singh, ‘it would be all right, but this fellow Chottu!’

  But Chottu only accelerated the devouring process.

  ‘Actually, I could outdo him any day,’ said Partap Singh.

  ‘That’s a challenge!’ said His Highness, relaxing his face to admit a smile.

  ‘I shall take the challenge!’ said Chottu.

  ‘I shall win!’ warned Partap Singh.

  ‘Take a bet on it!’ said Chottu.

  ‘Acha,’ said Partap Singh. ‘Let His Highness name the conditions and the bet.’

  ‘I shall eat twenty hard-boiled eggs here and now and drink a bottle of champagne!’ said Chottu.

  ‘I shall eat twenty-five!’ said Partap Singh.

  ‘All right, whoever gives way will pay five hundred rupees to the other,’ said Victor. ‘And I shall give a thousand to the winner. . . . Bhagirath, get forty-five eggs boiled at once!’

  ‘Han, Maharaj, by tomorrow,’ said Bhagirath.

  ‘No, today, just now,’ Victor ordered.

  Bhagirath looked dubiously about and smiled as though he thought that His Highness was playing a joke on him.

  ‘Why are you sniggering?’ Victor shouted. ‘Go and get the eggs.’

  Bhagirath could not help sniggering even though he bowed his head and went to the kitchen.

  Mr Watkins and Mr Lane had not quite understood this game and turned to Mr Bell for enlightenment.

  His Highness explained to them the nature of the contest even as he got up and plied them with more champagne. He wanted to warm up the party.

  ‘I shall show Chottu that I can outdo him in eating!’ boasted Partap Singh after he had swallowed the champagne left over in his tumbler. ‘I shall show you all! Why, I could have become the second cheetah last night! I could have sucked up its life-blood!’

  ‘Some men only look human!’ I commented to mitigate Partap Singh’s animalist bragging.

  ‘Domestication makes some difference,’ said Victor.

  ‘Huzoor, in captivity even a lion grows to be a goat. And I am by religion a Singh, a lion, King of all the beasts.’

  ‘And you will never be tamed,’ I said.

  Bhagirath appeared with six hard-boiled eggs on a plate, saying:

  ‘Maharaj, there are six hard-boiled eggs left over from the morning.’

  ‘But we want fifty!’ Victor roared.

  ‘I have put twenty more on to boil, Maharaj,’ Bhagirath said. ‘I thought I would bring these to go on with.’

  ‘Acha, meanwhile serve the halwa and the dessert,’ Victor said.

  The foreign guests signified that they had had enough.

  ‘Only coffee for me,’ said Mr Lane.

  ‘Come on, Mr Lane,’ coaxed Victor. ‘Satisfy yourself even though you choke yourself, because then you will be free of desire. This is the safest rule, be it for food or be it love.’

  ‘Your Highness, you must know a great deal about both,’ ventured Mr Watkins with an impish smile.

  ‘I have never been untrue to any emotion,’ Victor said, taking Watkins’s light-hearted remark seriously. ‘So I have had a lot of experience. I never deny any emotion, crush it or turn away from it. During my youth, I got everything I wanted. All the obstacles in my way were removed, so that I could have what I wanted. And I have become habituated to having things my own way. But, of course, I get trapped by the things I want and possess, and so I am, as Doctor Shankar would say, really the loser when I gain. Now I have been trying to develop the art of never being caught. . . .’

  ‘And yet, I am afraid,’ I put in, ‘His Highness always gets caught. His vanity is colossal and he doesn’t know when he is being trapped.’ I winced at my rudeness.

  ‘Doctor Shankar may know me better,’ said Victor. ‘But, Mr Watkins, inside me I am really fundamentally free, unattached. All these things pass me by. I remain untouched and unmoved, though, on the surface, I know I am involved. That’s the truth. Really, believe me.’

  ‘Somewhat of a yogi,’ said Mr Lane.

  ‘More like a schizophrene,’ said the canny Mr Bell.

  ‘Yes, that’s what he would like to be, a yogi,’ I said. ‘But he is not. Mr Bell is right. His Highness is incapable of permanent attachments—except that he has his fixations!’

  ‘Bhagirath! Where are these servants? What about the eggs?’ Victor shouted suddenly, in a frenzy at my rudeness. And he turned to Chottu Ram and Partap Singh. ‘Get ready, you will soon be remembering your mothers!’

  So we descended from the sublime to the
ridiculous again.

  Bhagirath appeared.

  ‘The eggs! the eggs!’ Victor shouted. ‘Don’t you see that the two giants are hungry? They will devour you if you don’t look out!’

  ‘Here, Maharaj, I have brought twenty more,’ he said. ‘The cook is boiling the rest. But the fires in the kitchen had been extinguished.’

  ‘Chalo, begin!’ His Highness said to Chottu and Partap Singh.

  ‘After Captain Sahib,’ said Chottu.

  ‘No, you first,’ said Partap Singh.

  ‘Stop this war of courtesy and begin!’ ordered His Highness.

  The two giants began peeling the eggs.

  ‘Salt, pepper, khansamah! And some more champagne!’

  Bhagirath put the cruet-stand before the giants and went off to open another champagne bottle.

  The giants began to eat.

  ‘Let us help peel some more for them,’ offered Mr Watkins, joining in the fun.

  ‘You will both die of jaundice,’ I said to the contestants.

  They had polished off two eggs each already, and were reaching out for more.

  ‘Have some champagne to wash them down with,’ Victor suggested, pouring the frothing liquid from the bottle that Bhagirath had opened.

  Both the giants merely nodded assent and went ahead with the competition. The atmosphere became more and more awful as their faces got redder and redder.

  Chottu Ram had eaten ten eggs already and his eyes were bulging behind his glasses, his face looking gloomier than when he started.

  ‘Fourteen,’ said Partap Singh. ‘I am leading. Bhagirath . . .’ And he picked up his tumbler and swallowed the champagne in a mouthful.

  ‘I should chew them slowly,’ I said to him. ‘I say this as a doctor.’

  ‘I shall eat them as I like,’ he said.

  Bhagirath brought another dozen eggs.

  Chottu began to look a little green.

  ‘Stop it now,’ I said to him.

  ‘Of course not, this is a match!’ said His Highness.

  ‘I shall persist to the last,’ Chottu said. And he began on the eleventh hard-boiled egg.

  But somehow it wouldn’t go down.

  ‘Have some liquid,’ I suggested, concerned for him.

  He hiccupped, groaned, and brought up the eggs and the champagne on to the table before him.

  I got up and walked away, unable to control the bile in my mouth in the face of the men. I saw that everyone turned away and left. The lunch party broke up.

  After such a lunch a deep siesta became inevitable, and the four o’clock tea was served in the bedrooms of the guests.

  As Victor had asked me to come in and discuss with him the exact way in which to broach the subject of American help for his independent stand, I knocked at his bedroom door, after Bhagirath had been in to put the tea at his bedside.

  I thought that Bhagirath had awakened him, but it seemed that he had been sound asleep, and it was my knock at the door that broke his slumber.

  As I entered, he looked somewhat startled and passed his right hand through his glossy, silken hair. But, suddenly, he was more than startled. He was in a panic. He looked round, open-mouthed, and said:

  ‘Where is Gangi? She was asleep beside me!’

  I knew what was in his mind. His face paled and I thought he was going to shout. His head swayed dizzily and he bit his lower lip in order to control himself.

  ‘I guess she has gone to Kurt,’ he said. ‘As you said, “the moon is in her blood”. When Kurt lifted her in the machan last night, I knew she would. . . . That is why I was so worried this morning . . .’ But he did not finish his sentence.

  I moved my head despairingly.

  He shot out of his bed and raced out of the room into the veranda and towards Kurt’s bedroom.

  I dared not call him back for fear of rousing the other guests, but merely followed.

  With an uncanny instinct for manoeuvre, even in this mood of excitement, he applied his eyes to the jali which covered the window, and he stood transfixed. Then he beckoned me with a swift gesture of his right hand.

  I got up to the window and saw the shocking reality; Gangi lay in bed with Kurt in a passionate embrace. She was still dressed, though her salwars were undone, while Kurt was naked.

  I dragged Victor away to prevent him from seeing too much.

  ‘Get away!’ he growled at me. ‘I shall kill them both!’ His voice rang metallic and hard across the corridor and penetrated Kurt’s room. There was an instantaneous sound of shuffling feet and anxious whispers.

  I put my right hand on Victor’s mouth, and holding him hard with the left, dragged him back towards his room. He bucked like a stallion and his eyes were red hot, spitting fire at me, while he wrestled with me to get free. I exerted all my strength and bent myself in the effort to extricate him from the scene which he wanted to create with that latent histrionic ability that he exercised to the full before believing the evidence of his senses. Nothing but foul abuse of Gangi would have sufficed to reassure him. His mouth opened and his hysteria spluttered across the tense silence of the veranda.

  At that stage I lifted him bodily and took him to his room even while he shouted and protested.

  ‘Vicky, you will ruin everything if the Americans hear you,’ I whispered peremptorily. These words seemed to hypnotize him and he became docile in my hands.

  I brought him to the room and flung him on his bed.

  He burst into tears and, turning on his face, buried his head in his pillow and sobbed.

  I sat down by him and stroked his back.

  He seemed inconsolable and poured forth sentiment and abuse for Gangi in turns, with the refrain, ‘Oh, how could she do it to me!’

  I let him cry his heart out and he calmed a little.

  After a while, he said, ‘I know she can’t help these urges.’

  He paused for a moment and then continued, ‘It seems so cruel that she should do this kind of thing and hurt me to satisfy a passing fancy!’

  He lay back and rolled across the bed from side to side, evidently whipped up by the agony, thrown back to resources which he did not possess, for he had given himself up to her unreservedly for ever.

  ‘I shall leave you to dress,’ I said, embarrassed. ‘You have to talk to the Americans.’

  ‘Call Mr Watkins.’

  I walked away silently.

  ‘Ask Watkins to join us for a stroll in half an hour,’ Victor called after me.

  Victor did not keep a pretence of secrecy about the talk we were to have with Mr Peter Watkins. For, meeting the Premier, Popatlal J. Shah, in the garden, His Highness asked him whether he would care to come for a walk.

  ‘I can see that wonderful swing there at the end of the garden, Your Highness,’ said Srijut Shah. ‘I would like to sit on it. I feel like a child. Come, there is a bench for you and you can talk while I enjoy myself on the swing.’

  ‘Nero fiddled while Rome was burning,’ Mr Watkins said. ‘But we will let you have your little game.’

  So we strolled up to the end of the garden where Popatlal occupied the cushioned seat at the base of the swing. Victor seemed absent-minded and racked.

  ‘People are saying that Nehru fiddles while India is burning,’ I said airily.

  ‘And it is true,’ said Mr Watkins. ‘He has been saying that he believes in Communism—’

  ‘No, no, no, Mr Watkins,’ said Popatlal J. Shah. ‘Panditji says many things. He was once a Socialist. But he has said on the radio that there is no difference between him and Sardar Patel on fundamental questions. And the Sardar has stated that he will see every Communist in India dead before he is finished with them.’ And as he said this, the Prime Minister looked towards His Highness naïvely for approval.

  ‘If the Sardar is out to destroy the Communists, then why doesn’t he help me to put down the guerillas who have raised their heads to the skies in Sham Pur?’ Victor said irritably. ‘Even the noblemen of my state do not see the threat cle
arly enough and have combined with the Reds against me. And yet the Sardar is helping these cousins of mine.’

  He seemed naturally to have become bitter.

  ‘That is a different question,’ said Popatlal. ‘The issue of Sham Pur is accession or non-accession. Once the accession is conceded, the Government of India will help the state forces and the police to put down the Reds. The unity and integrity of the Indian Union comes first. And we are doing our best to encourage this unity.’

  ‘I am not concerned with the inner differences of the various units in your country,’ said Mr Watkins. ‘But I do see that the position of Sham Pur State is a very important one, considering its peculiar geography. Especially in the days of the aeroplane. With the advance of the Chinese Reds to Sinkiang and Tibet, India will need to defend itself against the Communists from the north. And if there are guerillas already plying in the state, then the sooner something is done about it the better!’

  ‘Of course,’ I suggested, in a vein that I knew would obviously open me to the suspicion of being pro-Red, ‘the one way of making Sham Pur proof against disaster would be to feed and clothe the people.’

  ‘That is a platitude which is being put about in all the liberal and pro-Communist press,’ said Mr Homer Lane, butting in from where he had come to stand by his chief in a shirt and shorts which exposed his feeble skeleton-like body in all its ridiculous Goebbels distortion. ‘People don’t realize the acuteness of the menace here. Soon, the Reds in China will be infiltrating across the mountains into India. In fact, I hear the Tibetan Communist Party is planning to conquer India!’

  ‘What, the Lamas have turned Red?’ said His Highness.

  ‘I have heard an interesting story about the Tibetan Communist Party,’ said Mr Lane. ‘They sent a member of their party to Mao Tse Tung to get to know the latest line. This comrade travelled for six months by yak and pony to get there. He received his instructions and took another six months on the return journey. After he got back and reported to his friends they heard that the party line had changed in the meanwhile. So they sent him back to Mao Tse Tung again to get to know the new line. . . .’