Partap Singh knocked at the door on the first floor, and a middle-aged woman came out, demurely covering her greying hair with her dupatta.
‘Come, come, Sardarji, our fate seems to have awakened that you have actually come,’ she said, her fair broad face with its sensuous lower lip wreathed in the whore’s forced smile. ‘I thought you would never come. . . . And is that the Maharaja Sahib? Come, Sarkar, come and grace our house with your presence. And where is that fat Munshi you brought with you when you came three days ago?’
‘Where is Lakshami?’ Partap Singh said, leading us into the old-style baithak, or living-room, with its cow-tailed cushions and dirty white sheeted elegance. He ignored her inquiry about Munshi Mithan Lal, because he really had not wanted His Highness to know that he had brought that puritan here.
‘She has gone to sleep,’ the woman said. ‘And so have the tabalchi and Ustad Durga Das. But I shall awaken them. . . . Come, Maharaj, come on our heads, come and sit down. . . .’
We went up shyly and settled down by the cushions. Fortunately we were all wearing tight pyjamas and achkans, and it was easier to recline back than it is in English clothes. And Vicky seemed to relax.
‘Does she really sing well, or is she just an amateur?’ Victor asked Partap Singh.
‘Huzoor, I made sure of all that when I came here the other day,’ Partap Singh answered.
I looked around and saw the familiar paraphernalia of a courtesan’s living-room scattered about: the hookah, the betel-leaf carrier, the drums and the harmonium. And on the wall facing us was the inevitable calendar with the picture of a Japanese geisha girl dressed in a kimono, smiling broadly, a fan in her hand. But with all, the room was empty of content, as though it was the stage of that Shakespearian phrase where everyone came and played his part and went on.
Victor seemed to grow more and more solemn as we waited for the performers to appear. And I guessed that he was so much in the grip of his memories that he could not relish the prospect of pleasure in another woman as much as he used to do in the past.
‘Still introspective?’ I said lamely.
‘I feel,’ said Victor, with a frankness that was meant to bluff as well as to uncover his domestic predicament before Partap Singh, ‘that I have descended into a dark night where the only thing I can see is the light she brought into my life. . . . You know when I first had her, I wanted my union with her to last for ever and for ever and wanted to shut out the whole world from my gaze. I wished to be with her in an unending life, in the living, palpitating passion I shared with her, as she came to me, a golden girl, shrieking with desire. . . . And yet I was afraid then that it might not last. And now I think of that moment and am imprisoned in the memory of it, and nothing seems to exist outside. . . .’
Partap Singh was obviously enjoying the confidence, but also had his own formula for distracting the attention of the Maharaja.
‘You will see, Huzoor, how lovely Lakshami is!’ he said.
But Victor went on grinding his soul for souvenirs from the past.
‘You know Gangi can be very playful. She would deliberately play hide-and-seek with me before yielding up to my embrace. Or she would coyly avert her face to evade my kisses to draw me on. There were times when I believed that the sports of Krishna and Radha would last for ever.’
‘Who knows they may last for ever,’ I consoled. ‘After all, Radha and Krishna had their quarrels as well as their minglings.’
‘But she is very strange,’ Victor said sadly.
‘A snake,’ said Partap Singh.
Victor did not accept the comment as it came from the ADC, whose opinion in such matters he did not respect. And he became aware that he had said more than he had wanted to say in the presence of Partap Singh. And he withdrew into himself again.
After a while, the middle-aged woman appeared with Lakshami and the musicians. They all joined hands in obeisance to His Highness. They were obviously refugees, amateurs at this game, for they seemed lacking in the graces of the traditional courtesan and her troupe.
‘My name is Rukmani and this girl is called Lakshami, Maharaj,’ the middle-aged woman began. And, turning to the girl, she said: ‘Now, don’t be shy with the Maharaja Sahib. He has come such a long way to see you.’
‘Han, han, daughter, sit nearer the Maharaja Sahib, snuggle up to him while I tune up the tabla,’ added Ustad Durga Das.
Lakshami’s face was cast in a demure mould. She was a dark-complexioned girl with a well-chiselled, sharp, fine nose, big brown eyes and a strong chin, all framed by a white dupatta which set off the whole dusky visage as an evening is often set off by the moonlight.
She moved a little nearer but still remained outside His Highness’s range.
He looked at her with an appetite that seemed to grow with the looking: the warm, dark flesh conduced to a kind of enchantment.
She became aware of his interest, but sat as though stranded, a little helpless as she bent her eyes before Rukmani, and forlorn, lost to the world.
‘Acha, then get ready to sing,’ said Rukmani in an admonishing voice.
Lakshami looked dumbly up at the taskmistress and then lowered her eyes.
‘Don’t force her if she doesn’t want to,’ Victor said. ‘Let her just get used to us and she will talk.’
‘You see how gracious His Highness is to you,’ said Rukmani. ‘I know he is as generous as he is gracious.’
‘At first let her perform,’ said Partap Singh brutally, ‘before she can expect any generosity.’
Lakshami’s face seemed heavy with disappointment. Her lips trembled a little and she looked pathetic like a young calf ushered up before her butchers.
‘Sire, you must forgive her shyness,’ said Ustad Durga Das, the tabalchi.
Victor’s solitariness and detachment had disappeared at the sight of the girl. Now his face quivered. He bent forward and patted her on the head, saying humorously: ‘Don’t be afraid. I am not a cannibal. I won’t eat you.’
With this Lakshami smiled through her tear-dimmed eyes and looked up.
‘Now then,’ said the Ustad, striking the drums hard on the sides to test them, even as he turned to his companion: ‘boy, start up.’
Lakshami’s head stooped again.
‘Show your cursed face to the Maharaja Sahib,’ ordered Rukmani peremptorily. ‘He is so kind to you.’
The dread of Rukmani’s wrath overpowered Lakshami now. She cowered, then shook her head and braced up to the occasion by a patently artificial put-on smile, in the light of which the tears in her eyes glistened. But her mouth would not open. Only her lips trembled and she seemed to be making a desperate effort to keep up appearances.
‘Come, let us have a song, Bibi,’ Partap Singh coaxed her, in case His Highness should get bored with her reticence and go.
‘Han, daughter, sing for the Maharaja Sahib!’ goaded Rukmani, her face wreathed in a frown.
‘Han, do sing,’ said His Highness. And in order to reassure her, he lunged forward and patted her on the head.
She moved her head away instinctively. But then she realized that he might be offended at her recoil. Drawing the dupatta over her forehead, she inclined her face a little, smiled genuinely for the first time, glanced coyly through the corners of her eyes at Victor and said in a mellow Punjabi accent:
‘I will try and sing. I am rather out of breath, because I have just eaten.’
‘There is no talk,’ Victor said in Punjabi. ‘Take your time.’
After this there was that awkward momentary silence which yawns before the singer actually starts to sing.
Lakshami cleared her throat, hummed like a blackbird, became silent and then began to utter the first accents of a popular film song:
‘A heart broke into a thousand pieces . . .’
The refrain carried an air of foreboding about it, which was accentuated by the drum beats of the tabla, and the noise of the harmonium, and the verses became potent with meaning for Victor in his prese
nt state of mind. He swayed his head gently as though stirred from the depths. And he looked at Lakshami, regarding her as a kind of prophetess, who had sensed the impending disaster which was coming to him. Then he sat fascinated, inert and sad, listening to the lilt of her voice.
‘A heart broke into a thousand pieces,’ she repeated. And she added the next verse:
‘Some fell here and some fell there . . .’
Now the words seemed to affect him so deeply that his face was set in the mould of agony, even as he sighed and moved his head slowly as though accepting the threatened break-up of the centre of his life.
‘Wah! Wah!’ the vulgar Partap Singh shouted the conventional appreciation of the heart-squanderer. Victor gave him a withering look till the ADC shrank into his shell.
But the damage had been done.
Lakshami’s voice broke into a sob and the tears welled uncontrollably to her eyes. The thread of her song, which she had held fast in her throat, had snapped.
She covered her eyes with her hands, darted like an animal at bay and ran into the back room.
‘Lakshami! Lakshami!’ shouted Rukmani. ‘Shameless one! What talk is this?’
‘Hain! Come here!’ shouted Durga Das.
‘Let her go,’ Victor shrieked, as though he had sensed, with complete sympathy, the girl’s inability to go on with the song. Somewhere, deep down, there was an almost convalescent feminine strain in his nature with which he felt a strange weakness for women, a kind of fellow feeling that was morbid like the prolonged anguish of some reparation he had to make for past guilts. It was this feeling for atonement which had drawn his body always towards women: and it was perhaps through this that he was rooted in Gangi, the weakest member of her sex that he knew.
He collected himself after his display of bad temper, but sat in absolute hostility to the company. He seemed to be under the spell of Lakshami for the moment, as he could never have been in the power of a self-conscious whore.
‘Please forgive us,’ began Ustad Durga Das. ‘Lakshami comes from a good home. She was abducted by the Pakistani Muslas from her Hindu husband, a vakil of Lahore, and she was married off to her seducer in Sialkot. Then Shrimati Sarabhai had her rescued and brought back to Jullundur, where her first husband was. He would not have her back, because she had been used by a Musla. . . . And Rukmani found her, hungry and homeless, at Delhi station, and brought her here . . .’
‘The swine!’ Victor hissed.
‘These Muslas have done terrible things!’ said Durga Das.
‘Han, Maharaj, they tortured me and even spoiled me, an old woman,’ said Rukmani. ‘Until I had to take up this profession.’
Victor’s face glowed with rage against the pimps before him. They had misunderstood him. I knew he had abused the lawyer husband of Lakshami and not the Muhammadans. He sat with his head hung down, as though he was sinking into the bottomless pit of despair. And he ground his teeth in an effort to chew the bitterness hard in his mouth and then he swallowed the dry husk of horror, in his throat mirroring the dread which was passing down into his system.
We were all dumb with fear at the incalculable elements in the situation. Would he rise and smash up everyone and everything? Or would he growl like a tiger at bay and frighten us all? What would he do?
I surmised that he had transferred his tenderness from Gangi to Lakshami for a moment, and then taken the feeling, enriched by compassion, back to his mistress. But, because Gangi was not here, he sat in the wilderness, suspended, unresolved and ignorant of what she, whose sex he adored, would do to him.
We waited patiently for a sign from him.
‘I think a husband who turns a wife out, because she had been abducted by a Mussulman, is a swine!’ Victor said, looking up and flashing like a sword which is suddenly unsheathed.
No one dared utter a sound, though I could see the confusion in Durga Das’s sheepish eyes.
At that instant, there was a furious knocking at the door.
The boy at the harmonium sprang up.
‘First ask who it is!’ shouted Rukmani in a panic. ‘Then open the door.’
‘Kon hai?’ the boy asked.
‘Is Maharaja Sahib here? I am Munshi Mithan Lal. . . . Open the door.’ He struck his stick furiously at the panel.
Captain Partap Singh ran up to the door and opened it.
‘A call has come from Sardar Patel’s secretary, Maharaj,’ said Munshi Mithan Lal, panting breathlessly, his eye-glasses dimmed with the steam of perspiration. ‘The Sardar has given an appointment for five o’clock at dawn for you to meet him.’
The red anger in Victor’s eyes turned to a white fear. His warm face became pale.
Then he said:
‘Five o’clock in the morning, did you say, Munshiji?’
‘Han, Maharaj!’ answered Mian Mithu in a voice which showed the kind of distress he must have felt when his mother died.
At this Victor laughed out loud, an artificial, hysterical laugh, which fell cracked and hollow on the abject audience.
‘Chalo!’ he said, lifting his hand. And then he got up and stood like a little stiff colossus in the middle of the empty, soulless room. ‘Give them five hundred, Partap Singh,’ he ordered. And, turning to the pimp, he said: ‘Look, three hundred is for Lakshami. Give it to her. That is my order!’
For a moment, he surveyed the room with a blind, frustrated look. Then he made towards the door.
We followed.
A grey night was merging into a grey dawn as we motored up to the residence of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel at a quarter to five. Dead Delhi seemed deadlier in the eerie silence which enveloped the long roads and the sequestered bungalows, enshrouded in the mist-covered foliage. Only the lamplights glistened like jets of life from the empty, soulless capital of India.
The sentry at the entrance of the bungalow told us to park the car on the roadside and wait by the lamp post fifty yards away. As we followed his directions, I couldn’t help wondering at the oddness of the hour for which this appointment had been given, and felt both irritated and amused at the place of the rendezvous. I think all of us were thinking similar thoughts, though no one dared to say so. And I guessed that His Highness, who had been feeling humiliated enough at having to wait about in Delhi all these days, felt more humiliated when he realized that he, a prince of the Suraj Bansi clan, had to wait by a lamp post in order to see a mere commoner, who happened by good fortune to have become Deputy Prime Minister and Minister-in-Charge of the Indian States.
‘It is cold,’ Victor complained, shivering a little.
‘Maharaj, take my muffler,’ said the devoted Mian Mithu.
‘No, no, let us walk a little and I shall get warm,’ said Victor, proud and taciturn.
As we strolled up to the lamp post and beyond, I felt as though, instead of diminishing, the grey darkness was growing. I tried to distinguish the colours of the flowers in the rounder at the crossing of the four roads, and I could see the pinks and the blues and the reds clearly, so I realized that it was my black mood, arising from sleeplessness, the worry about the future, and the general strain, which made the world seem darker to me. We had all been so sunk in the morass of our own subjectivism, that everything outside us seemed to be contracting, withering, darkening.
We retraced our steps towards the gate of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s bungalow, our shoes getting soaked in the dew on the copious grass that grew here and there on the fringes of the pavement.
There was a stirring on the drive by the hall of the bungalow, and by the time we got to where the sentry stood we saw the Sardar walking up. His hard jaws were contracted beneath the dark brown refulgence of the serious, set mien, under the two small points of light which were his half-closed eyes. A simple homespun tunic under a shawl was on his compact torso and a shortish dhoti, going down to just below his knees, covered his legs. He had chappals on his feet and a stave in his hand. The moment of his approach was full of the most awful terror, as though his legend had ov
erpowered us. We all made obeisance by joining our hands to him.
‘Raja,’ he said, nodding his head briefly.
Victor’s face became abjectly pale, though there were streaks of livid anger across it at being called merely Raja, when his title was Maharaja.
But Sardar Patel’s strong point was the scowl from which he seemed to frown contemptuously on all and sundry. And against the hard lines of that face, Victor’s visage was comparatively gentle and mellow, in spite of the hysterical monarchical rages he used to put on.
The Sardar looked around cursorily and scanned the faces of the two plain-clothes men who followed him. And it flashed upon me that even this arbiter of the destiny of the princes, the Deputy Prime Minister of India, the man of steel and iron, was slightly afraid.
‘Walk with me,’ he said, ‘and we will talk your business over.’ And he strode forward, a stolid peasant, with a shrewd glint in his small eyes, and the conceit of power seated casually upon his knotted forehead.
For a few moments, Victor, who walked abreast of him, tried to keep step with him—an awkward process, because the Sardar’s tread was slower than his own. Then, after he had adjusted himself, he waited for the great man to begin. And the essence of the greatness of the great man lay in not beginning at all, in breaking the nerves of the person he was dealing with by not saying a word, until the victim fell a prey to the folly of words, always fumbling and stupid when they come out of a terrorized soul. If Victor had lived and moved and had his being in the dark night, the Sardar was not really very far advanced towards the dawn, in so far as he dared not project the blinding light of his convictions, without restraints and hesitations, on to his victims. Neither of them would throw a fire-brand into the darkness.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 74