‘So you don’t think I can do it?’ asked Victor when he got no verbal support from me.
‘I must think this over,’ I lied, because I just could not credit Victor with such a conversion, though I could just about believe it possible in the life of Maharaja Hanumant Singh. For, 200 years ago, when violence and tyranny was the only history in Sham Pur, and sanctity the only way to hide the nefarious intrigues, I could conceive of a situation in which a prince might suddenly tire of it all and exile himself out of his own volition. Not far from the powerful shadows of the palaces, the torchlit processions of bejewelled elephants and extravagant luxury, there stretched the ocean of squalor, emaciation and disease, in which lived people floundering in the depths of human misery. The weak little man with the wizened face, that was Maharaja Hanumant Singh, lord of the vast countryside, where men and women and children laboured with the patience of despair, straining their anaemic bodies throughout the hot day to earn a meal of crushed grain and a loincloth, may have suddenly glimpsed the wretchedness of the poverty-stricken land and decided to expiate his sins. His soul, filled with the superstitious awe of the gods, that held everyone at bay, may have suddenly been overawed. Or, what was also likely, the last of his wives, but first lady of the land by dint of her unscrupulousness, despairing of his capacity to produce an heir, might have thought of marrying him off to some stone goddess in Benaras and herself considered the possibility of securing a son of the gods in her own womb from one of the concourse of priests or ascetics who bathed and prayed and performed sundry other services to the deity on the banks of the sacred Ganges. . . . But in Victor’s case the resolve to renounce life was certainly another of a series of romantic gestures. Because he lived, as I tried to remind him, not in the age of chivalry, where such gestures could be made, but in the period of the end of pre-history, where one’s real sympathies went not to a Maharaja, however ill he might be, but to the exploited peasants, loaded with all the burdens of debt and disease, harvesting little grain but reaping a prolific crop of troubles all the year round and all through the years.
The poignant yearning for the holy life made Victor’s face look a trifle bilious, especially as he seemed to be disappointed at not getting from me the unfailing response that I always gave to his more mundane demands.
‘The trouble is that you don’t believe in God,’ Victor said in a despairing whisper, and lay back. ‘I must write and ask Munshi Mithan Lal’s advice.’
‘Yes,’ I said, unable to suppress a smile. ‘You must ask Mian Mithu about this.’
‘If you deny God, what do you believe in, then? What are we? How did we come to be?’ Victor said frantically.
‘I think that in spite of man’s bewilderment and confusion about such questions as to what he is, how he ought to act and where he is going, he is the final fact of the universe. There is nothing higher and more dignified than human existence—’ I felt embarrassed with my abstract words and stopped short.
‘But how can one do good if there is no standard of behaviour ordained by Brahman?’ Victor asked, a little querulous.
‘If he gets to know himself a little better, he will know how to live and act. Because he has in him an instinctive awareness of decency, which is more or less derived from his idea of his own and other people’s welfare: he is both norm-giver and subject to such norms. This kind of conscience I am speaking of is the voice of our love for ourselves and others; it is the expression of man’s self-interest and—’ Again my big words troubled me, and I didn’t finish my sentence.
‘Aren’t you afraid of the unseen powers?’ said Victor indignantly.
‘No,’ I said, warming to the debate because of the heat which Victor brought to his words. ‘I don’t believe that there is any power transcending man, who can decide things for him. Man is responsible for gaining or losing his life.’
‘But surely, surely, there is some test by which every man has to judge his own acts,’ said Victor, cutting me short, but half inclining to what I had said. ‘Isn’t there a higher self in man—higher than the lower self?’
‘I suppose at his best man is creative and alive. And that is the only test by which he can judge his conduct. When he is most creative and uses his powers for enriching life, he is good.’
‘This goes counter to the whole teaching of our Vedanta.’
‘There are many philosophies in the Vedanta. Not only the idealistic, transcendentalist idea of Brahman, the Supreme God! At any rate, nowadays one’s religion must become more universal and applicable to all . . . .’ My face fell with the suspicion that my words would have no effect on him whatever.
Victor seemed puzzled. Vaguely he knew that there was much more in what I said than in the ritualistic religion of his inheritance. And he was irritated that he should have felt evasive enough to want to go and become a yogi. For the glow of life remained in him, in the fast extinguishing coals that burnt in the smouldering ashes of his being, silently and unknown even to himself.
‘Perhaps you are right,’ Victor said in a vague, indistinct voice, even as he lay quite flat. ‘But then, according to you, there is no good and evil!’
‘There is no such thing as good and evil in the ordinary moral sense of those words. There is only knowledge and ignorance. All our lives are lived on the quicksands of uncertainty and doubt and inconstancy. And we have a large heritage of darkness in the subterranean caves of our natures. So to work up moral indignation, in the face of what is called evil, is only to disguise envy and hate in the cloak of virtue. . . .’ There was a vibration in my lecture which seemed to affect him, to transport him into the atmosphere where I wished to lead him.
I was aware of my influence on him now. So I went on driving the point home.
‘The crucial sin is impotence and lack of the will to do something, lack of some creative purpose in one’s life.’
‘But my life is useless,’ he confessed. ‘What can I do now that I have been forced to abdicate?’ And his lips trembled with a misery which was self-contained in him. And he couldn’t go on, for the tears welled into his eyes.
‘You despise me, don’t you, for my self-pity?’ he continued, his face quivering.
‘No,’ I said to console him, ‘even self-pity and self-love are an attempt on your part to get well.’
‘But I shall never be strong and firm and have character.’
‘There is some chance for a person, who accepts dissolution of the personality, to become whole, because integration can only arise from a complete breakdown—provided the fire burns in one.’
He seemed absorbed for a while, as though at the significant moment he had relapsed into the darkness of his soul. But his eyes glittered as he looked at me and I felt that he was making the effort, that perhaps in his inner life there were real stirrings. And I knew that he had a considerable personal drive. Whether he would come through, in spite of the currents which buffeted him about, or held him in whirlpools, was not certain.
‘The fire burns,’ he said, ‘but it is mixed up with the ashes of bitterness and remorse. I feel so unhappy, so lonely. I wish I could die!’
I was surprised and relieved to have confirmation from him of a feeling I had a little earlier in the conversation: that there was still a little glow left in the embers of his being.
‘Don’t talk like that,’ I said. ‘Life asserts itself.’
Life did begin to assert itself, but in the way rather more as Captain Partap Singh wanted it to assert itself than as I felt it might assert itself.
Victor came shopping at Barrots with Captain Partap Singh and myself, on the afternoon following our prolonged philosophical dialogue. We all wanted to buy a few toilet requisites in anticipation of a projected visit to Paris about which His Highness had spoken casually. We alighted from the car and were ushered into the store, through the swing doors. And we became part of the good-humoured promiscuity that resolves itself towards the lifts going up and down, all a little out of breath in the crush before closi
ng-time. Victor liked to mingle with the herd for a fleeting hour, because now that he had lost his former grandeur as a Maharaja and was not receiving the attention which Captain Partap Singh’s caparisoned presence always brought to him, he was trying perversely to cultivate the democratic manner. Thus, strictly incognito, we were part of the stream of humanity that flows into the less crowded corners of the mammoth stores, and we bought the few things we had to purchase. Due to the general depression which had settled on Victor, he was not in the spend-thrift mood which had characterized him in the old days, and we did our shopping quickly. Then I suggested that we should go to the restaurant downstairs and have tea, but Victor recalled that he wanted to buy a timepiece, as he could not wear a wrist-watch, because the current of his blood always made any watch he wore go much faster.
I had noticed that throughout the shopping tour on the various floors of the store, the heart-squanderer in Captain Partap Singh had been drawn towards the school-girl complexion of the younger among the female shoppers and the shop assistants. And he told me that he was fascinated by their shapely legs. And, in the secret code that he had established with Victor in a language of gesture that was almost akin to Kathakali dance technique, they had shared the furtive excitements of certain sensations which shimmered and swirled in their eyes before the somewhat sublimated respectability of my presence.
After they had eyed the fine points of every passable female in the store and performed their lascivious diagnosis, their libidinous hungers were aroused enough for the inevitable to happen as soon as we got to the department where watches were sold. The young lady behind the counter was by no means Venus de Milo or Ganga Dasi, but she was a pretty, slim blonde, with her hair deliberately brushed to one side in a manner that permitted her to fling it aside with the self-conscious grace of a jerky blandishment of the head.
‘What can I do for you, sir?’ she said pertly, with a little glow of warmth on her pale cheeks at the sight of Partap Singh’s turban and beard.
‘Everything,’ Partap Singh said with his usual vulgarity.
The shop assistant smiled, blushed and, averting her eyes from Partap Singh, looked towards the more subdued Victor.
Victor looked back at her and for a moment their four eyes met. Then he said almost shyly:
‘We want to look at some timepieces—one of those in a case which folds up for travelling.’
The girl stood transfixed for a moment, her face suffused with an ivory pallor that showed up the specks of brown powder on her nose and on her delicate neck, above the cheap brooch by the collar of her satin blouse. She turned like a young doe in a panic towards this side and that as though she needed help.
The manager of the department, a dapper little bald-headed man with the suave grace of the experienced shop assistant, now exalted to rule over the other shop assistants, and for whom ‘the customer is always right’, sensed the difficulty and came flat-footedly towards the counter.
Behind him came a tall, shrivelled-up old hen in a black dress, cluck-clucking at the shop assistant:
‘What do the gentlemen want, Miss Withers?’
Victor got panicky at all this fuss and, with half-closed eyes and a feeble voice, said:
‘Nothing, nothing.’
‘His Highness the Maharaja Sahib would like a timepiece,’ said Captain Partap Singh, knowing that the announcement of Victor’s title would restore the situation to its proper proportions, for the right of a Maharaja and his ADC to exact the tribute of a little confusion on the face of a shop girl was conceded by everyone, even by a prim and proper superintendent.
‘Show His Royal Highness a timepiece, June,’ said the manager, rubbing his hands and bowing to Victor. ‘It’s all right, Miss Atkinson. I’ll look after the Maraja sab. . . .’
‘All right, Mr Drake,’ said Miss Atkinson. And she withdrew towards the group of girls on the counter for leather goods who were whispering their comments on the scene in which June was involved.
I don’t know if it was fear, terror or love that came over June, or whether standing by the counter all day with a watercress sandwich and a cup of coffee for lunch had exhausted her, but she reeled, swayed and fell forward on the counter in a faint.
‘Smelling-salts!’ whispered Mr Drake. And he rushed behind the counter and, lifting her in his arms, sat her down on a chair, while Miss Atkinson came with a bottle of smelling-salts produced by a girl behind the leather goods counter.
‘I am so sorry,’ said Victor apologetically to Mr Drake, as he came forward to help.
‘What happened to her suddenly?’ asked Partap Singh gallantly. And he advanced a step or two even beyond Victor and began to fan June. ‘Doctor Shankar Sahib, come and look at her.’
Miss Withers opened her eyes after the smelling-salts had been applied to her nose, but closed them again, crying a half cry, while her lips trembled.
‘What’s the matter, Junie?’ said a young man, rushing up from the leather goods department. And he looked daggers at the three of us.
‘All right, Mr Cummings, all right,’ Mr Drake said to the young man.
‘Please give her some air,’ I said. ‘She will be all right in a minute.’
But already she had opened her eyes and come to, wincing between the eyebrows and smiling sheepishly, even as she gasped for breath and said:
‘I just felt giddy.’
‘All right, my dear, you are all right,’ said Mr Drake reassuringly.
She sat for a moment with a flushed face, closed her eyes, obviously with a swirling in her head, and then got up.
‘I should see her home, Mr Cummings, if I were you,’ said Mr Drake.
‘Permit me to offer the young lady my car,’ said Victor in his most deliberately gracious manner. ‘My ADC will see the young man and the young lady home.’
He said this with such authoritative kindliness that the words were both regal command and supplication. And there could be no refusal, especially because he backed it all up with the swift foraging manner of the gallant who is only concerned to help a damsel in distress and is not interested in anything else.
There was a dubious frown on the eyebrows of Mr Drake, but equally the servile ‘customer is always right’ man smiled and bowed and scraped and shuffled on his feet as he helped June Withers to get up with soft, hypocritical words of comfort like: ‘Now then, my dear, there you are. . . . Now then . . .’
‘Captain Partap Singh,’ ordered His Highness, working up the histrionic talent of the old days when he had to act every inch a king, ‘see the young lady and her friend home and come back to the suite afterwards. We will get there on our own.’
‘Yes, Your Highness,’ said Captain Partap Singh, coming to attention and saluting.
There were obvious tremors of excitement on June Withers’s face. And she raised her head like a young colt snuffling with delight.
Mr Cummings, who was, from his proprietary airs, her young man, seemed tense and nervous and angry by turns. To him it was strange that June could accept the offer of this ‘Maraja’ so radiantly.
And there was a gleam in Victor’s eyes as he turned with self-conscious grace and said to Mr Drake:
‘I will come in to look at the timepieces another day.’
I surmised that his heart had been kindled by the romance of the situation.
He did not look back at her and carried the bluff of an unconcerned manner right to the end of the corridor where the lifts went up and down.
‘Poor girl!’ he said, turning to me after we had passed the knots of whispering shop assistants in the department. ‘She has quite a pretty face, though she is flat-chested like all the English girls. . . .’
I knew that he had already decided to begin with her. I guessed that there was a revival of all the old stirrings for the unadmitted life of desire in him: in which all women were different, and each one a new prey for the eternal hunter, Man. I recoiled against the adventure, but equally felt a little relieved that he would be less o
bsessed with Gangi if he got involved in a minor flirtation.
It turned out to be not so minor a flirtation.
From the first day after the incident at Barrots, Victor made a dead set at Miss June Withers. He seemed a past master of the art of seduction. He had had the uncanny instinct to send Captain Partap Singh with June and her boyfriend with the dual purpose of showing gallantry as well as to find out her address. And, the next day, choosing the time when June was away at work, he sent a bunch of red roses by the ADC to her home, with a note on the back of the card asking if she would give him the honour of her company at supper that evening and informing her that Captain Partap Singh would call for her anyhow. The card, of course, bore his address and the full regalia of all his titles and honours, which he knew would impress her:
‘Maj.-Gen. His Highness Farzand-i-Khas-i-Daulata-i-Inglishia Mansur-i-Zaman. Amir-ul-umra, Maharajadhiraj Sri 108, Sir Victor Edward George, Ashok Kumar Bahadur, K.C.S.I.., K.C.I.E., D.L. (Benaras), Maharaja of Sham Pur.’
Victor had acted dexterously. For I guessed that Miss June Withers, who had tasted the outer edge of a romantic meeting with a Maharaja in her capacity as a shop girl when she had fainted and been driven home in a Rolls-Royce by a tall and handsome man, would be suffused with the glow of a feeling that there might be a little more in the odd behaviour of the prince than he could make obvious at the shop counter. And having spent the day in a suppressed state of excitement, torn between the stares and glares of her colleagues, who had seen a definite ruse in her giddiness and the definite signs of a beginning in the Maharaja’s eyes, she was not surprised when she got home and found the flowers waiting for her, red roses, the boldest confirmation of his inclination towards her, as well as an invitation to supper. And, naturally after the hesitations, occasioned by her regard for Bob Cummings, the lack of an appropriate coat to wear over the only long evening dress, the fear of consequences of such an adventure (what would Mum and Dad say?), the inner barren feeling of the shop girl about a life with mechanical repetitions, had urged her to take the plunge.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 81