Black slippers, with high heels,
What is the use of Indian style shoes,
Ni, Harnam Kauré! . . .
This amused the passengers a little. And Captain Partap Singh was stirred enough by old memories, in spite of his present depression, to encourage Victor with a ‘Wah Wah’.
But, instead of continuing his song, Victor began to talk gibberish, with a far-away look in his hard glassy eyes:
‘My sweetheart is wearing black tights! O my little white elephant! Dance, dance, dance, ah! ah! ah! Arré wah, wah, kiya kehne hain tere, meri piari jan! . . . Darling, darling, darleeng . . .’
And then the last words became a sing-song in his mouth, ending up in a queer falsetto which was an imitation of the last accents of a baritone opera star.
Again there was a continuous flow of words; dead reverberations of his tortured sensibility, sunk in the abyss of memories and aspirations and dreams, and emerging as an assortment of isolated words in complete disorder, spilling over the boundaries of sense into a jungle of nonsense. It was as though from the primeval darkness of his soul a certain shapeless form became speech and the primal sound turned into song at the merest impact of the warm throat, hushing us into terror with the trace of fury that was in each syllable. And all the utterances became timeless, beyond understanding, but with a coherence of their own, a kind of omniform of the demented personality.
Apart from a few amused smiles, no one dared to laugh in the face of this primordial fact of the unhinged mind, even as there is no defiance possible against a bad dream, but only acceptance.
And involved in the thick undergrowth of the forest of his soul, caught in the ramifications of his dreams and fantasies, almost as though he believed that each yearning was a happening, he became a transparent mirror for each impulse, fixated perhaps in one primary fact but now scattered and homeless, without roots, much more of an orphan now than he had been in the three years during which I had known him.
I sat there whipped, whipped to exhaustion by the strain and sleeplessness, wishing that I could pity him, but unable to control a certain hardness into which I was stiffening. For his frenzy and madness, and even his suffering, had driven me into myself until I felt that my mind was insidiously devising plans to give him the go by, dump him on the scrap-heap somewhere and free myself from him.
It was then that I thought of taking him to the Poona asylum, almost as a murderer takes a victim to the place where he is going to do away with the innocent one.
And yet as soon as the thought came to me, I felt tremors of hot blood go through me and my body was sodden with sweat.
A little while later, the plane alighted at Cairo aerodrome. And as everyone had to get down while the plane was being refuelled and cleaned, I had to undergo the most terrific ordeal of all at the hands of Victor. The Egyptian policemen, each looking more like King Farouk than King Farouk himself, refused us permission to keep the mad Maharaja on board. With an insensitiveness characteristic of a defeated people, unsure of themselves, they harassed us inordinately as they scrutinized our passports. Under such circumstances, Victor let go all the brakes of his being and became a monster. He struggled to get loose and kicked and stamped and bit me and Partap Singh like a mad dog. Speaking from a mouth that was no mouth, straining from a throat that was all husk, he said words which were no words:
‘Don’t hold me, swines! Don’t hold me! I want to fly. . . . Ohe, let me be a needle! Thunderbolt! Mountain goat! Horse! Woman is the beginner! The valley is green. And there grows the root. Strike up the band for a rhumba! Darling, darling, darleeng. . . . Go or go. . . . Ohe, ohe, where are we?’
And the hard light of utter lunacy came into his eyes as people in the aerodrome crowded round us. Surrounded on every side, he began to spit imaginary spittles from his dry mouth.
I shook him violently and admonished him to behave, while I dragged him towards the waiting-room with the help of Partap Singh and two Egyptian Farouks.
Now he was pathetic and docile, with a poignant look in his eyes, as though he was asking me in a brief lucid moment to be gentle with him. As I turned to him, however, I could see that he merely looked sheepishly but could not understand any tenderness given to him. This confirmed me in my decision to lead him straight to Poona when the plane should reach Bombay. Perhaps they could give him shock treatment there. Meanwhile, I took the opportunity, which the break of the journey supplied in Cairo, to give an injection to Victor so that he might sleep. He was a little less violent when he got back into the plane and slept for eight and a half hours at a stretch through the next lap of the journey. As we neared the end of the journey, however, he began to act a strange drama: he would call out the abject cries of a man who is being murdered, supplicating the murderer to spare him, to forgive him; and then he would shout in the voice of a murderer, hard, cruel words, pronouncing the doom of his victim.
The passengers were fascinated by this histrionic act, performed with such vigour and instinctive fidelity to the two different roles that they were completely absorbed until they had to make preparations to alight from the plane.
At the end, when the time came to deplane, he would not shift, and stiffened himself like a sulking, spoilt child. And he began to cry and lent himself to all the confusion again, abusing every one of us in the most filthy Punjabi abuse, brutally callous to all appeals from me or Partap Singh, only yearning towards his own misery in bursts of self-pity, pandering to himself with the sentimentality of the lunatic.
One of the passengers, a rich young English writer, Mr Ashley Gibson by name, who was engaged in some archaeological research in India and happened to be travelling back to Bombay after a holiday in the UK, interested himself in our plight and offered me the use of his car, which his chauffeur had brought to the aerodrome, so that I could take the Maharaja to Poona straight away. What was more, when he came to know that Captain Partap Singh had been arrested by the police at the airport, he insisted on accompanying me on the journey. I was moved by the kindliness of this stranger and accepted the offer, especially because Victor was proving to be the greatest nuisance on the face of the earth and I dreaded the journey to the mental home alone with him. I had been nearly broken by the nightmare of the air flight, during which I had had to wrestle with the madman.
The sun rose on us at Kirkee and early after the dawn our car slid into Poona, where the cantonment atmosphere still prevails, reminiscent of the polo-playing, hard-drinking Blimps who once lived in the large squat bungalows with their sequestered shade, in spite of the fact that the Rashtriya Sevak Sangh, the reactionary, revivalist, fascist Hindu volunteer Blumps dominate the town. The Buick ran smoothly across the well-metalled roads on towards Yervada, interrupted by brief pull-ups when we asked the way to the asylum. And soon we had crossed the river and glided beyond Yervada jail, famous for the generations of political prisoners who have been confined there, to the lunatic asylum. We were far too early, as the Superintendent does not arrive till ten; so we asked the warder at the gate his address and went straight on to his bungalow.
Captain Bhagwat, the Superintendent, was a demure and sympathetic man of about fifty. He was unconventional enough to ask us to breakfast. And, strangely enough, Victor calmed down in his presence and, apart from the furtive glances he cast all round, he continued to behave.
Mr Gibson and I were both fascinated by the effect that the Superintendent of the asylum had on the mad Maharaja. The spasmodic bouts of hysteria in which he had indulged, even from the midst of the injection-induced slumber he had enjoyed in the car, seemed to evaporate. The young Englishman relaxed for a few moments in the cool veranda, surrounded by the beds of flowers in the garden. Victor followed him with his gaze. And I could see that there was an antagonism of distrust lurking in his eyes, the distrust of a man who knew that he was cut off from all contact with men and had become a public enemy to humanity, which somehow keeps the uneasy balance between madness and sanity. I knew that the fits of fear and
hatred were more inevitable in him than the ordinary indifferences. Therefore, I remained uneasy throughout the meal.
Captain Bhagwat cut short our ordeal by leading us quickly back to the asylum.
As we alighted from the car, however, Victor burst out into wild hysterics, stiffening and twisting like a serpent that fights back before it will enter the bag. And he shouted and yelled even as he hit out, and I felt as though he had sensed the danger he was in.
Looking past the lovely flowers on both sides of the road, beyond the gates of the asylum, I could see the barrack-like wards stretching in the huge high-walled compound. And, in a flash, the whole horror of being confined there for any length of time impressed itself upon me. How could a human being, even if he was not mad, avoid going crazy here, especially with the other lunatics raving and shouting all the time? And, although it was necessary that the fantastic egos of the madmen had to be controlled in the social fabric of this institution, I knew that Victor, with the intense egotism of the descendant of the Sun, the Rajput warrior prince, would not submit his mind as a unit in this universe of restraints and prohibitions.
‘Is it possible to give His Highness a private room outside the hospital?’ I ventured to ask Captain Bhagwat.
‘I think so,’ he said understandingly. And he pointed to a place a hundred yards away on the left-hand side of the road.
‘We will walk there,’ I suggested. And turning to Victor, I said, ‘Come then, we shall take you to a nice annexe of this hotel.’
Mr Gibson smiled at my fairy-tale manner and, taking Victor by the arm with the gentle firmness that he had exhibited throughout the drive to Poona, he led the Maharaja onward.
Victor yielded and walked along docilely enough.
The one-room wards of the small bungalow seemed insignificant enough, but there was no avail against the poverty of accommodation provided by the mental hospital, which Captain Bhagwat said was very overcrowded.
I felt a strange sense of the cruelty and ugliness of Indian life, which was driving so many people insane. I had felt this feeling before, ever since I returned from my post-graduate course in London, that our country was going through dark days, in which the poverty, the prejudices, inhibitions and traditional restraints were ever coming into conflict with the instinctive sense of undiscovered possibilities of human life. And through the fear of the new which threw people back into the shell of the past, there were, set up in consequence, violent resentments in each soul against the brutishness of the awkward feudal self, which resulted in bitterness and chagrin and frustration, until the whole world was rejected, personal escapes made or eccentric habits developed, which led to neuroses or madness. In a way the whole of India was a kind of lunatic asylum, part of the bigger lunatic asylum of the world, in which only those who struggled against the status quo and gave battle to authority seemed to find some sense of balance through the elaboration of a new sense of values. Only, how many were there who asked themselves where they were going and what was the meaning of human existence, and how one could become aware of anything real in the midst of this great, unformed, uncreated, undiscovered muddle and wretchedness of the atomic age?
With quiet efficiency, and radiating a calm that seemed to be proof against all the tempers of madmen, Captain Bhagwat negotiated Victor into a clean bare room, furnished simply with an iron bed, a table and a chair.
Victor stood for a moment surveying the small courtyard outside the room which was bathed in the shade of a tamarind tree. Then the terror in his eyes seemed to melt, and, heavy-lidded, he sat down on the bed. His head was lowered with fatigue, and the obstinacy of the other self which had jutted out for days from the agonized, shadowy, corrosive world of his split soul, seemed to melt. He submitted to the warder who began to take his shoes off and undress him. And, as Captain Bhagwat stroked his head with casual, kindly gestures, Victor began gradually to doze off into sleep. For a moment or two he opened his eyes again, lifting the whites from the dark rings as though in supplication to us all. And he looked round again as though he was asking himself where he was, what he was, and how he had got here. Then he lay back with a thud, overcome by powerful tremors of sleep.
‘I would like you also to go and rest,’ said Captain Bhagwat. ‘There are nice rooms in the Napier Hotel. Then please come back at 4.30 in the afternoon for tea and give me the case history.’
I felt a little relieved that I would not have to keep watch on Victor, for I was tired out by the vigil of so many nights. As I walked away with the reticent Mr Gibson I seemed to myself to be stretching out from the shrunken small person into whom I had abated through the assaults of the mad Maharaja, and I could smell the tang of freshness in the wholesome Poona air. At last, perhaps, I was free.
We went back to Captain Bhagwat for tea at his bungalow at 4.30. And, in the informal atmosphere he created, I gave the Superintendent of the asylum a brief account of the private life of Maharaja Ashok Kumar of the last three years, with sidelights on the few significant things I knew about his childhood. I did not philosophize or theorize, but told Captain Bhagwat the actual facts. I found that this was a good approach, because Captain Bhagwat seemed, from the few questions he asked me himself, a practical kind of man, who regarded the ordinary social life, with its relative madness, as a norm to which he wanted most of the cases in the asylum to approximate. I realized the difficulties of having to reproduce the texture of a person’s life and the care one has to take, the integrity one has to bring to judging people when one’s standards are more psychological than moral. I confessed my difficulties to both my hearers and Mr Gibson said in a soft aside:
‘You should write down the private life of our prince, you know. It may be useful for Captain Bhagwat and it may interest other people—it seems a fascinating story.’
Captain Bhagwat also politely encouraged me, though I could see that, having to deal with so many mental cases, and knowing so much more about them than most people, he only added perfunctorily, ‘Yes, yes, it may be useful to do that.’
Perhaps it was this casual aside in our conversation which became the core for passion behind this book; for, apart from the vague desire everyone has to write at least one book in his life, I felt that I could not really see anything straight until I put down the crucial experience of the last few months on paper and got things into some kind of perspective. It seemed to me that one main thing had been lacking in my life, through the awkward crisis in Victor’s life in which I was involved, and that was: poise or harmony in my own heart. And though I knew that I could not resolve my own conflicts merely by putting down someone else’s conflicts on paper, I felt that I might get it off my chest and feel easier.
‘What do you feel about His Highness?’ I ventured to ask Captain Bhagwat. ‘Do you think he will get cured?’
I knew that it was a foolish question as soon as I had asked it. But Captain Bhagwat was indulgent and did not answer in a yes or no, merely saying:
‘I shall keep him under observation for the next few days and shall tell you.’
Mr Gibson was as curious as I was, and bolder for once, the writer in him forging ahead of the Englishman.
‘Would it be possible some time to see the actual examination you undertake, Captain Bhagwat?’ he asked.
‘You could see it,’ Captain Bhagwat answered, ‘but you would only be bored and not understand much from it. First of all, these patients are rather uncontrollable. Secondly, there is not much possibility of a psychiatric examination until shock treatment has been given and the patient is able to say something coherent. And, thirdly, when a patient is able to talk he may say hundreds of things before anything significant is revealed.’
‘Do you find it difficult to relax after examining these cases?’ Mr Gibson said, surveying the lovely garden which surrounded the luxurious bungalow.
‘The flight of ideas,’ said Captain Bhagwat with a smile, ‘is very difficult to cope with. The maniacs run from one thing to the other, and do not fi
nish one train of thought because they want to disguise it. But they are at last in touch with reality or may be brought back to it. The schizophrenic cannot be brought back to the actual problem easily. There was a young man here who claimed that he was a genius. He had to say it because he had failed in his matric exam and would have committed suicide if he had not boasted that he was a genius. But I could always bring him back to reality in our talks and then he admitted that he was not a genius yet, but hoped to be one in the future.’
‘He seems to have had a sense of humour,’ said I.
‘That was what saved him, perhaps,’ said Mr Gibson slyly.
‘Yes,’ confirmed Captain Bhagwat. ‘When the sense of humour is absent, as it is in most simple people who are hard-pressed by realities, then the cure is difficult.’
‘Well, then, there is some hope for Victor,’ said I, ‘because he has a sense of farce if he has not exactly a sense of humour.’
I had turned this phrase deliberately in order to terminate the tea party. And we left Captain Bhagwat with the understanding that I should be allowed to visit Victor as often as I liked.
Mr Gibson wanted to leave the next day and expressed the wish to see Victor before his departure. I thought it was best not to visit His Highness on our way back from Captain Bhagwat, but on the morning after. Then Mr Gibson could motor back to Bombay.
So we went along about ten o’clock the next morning to the annexe where I had secured the private room for Victor.
He became very noisy as soon as we entered and began to stand on his head, while he spat and uttered filth from a frothing mouth. And the attendants had to tie him down to the bed with sheets over the shins and the abdomen. Even so he strained to sit up, and sang the ribald Punjabi song about the two Lachis, the younger one of whom had made all the trouble.
It was strange, this image about the little Lachi. From what interior world of experience had he resurrected the memory of a bad little woman? And exactly how deep was the connection between Lachi and Ganga Dasi? Did he feel that the demons of his dissociated consciousness would be overcome by the frequent recitation of a symbolic name? Or was it just an irrelevant image from an odd dream memory? The concentration of his eyes on the vacant air, even as he listened to his own snatches of song, the will to move, the occasional whining despair, the comparative remoteness, followed again by animosity and the sudden compulsion of tenderness—all the alternating moods and grimaces seemed like different incarnations, multiple personalities, the split-off facets of the ego, which had been disrupted through its own weakness. And I felt that the demons in him were perhaps seeking to free themselves from the guilts, the red-glowing excesses, the terrifying deeds committed by the serpents of his unbridled passions and emotions. The unity of his life having gone with the shock of the murder of Bool Chand, which he had ordered, he had left only the yearnings towards sanity, while he was no longer capable of self-mastery. A pathetic spectacle he presented, with his deeply shadowed, sunken eyes, his drawn, haggard face and his dry lips broken for lack of moisture, his swollen gums and dishevelled hair, unable to lie down, to sleep and rest, but reaching out to be a man, to stand erect, and failing ignominiously because of the bandages which held him a prisoner. He was also frightening, with the desperate broken spasms and urges with which he lashed out at everything within his reach, the surging of the demons like the hosts of Mara in the assault on what was once his essential ego.
Classic Mulk Raj Anand Page 85