Rajmahal

by Kamalini Sengupta

  “At least he won’t be knighted,” said Jack.

  “He can’t be,” said Myrna, her small triumph being that Kuldip was the loser somewhere for not being British.

  What, one might wonder, made Jack Strachey stay on? Was the ignominy of losing to the outstanding Kuldip Chopra, of not being knighted, of seeing his wife’s ex-lovers flitting around him till the end of his life, of living among subject people cocky with freedom, not enough to drive him away, join at least one of the later streams of returning Britons? And if the attractions of staying on, ineffable or otherwise, had been so overwhelming, why was it that most other Britons thought and decided otherwise? Demographers, sociologists, psychoanalysts, historians, and political scientists may have come to the conclusion that this was the inevitable pattern when colonialism was ending, when, usually, the approaching end of an alien rule braked the ruling expatriates’ ideas of putting down roots, turned their eyes homeward.

  It is difficult to say, except that going back depressed Jack unbearably. Not even the attraction of Martin’s nearness could turn that depression around. Underlying this choice was the memory of the cold, gray Skiddaw world, the formal distance between people in that small space. Here, there were all the other advantages, the automatic assumptions of the ones who had ruled, and the infinite and tender arrangements for leisure. And his common sense told him that in spite of the grumblings of other expats, they were still well-off, and life would still remain “good.” As for the Indians being cocky, Jack knew his Indians. Kuldip Chopra would always behave decently with him, and a subtle superiority still clung to the expats as long as they had money. He convinced himself Calcutta society inherently knew an injustice had been done to him. How could he face the idea of Kuldip Chopra being the better choice?

  When the Stracheys’ son, Martin, came back to Calcutta with his bride, the first floor tenant, Proshanto Mojumdar, snatched at the excuse to indulge in his favorite pastime, hosting an entertainment. “We shall go to the theater!” he enthused. “And then to the 300!”

  Martin’s bride, Gwendolyn, was a scholar of European music, a subject far removed from his own. He was an academic too, specialized in nineteenth century British colonial history with Calcutta as his focus. Martin, who was more than normally promiscuous, had been Surjeet Shona’s lover for a while. But this affair had been too zippy and it had all but zipped out of his mind. Occasional visions of their intimacy sometimes came into his memory, but divested of feeling. Gwendolyn had knocked Surjeet Shona and everyone else off his mind, and he was too lost in the blinding meeting of bodies to worry about minds. She was just the intellectual yet passionate bluestocking he had always wanted to marry. However, a shortcoming Martin hadn’t anticipated was her antagonism to India. The signs were visible on the drive in from the airport. Gwendolyn was a petite blonde, her long hair plaited and wound around her head, a delicate renaissance painting, but churlish. As they headed for the city, her lips clamped together tighter and tighter, till they became a thin sealed line. Martin did his best to distract her with hurried chatter. But he couldn’t block her view of a naked boy selling newspapers on the roadside. He groaned when Gwen unstuck her lips and hysterically stopped the car. Before he could think, he found himself helping her buy a cheap set of clothes at a nearby stall. She raced back flushed with her deed and presented the clothes to the astonished boy. A crowd immediately collected. Gwen, reeling with shock when she saw a pair of young men blithely holding hands, plunged back into the car. The young men peered through the car windows and planted their fingerprints on the panes, scattering when the chauffeur shooed them away. When one of them scratched his private parts, Gwen shivered, already sick with mental malaria. Martin’s lips were tightly clamped now, but to dam up the laughter. He said nothing when the shirt was hauled off the little boy to the amusement of the victim. Just as he didn’t point out that being naked, even because of poverty, was more pleasant in the heat than being burdened with sticky clothes. Or that the young hand-holding men weren’t homosexuals. Or that in India, when you itched you scratched. What was the use, he groaned, of trying to remind her of their jointly mocking at white missionaries for clothing, civilizing, and Christianizing “naked savages.” “They are savages!” hissed Gwendolyn, startling him.

  Proshanto Mojumdar asked Martin to make a choice of entertainment, a regrettable move, he felt, because Martin lighted on Neel Dorpon, a historic and controversial play, unflattering to the British. He suggested safer alternatives. “Your wife is new to this country,” he pleaded, “she may find it embarrassing.”

  “Why? It’s history . . . ”

  “But nevertheless, do you not think we should try something lighter, The Pirates of Penzance at the New Empire, for instance?”

  “The Pirates of Penz . . . !” Martin was outraged. “The Pirates of Penzance! Come on, Pro. This is India!”

  “No, but seriously . . . ”

  “But I am being serious. Don’t you understand? Neel Dorpon’s from my area of specialization, nineteenth century colonial Bengal. I never dreamed I’d get a chance to see it. And Reema Devi’s acting at the Petrovs’ own theater! It’s too exciting.” He spoke of their neighboring tenant, the Russian, Anatoly Sergeivich Petrov, who was married to the celebrated actress of the Bengali stage, Reema Devi.

  The ghosts were excited. “I wish I could see it too,” enthused a grandmother ghost from the Sheetanath family. “I remember what an uproar it caused when it was launched! In the early days of our wonderful theater . . . ”

  “These Bengalis are always showing off about literature and drama and art!” said the tart Sikh. “As if they are the only ones who are cultured! What do they know of a good robust Heer, or a manly bhangra. Hunh!”

  Finally, Proshanto Mojumdar gave in. “Very well,” he said glumly. “The evening is in honor of your bride, and it is, after all, your choice.”

  Martin was being partly dishonest. Neel Dorpon per se wasn’t as exciting to him as testing his bride’s reactions, and even more exciting, indulging in the erotic prospect of teasing her. His mischievous intellect at work. “It must provoke her, one way or the other,” he thought.

  Neel Dorpon, in its English version, was brilliantly done and the audience watched Reema Devi’s rendition with hushed awe. Reema Devi Petrov was in her fifties, yet as the young victim of rape her bulky body was transformed in effortless illusion. Her small, mysterious smile, hardly visible to the audience, seemed enlarged by a nonexistent projector onto a nonexistent screen, and each member of the mesmerized audience felt its quality. When the dastardly English planter, played with a combination of bombast and lasciviousness, threatened to rape her, the labored breathing of the audience turned the hall steamy.

  “To speak to me is like throwing pearls before swine!” spewed the planter, convulsed with laughter and brutally flailing the victim of his lust with a whip. “We indigo planters are the companions of death! We can beat ten women with a whip!”

  While the swooning Reema Devi—the victim—lay face down awaiting the lashing leather thongs of the whip, Martin felt his arm gripped by Petrov, at the very moment the would-be rapist shouted, dropped his whip and fell. The cause was a black object which had gone arcing through the air to strike him on the head with an audible clunk. The audience roared, and Martin, jerked out of his trance, said to Petrov, “My god, they’ll lynch him!” But the lights came on, the curtain dropped and the roar diminished as suddenly to a loud murmur. Petrov had vanished and Martin turned to find Gwen glowering at him.

  “How can you sit and watch this, this . . . !” She couldn’t finish her hissing sentence and turned toward poor Proshanto Mojumdar. Brilliantly and smoothly, Martin hustled her out of her seat. Every time she turned to him to speak, he silenced her by urging her forward. As the Rajmahal party inched its way out, it caught the announcement that the play was indefinitely postponed. A shoe had been thrown at him, and Planter Rogue had “suffered an injury to his person which had caused concussion and in
capacitation.”

  Proshanto Mojumdar squirmed at this post-Independence rudeness to his British guests, so abhorrent to his exaggerated notions of politeness. Though it was only a few weeks earlier that he had helped break the “whites only” taboo of a swimming club, his sensitivity was far from contradictory. At the swimming club it had been the righting of an anachronism, when racism (surely the very antithesis of politeness!) was supposedly justified in the context of ruler and ruled. When “natives” weren’t allowed into the exclusive pool of the whites. (“Did they think our color would come off and stain their pool? What about sharing the water with people who only use bathroom paper . . . ! Chchi!” the minister who led the party had said.) Once the ruler had left, the racism lay exposed and had to be excised. It was the racism, which had been “impolite.” But this in no way justified his, Proshanto Mojumdar’s reverse impoliteness to members of the offending race who were here as his guests, when most of that had been put away in the past.

  It was later that Petrov, who had gone backstage, would tell them of the ironic parallels between this incident and the happenings of the first Neel Dorpon nearly a century ago. That during the rape scene, a shoe had been thrown at the offender, to opposite effect, because the flattered actor, unhurt, had taken a bow! The incident is a legend in Calcutta theater circles.

  “Maybe today’s shoe-thrower reenacted it on purpose!” said Petrov.

  “Poor Pro!” exclaimed Martin in the privacy of the Strachey limousine. “What a disaster!”

  Gwen’s rage simmered down to a squeaky indignation and she suggested boycotting Proshanto Mojumdar’s party.

  “Oh come!” protested Martin. “You’ ll break old Pro’s heart. Besides you must go to the 300 at least once before it folds up.”

  “Of course she must!” enthused Myrna, who couldn’t bear to miss a party. “The 300’s such fun!”

  “Is it?” said Jack.

  The play had left him dejected, adding to the weight of a sadness he didn’t want to analyze. Every dismal event sharpened his sense of failure, shrinking his ego, leaving him only with the natural aversion to letting go.

  Martin hadn’t given up either. He planned to persist in Gwen’s indoctrination. Tonight he would tell her of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, when the odious Dyer had ordered his men to fire mercilessly on an unarmed and cornered Indian crowd, killing hundreds. He would tell her of the same Dyer who had ordered that Indians would be whipped unless they crawled on their stomachs when they were on a particular lane, because an English woman had been attacked on it. Martin would then take her to dine at the Bengal Club, just up the road from the Rajmahal. There, he would point out the entrance gates which the British women of Calcutta had picketed in 1919, demanding a collection for the disgraced Dyer. And then he would point out the valuable paintings in the Club, its history as the color bar, and finally soothe her with the magnificent Anglo-Bengali smoked hilsa fish. He wondered if her intellect would allow her to accept what he told her and if she would get her balance back, or if she would get squeakily indignant again. His erotic fancies were aroused by thoughts of provoking his petite intellectual.

  At the 300, Myrna almost fell in love with Proshanto Mojumdar as he swept her on to the dance floor and surpassed himself, pressing his right hand firmly into the small of her back and holding her hand high with his left, fox trotting and quick stepping with authority, sideways, backward, swaying and gliding, waggling his backside for the rumba or twitching his shoulders for the cha-cha-cha. It was a good thing they would dance less and less frequently. Who could imagine them replacing these structured dances with the grinding of the grunge generations? This was one of the last times the Stracheys would visit the 300. The Russian couple who had contributed to its special quality had already left, and the 300 was to follow Martin’s prophecy and fold up. That night, in spite of Proshanto and Myrnas’ wonderful exhibition on the dance floor, the Rajmahal party stayed somber, and the characteristic gaiety of the club went missing.

  Martin could see his dream of staying on in Calcutta receding. After all his persistent and desperate attempts, he recognized the futility of persuading Gwen. “Lucky Petrov,” he thought, filled with a genuine and deep envy, and he often sought the Russian’s company.

  “You don’t miss Russia, Europe, the language, the people . . . ?”

  “I have been on visits,” said Petrov. “What is there to miss?”

  “Do you still think in Russian?”

  “No, no,” Petrov shook his head. “I realized some time ago that I now think in English, and sometimes Bengali. Very rarely in Russian!”

  “What about the food, the culture . . . ?”

  “I adore Bengali food. And I can have Russian food in a restaurant here. I can see European theater, admittedly only occasionally. Listen to European music . . . in fact, I am planning to go to a film on New Year’s Eve. I do not usually go to films, but this one is a must. It is a film on the life of Glinka, the Russian opera composer? Well? Interested?”

  “Glinka!” said Martin. “Well. I shall certainly mention it to Gwen. Her field’s music, and she’s sure to have heard of, er, Glinka. As long as it’s nothing to do with India!”

  “You will be going to an Indian picture hall,” warned Petrov. “More correctly a Calcutta picture hall! On New Year’s Eve!”

  “Oh yes!” said Gwen when Martin broached the subject to her. “Glinka’s a particular favorite of mine!”

  “Mother, Father,” called Martin unbelievingly. “Have you ever heard of Glinka?”

  “I’ve heard him mentioned,” said Myrna vaguely. “But we’ll go on to Prince’s after the film, dear.”

  At 11:00 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, the Petrovs and Stracheys walked into the Globe to watch Glinka.

  The hall was abuzz with an unnaturally excited chattering and a raffish element had occupied the cheap seats in the stalls closest to the screen. The Rajmahal party sat upstairs in the plush Royal Circle. In spite of the cool Calcutta winter, it was stuffy in the hall without air conditioning, and the raffish element had divested itself of its collective shirt, which hung limply on the proscenium. “What interest can they possibly have in Glinka?” wondered Martin. He saw his father nudging his mother and heard him whisper, “Can you imagine them when the singing starts? What will we do with our Gwen? Shall we leave?” And he was delighted when Myrna whispered back, “No no. Let’s watch the fun.”

  Goaded by this remark Martin applied his diversionary tactics to Gwen again, murmuring to her and nibbling her ear. “It’s our last night here, after all. She owes it to me,” he thought.

  Gwen woke up when the first firecracker burst against the screen with a greenish spark, Bang! followed by a cheer from below. There was a hush when the film began. But it was clear this would be no ordinary viewing. Half an hour into the film, myriads of little firecrackers were exploding and sparking against the screen while the actors went through an inaudible mime. The mob downstairs wildly imitated the arias, and when there was any suggestion of a kiss they erupted with smooching noises and pranced joyfully in the aisles. Plucking their shirts off and swinging them about their heads, they continued to fling endless salvos of firecrackers with inspired frenzy at opera stars, amorous couples, and the miraculously unharmed screen. Petrov shot out a swear word and Martin turned to him with his face split in a grin. In the end, the Rajmahal group was shaking with collective laughter. They watched the pale magnified figures on the screen and the thin dark Bengalis writhing in the pit below. “I’ll send you some Glinka records from London,” shouted Gwen to Petrov. “You can listen to him at home!” “Yes, let’s go to Prince’s,” said Myrna quickly. “It’s New Year’s Eve! Come on!” They left their second aborted theatrical entertainment in a month, and crossed the street over a carpet of expended firecrackers. Just outside the Grand Hotel and Prince’s, above the sounds of merriment, they heard the ships’ sirens hooting as the year turned. Martin swung the car on to the edge of the maidan and they all
got out inhaling the smoky chilled air. Then they stepped on to the grass, joined hands, and moved slowly around in a circle singing “Auld Lang Syne.”

  “Penny for your thoughts, Jack Strachey,” from the very old and India-haggard Myrna, joining her husband at the veranda balcony.

  “None,” promptly. “I have none at the moment.”

  The only secrets Jack had from Myrna were her secrets, her affairs, the knowledge of which he had always kept hidden from her. He guessed at most of them, wondered how far she went, and stopped worrying. He knew she must come around, some day. Confronting her, giving her ultimatums, all that was never an option. Myrna knew he knew. She also knew, deep down, that he could never betray her. Why did she deserve such devotion, she often paused to wonder? Straying was so zealously surveyed and expected in their society.

  Away from it all at this age, her nagging drowned such considerations.

  “Why?” she said, pulling at Jack’s arm. “Why should you have no thoughts?”

  “Petrov, it’s because of Petrov. He’s teaching me meditation. You have to stop thinking, that’s what he says.”

  “It isn’t that, of course it isn’t!” Myrna Strachey, nowhere near as gentle-minded as her husband, still fretted at the loss of the Sharp’s chairmanship and its follow-up of honors. “Sir John and Lady Strachey!” Not to be, not to be ...