Rajmahal

by Kamalini Sengupta

  “We should have gone home of course, left this ungrateful country and this, this puerile city and gone back to our proper places. We can still go home. You never talk of going home any more!” Myrna’s high-pitched voice was a direct contrast to her stately body. Her voice . . . ! Jack quickly disciplined himself against blasphemous thoughts.

  “I thought you liked Calcutta . . . ”

  Myrna catered to the common view of their peers that India, and Calcutta, of all places, couldn’t possibly hold a candle to the imaginary Britain with a big ballooning “B.”

  Jack half-listened to her and mentally listed the plus points of their staying on. The Rajmahal with its congenial tenants, the luxury of servants, the friendly Indians, the blissful Royal Calcutta Golf Club and the Tolly, with grounds more reminiscent of English country estates than the paddy fields, fish ponds, and banana groves typical of Bengal. Top-notch partying with industrialists, diplomats, and the Governor of West Bengal who continued to include them on his guest list. The races, where they preened with maharajas. The air conditioning and the annual sojourn in the hills to combat the hiatus of the hot weather. And the veranda views over the ceaseless activity of the maidan, the cricketers, the yogis, and ear cleaners, the Jain monks feeding ants early in the morning. Distanced from the people, yet in touch through the maidan’s spectacular rallies. Monsoon rains cascading and sweeping over green, ghostly tree forms through windblown mists.

  But friends dropped off as the Stracheys lost their glamour. Martin visited them less and less, discouraged by a wife hostile to India and his parents. Then there was Petrov, across the landing, turning peculiar, and Proshanto Mojumdar, dozing off in the middle of his scatty chatter.

  “It’s the tropical climate.” Myrna complained. “Brains get addled.”

  The Stracheys no longer vacationed in Britain. How could they understand that aging and its refinements were universal?

  Jack was urged by many to write his memoirs. He was a prime witness to the loosening and final removal of the jewel from the British crown. But the great famine and Great Killing, most of all the Raj’s abdication, its indifference to these major disasters, with first, its priority to the war and then, the immensity of its impending colonial finis, took Jack through trances of disbelief and shame. This reaction he camouflaged, then forgot, and raking up its memory was too painful to encourage the writing of memoirs. The rest of the tale too was full of dubious merit. Jack Strachey saw, as India and Indians became more and more his, that though it was a tale worth telling if honestly told, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  It was easier to poke fun at quaint Indianisms, to decry the persistence of the poverty and illiteracy of Indians, the corruption, in which he was enthusiastically echoed by his Indian friends. He couldn’t resist the assumption of a distance and superiority without any reference to the British role and responsibility even so soon after the break.

  His work had helped him carry on, and he had been spared from direct attacks on his conscience when Indians died in the millions from starvation and in the thousands from violence for reasons beyond his wish to comprehend.

  The Stracheys were already in the Rajmahal when the great famine hit. The gross reality had been right there, in front of their eyes, under their feet, surrounding them. But it was impossible to pull out of the inertia imposed on them by their origins. Before going into Firpo’s one evening, they had come across a scattering of skeletal bodies on the pavement. Jack had swerved to avoid a comatose woman while an emaciated child tugged at the breasts flapping over her ribs. He had turned sharply to see if Myrna had noticed and saw her face set resolutely toward the brilliant lights of Firpo’s. Taking her by the elbow he had walked her up into the palatial Italian restaurant where he had cleared his mind of this scene with a stiff drink.

  During the Great Calcutta Killing, after Direct Action Day, when Hindus and Muslims were blasting each other with bombs, and hacking and sawing at each other like mad butchers in a slaughterhouse, Jack had been caught behind the office district and would never forget the racked bodies and faces of terror. But, like the mems of the jute mill compounds, he had stared steadfastly at the back of his chauffeur’s neck and urged him to drive away.

  He once caught a glimpse of Mahatma Gandhi addressing a vast crowd on the maidan. The Mahatma was sitting on a dais surrounded by the Indian leaders of the time. He was at a great distance, but Jack focused on him through his binoculars and imagined he could feel the Mahatma’s power. The little shriveled man was to receive a bullet in his heart a few years later to slump gently over into eternal rest after his hectic, sad life.

  And there were the times the distance dropped away, bringing unsettling close encounters. The time after some disturbance involving white sailors misbehaving with local women, when Jack had been hauled from his car to chants of “Shala white monkey! Monkey! Shala!” jostled and made to kneel on the pavement, till Proshanto Mojumdar, his neighbor, had rescued him. Proshanto himself had been threatened because he was light-skinned and wore a tie. But he had soon pacified the crowd when he spoke in his native Bengali, and they were spared after their ties had been yanked off, stomped, and spat on. That ties had little to do with sailors was not the point.

  He sent Myrna and Martin away to England at the time of the killings, but they had come back in two months when it was clear the killings would go on and on, off and on, as they had done for an eternity. Yet, like the famine, the mayhem all around had hardly impinged on the Stracheys’ domestic front. In the Rajmahal, nothing was felt of the terrible wounding in the body of the fetal country nearing the end of its gestation. Just as she was to be far removed from the savagery between Hindus and Muslims on the western border, Myrna scarcely witnessed anything out of the ordinary right here in Calcutta or knew much of what was happening in Noakhali in the same province she inhabited . Even when Gandhiji arrived to exhort the mad populace with his toothless, heart-wrenching whispered utterances.

  Jack watched Calcutta shifting gears repeatedly till it lost its industrial supremacy, and the flight of capital created a vacuum in the city. A city which had all but forgotten its glory days as the second city of Empire and the capital of British India, but which continued with its seductive club life. At eighty Jack still, though less and less, limped around the greens at the Royal with his clubs, or visited the stables of the Tolly to look at the horses.

  Both the Stracheys were lovers of curry and when the clubs were taken over by Indians, the insidious difference in the food provoked an indulgent nose-wrinkling by the British. But really, they couldn’t resist a good curry, and Jack Strachey’s face broke out in a heavy sweat and turned slowly red as he bit pleasurably into the spicy mouthfuls. The Stracheys had only westernized local friends, and hadn’t explored the intricacies of Bengali cuisine which no restaurant served in those days. But the hybrid developed during the British Raj, epitomized by the skills of the Chittagong Mog cooks, smoked hilsa fish, “cock-up” in tartar sauce, prawns baked inside tender coconut and a version of lobster thermidor, not to speak of caramel fruit baskets, soufflés, and gateaux, made for intensely pleasurable eating. And they were among the few privileged still with a Chittagong Mog cook.

  Jack Strachey sank sometimes into nostalgic memories, of Lys and Lyn shimmying on Maxim’s floor, of Angelo Firpo charming his way from table to table, kissing ladies’ fingers, of the band led by the romantic Francesco Casanova. The Blue Bell girls would never again dance at Prince’s and Scherezade, and the choicest hors d’oeuvres and ice creams of Firpo’s had become a legend like the defunct restaurant. There was a gradual narrowing down and loss as the international quality deteriorated, then dwindled, till the last tawdry belly dancer from Australia performed in a restaurant on Park Street. The razzle dazzle of a city set up as a trading post by Job Charnock with Armenian, Jewish, Persian, and Chinese settlers, attracting a top dressing of international buccaneers, apart from missionaries, civil servants, and boxwallahs, was to go through a ravag
ing yet revitalizing transition. Calcutta had to grow out of its rambunctious past to redeem itself. And the denizens of the erstwhile “black township,” the “natives” of those days had this responsibility.

  Myrna looked back too, but chiefly at her conquests. Her first lover after their move to Calcutta, for the brief period of two weeks, had been a newcomer at Sharp’s, a mere boy. Myrna couldn’t resist his limpid brown eyes and dark hair, though the boy was ten years her junior. He came from a robust middle class Punjabi family. “Oye, Oye,” he thought to himself. “Who is this European stunner?” The ghosts, still to learn about Myrna’s weakness, held their breaths, wondering what this mlechcha would be getting up to. Before long, Myrna was driving frequently to the young Punjabi’s small apartment and the swadeshi ghost was congratulating itself, “See? I told you!” “What?” said the tart Sikh. “Have you forgotten the scandal of your Indrani . . . ?” The swadeshi ghost subsided, but Myrna’s behavior continued to thrill and shock the ghosts. The Punjabi retired and settled in Delhi, and was in his sixties when last seen, unrecognizably coarsened, with a thick scarred face and paunch, his liquid eyes sunk into fat, his dark hair gone.

  The British were plagued by the devaluation of the rupee, and only a few of them still thought it worth their while to continue in India. Jack Strachey regularly discussed and kept up with developments, but his mind was made up. The city was now his city for the rest of his life, as much as any Bengali’s, and his body, when lifeless, would be given to its soil. Sharp’s had vanished, an unimaginable development, and he was saddened to see the decline in local industry.

  And now old age claimed the prime attention of this couple. Both were completely white haired and though Myrna used corsets in cooler weather and they tried to keep themselves trim by walking briskly on the maidan and golf course, they couldn’t hide the facts that their bodies and faces had thickened, their hair had thinned, and they found it more and more difficult to negotiate the stairs.

  The progressive mental decline of their friends had a poignant effect on Myrna, and she worried incessantly she would go the same way.

  “What if I don’t know, if I don’t realize it?” she asked Jack that day, after they had decided yet again not to return to England. “What if I get senile, how will I know?’

  Jack decided to face her questions. Myrna had that effect on him. When she persisted with something, he, who took her every utterance so much to heart, was quickly convinced. He remembered the Wentworths in their crumbling house on Lansdowne Road. The house had been under endless litigation, and the neighboring guards had had to chase away the landlord’s thugs when they had tried to create a disturbance. The litigation had reduced the Wentworths to a state of penury and they had only one erratic servant. When he stopped coming, the Wentworths didn’t eat but drank endless cups of tea. When that was beyond them, one of them would totter across the street to a tea shop in the wall and fill up an old kettle with steaming, milky tea, pick up a spicy samosa or two in tendu leaf containers. And magically, there had always been alcohol in some form, devolving from rare scotches in their heyday to Indian whiskeys, gin, vodka, beer, country liquor, and finally to poisonous concoctions which almost turned them blind and certainly sped up their end. The building had become decrepit and dangerous and they had moved out into the garden permanently, taking shelter in an abandoned outhouse. The British community, including Jack Strachey, had tried to help through the Society for the Aged run for Anglo-Indians. But Mrs. Wentworth had driven them away, screeching at them in her own version of Hindi, and brandishing her stick at them. The Wentworths had died, half-starved, filthy, their bodies dropsical and barely clothed, not a possession to call their own, except the rusted kettle and kerosene stove in the kitchen. Their servant had made off with whatever little of value lay in the house, the litigation was at a standstill, and the landlord, patiently waiting, reclaimed his property and completed the demolition of the building.

  No one knew or remembered if the Wentworths had children, and if so, why they hadn’t come forward.

  Seeing Martin’s impossible distance, Jack Strachey realized the fragility of their state. And here was Myrna, possessed, impossibly abrasive. He fought the certainty that this was the very thing she dreaded.

  It was just after the monsoons. The air was pleasantly cool with stirrings of the South breeze, which made the veranda such a blessing.

  “What if I get senile without knowing it?” said Myrna, again.

  “Why should you?”

  “Have you forgotten the Wentworths?”

  Jack winced at this evidence of their coinciding thoughts.

  “I must write to Martin,” he said, trying to steer the conversation away.

  “Martin! As if he’ll do anything! It’s because of you that Martin is what he is! How can you let him treat us like this?”

  Jack turned from the balcony and limped to the sofa, nursing a sore knee.

  “What could I do?” he protested feebly. “He did ask us to come to London, to live with him. It’s we who refused. You know that!”

  Myrna followed him obsessively to the sofa. “He knew we wouldn’t come! Can you imagine Gwen accepting us? What’s more, you knew he knew!”

  “What’s that dear? You’re confusing me!” Jack tried facetiousness as another escape.

  “Martin asked us because he knew we wouldn’t come.”

  Jack thought how her vocabulary limited itself once an idea took root. “Soon, she’ll be reduced to one word which she’ll repeat endlessly, like duckspeak.” He lost himself in a game where he settled on a word and imagined her repeating it in all its versions. “Know, knew, knowing, will know, did know, must know, quack, quack, quack . . . ” Downstairs, the lobby guard stretched his limbs before coming on duty. He heard Myrna’s fearful voice through the sounds of the traffic. “Poor Strachey saheb.” His breast filled with pity.

  “Well, at least you’re still clear enough to make such statements, dear!” Jack’s voice trembled.

  “You should have given Martin some of your money,” Myrna went on relentlessly. “You haven’t given him any yet! He has to have some money to face that Gwen! Money gives you confidence!” Their daughter-in-law was a subject Myrna always alighted on with verve. “No wonder he’s so disappointed in you. He’s just hiding his disappointment, wondering where all your money went . . . ”

  “Money, money, money.” Jack hummed, and thought, “I cannot pass on any of our assets or give power of attorney over any of my affairs to Martin. How can I take the risk? And who knows what Gwen might do?”

  “Time enough for Martin to enjoy our money once we’ve gone,” he muttered. And he added in sudden fear. “We have each other, don’t we my darling?”

  He looked at his beloved wife, at her lined face with the heavy jowls, the wrinkle nest around her eyes, the carefully blue-tinted hair held in place by a fine net. He looked over her once exquisite body, the stiff waist encased in its corset, the hard-looking, well-bound breasts which had long ago lost their natural shape, the blue-veined legs. A thought took shape in his head.

  “Qui hai,” he called out in Hobson-Jobson, and added, “we must get that bell repaired.” He went on calling, his voice getting louder and louder, aided by Myrna’s shriller calls. Their old bearer, Abdul came in.

  “Where were you Abdal?” Myrna scolded. “Have you gone deaf? Or were you loitering in the bobachee connah instead of laying the table? Go on! Answer me! Are you deaf?”

  “Enough.” Jack murmured. “That’s enough, dear. Abdal’s here.” He carried on before Myrna could interrupt. “Abdal,” to this toothless old man with the round eye glasses. “Two whiskey bilayatee-pawnees please. Doubles. And tell consommah to give us our supper half an hour later today.”

  “Yes huzoor.” Abdul cackled, a lately acquired nervous habit. “I get whiskey-soda.” He cackled again, showing red pan-stained gums.

  “You’ve been eating betel again,” scolded Jack mildly. “And tell Ayah to come.
Bring memsahib mora for feet and give massage. Wouldn’t you like that, darling?”

  “What? What was that?”

  “A massage. For your feet, and a nice whiskey!” He put his arm on Myrna’s back and stroked it. “Ayah’s coming to massage your feet with a little powder. You’ll like that, won’t you?”

  The ayah came in. A wizened little Bengali woman in a plain white sari. Her head, though covered by the sari, was clearly shaved. A widow following the orthodox Bengali tradition, shaving her head, giving up meat, and wearing white. Initially the ayah had discarded the wearing of blouses too, thus sometimes inadvertently exposing a shriveled breast, like a famine case out of ’43. Myrna had firmly opposed this. Now the ayah sat demurely bloused, next to her memsahib’s feet, which were stretched out on a cane stool. She took them in her lap one by one and massaged them with talcum powder dabbed on with an enormous puff. There were little cries from Myrna when a tender spot was touched.

  Abdul came in with the whiskeys on a silver tray, and deposited them by his masters.

  “Remember lawl shrub? And evening time hugger?” Jack said to Abdul. Lawl shrub the Anglo-Indian for lal sharab, red wine, and hugger the Hindi hukka, hubble bubble. “Remember?”

  “Of course, Huzoor. How I can forget? So nice, Huzoor, in British time. Everything gone now ’day.” No good . . . ”

  “Yes, yes. Quite. But at least you don’t have to wash ice with soap any more, eh? At least you have good fridge, and making nice clean ice. That’s better than before, eh?” Jack laughing, watched Myrna out of the corner of his eye, hoping she would be amused enough to join in. This was the sole purpose of the contrived conversation with Abdul.

  “When, when? I didn’t see him washing ice!”

  “Oh come, darling. Surely you remember that morning. There was Abdal, out on the lawn at Nagarpara, bright and early, scrubbing away at the ice block with soap . . . ”