Rajmahal

by Kamalini Sengupta

  Shudhangshu collected himself enough in the morning to rid the apartment of Rover’s body with help from the bemused servants. He himself would never recover from memories of that gin-drunk night and he gave up alcohol in contrition again, for twenty-four hours.

  Circumstances now pushed Proshanto’s elevator campaign into its final stages. One day, the pulleys of the dumbwaiter gave way and deposited it with such a jarring impact on the lobby floor that he passed out for a second. There were many witnesses, most significantly, Junior, who was on the stairs.

  “That does it!” he said. “I’ve had enough! This contraption is going to be dismantled today!”

  Proshanto, still struggling on the floor of the constricting dumb waiter, couldn’t get his words together before Junior had stalked away. Junior saw to it that the dumb waiter was dismantled and all traces of it removed. Thus ended the last of Proshanto’s aspirations . . .

  More and more, as he lay in his bedroom, the Hong Kong salon’s look-alike, he lived on board in his dreams, a way to bring back his prime and his wife in one go. Between decks he coasted vertically in the fancy elevators displayed in his brochures, emerging at each deck from a different model. He thought of death, though apart from a blood pressure problem and those few aches and pains, he felt quite well. The overwhelming will to live and enjoy his day made nonsense of these and other setbacks.

  He didn’t realize his failing memory had a part in this. Most senile forgetfulness, apart from obliterating the recent past, highlights stressful rather than pleasant memories of the distant past, reaching back to childhood. In Proshanto’s case it was the opposite, only the happy past came up. Hence his laughing dreams. Mohini’s ghost looked forward to the nights, because then she too could lull herself to sleep and imagine she was sharing Proshanto’s bed.

  The beveled edges and glinting peacock-tail eyes of the room’s finest glass caught the light, filling the air at sunset with golden sparklers and sprinkling the room at dawn with diamonds. To Proshanto the dawn was best. This was when he would wake up, in an interval in every dream, still with the promise of the rest of the dream to follow. The sun would rise over the back of the Rajmahal, and the southwesterly peacock windows would be pearly and opalescent, a playful Aurora-Ushas throwing streamers across to strike those cold jewels. Proshanto would savor the dream already passed and fall happily into it again. What were the memories embellishing that half world? What dolphins and mermaids disported themselves in the sparkling deep? What provoked him to this nightly rejuvenation of erotic laughter? Maybe it was something to do with the children of his lacking seed, sensual nights planting that seed, magically fertilized, and then awaiting the sequel in a state of timeless arousal. In and out of the spirit world, in and out of the looking glass of mortality drifted the couple in pleasant and expectant camaraderie. Never before in reality had they such harmony and peace as during those nights, one not in and not out of this world, the other in a dream.

  But how long could such bliss last? Mohini’s ghost was frantic on the night of Shudhangshu’s madness. Unlike Proshanto, she was fond of the dog and sorry his ghost had appeared only briefly in great distress before vanishing, an indication of the deterioration setting in at the Rajmahal. “Poor Proshanto’s had enough,” she said. “First, Shudo’s installation in our apartment. Then his unheard of violence. Rudro and Rover’s disappearance. And the Stracheys, our good friends in the end, into their graves together. Why did they have to take such a drastic step? Foolish ones! They didn’t even show up in my world! Poor dear Proshanto! All he can do is call out and call out for the nonexistent. Except for me. He can never forget I’m gone from his world. For good! Oh come soon dear, come soon to me! It’s time.”

  She grimly watched Proshanto, still dwelling on young girls, still devouring them with his eyes when he went swimming, a daily routine he kept up with tenacity. Still swirling the aquamarine water with his arms so streams of translucent bubbles could connect him to the springing breasts and tight bottoms of those unattainable beauties. She could catch his thoughts. “Where are the girls? The fresh girls with the utterly soft fingers and damp palms I once held so delicately while I taught them how to dance?” He would have to wait for the young ones, children, for that kind of beauty. Did they come to the Rajmahal any more . . . ? Where had the Mojumdars the joy of their own? “It’s time,” thought Mohini. “There’s only one worthwhile service left for him in this world, and that’s to leave dear Rudro well off. It’s high time . . . ”

  Time it was that decided to cut short Mohini’s vigil, and she was soon to receive the ghost of her Proshanto in her nebulous embrace. “Cardiac arrest,” the doctor’s death certificate clearly stated, not doing that portentous event justice with this brusque brief. Proshanto was fortunate his death took place even while he was in the middle of one of those laughing, happy dreams.

  No sooner did Mohini’s ghost scream with joy at her beloved Proshanto’s still-dazed ghost joining her, than there was a whirling swirling agitation in the Rajmahal spirit world, and the Mojumdar couple vanished forever.

  “Are they all going to leave like this without even bidding me farewell?” creaked the Rajmahal, its walls darkened permanently with loss. The remaining residents were slow to notice the growing gloom, but their spirits were affected, and they went about with grim faces for a while. The ghosts knew the end was near. “The Mojumdars have got away in time,” they griped. “Some are luckier than others.”

  It was Rudrangshu who returned to perform the rituals of the eldest son at the burning ground. Scattering scented powders on his uncle’s spare en-flowered body, setting his soul free by smashing the earthen pot to the ground, putting to flame the nest of logs within which the body lay. As the flames crackled high Shudhangshu, who stood by his side, raised his shining eyes to his son, and sang to himself, “At last! At last, my boy will get his chance!”

  Other Rajmahalians who attended the cremation couldn’t help but notice his widely stretched lips. For a moment they wondered if this denoted sorrow. Smiling and weeping are so similar.

  Surjeet Shona looked away from the embarrassing spectacle. She avoided Shudhangshu and went up to Rudro. “What are your plans, Rudro? Are you giving up your job?”

  Before Rudrangshu could answer, Shudhangshu had come up to her, blooming, his mustache bristling with health. He laughed boisterously. “The beautiful Shona, here in person! We are honored!” Shudhangshu was making no attempt to hide his delight. “Rudro must fulfill his destiny, Shona. Dada has made him his heir and there’s no hindrance! Isn’t God great?”

  “Oh, Rudro’s the heir,” she said. “And, er, what about you . . . ?”

  “It’s all the same,” said Shudhangshu with uncontained joy. “He’s my son after all. He’s the one who needs it most, not me!”

  Surjeet Shona looked at the rich young inheritor, the son of this joyous father, and found something distasteful in his expression.

  Later, when she visited the Mojumdar apartment she would find Rudrangshu reclining on a chair, absentmindedly pushing his fingers through his beautiful hair.

  “Where’s your father?”

  “Oh I’ve sent him away!”

  “Sent him away . . . ? Your own father . . . ?

  “So? He’s an old rogue! Mini-ma and Uncle were more like my own parents.”

  “But, where’s he gone?”

  “I don’t know. Where he always went, I suppose? He doesn’t need all this.” Rudrangshu gestured vaguely around him. “I’m getting married, you know. And this is mine, all mine.” He hugged himself. “All mine.”

  This was the ruthless side of Rudrangshu again. The first sign of that ruthlessness had manifested when he had, without warning, walked out of his doting uncle and father’s lives and gone to sea. Since then, the parameters of his ruthlessness had widened. With practice perhaps. And he had done something recognizably ruthless by disowning his devoted father.

  4

  The Book of Famine


  IN ONE OF THE SECOND FLOOR APARTMENTS LIVED THE RUSSIAN Anatoly Sergeivich Petrov. Firmly fixated on India and India studies, he fled the Bolsheviks, and was forced to take a tortuous and decade-long route to Calcutta via Tashkent and Europe. He reached the city when British Calcutta was descending from its imperial apogee with the shift of the capital to Delhi. But it was still commercially crucial, elegant, well-lit by gaslight, and it could still reflect distant London to some and St Petersburg to others. Its flourishing port and riches still impressed.

  Petrov belonged to a family connected to the Romanoffs, though not especially royalist in its leanings. His father, for one, was a dove toward his serfs, releasing them from bondage in imitation of his mentor, Tolstoy. When he heard Tolstoy was helping the poor during the famine of 1891, he made plans to join him. But they never materialized, and his contact with the great man was restricted to a few letters. The obstacle was his obsession with his vast and orderly library, in direct contrast to the confusion in other aspects of his life. So he kept papers and clippings on the famine neatly bound in numbered volumes, while his ideals struggled for translation into action.

  From the time he could understand, Anatoly Sergeivich Petrov would hear his father’s discourses on the subjects of Tolstoy, freedom and famine, and from his early teens, he had become familiar with all the newspaper clippings that his father so sedulously kept in chronological order in his library, including records of Tolstoy’s correspondence with Indian nationalists agonized by British rule. And by contrast, items on the ancient civilization and learning of that country.

  His father’s aspirations re-appeared in Petrov at a remove. Where his father succeeded only in refined bibliolatry, Petrov longed to study and perhaps one day resolve a great metaphysical riddle—the existence side by side of civilization and human degradation. Complicating this desire was a feeling of frustration at the impotence or lack of will of the “civilized” state in fighting this degradation. He could identify some of this with the antiroyalist and Marxist fervor of his countrymen. But being elliptically inclined, he found himself veering toward the Indian situation and sympathizing with the Indian struggle against colonial rule. A fascination for philosophy gave the final push. India, he felt, would offer him the most dramatic theater in which to witness the great riddle in action. And its philosophy, arcing like a rainbow over the collective mind of its people, would provide the answer.

  Petrov joined the Institute of Oriental Studies in St Petersburg to familiarize himself with Sanskrit as well as Bengali, the languages he would need before going to India, specifically Calcutta. Thus his father’s attitude on life and society and its effect on Petrov were to lead him on a philosophical mad quest, impossible of achievement.

  Petrov knew it was only a matter of time before his fellow students denounced him with his imperial connections. He had two older brothers who were gearing up to flee to Germany, and Petrov, always dreaming of India, was left almost penniless when they disappeared westward.

  Ali Sher, a co-student from Tashkent, kept Petrov revving with stories of a Bengali, M. N. Roy, who had reached Tashkent with a train full of arms from Lenin. He heard of the sympathy for Indian nationalists, who sometimes used Tashkent as a nucleus. Of the prodigious scholars working from the last century turning out encyclopedic histories of Central Asia with detailed references to India, and of Indian language courses developed and taught in Tashkent.

  “Maybe I can study there for a start,” thought the young Petrov. “It might be safer than St Petersburg!”

  Ali Sher told him of the scholarship on the subject of British rule in India. Of Saeed Ali Khoja, who had traveled in India at the end of the nineteenth century, and written of the death of nineteen million people due to famine during just one decade. As compared to five million war-related deaths in the whole world in the hundred years enclosing that decade! He described the rulers’ policies to retain and drain the fabled colony while the ruled lived degraded lives, bringing into focus once again the riddle that stirred Petrov’s imagination. How could a power, great at the time, tolerate this burden of dehumanizing contrast, including famine, without a tremor, and yet claim civilizational superiority? How could its elite enjoy the flaky delicacy of a prima ballerina and denounce the heavenly hetaerae of Indian dance? He couldn’t have forecast that he would witness at first hand the flesh and blood horrors of the great Bengal famine two and a half decades later in Calcutta, getting deeply involved in its ramifications and those of the tortured and wonderful metropolis.

  He would play with the figures given to him by his friend and write it down on any scrap of paper that came to hand. Nineteen million dead people equals ten years, he would write. That is, 1.9 million per year under the heading Famine in India. And next to it Five million dead people equals 100 years. That is, 5,000 per year under the heading War in the World. Another time he would write, 5,000 in war against 1.9 million due to famine of one-sixth of the world’s population (India). Or 1 war death in the whole world against 380 deaths due to famine in India alone. Or 1 war death against the iniquity of 380 famine deaths multiplied by 6 equals 2,280 . . . And again, 1 is to 380, 1 is to 380 X 6 .... Which is justified, which not? Why should that seeker put the two figures together? Is there greater consideration in and about war, consideration that only 1 person should be shot dead, the parts of his body strewn on a battlefield, when 380 (x 6 times the iniquity) are carelessly left to starve, strewn about the countryside in India? 5,205 dead people in ONE DAY in India of famine! Thirteen or 14 dead people in one day from war . . . Is the war machine less cruel than the manipulation or indifference which kills by starvation?

  He would rack his brain for a philosophical equation, the perfect formula, hardly aware that a famine was taking place in his own country right then, torturing, maiming, and locking in its ratchet, the customary countless faceless numbers. In the end all he could do was divert himself by practicing the lotus posture. “That’s the first step,” the eighteen year old would murmur. “I must meditate. And before I can meditate I must be able to sit, for hours, in the correct manner. The answer will surely come . . . ” He learned to bend his unaccustomed legs, make them supple with yoga, and sat for hours in the lotus pose. But the answer didn’t come. It never would.

  Petrov went to Tashkent, assuming the cover name of Rahimbaeff. There he sought out the legendary M. N. Roy with the vague idea of enlisting his aid. Roy was busy rehabilitating a band of Indian khilafatis on their way to Turkey with even vaguer ideas of rescuing the caliph. Instead, they had got caught in the wilds of Central Asia, in need of a rescuer themselves. And Roy duly played this part. Failing to appreciate their desultory though romantic aim, Roy planned to transform them into rescuers of their own country, completing the reverse cycle of rescues. The plan was to smuggle them in from the mountains bordering India to mobilize and arm the local populace. Roy had organized a building, India House, and Petrov was allowed to stay there with the khilafatis. But a sinister development finally winkled him out. Comrade Peter, vice-president of the Red Terror, part of the Cheka or Secret Police, arrived in Tashkent. The dreaded Cheka claimed the inheritance of Ivan the Terrible, now dubbed Ivan the Great, his example a part justification for its purges. Petrov was pushed into another room by Roy on a sudden visit by “Bloody Peter” at India House, and caught a glimpse of the tall thin man with a face as ugly as his deeds. Bloody Peter had found out about Petrov, but Roy, with his great influence, was just able to save him. Ever the pragmatist, the wise man advised him to leave for Europe. Poor Petrov left Tashkent despondent at getting further and further from his goal. The adventure deepened his fascination for India. Roy’s plan may have been almost as impractical as the khilafatis’, but he loved big dreamers of such conviction. “If there are others of that kind in Calcutta, its attractions could be legion,” he thought.

  And he didn’t allow his dream to vaporize. He fetched up in Europe, and stayed with his brothers. He tried academia in the “Oriental” departments
of European universities. But nothing could divert him from his attempts to access the original. Finally, when his brothers handed him his full share of the family wealth, the restless Petrov joyfully booked passage for Calcutta. The diversion had taken him almost a decade, during which he had had to battle the inertia of luxurious living in Europe, and pinch himself to believe his Tashkent adventure. So, in 1929, at the same age as the century, he finally reached Calcutta.

  The British were suspicious of this exotic immigrant and watched him closely. In those days when spying was rampant all over the globe and particularly in Central Asia where British spies jostled with Russians, Turks, Afghans and Sindhis, this strange figure claiming to be from the Russian nobility but unfathomably hobnobbing with the natives, was automatically suspect. They were wary not only because of the age-old Anglo-Russian face-off in the region, the Great Game, but because of the complications of the Bolshevik Revolution, the activities of Indians looking for arms, and Lenin’s sympathy for them. They became still more wary when Petrov admitted knowing the wanted revolutionary M. N. Roy though his frankness was puzzling. He was prepared and trotted out his family credentials, hinting untruthfully that this underscored automatic royalist leanings and an antagonism toward anticolonial activities. He had to flee the Bolsheviks, being from a noble family, he told them truthfully, and so the false name in his passport. And then, as a Christian and a European with an imperial legacy, how could he possibly be interested either in the caliphate in distant Turkey or in the freedom of India? He told them his aims were purely academic, to study Indian language and philosophy. His British interlocutors couldn’t get any more out of him but his friendship with local Bengalis continued to puzzle them. They confiscated his passport and kept him under surveillance. When M. N. Roy arrived in India in 1931, Petrov was taken in again for questioning. But no further connection could be found between the two, nor any active participation by Petrov in the communist or freedom movements in India. M. N. Roy, though he had broken from the Comintern, was still wanted by the British, and was arrested in Bombay and sentenced to a long imprisonment.