Petrov chewed over Roy’s history in his quest to solve the riddle, the contradiction inherent in the “legitimacy” of British rule in India. The British prided themselves on their “rule of law,” that they didn’t allow summary executions and imprisonment like some despotic Oriental potentate, assumed to have no inkling of such practices as fair trial and due process of law. Yet, within this pattern of their own prideful claiming, if trials were manipulated, or troublemakers confined without trial, what did that mean? And if the hardships all prisoners went through in jail often damaged their health irretrievably, as it did Roy’s, what did that mean? There were the numbers executed, for instance, after the major uprising of 1857, for “treasonous” or “seditious” acts, which presupposed a “legitimate” ruler. The contradiction had already reached its full poignancy with the last Mughal emperor’s exile to Burma and the assassination of his sons, their bodies displayed at the Khooni Darwaza, the bloody gateway, which still stands in the middle of a busy Delhi thoroughfare. Roy was allowed a say in court after his arrest, and his defense was trenchant. What crime was he guilty of in trying to unseat a government, illegitimate in the first place . . . ? How could an illegitimate government presume to question an Indian’s wish for self-government and call it “illegal”?
In Calcutta, Petrov went straight to the university where he located a Sanskrit teacher. Soon, he found himself living with a Bengali family in an outlying section of Calcutta, among narrow lanes, straying animals, including the occasional hyena and jackal, swampland, unsanitary open spaces and rural enclaves. This was the “black” or “native” town of the time, many leagues apart from Anglo-India, and to this day, though the rural atmosphere has been displaced, few non-Bengalis, let alone foreigners, are seen here.
The reactions of the Calcuttans were complicated by the “Rahimbaeff ” patronymic, which Petrov re-adopted in a burst of foolish orientalism.
“Is he a Russian or a Muslim?” they asked, assuming the two things to be mutually exclusive.
“How can he be a Russian, ‘Rahim’ is a Muslim name!”
“What about the rest of his name?”
“It sounds Russian.”
“And he has a white skin too.”
But the initial discomfort felt by the Bengalis at the presence of this foreigner, was taken over by warmth because Petrov lacked condescension. It confused them, in any case, to think of a white person as Muslim. The only other whites they knew weren’t Muslim, and the only Muslims they knew weren’t white.
“Have you ever seen him in a mosque?”
“Or prostrating five times a day?”
“He doesn’t act like a white skin either.”
“Yet he is white!”
“Most mysterious,” they added.
Petrov’s knowledge of Bengali, his donning of the Punjabi-dhuti and his hunger for learning more about his adopted city and its culture won them over. In spite of his frequent incomprehension and peppery outbursts, his new friends went all out to locate tutors for him and help him settle down. When some of his left leaning friends learned that Petrov was not only from the home of the new politics but had known Indian revolutionaries, they felt more drawn to him. In their eagerness for his company they thoughtlessly violated his privacy, and Petrov had to control his swelling impulses of inhospitality.
“Can’t they knock before coming in?” he fumed.
He locked his bedroom door, and soon gave up when the persistent banging became intolerable. But there were compensations, including dream sequences of singing by the women of the family. And the food. He relished the distinct flavor of each dish: the bitter starter, the savory middle courses of vegetables, fish and mutton, the sour-sweet chutney-digestive and the sweets to follow. “Bitter, salt, sour, sweet,” he said. “The Bengalis have a genius for structuring their meals!” At first the bitter shuktoni was a nightmare, an artifice concocted to make anything else delectable by contrast. “What a subtle test of the palate,” he sneered, grimacing over another dish, of neem leaves and eggplant. “Are they trying to punish me?!” But by degrees he became an enthusiast then an aficionado, looking forward to the bitterness, followed by fish head and pungent mustard flavored hilsa fish, and managing to manipulate hair thin fish bones like a true Bengali.
Very soon, putting his paranoia behind him, he admitted he was “Petrov” and not at all “Rahimbaeff,” giving his Bengali friends the reason for the canard. The demystified white Russian was adopted with renewed ardor. Apart from the philosophy classes at the university, he had Sanskrit and Bengali private tutors. He was also taken frequently to the Bengali theater, which helped speed up his learning of the language. It was now his friends decided to nickname him “Herassim,” which was first reduced to “Asseem,” and then to its Bengali version, “Osheem.”
Herassim Stefanovich Lebadeff was the adventurous Russian who had launched the first westernized Bengali theater in 1795. Almost a century and a half later, Petrov was given Lebadeff ’s name because of the remarkably similar circumstances of their lives so far. Both were Russian, both were passionate Indophiles who had chosen to come to Calcutta and both had an interest in Bengali theater. The slide of Petrov ’s name to “Osheem” was a sign of his final acceptance.
Confusing the melodrama of the stage with real life, and still bemused by Calcutta, Petrov impulsively invested a small fortune in buying a theater, a defunct auditorium, the Eros. He spent another fortune refurbishing and renovating the Eros, but it had the advantage of being strategically located in the theater district in North Calcutta and was to turn into one of the leading drama centers of the city. And at last he came into direct contact with Bengali women who had begun to appear on the stage in place of adolescent boys.
The family he had lodged with till then, kept its women private, in contrast to the exposure he was forced into of his own life. But he was sensitive to the new culture. That the women led lives somehow different from the veiled world of Turkestani women, though he wasn’t sure how Hindus would react if he asked to meet girls from educated families. In the end, his friends, realizing his predicament, encouraged him to leave their conservative home and shift to the Eurasian part of town. Impressed by their reading, and the delicate manner in which they had pushed him out, Petrov prepared for further adjustments.
He moved into a boarding house on Royd Street run by Eurasians, where he felt an immediate relief at being in westernized surroundings. But the relief didn’t last when his privacy was violated just the same. This time he was swamped by the attentions of a group proud of showing off this desirable European at incessant parties and dances. This together with his acquisition of the theater meant giving up his studies at the university. But the Bengali lessons continued and his tutor came to his lodgings. When his Eurasian friends discovered his interest in things “native” including the theater and the language, there was an outburst.
“Can you imagine! Sergie’s bought a native theater!”
“Sergie!”
“Don’t you know . . . ?”
“What’s the matter?”
“They’re junglies, men! How can you put up plays in that half-baked lingo?”
“And he’s learning it too... ”
They insisted on taking him to the English theater.
“Can’t you see . . . ?”
“See what?”
“There’s no comparison!”
Though Petrov couldn’t be deflected so easily, he enjoyed this exposure to British Calcutta and the fashionable and better-lit areas of Chowringhee and Park Street. He gained access to the scholarly Jesuits associated with Calcutta from the nineteenth century through St. Xavier’s College. Life became even richer when he discovered a Russian couple who were to be involved in the launching of the 300, a night club which served Russian food, followed by more international fare, and which would bring him into contact with the westernized Indian upper crust. His interests, talents, and pursuits were following a familiar dispersal. Petrov was after
all his father’s son and Calcutta was layered like a rich cake.
While lodging in the boarding house on Royd Street he was distracted by the wild evenings spent with the landlord’s gang, drinking and dancing, and mired in amours. Bars, nightclubs, flophouses and the opium dens of Chinatown were enough to fog his brain, already fogbound by the women who attacked him ferociously for his pure white blood and money. Richie, his landlord, introduced him to Karaya Lane, the red-light district for Europeans, where the bungalows and gardens housed girls from Russia among others.
He watched cynically as his chaste Bengali tutor’s eyes strayed toward the bared legs and bold looks of the women who lounged on the veranda of his boarding house, wearing shorts, smoking, and carelessly flinging out glances and giggles. Whenever they sighted the socks held up with garters and exposing the reedy calf muscles of the Bengali tutor in his despised native dress, these giggles would reach a crescendo, and Petrov had to suppress his rage.
He was betrothed several times, tricked between his dreams and real life. It was during his third betrothal that he made a conscious effort to pull his life together.
“Richie,” he said to his landlord. “A friend of mine wants your advice.”
“What’s up, Sergie?”
“He has affianced himself for the third time without any desire for marriage . . . ”
“So?”
“The first and second times were mistakes and he wiggles out. The third time is a mistake too . . . ”
“So he wiggles out again . . . ”
“How?”
“How do I know? Who’s this fool?”
Petrov groaned. “I,” he said. “I am that fool. I have got engaged to Greta. After the first two! What can I do now?”
Richie was aghast. “Greta! She’s a beautiful girl, man, beautiful! I wanted to marry her myself. Bastard!”
“You know what it’s like, Richie. All the time drinking and parties, parties, parties. I cannot at all remember asking her . . . ”
“But you made a good choice Sergie. Imagine how she’ ll do in Europe . . . !”
“Europe! I plan to stay on here, in Calcutta. And how will she get away then, from this place full of Indians, Bengalis, what is it you call them? “Niggers,” “blackies”? My best friends are Bengalis! I speak Bengali with them! I plan to run a Bengali theater.”
“Bengali, Bengali, Bengali. And I suppose you plan to marry a Bengali nigger bitch, eh?”
Petrov sprang up, directing his arresting eyes at Richie, emanating a Tartar-Nijinsky personality, bulging uncompromising tights.
“If you say one more such word Richie, I will drag you by the hair to my friends to apologize! Come! Let me dare you!”
“Okay, okay, I’ ll talk to Greta. I hope she comes around. But y’all should really be less careless . . . ” Richie edged out of the room.
Petrov flopped on to a chair, in his loose bush shirt and trousers, no resemblance to the imaginary tights. The melancholy pity of Richie shuffling away with stooped shoulders brought home to him the plight of the small Eurasian community.
“It will be wisest for them to displace themselves from this country of their origin. That will be easier than re-adjusting. For neither their countrymen nor the ruling foreigners will accept them with open arms. Not until the mutual disdain is forgotten by a new generation.”
Petrov was close to reality. Later, the children of those Eurasians, who would come to be known as “Anglo-Indians,” and who would opt to stay on in India would put away the bitterness boomeranging from their earlier attitudes. They would take pride that they could enrich the country with their community’s skills in education and other fields, and accept that calling the new India their own was only logical.
In the end, he soothed the frustrated Greta with a generous gift. “That absolves me of all guilt! I thank her silently! And my exposure to the Eurasians at close quarters will help me in my study of colonialism!” With this brave epitaph Petrov ended his association with Royd Street and moved into independent lodgings close to his Bengali friends.
During early days, Petrov occasionally visited the Rajmahal to meet Maninder Singh Ohri, a grandson of the owner, the Sardar Bahadur. From the time he first saw the house, then occupied in its entire magnificence of four floors by the extended Ohri family, he had nurtured a secret envy toward its inhabitants. His friend offered him an apartment after the conversion, and when he was taken, as a concession to a prospective tenant, into the lobby for the first time, he felt as if he were in a cathedral, its inner spaces reaching celestial heights. The Rajmahal sensed his awe and a frisson went through it, generating a rainbow below the skylights.
Petrov was reminded of Russian settings, a combination of the stairway of his ancestral home and the melancholy village square flooded with pigeons. A white streak on his lapel didn’t stop him from gazing upward when a flourish of heaven borne giggles came floating down filling him with longing. He strained to locate the source, but his ears couldn’t isolate it beyond the screen of pigeon coos. “Being hit by bird shit is a sign of good luck,” Maninder assured him. They had a brief and hushed encounter with the great Sardar Bahadur in bed, hanging over himself in the ceiling mirror.
“I saw Tolstoy like this,” whispered Petrov to Maninder.
“What, in his death bed?” asked his cheerful Sikh friend. “You knew Tolstoy?”
“No, I’ve never seen Tolstoy, dead or alive,” said Petrov. “It was in a dream, and Tolstoy was exactly like this, exactly! His white beard spread out, lying on a big bed with a mirror above, and surrounded by admirers.”
After this, Petrov became so covetous of the surroundings and the mysterious European ambience that he couldn’t wait to move in. To continue his association with Calcutta yet live in such a place, the thought made his spirit soar like the staircase. In the growing atmosphere of mutual admiration, the house too longed for Petrov to inhabit it. When the tenancy papers were signed, there was rejoicing in the house, and the pigeons wheeled and plunged like planes in an aeronautical display.
Petrov had much earlier made the final capitulation to Calcutta by marrying a Bengali woman, Reema Devi. Reema Devi’s family was Brahmo, but the Brahmos, like Surjeet Shona’s Bengali side, were outside the normal conservative paradigms, and there was no great objection to this foreigner in the family.
The house and ghosts felt intensely proud of having Reema Devi at the Rajmahal.
“Imagine, it’s Reema Devi! Aren’t we lucky?”
“I watched her in her first season on the stage. She looked like a young boy! But her acting . . . !” This was from a very culturally minded ghost.
“No one to match her . . . ”
“Yes, but why go and marry a mlechcha!” said the loud swadeshi ghost again.
“Oh you and your mlechchas!” said the disgusted cultured ghost. “Can’t you forget all that rubbish for once?”
Now, in a sense, Petrov had the “enemy within.” Reema Devi was fiercely protective of her autonomy and was as gregarious as most Bengalis. But in spite of the social surge, their bedroom stayed privileged and private. This sacred space was their enclosed world of carnality and any idea of subjugating strong-minded Reema was wildly exciting to Petrov. Another titillation was her powerful stage personality which seemed to vary her identity as often as her roles.
Reema Devi was a budding star when Petrov met her. “A budding star with budding breasts,” Petrov always reminisced. He would never forget his first view of her on the stage. She was sixteen, so slight of frame she had to pad out her figure to play the heroine, an impersonation of a female by a female. An imitation of an adolescent male actor, common in those days when few women appeared on the stage. By the time they were married, the padding was forgotten and Reema Devi was a young woman in full bloom. She was now the center of Petrov’s life and a central figure in Calcutta’s theater world.
Petrov’s decision to produce Neel Dorpon, the Blue Mirror, was the result of his continuing obse
ssion with famine, an examination of all the possible nuances of that terrible recurring phenomenon. Indigo was planted on precious rice paddy land at the behest of the planters, adding to the choiceless peasant’s chronic hunger. Petrov imagined the peasants being forced to eat indigo in place of rice and turning blue before they died. No grotesquerie could beat the pictures imprinted in his gut.
The great Bengal famine occurred in 1943, soon after his move to the Rajmahal. Here he was, filled with the joy of his personal life, yet it was as if the world had entered the intrinsic darkness lying in the pit of humanity’s stomach. He saw writhing before him the spilled and stinking intestines from that stomach’s pit, defiling the pavements of his adopted city. Nineteen forty-three plunged him into a well of cynicism, the deepest cynicism of which man is capable. It coincided with the other catastrophic cynicism across the oceans, Hitler’s death and torture camps, which were shrouded in secrecy before hitting the world. Yet, and this to Petrov was the climactic point of that cynicism, the famine was out in the open, in full view in one of the largest cities of the world, but it would never be addressed by those who mattered at the critical time. It would never provoke the outrage and telling castigation that followed the end of the war in Germany. It would slink in slyly unheralded, and then like a whiplash, scourge, stun, and destroy its mass victims. And there would be no rebuke, no redress.
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