The shock to Reema Devi was intense. It took her time to realize her beloved Petro had removed himself from her life. The day-to-day exchanges were ended, all communication was ended. She swallowed her deep hurt, the final capping to a rich life full of triumph and pain. There was her Petro, stationed cross-legged on a low seat placed on the veranda, reduced in dress to a single loincloth, hardly eating, and uttering only a few monosyllables. The delicious secret of that last night was made bitter by this abandonment and sharpened the memory of her dead child. She had attained the ultimate maturity, and she would have to turn the hurt around, allow it to spread itself in her and strengthen her. She reasoned that Petrov’s adoption of her culture, the Indian’s last stage of life, as an ascetic forest dweller, was an accolade to her country and therefore to her.
Surjeet Shona visited Reema Devi often, trying to fill in the cruel gap, amusing her with videocassettes of her plays, reading out reviews and notices which were available from orderly scrap albums, Petrov’s inherited hobby. But Reema Devi couldn’t hide her ebbing interest.
“Dear girl,” she confessed. “In the end, it’s Petro who remains my abiding concern. Not reliving my past career, or my glory. While he is still with me, yet not with me, I can’t concentrate on any of this . . . ”
She preferred to settle into the cane armchair placed just behind Petrov out of the line of his sight, taking comfort in his presence and sending out waves of love to him. This was her only way to confront his transfixation.
After a period of meditation, Petrov reached the last stages of hallucinatory malnutrition. The prolonged periods of sitting cross-legged impaired his muscles so he could no longer walk. He put behind him not only his dying wife, his dead son, his distant living children, his Eros which had turned lackluster without the presence of the Petrovs, but his whole life. Robi, his tenaciously faithful servant, famine-precipitated, natural mystic, hatha yogi, had to carry his master about in his arms.
And then one day Petrov said to Robi in his faint voice and chaste Bengali, “I feel constricted by these walls, oh Robi. Only up on the roof, under the open sky, will it be good. Will you arrange for it?”
Reduced almost to the famine-induced state suffered by Robi during that tragic and remarkable period in Bengal, he intended to enter a state of bliss and gain the Universe.
Surjeet Shona was quick to repartée, “But even Buddha sat under the shelter of the Bo tree. Can’t the veranda be your Bo tree?”
But Petrov’s will was unbendable. He refused to answer Surjeet Shona, or look at Reema Devi who was sitting just behind him.
Robi, understanding his master would only sometimes visit the roof, was concerned with the logistics. The only access to the roof was by the servants’ spiral stairway, made lacier than ever with worn away patches, impossibly narrow, precariously attached to the outer back of the mansion. The Rajmahal was in despair over it, sure that if just one of the iron clamps gave way, the spiral would snap from its moorings and sway out losing control and spilling its users from precipitous heights. “We can take him up to Mallik shaheb’s and start from there,” said Surjeet Shona. “It will make the distance very short, just one floor.”
“Are you not forgetting one thing, Shona baby . . . ?”
Surjeet Shona knew the reference was to Junior Mallik. “Come on,” she said firmly. “Let’s confront him!”
“You mean,” stuttered Junior irately, “You mean you are going to drag old Petrov up to the roof in his condition?”
Surjeet Shona watched the tomato ruddiness of Junior’s face turn to fire. “I forbid you!” he flamed. “I forbid you completely and totally! Do you bloody hear me! Do you . . . ” he stopped an unprintable mouthful.
Surjeet Shona often felt pity bordering on affection for Junior, easily the most unpopular person inhabiting the Rajmahal, but this presumptuousness was too much.
“I would like you to know, Junior,” she said, icily cool, “that Uncle Osheem is going up! And I would like to see you even so much as try to stop us!”
She signaled to Robi who was grinning uneasily with hands folded in prayer and marched out before Junior could untangle his face.
With the fretting Junior peering at them through a gap in a curtain, Anatoly Sergeivich “Osheem” Petrov, was gently carried up on to the roof by the devoted Robi from the Mallik kitchen on the vibrating spiral staircase. Reema Devi was on the landing to ceremonially witness her husband’s ascension. She had steeled herself into a stoical, if tremulous dignity, and she kissed her dear Petro on each cheek. “It’s all right, Petro,” she said, trying not to react to the pathetic sight of her husband crumpled up in Robi’s arms. “I understand. I have always loved you . . . ” The couple raised weak hands in touching gestures of farewell. “Good-bye Petro, my dearest. Good-bye . . . ” whispered Reema Devi to her silent husband. “It’s all right, my friends,” she said to the grieving Robi and Surjeet Shona that very night, before giving them a benedictory look and suspiring to the last of her life’s breath. With the tears streaming down their faces, the faithful twosome covered Reema Devi’s body up to the neck after laying her on a groundsheet. Surjeet Shona took on the ordeal of phone calls, to the relations, to the press, to the theater contacts. It was agreed that Reema Devi would be presented as she had liked it till the last, heavy pancake makeup, deep scarlet lipstick, and a brightly colored sari draped over the head to reveal a little of the still thick, dyed black hair, eyebrows darkened, while the closed eyes were kohled at the corners. Soon the photographers and lines of visitors were trudging up the stairs on their last visit to this doyenne of the Calcutta stage, whom they had lost sight of over the years. It was a mixed and colorful crowd who mourned the passing of the great actress, from wizened old stage prop handlers to screen painters and makeup men, from playwrights and directors to heroes and heroines both bygone and contemporary, from nephews and nieces to distant cousins. A representative from the Russian consulate, ordered to attend, having been told Mrs Petrov was Russian, wondered why she looked so Indian. Flowers filled the apartment, gladioli, tuberose, and marigold. Most of the visitors, not seeing Petrov, refrained delicately from asking for his whereabouts. “He must be long gone . . . ” they whispered, not sure whom to ask.
Surjeet Shona and Robi waited for the Petrov children, Boris and Meera’s arrival before taking the news up to Petrov. They found him at his post, as if he were a paper sculpture, the result of the siccative tendencies he had been showing for years. Meera wept to see her father. “The slightest breeze will blow him away,” she whispered. Robi rustled him gently, calling him with endearments. “Shaheb, dear Shaheb . . . ” And Surjeet Shona thought, “He knows.” Meera and Boris sat by their father, one on each side, with their arms around him, and saw two thick tears rolling from under his eyelids as if the last drops of fluid were being drained from his desiccated husk. He said nothing, but opening his eyes briefly, turned to each in turn and stroked their arms. There was no other sign from him, except that he didn’t swallow his broth that evening. He resumed his “normal” life the very next day. And his two children would wait uneasily for the end so they could sell their rights to the apartment and the Eros and have done with their past.
Robi had done his best to prepare the roof, with the help and support of Surjeet Shona, before Petrov’s ascent, having it cleaned, and one bathroom converted to the western style. The conditions were slummy. Even zealous Junior hadn’t inspected the roof for years, and the repairmen often pocketed parts of the money paid by the landlord, while, the roof was left to get discolored, peel, crack, and deteriorate. The Rajmahal had given up the fight and concentrated only on the waterproofing.
Petrov was fascinated to find the old riddle in another form. All his life he had been unable to reconcile the injustice of the rich to the poor, the exploitation of the colonized by the colonizer, the death by famine of thousands while the rich sauntered past to their repasts. Yet here, where the servants’ quarters were located, was a reversal. It w
as the servants who were exploiting the trust of their rich masters. Too soon, he learned of the servants’ activities, gambling, drinking, and whoring, of the perfidy of those who boasted of pilfering from their masters’ apartments, openly, to the hilarity of the rest, and the gossipy insouciance with which they disposed of the sexual depravity of Myrna Strachey, the nocturnal ravings of Proshanto Mojumdar, and, when they forgot the large ears of the ghostly figure on the divan, the Petrovs themselves. Here was a case study so close he had missed it altogether. Robi was partly responsible, such a hard working, emotionally predictable, and honest servant, he had brainwashed Petrov into believing all servants, having been saved from destitution by their masters, were petrified in willing servitude till their deaths. Yet it was a complete reversal, an inexplicable, unanswerable question . . .
Petrov found it easy to adjust to the open air. When the resourceful Robi realized his master intended to stay up here permanently, he had a small portable canvas shelter built for times of excess rain and sun, and dewy nights. A utilitarian Bo tree. Leaving Petrov free to philosophize, meditate, allow his thoughts to meander, and to enjoy the open sky when weather permitted. And the weather was clement to a fault.
“But of course! I understand now! India is an outdoor country. It is not meant to have walls, roofs. This beautiful Rajmahal is a redundancy after all! Oh, what I have missed all these years . . . ”
Petrov settled down to enjoy the open air while occupied in the self-absorbed pursuit of nirvana. Day after day he battled with the big questions in a knowingly unstructured manner, waiting for insights, the path to the answer. His mind ranged over anything that came to it. With the occasional blanks and time warps creating new patterns he delved this way and that, like the timeless interrogators recorded in the ancient scriptures. But he was unlike even the wondrous boys of the Upanishads, Nachiketas or Svetaketu, who asked the great questions about death and immortality, about life and God, or the questing wife, Gargi, warned by the great sage, Yajnavalkya, “Ask no more, oh Gargi, lest thy head fall off!”
Kali, the terrible black goddess with blood-dripping tongue, garland of skulls, and girdle of chopped-off arms, holds on one side the guns and knives of war and the decapitated head of the enemy, while on the other, her hands gesture gently to gratify and bless. The evil inherent in God is out in the open, balanced by the visible but temporarily subordinated good. Perhaps it is the vexing riddle of a supposedly ever-loving and benign God, in whom the existence of evil is unacceptable or never overtly acceptable in the Christian tradition that baffled Petrov through the filter of his ancestral memory, a Christian memory. Yet mystics and philosophers such as Ramakrishna and Vivekenanda cheerfully accept the Goddess image and its evil aspect.
Does evil exist? Does good exist? Is either absolute? God-with-an-extra-O—good? Evil-with-a-D—the Devil? Is human nature immutable? Had he himself, Petrov, ever been evil? What would he have done if his father, or Reema’s father or brother, had been one of those hoarders of grain during the famine? Why had he chosen to stay on in this country, almost immediately tying himself to it with a commitment to the theater, racing off at a tangent from his aim, always elliptical? Was his aim really to examine the contradictions of country and society, ruler and ruled? What of his dubiously illustrious countryman, a century and a half ahead of him? Herassim Stefanovich Lebadeff, 1795. He too had come to Calcutta to study philosophy, language. And he too had involved himself in the theater. He had been hounded out of Calcutta by the machinations of a rivalrous British theater group “thirsty for gain.” That was a telling phrase. “The gold glittering humors and silver glinting blood that runs in the veins of theatrical people thirsty for gain,” the wrathful Lebadeff had said. His theater would be burned down by his enemies, and the ruling power would see to it that the Russian “infiltrator” would be run out of the capital of British India. They had been more concerned with keeping ahead in the Great Game than the fate of a crazy adventurer. Why had Lebadeff started a theater in Calcutta, for Bengali drama, when no European would have any contact with Indians except for “law courts, commerce, brothels and servants”? Why had he, Anatoly Sergeivich Petrov, set down roots before he knew about the old Lebadeff, along such dramatically parallel lines a century and a half later? British attitudes hadn’t changed much after that century and a half, when he had arrived in India, still broadly restricted to the same four points of contact. But then, he, Petrov, in spite of being a white man, would find the life so rich, the strange and deep culture of the Bengalis, the indeterminate twilight tragedy of the Anglo-Indians, the Calcutta upper crust Joseph’s-coat society. And so, instead of pursuing his aim, he had diverted himself with the theater. And Reema Devi. And now. Was he really fulfilling his destiny by going through to the last two of the four stages of life as ordained by the Hindus, of the apprentice, the householder, the forest-dweller and the ascetic?
Seated on his divan and looking out at the horizon through half open eyes he dreamed and had visions. He saw the flighted kites cresting the clouds, the black crows croaking and flapping below them. He watched the sun rising and setting in its myriad forms, cool mist-covered white, in and out of golden clouds, fireball.
He dwelled on his adopted language, Bengali, its beauty and expressive-ness. On digonto—the imaginary line between sky and earth. Sheema—the limit, of which he was the opposite, Osheem—without end or limit. His Bengali friends had dubbed him “without limit,” in a semantic slide from the Russian Herassim. Did Herassim have a meaning, and did that meaning, through the bedrock of the Indo-European linguistic family, have any connection with Osheem? Would that lead to a clue in the great mystery, and would the confirmation of such a linguistic syllogism mean that he, originally Anatoly Sergeivich Petrov, was without limit? His mind moved playfully about the possibilities, soaring beyond semantics. He thought of Reema Devi. Did she age gracefully? Was he aging gracefully? Did those who kept as healthy and cheerful as possible without expectation, or those who wanted to be told how young they looked, or those who had facelifts, dyed hair, and artificially removed fat, age gracefully? Wasn’t there always a gap, a never-ideal situation?
So then, ultimately, the ideal can never be. The second that state is achieved it must end! The moment utopia is, in that split second, it is not. It follows, therefore, that the impetus for all being is conflict, contradiction. Though theories of the ideal state can be intellectually conceptualized and framed in constitutions and laws and safeguards by the good state, it can never work. There is no perfectly workable state of being. If there is, it must be the end, the imploding-exploding, big-bang end! Perfection is an illusion. There will always be famine . . .
He sits and dozes, watching each morning and evening when the horizon, that imaginary line, digonto, appears and disappears in the changing light, and the globe and the dome merge, another illusion.
Why do the poor people on the streets of India laugh? Why do the beggars of India laugh? Do they laugh because they are happy? If one laughs, does it automatically mean one is happy? Do those whose intestines refuse to accept food ever laugh again, if they survive? Is old age its own exploitation, when the fading faculties deprive the possessor of those very faculties, when that deprivation invites youth to exploit age? Does youth always exploit age? Why do children wish to discard parents after their use is over? He thinks of his children, Boris and Meera, Boris and Meera, he has to keep repeating their names like a mantra to recall their images, Boris and Meera, their eager distancing, of which he felt the currents even as they wept and held him. Didn’t Rudrangshu discard his poor father in the end? Calcutta too is being discarded by many, those who find it old, aged. The aged interfere with the aspirations and fulfillment of youth, by holding up inheritance, by their very presence. And he thinks of Reema Devi who went long after the ending of her career, but just at the time when he, her husband, no longer needed her. Did he, Anatoly Sergeivich Petrov, exploit her? Is desertion exploitation, is indifference exploitation, the ulti
mate indifference of his children, is that exploitation? Are they waiting eagerly for him to die so they can get the apartment, his treasures, his money? When Proshanto Mojumdar was cremated why did Shudhangshu look so happy? Did he gain from his brother’s death? Did that gain make him happy? What about the Stracheys? Myrna the beauty, reduced to dithering old age, and Jack Strachey, dying together while holding hands? Who is exploiting whom? Is someone having a malevolent joke at the expense of their age? And old, whatever his name was, the titled sardarji who built the mansion, with the peasant face of a Tolstoy, was he too exploited by his children in spite of his great power and wealth? In the time of famine, did children push aside their parents to snatch at the last morsels of food? But he had witnessed the opposite, hadn’t he?
The mansion and its ghosts tremble and writhe. He is dealing with things that are sacred, turning them profane . . . Petrov’s brain grows sharper, clearer.
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