Rajmahal

by Kamalini Sengupta

  “Dear Shaheb. Are you ready to come down to your own home? It is a void without beloved memshaheb. It behooves you to fill it with your presence to make up for that unimaginable loss.” Robi feels deeply hurt at Petrov’s indifference to his great wife’s passing.

  The mansion wills Petrov to follow Robi’s injunction, so that it will be allowed to nurture and soothe him till his end, instead of this unnatural exposure to the elements in its least propitious region. How it longs for him to come down so that it can manifest again through a rainbow in memory of the first time.

  “Dear Shaheb, have your broth,” says Robi. “It is late and your body is weak.”

  “Yes all right. Give me my broth Robi, oh faithful Robi.”

  Hope flares, even excitement, when Petrov orders Robi to massage his body, the initial sensitivity gradually dissolving till greater vigor can be applied. Repeatedly Robi pleads with him to reoccupy his apartment.

  “Keep quiet, Robi!” Petrov scolds. “How do you expect me to give up the free air for an enclosed space again?”

  The Rajmahal groans each time it hears these words, and Robi sighs, while a tear trickles down his wide cheek. “Hey Ma Kali, what can we do, what can we do after all?” In the meantime, he reinstructs Petrov in the simpler aspects of yoga. The earlier years of practice pay and one day Petrov is upright, able to take a few shaky steps and then walk, his knees huge between his fleshless shanks and shins. While the physical regeneration goes on, Petrov’s brain is active. His mind relaxed from all those vexing questions and in that state of rest arrives at a culmination, the final full recognition of the nonexistence of the secret. “Why all these questions,” he asks himself, “which of us can have the arrogance to claim we know? How many of us are Buddhas and Christs or know if even they, the Buddhas and Christs, knew?” And his Christian grounding pulls at him. Cautiously, he takes his mind to his childhood. He thinks of Christ, after his whole life spent in labyrinthine pleonasms. His early conditioning comes up to the surface. He now knows there is no answer, no secret. Only a simple rule. Of which his beloved Reema reminded him at the very end. Love. Love for the starving, love for him. The greatness of her acting was built on love, he knows that. He tries to remember the Sermon on the Mount, not abstract theories about good and evil and the existence of consciousness or the nature of the self. But a human state-of-being for those who will it or are blessed with it. Love. Ramakrishna, Jesus Christ . . . He is combining his indelible conditioning—both pre- and post-Russia, the one inherited, the other acquired. He blows an imaginary balloon up into a vast, shimmering round with the breath of love and lets go the string. The balloon floats away and becomes invisible against the bright glare of the sky.

  The renewed Petrov commands Robi to call up Surjeet Shona from her ground floor apartment. Robi leaps up to obey, almost having an accident as he circles swiftly to the bottom of the stairs.

  “Come, come, Shona baby. Shaheb is calling you.”

  “What is it, Robi? Is he all right?”

  “Yes, yes. Just come . . . ”

  They go up the broad inner stairway, sensing the house’s unease, and access the winding staircase from the top floor Mallik kitchen. On the roof they find the ascetic teetering at the balustrade, the ancient mariner on the bridge of his ship, his age like the albatross gripping him at the neck. Surjeet Shona joins him quietly, swallowing her emotions at seeing him exposed in his meager loincloth.

  “Uncle Osheem, I have come. Tell me. What is it?”

  Petrov continues gazing out, but holds Surjeet Shona’s elbow with one hand.

  “Do you see it?” he points to the horizon. “Look out there. Do you see the digonto, that nonexistent and illusory line between there and here? We are all from that division, dear child, all of us, half here, half there. And there is the no answer.” He puts up his hand to stop any interlocution. “Now,” he says. “Look down there, and tell me what you see.”

  Surjeet Shona glances down. “Oh no!” she says. “Oh no!” She draws back jerkily, trying to pull Petrov with her, and Petrov directs his colorless eyes at her.

  “Well?” he asks in his dry tone. “Well?”

  Surjeet Shona turns reluctantly to look down again at the ghoul in person, a vulture. It is perched on a ledge outside the far end of the veranda, but Surjeet Shona feels she can reach out and touch the bald head on the scrawny neck comically emerging out of its large jacket of feathers. The bird hops clumsily away, one untidily hanging wing drooping out of alignment with its monstrous bird body so unlike other birds, whose wings fit sleekly along their curves, and who are so much smaller. She relaxes as the vulture flies away heavily, its powerful wings beating, to perch on the raintree. “You’re all for me,” it seems to say. “In the end.”

  Robi is frantically trying to drag his master back to his seat. But Petrov chuckles, “What is it, oh Robi?” He soothes Surjeet Shona, stroking her trembling and hot arm.

  “Why not some enjoyment now? Didn’t Ramakrishna say that of his beloved Kali? Didn’t he say in answer to all those serious questions, that Kali visits us with such pain simply because it is great fun? Well then. What do you think I was doing, coming up here like this?”

  Before either of his friends can respond Petrov starts heaving for breath.

  Surjeet Shona swallows. She can’t see the ghosts whooping and shooing at the vultures, their efforts flagging, so tired are they with all the whooping and shooing at all the vultures which have been hovering in the vicinity for so long, more and more reluctant to leave as their bodies get heavier and heavier with dreams of carrion.

  “What are you afraid of?” says Petrov gently, settling down cross-legged on his divan. “Come on, dear. We all go into that unknown space. And even,” he smiles so very kindly that a halo seems to surround his beatifically pale head, like a modern-day Choitonyo. “Even if our old friend Yama, with his noose and his net and his hook, the Lord of Death, finally gathers me to him followed by that beautiful and necessary bird, you will continue for the present . . . I have nothing to teach you. You have had the solution always. And with that solution fear has no place.”

  Surjeet Shona prepares herself for something momentous. It has to be momentous, with the sky gently glowing pale aqua among gray and white clouds, with the vultures draping the raintree in increasing numbers as they swish noisily and gracefully about their legitimate work.

  After Petrov is helped to lie down, he says, “I must sleep.”

  Surjeet Shona speaks out strongly to Robi. “Your shaheb has to go. Allow him! It is you who are holding him back!” She is angry. “Let him go, Robi! He’s old! Let go!”

  “Tomorrow, Shona baby. Tomorrow itself, in the morning, I will see to the lowering of Osheem shaheb to his own proper abode, where he will end his life’s earned span in dignity.”

  Robi feels very strongly that exposure to the open sky lays one bare to its birds and insects and naturally thrown up marauders. They stay at bay only if one is protected by four walls and a roof. The vulnerability of his early village years, where the air burned and shimmered and spat at them, destroying their homes, their crops and taking away their livelihood could only be combated by well-being, wealth, and the armor of a good house. He has made a connection between the extreme age of his shaheb and the outsized beak of the vulture and he is deadly afraid.

  The Rajmahal too is disturbed by its emptying premises, apartments imbued with the scent of stale incense and decayed flowers. It imagines the pillars of its verandas cracking up and sprouting rooted weeds, providing no protection against the vultures, and it longs for the invulnerability of its youth here on the roof, where there are not even the fragile chiks of the lower verandas.

  Robi rolls the portable shelter over his Osheem shaheb and lies down next to him with a protective arm about him.

  “No vulture,” he says to his wife who watches shivering with superstitious fear from her room, as do other roof-dwellers, “No vulture will be allowed to get near shaheb as long a
s he lives!”

  Just as it is dawning, a piercing chorus of cries and moans from the roof, followed by a drumming sound above his head, wake Junior up.

  “What the hell!” he curses. “Tea, tea!” he calls as if any servant will be on duty at this hour.

  Petrov has disappeared, vanished.

  “That’s it. He just vanished. Hey bhogoban, oh God, Hori-bole, Hori-bole, Hori-bole . . . ”

  That drumming and chorus were caused by the servants calling and running back and forth, a frightened flock not knowing which way to turn, only some brave enough to peek over the balcony. Certain of discovering the white, slight body of Petrov shaheb lying smashed on the ground below. But Petrov is nowhere to be seen. Not even later and through the day. With Junior and the police swarming about, searching every room and cranny, to the insides of the four water tanks hoisted on platforms at each corner of the roof, and in each and every apartment of the Rajmahal, the garages, the garden, the godowns.

  “I told you!” mutters a furious Junior to Robi, “I told you something ghastly would happen.”

  “Take it easy, Junior,” says Surjeet Shona. “Don’t excite yourself. Remember your blood pressure.”

  But Junior isn’t listening. Seeing Robi swaying back and forth on his haunches with his head in his hands he dances with fury, “Bloody fucking idiot!” he shouts. And Robi sways even more frantically and beats at his forehead with his palms.

  “Yes,” says Surjeet Shona clearly, looking out at the raintree, mysteriously divested of its vultures. “What is the need for them any more? He’s gone, the ephemerally light Uncle Osheem, a mere snack for them, returned to dust, to ether, to the elements . . . Does it matter how?”

  The Rajmahal is getting lonely, one of its floors echoing emptily and its ghost population vanished. It isn’t just the ghosts of the tenants who died after the lemming-rush begun by Myrna and Jack Strachey, Rover the dog, Mohini and Proshanto Mojumdar, and Reema Devi and Petrov. They are not the only ghost-deserters, as the mansion glooms. The other ghosts have left too, in a startling whoosh with Anatoly Sergeivich “Osheem” Petrov.

  It had taken the brief time of abandonment by Robi, when he went on that automatic necessity of a call of nature, for Petrov’s heart to stop beating. For the waiting vultures to swoop, unseen, silent in the dawn dimness, on his carcass. And as they carried on with their pecking and prizing open of his body with their fearsome beaks, squabbling and snatching at it, the body lifted up and down in its extreme feathery brittle lightness, tossed up and down between vulture rushes.

  Jarred awake by the agitated Rajmahal, the sleeping ghosts were made to instantly manifest above the roof to start a spirited fight for Petrov’s body.

  “Why did Osheem become so harsh in the end?” the ghosts asked.

  “These Westerners are like that,” the swadeshi ghost shouted. “Where do they have our tenderness? Did Reema Devi have a chance?”

  “As if our men are kind to their wives . . . ”

  “Don’t they take all the rights and powers to themselves . . . ?”

  “Yes, yes, that’s enough!” one of the few sober ghosts said. “Reema Devi had to leave, just as she had to die on the fateful day of Osheem’s ascension!”

  In the sudden vacuum caused by the ghosts’ challenge, a wind swirled up and Petrov’s carcass lifted higher and higher with the vultures’ beaks and flapping wings. Astonished, the birds transferred to an air squabble over the remains, wafting up and up in swirls of warm air with the body till they reached impossible heights away above city lights. The ghosts swarmed with the vultures, and chasing and swooping, this macabre host raced above the Hooghly toward its confluence with the unending ocean. And there, where the many-headed Ganga lay dynamically sprawled, its mouths fanged with mangrove and crocodile, the vultures succumbed to their gibbering-prodding pursuers, and finally lost hold of their prize. So Petrov had the grandest end of all, with air and river and sea for his interment, the ghosts cushioning his fall, letting him gently down into the Goddess’s multiple maw.

  Having come so far and seen such wondrous expanses and the scope of the silver-gold glittering universe, who could hold those ghosts back? The fear of the unknown which had confined them to the Rajmahal and their pasts, dissolved, and swift and eager at last they disappeared in currents of changing air.

  5

  The Book of Hope

  WHEN POLO-WIDOW MAUDIE JESSOP MOVED IN WITH HER BROTHER David Norman, the Rajmahal was neither pleased nor dismayed. Uneasy, it was uneasy about the widow who spent so much of her time prettifying herself yet with a clothes pin on her tongue. The house was sorry for her, recognizing the incipient weakness in her will, knowing in its bricks she would take to drink and be quickly seduced, both possible during one of the Norman’s rambunctious parties. Too much drama around any inhabitant disturbed the house.

  Maudie’s husband Anthony Jessop was a member of the Indian Police. While on district postings, they visited the Rajmahal often. Maudie would then replenish her wardrobe at “Right Away and Paid For,” Whiteaway and Laidlaw’s alias, or Hall and Anderson, or the New Market, and bask in the warmth of her brother’s household and ready parties. Her arrival was an excuse for these parties. Maudie didn’t unpin her tongue to blossom into the belle of the ball but she relished dancing and picking out tunes on the piano. The traditional Anglo-Indian fare lasted as long as their generation. Meats, curries, wines, cakes and confectioneries of which Maudie was the specialist in the rosy cocade, a rose-shaped candy finished in a dip of boiling syrup. They belonged to the top end of Calcutta society, accepted by British as well as native circles. Most Anglo-Indians would be shocked to hear themselves branded by the pejorative “native,” but that, as recognized by an outstanding member of their community who led them well into Independent India, was what they were. Even if the leader didn’t use the despised word itself, he recognized his community as Indian, first and last, whatever their color. Some of the community understood this, keener on adjusting to their difficult place in India than flaunting a superiority based on unreliable British patronage. Or claiming as their own an unknown, unseen country. The Jessops recognized this, and with Anthony’s successes in the Indian Police, stayed on without question. The first body blow to Maudie’s sense of a perfect life was her only child Eric’s death, when he was barely an adult. Independence had come and receded and Anthony’s climb in the police continued. But Eric hankered for the glamour of foreign lands. He, like many fellow students, and as expounded by Petrov in his diary passage on post-independent India, was sure Valhalla could exist nowhere but in the West. India held little immediate attraction. While some of his wealthy friends, mostly fully Indian, could afford a university education in England the rest stayed back, giving vent to their frustration through verbal tirades. But they stabilized in a few years. Those who became leftists and held lasting convictions, and that wasn’t just a pose but a solemn matter in Calcutta, entered into the violent politics of the state. The Jessops could afford to send Eric abroad too, but he couldn’t pass the entrance exams. Stuck in Calcutta, he tingled with sensitivity at what he imagined was his friends’ scorn toward Anglo-Indians. He decided to become a deck hand and head ostentatiously East, not West. This was his shallow defiance when all he wanted was to end down in Australia, the Eastern West. After exploring the non-Anglo-Saxon countries on the way, he planned to integrate with help from his cousins in Perth whose address he surreptitiously copied from his parents’ address book. He succeeded in the first part of his plan. But this time class became his enemy, and when the other ship hands discovered this sahib in their midst, they took to taunting him without mercy. He acquired a hard veneer and built up a reputation as a debauch in the exotic ports at which his ship docked, including Colombo, Rangoon, Chittagong, Arracan, and Penang. Maudie and Anthony’s worried attempts to keep contact through the ship’s wireless, with letters waiting at the ports, and through the BISN Co. on whose ship, the Clan McBride, he was sailing, only fuele
d his mates’ taunts. Finally, at one of the ports, Eric, a handsome, strong boy with light coloring and honey blonde hair, got into a brawl with a sailor over a flattered prostitute, both were drunk, and Eric ended up with a knife in his heart. The knife reached all the way to Calcutta deep into Maudie and Anthony’s hearts, and the ultimate knife-thrust for Maudie was Anthony’s death.

  Anthony was fascinated by cars. The morning of his death, he gave Maudie a driving lesson on “Lover’s Lane,” the wide, quiet road skirting the race course and polo ground. They were using the Pram, an Austin 7 which Anthony cherished for its vintage value. Both knew Maudie would never be able to drive and the Pram was just a safe toy. Its playroom status had struck Anthony when, as a child, he sometimes saw another Calcutta Pram driving by with chauffeur and owner squeezed into the constricted front seat, two uniformed orderlies squeezed on the back seat, and a brace of mounted police toweringly clip-clopping alongside. This playroom-toy-soldier image went with the exaggerated trappings of the British Empire as it lost its sense of reality. It was also in direct contrast to the other Pram he had seen in the Bengali area of town. A pliable bamboo arched over the passengers, dangling a lantern in front in lieu of the broken headlights. Anthony’s stable of cars, which included an Armstrong-Siddeley, a Humber and a Regal, names forgotten in the Calcutta of his last days, had been emptied and the Pram was all that remained, apart from a Hindustan 14, the ancestor of the Ambassador. That day, the Pram nearly brought about Anthony’s doom.

  “Fate was after him. Look at the narrow shave he had just seconds before the polo game!” people said.

  Maudie found herself grappling with a jammed steering wheel, and in her panic made the clichéd mistake of putting her foot down hard on the accelerator instead of the brake. Anthony’s side of the Pram crashed into a tree and a sharp broken branch just missed spearing his forehead.