Rajmahal

by Kamalini Sengupta

  “I told you even then!” said Inderjeet Kaur as if he hadn’t spoken. “I told you something terrible would happen. And what about Satinder’s children? They will become soft with eating rice and fish! They will not even be proper Punjabis, let alone Sikhs! The line will die away and they will speak that gole matole rasgulla language!” She rocked back and forth and slapped her forehead.

  “Arrey baba they will be Ohris, and they will be brought up as Sikhs! That has been made clear. And they will speak Punjabi, even if they know a little Bengali. Don’t I know Bengali?!” he thundered. “Are you saying I am any less a Sikh?”

  “I know how you learned Bengali, Rupinder’s father,” mumbled Inderjeet Kaur. “Oh yes, I know very well!” The reference was to the Sardar Bahadur’s ladies, who had acted as sleep-in language primers to him, so he didn’t answer.

  The Rajmahal, on the other hand, found the double pedigree of the Sheetanath-Ohri conjunction most auspicious and a cause for rejoicing.

  Surjeet Shona, the first born of that upsetting, breakaway marriage, was able, in the end, to absorb both Punjabi and Bengali currents and speak both languages, neither well. She was aware of the xenophobia of both sides and would often discuss the problem with the Rajmahal’s resident philosopher, Petrov. At the end of one of his discourses, Surjeet Shona forced the issue back to her personal self. “And in any case, what should I, as a hybrid, then do?”

  “Nothing, dear child, nothing. You are an important manifestation of what will inevitably happen after a hundred years, when every Indian is a hybrid like you and all the cultures fade out, and the not-this-not-that hybrid shines out like an arc lamp!”

  “God forbid!” shuddered Surjeet Shona. “What a deep loss that will be to us. Even I, a hybrid, feel this! Just a hundred years, you say?”

  “Even if it were after a thousand years, you would still say, ‘God forbid,’ would you not?”

  But all Petrov could do was to inscribe this discourse in his diary, which Surjeet Shona often dipped into in idle moments, or when she drifted up to talk to the old man. If she had known her Sikh great-great-grandmother she might have understood her fears about her parents’ marriage, because Surjeet Shona herself was gripped by confusion, sometimes overcome with loss at her split heritage, at others with elation at the unimaginable richness of that heritage.

  “Fifth rung” Surjeet Shona had been taken away by her parents to Delhi soon after her birth, coinciding with the change of hands of the mansion. When she moved back into the Ohri apartment, therefore, she had never met any of the Rajmahal tenants nor returned to her city of birth till now.

  Entering the Rajmahal as an adult, she felt the warm embrace of her ancestors’abode. The Rajmahal, having got back this Ohri-cum-Sheetanath as a resident, was beside itself with emotion. If it could it would have shed sentimental tears when the tall strapping beauty, whom it had last seen twenty-six years ago as a newborn baby, walked in. The ghosts murmured approvingly. “This is an auspicious day for us, after a long long time, our own young one has come back to us!” And poor helpless disembodied spirits, they would have shed sentimental tears too, if they could. The time had passed when the Bengali ghosts thought a “Punjabi contractor” acquiring the property such a disgrace. The grandeur and glamour of the “contractor” with his titles and riches had soon obscured such prejudices.

  Surjeet Shona had just lost her husband. She was reeling from the suddenness of her widowhood, the unfathomable cruelty of her Delhi landlord, who had evicted her with such short shrift, and her in-laws’ rapacity as they tried to close in on her wealth. Torn from Delhi, where she had spent most of her life till then, and transplanted to Calcutta, she hated the city before seeing it. The warm feeling spread by the house, therefore, was reluctantly, then gratefully received, and she sank on to a regal and dusty armchair to survey her surroundings. Unwittingly, the bhaiji repeated the words of the ghosts, “Oh this is an auspicious day, bi’ji, an auspicious day. I myself heard the order to the goldsmith for making the fifth rung the very day of your blessed birth. Wahey Guruji!” Surjeet Shona invited this protectiveness with her vulnerability, though she wore no widow’s weeds. The charm of the room gradually impressed itself on her. The chandeliers and lights were ablaze against the dark interior and she asked her new servants to pull up the bamboo chiks lined with blue markeen, which screened out the hot sun along the veranda. She followed them into the subaquatic length of the veranda’s blue gloom, with the flash of brass representing fish and the palm fronds brushing her face like undersea vegetation. One by one the chiks were drawn up, dispelling this vision, and revealing the long veranda frontage of pillars. Shallow stairs went down on to a lawn ending at a high wall trapped by twirls of barbed wire. These formidable fortifications against the incursions of Chowringhee were offset by sunlit creepers and grass and by a magnificent raintree standing in a corner and spreading the perfume of its pink, silk-panicled flowers. Her lifting spirits were helped along by the joyous whisperings of the ghosts leaning over an upstairs balcony and gazing down fondly at her and her mother, who had joined her out in the sun. Encouraged by the house and the sight of the young widow and her mother, they forgot all about their frustrated tearfulness and watched with detached tolerance as the two women were led into the room of the Book.

  “I never thought to see our girls doing all this Sikh thing,” said Raja Sheetanath’s mother’s ghost.

  “But then, Tha’ma,” said a daughter’s ghost. “You always told us the wife must jump into the same well with the husband . . . ”

  And Raja Sheetanath’s wife’s ghost put in quickly and cattily, “I know. Ma said it at least ten times a day. ‘A good wife will jump in blindfolded after her husband . . . ’” The ghosts’ laughter trilled and the dowager ghost had to keep mum, especially as one of the Ohri ghosts drifted in just then.

  The musicians burst into song while Surjeet Shona and her mother veiled their heads before the Holy Granth Sahib, the old Ohri book, open in all its splendor. The bhaiji proudly read from its pages through the worship that followed. Surjeet Shona’s mother came from a Brahmo Samaj branch of the Sheetanath family, and since her marriage to a Sikh, at which it had been more startled than dismayed, the Brahmo branch had included a Sikh reading at every religious function. Surjeet Shona, like her parents, was religious by inertia. She automatically welcomed the ready-made set-up in the Rajmahal apartment, enjoying the pleasant cadences of the singing and warmed by feelings of loyalty to her father and late husband.

  The Rajmahal tenants, at this time middle-aged and still active, welcomed the newcomer and Surjeet Shona, so much younger than them and of such a kind-hearted disposition, would find herself eventually the nursemaid-cum-caretaker of this motley group. It would strain her and lead her to latter day lapses, till when the group approached the geriatric stage and the deaths started, she would remark, “I have to get out of this houseful of near skeletons. And look at the Rajmahal! It’s falling apart like a dehydrated skeleton itself!” The walls would creak then, registering the house’s distress, and Surjeet Shona, herself well into middle age and familiar with the house’s moods, would stroke the veranda pillar against which she stood, and lean her cheek on it.

  That was a long time away. For the present, she was surprised by the mix of tenants. She had expected chiefly Bengalis, having little idea of the heterogeneity of this part of Calcutta, the one-time capital of colonized India, a global village before the phrase was invented. Yet here were not only British, Russian, and Anglo-Indian tenants, but the Mojumdars and Malliks who were far removed from the image she had of Bengalis. She was struck by their style and their households, and her initial surprise soon gave way to pleasure.

  But Surjeet Shona still had to cope with the loss of her lover, her husband. She had been too thrilled with her marriage to see Gurdeep as anything but a lover, with herself as the desired one, the mistress. And her mind was taken up with the tearing away and loss of that delicious relationship. So, her gloomy pa
stime was to dwell on the bitter parting, the fascination for one another transforming a minor tiff into an impetuous motorcycle ride to death.

  Guru, short for Gurdeep, kept his hair uncut as a conforming Sikh. When they made love his turban came off and it was a joke with them as their limbs were enmeshed in the coils of their equally long hair, that Guru’s was the more lustrous of the two.

  “Oh you lovely boy,” Surjeet Shona would murmur, “Such gorgeous tresses!” And she would stroke his head erotically as if he were the female aspect.

  “Hey girl, don’t talk so much!” Guru would say crudely to exemplify his masculinity and his lust. That earthiness copyrighted by his language lent itself perfectly to the situation. And Guru’s body was unmistakably male, darkened over with hair while Surjeet Shona’s was as smooth as alabaster. This ideal femininity would drive Guru crazy with desire, the contagion of his ardor spreading rapidly to Surjeet Shona. “Diabolical woman!” Guru would snarl. “Diabolical, perfect woman!” Their youth and grace took them on perilous rides on Guru’s new motorbike which aroused them as much as their embraces, so that when they roared back they would barely be able to shut the door behind them before hurling themselves at each other. Surjeet Shona knew the tiff which had sent Guru off on the machine would bring him back feverish with desire, and it would end in such wild passion there would be no time for reproach. While anticipating this, she had begun heating up and melting, putting out of her mind, and then forgetting completely the cause of their tiff. But death had replaced that fantasy. Death had always been close on those rides, yet the pair had felt immortal, protected by their lust. The logic, which was invented at such times allowed no interference with its consummation. When the knock came and the incoherent condolences, Surjeet Shona ran into her bedroom, locked herself in, and while others banged on the door and called anxiously, she ranted and screamed at her husband for the unimportant cause of their tiff and this end. Looking back on it, Surjeet Shona felt she may have temporarily lost her mind.

  The tragedy filled her chest and abdomen physically with pain, pushing tears into her eyes, which overflowed when her introspections continued uninterrupted. At other times, it made her frustrated with yearning and when Guru was conjured up through fantasizing, the pain would intensify and bathe her in the overwhelming heat of desire. The Rajmahal’s tenants formed a bizarre chiaroscuro about her self-absorption, impinging on her only when she stepped out. There, with someone’s gleaming eye usually on her, she would straighten her shoulders and carry on with a determined sniffle.

  Surjeet Shona remembered the robust life of sex, sport, and socializing she and Guru had led. For her, at least one aspect of her old life with Guru was reviving. Their favorite pastime had been horse riding and though she couldn’t ride being in the middle stages of pregnancy, she drove out early in the morning to the maidan by the race course and polo ground. With polo came the races, and Surjeet Shona was soon part of a group where, if not for her swollen abdomen, she would have been vigorously courted. The pain was temporarily anaesthetized when she met others, or thought of her coming child, or realized she would recover and marry again. But Guru was sharply present, still the core of her pain.

  She was with Maudie Jessop and Arny Aratoon, an elderly Armenian, at the polo ground when Maudie’s husband fell to his death. Anthony’s body looked so much like Guru’s after his accident that Surjeet Shona felt a bizarre retraction in time. She looked at the blurred images, the ultra-pale Maudie, the running figures, and heard the chattering distortion of fear. From that day, the eminently normal, courageous, sexy, and healthy Surjeet Shona would be haunted by the fear of death. This reminder of the implacable nature of death’s sickeningly selective power would not allow the fear to leave her. The pain of Guru’s death seemed abruptly gone, and she felt a hysterical panic that she was aging, aging too fast, prematurely, precipitated by Death. She was heading for that very Thing, waiting like a ghoul to snatch her to its bosom and crush her into a mass of broken bones and dead flesh and then to discard her, leaving in her place an enveloping miasma of fear. She was gripping a chair and retching when she heard a call, it was Arny Aratoon with another white man, stooping over her and trying to revive her. She could smell Arny’s cigars and leather, and saw the other man, in polo player’s gear, with a young shaving cream and sweat smell, a combination she would for a time, associate with her fear. In that swoon she realized the other man was Martin Strachey, who kept appearing and disappearing from his parents’ apartment on the second floor of the Rajmahal. But the concern of the two men was peripheral to that dread. This carbon-copy death of her husband had driven it into her, the young fast-aging widow, obliged to witness Maudie’s widowing within six brief months of her own. Later that day, when the same Maudie came to stay one floor above her, it was a hurtful reminder.

  Surjeet Shona knew some traditions in her country demanded that widows, often young like herself, must abdicate life, a greater sacrifice surely than an emperor abdicating his throne. That embrace and abdication called for skulking guilt, a shaved head, vegetarianism, an artificially shriveled sex drive and servitude. The widow’s punishment for having, by her negative emanations, caused her husband’s death. So, was this terrible fear Surjeet Shona’s punishment for Guru’s death?

  Surjeet Shona’s fear grew every time she thought of Martin Strachey or Arny Aratoon. But it was toward the younger man that it added a devastating thrust to the attraction she felt growing for him as she went through her pregnancy.

  Martin was large, as large as Guru had been, but he was white, with fine blonde hair, a direct contrast to Guru’s darkness and bristling black hair. Martin was also stockier in build, with thicker limbs. But his mischievous blue eyes held an inherent sexiness.

  Did Surjeet Shona know what she wanted from Martin? At the moment, the far from frail young widow was ready to enter the classical situation of a stormy love affair full of passion, without calculation. Her body craved a replacement for the precipitately and permanently withdrawn Guru. Martin had also observed Surjeet Shona going through her pregnancy and emerging unscathed with a baby at the end of it. He found the tiny appendage added touching overtones to her already touching image. They flirted with their eyes and a few teasing words whenever they met, till three months after the birth of the other Gurdeep, what else could Surjeet Shona have called her first born? the inevitable happened. Martin’s bumping into her on the drive was far from circumstantial, he had been watching for such an opportunity. In his caressingly light voice, he asked her to join him at Firpo’s for an ice. His mispronunciation of Surjeet Shona’s name sent shivers down her spine. “Sur-jeet,” she corrected as she unhesitatingly accepted. “Not Sir-jeet!”

  “Soorjeet! Soorjeet! Soorjeet Sona!” chimed Martin mockingly in time with the evening bells of St. Paul’s.

  “Shona, not SSSSona. Look, it’s easy, SSsurjeet Shshona! Go on! Try it!”

  “Sona, the golden, Soorjeet, Conqueror of the Gods, Conqueror of the Sun! How does such a very feminine girl have such a manly name, Conqueror of the Gods, the Sun?”

  “Sikhs do that,” said Surjeet Shona. “Sikh women are as brave as men! But go on, say it together . . . SSsurjeet Shshona . . . ”

  “Shshsh, SSSSs,” tried Martin valiantly. “Ess Ess. That’s what I’ll call you,” he said firmly. “SS. Much simpler . . . ” Thus it was Martin who set the trend for Surjeet Shona’s name form among Rajmahalians, the grandiloquent words shortened to a repeated letter of the alphabet.

  In the heat of the car and in the midst of their laughter, Surjeet Shona could smell her fear again, and in the unbearable edge of excitement emanating from that fear, she put a hand on Martin’s shoulder, the spontaneous outcome of their shared laughter, and felt him grip it and press it so hard to his chest she thought her fingers would snap. “This isn’t the way to Firpo’s,” she managed to say. The car rolled to a stop on an isolated road on the maidan and the answer never came, because Surjeet Shona responded without reser
ve, and mad with lust, she and Martin clung to each other, kissing and tearing at each other’s clothes. Every time Martin uttered the incoherent words of love, he sounded to Surjeet Shona so very romantically British, like her favorite film stars, James Mason, Peter O’Toole, that they sent more shivers through her. For Martin too, this was his first time with an Indian woman, and he would live consciously within the pages of the Kama Sutra, which he had read in college. Restarting the engine frenziedly he swerved the car back on to the road.

  “Where to?” choked Surjeet Shona, trembling and holding herself together.

  “Somewhere,” said Martin, continuing to caress her through her clothes with his free arm. “Not Firpo’s.”

  Eventually, with the car skidding to each embrace as if they were in an obstacle-strewn tunnel of love, they drove through an open gate. It was almost dark and stumbling out Martin pulled Surjeet Shona into an old musty smelling house through a door which opened magically to a key produced by him. Behind the closed door and in that semidarkness, just as Surjeet Shona had done with Guru countless times, she and Martin fell on each other hungrily till every shred of clothing was off and they were wildly copulating.

  Martin’s excitement mounted when he realized the shamelessness of this Indian girl. Had he not been told again and again, both that Indian women were overwhelmingly prudish and that one must at all times be circumspect with them?

  Surjeet Shona could sense Martin’s astonishment. She felt again the fear which had receded temporarily in the heat of their encounter. Inside her, it was spreading its poison and she knew her frank submission would in some way turn him away. She was sure his excitement was mainly due to new lust.

  They writhed their way into a large room and onto a dustcloth covered sofa. Martin struck a match revealing a romantically translucent curtain of cobwebs and looked fully at Surjeet Shona, caressing her, making her shiver in the heat and arousing her again. He was convinced this was the belle of the Kama Sutra come alive for him. She lay there in front of him, naked, the exotic, oriental, female principal representing the primal yoni, with him the primal lingam ever the lord of universal desire. While he went through the rites of passion his academic mind waited to find out if Surjeet Shona was not the type of the highly accomplished Kama Sutra courtesan. With this trysting place available to them, the two continued their meetings, but Martin kept doubly busy checking back on classical references, visiting the treasure trove of the Asiatic Society on the corner of Park Street, or the National Library at the old Viceregal Palace, trying to ferret out paintings, poetics, and ideals of erotic Indian womanhood. Was their supposed prudery merely a thin veneer covering a depthless erotic fervor? he excitedly ferreted. And ever a reductionist ad absurdum, he sought out the red light area. But when he drove through the narrow lanes of Shonagachi, “Shona again,” he thought, “Ah, delicious gold!” he found himself retreating from the beckoning pimps and painted prostitutes, fearful of a repugnant lack of hygiene. “Karaya Lane wouldn’t have been like this,” he thought as he cruised along. “Surely not!” He had read of the gardens and bungalows of Karaya lane and its now vanished ladies, who had come from Singapore, Hong Kong, French Indochina, “and add Russia,” Petrov could have told him. Here, in Shonagachi, Martin was certain the local ladies would pass on the very worst types of venereal disease, little realizing that, decades earlier, Petrov had contracted an infection passed on by a Russian “aristocrat” from a superior Karaya Lane establishment, and had to undertake a humiliating cure.