Rajmahal
Page 23
“Are we any better?” the professor interrupted. “Our servants dress poorly and sleep in any corner of the house, on a piece of cloth, cardboard, anything, and they work from dawn to midnight, or as long as we require them. And the housewife, a truly thrifty Indian housewife, will give them the minimum food to keep body and soul together. So. Perhaps there is not much difference?”
The diplomacy of the professor’s interjection hadn’t escaped the others.
A servant, a mere boy in shabby shorts and vest came in to clear away the glasses. “Oh, oh,” thought Surjeet Shona.
Martin, as diplomatic as the professor, quickly turned away from the boy. Surjeet Shona noticed and reprimanded herself, “There I go! Still sensitive to Martin!”
And then, Surjeet Shona completely lost her bearings. She could never remember exactly what happened next, except that her eyes were snared by the penetrating gaze of a complete stranger, who had just walked in. “Neel Banerjea,” she heard over the roaring in her ears. And then, “Come, come, sit down. Neel is an anthropologist,” the words filtered through to her, “single-minded about exposing the exploitation and erosion of adivasi culture! We are lucky to catch a glimpse of him. Otherwise, he is always wandering away to the interior. Which tribe is it now Neel? Oraons or Bheels?”
“You are poking fun at me as always, Shanto-da.” Neel spoke with the long vowels of the refined Bengali in a quiet husky voice.
“Nice voice,” thought Surjeet Shona. She had caught his incredulous look when he had first sighted her before her reactions overwhelmed her. Neel Banerjea was fiercely good-looking, with a rangy figure, dark, his receding hair emphasizing his arresting eyes and small eagle nose. Surjeet Shona recognized the same mischief that reigned in Martin’s eyes, and warning bells rang. She felt an overwhelming desire to run away.
“I just remembered I have to . . . ”
“Am I driving you away?” the voice was interrupting her.
“Where are you going, dear? We’ve just come . . . Sit down!” ordered Petrov.
Surjeet Shona obeyed, almost afraid to raise her eyes. All her efforts were directed to breathing normally, and she didn’t realize her hands were tightly gripped together. That quiet husky voice speaking articulately and at length completely absorbed her, though the words made no headway to her brain. She would remember nothing of the details of the evening after this point.
3
The Landlord’s Family
WHEN ALI MALLIK BOUGHT THE MAJOR PART OF THE RAJMAHAL IN 1942, he had chosen the top floor apartment for himself because he didn’t want tenants trampling all over him and preferred this distancing from up on high. The Malliks furnished their apartment luxuriously. Apart from the fixtures on the walls and the plumbing, most of the original furniture had gone out with the Ohris. So the apartment had no pretensions to regal splendor. But it had the approval of the Malliks’ many Europeanized friends.
Ali Mallik favored sharkskin for dress occasions, and cut a dash in his tailored evening suits usually sharpened by a bow tie and scarlet cummerbund. His tailors were Barkat Ali’s, hard to surpass anywhere in the world. Ali was slim and handsome in a skeletal way and his circle often teased him of starving to look like Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a family friend. Ali denied this, citing his pencil-thin mustache as evidence, a contrast to the clean-shaven Jinnah. Mrs. Mallik, Saira, was tall and statuesque with shoulder length blondish hair, a nose stone, and claimed her ancestors were royalty, Moghuls from Samarkand. Where exactly this was and whether Samarkandis were blonde or not, no one was quite sure, but the mystery made her doubly glamorous. By middle-age she had reddened her hair with henna and tended to have unhealthy-looking pouches under her eyes. But she was still handsome and her height added to the patrician effect. She wore chiffon saris and chain smoked cigarettes in a long jet holder, aggravating her chronic asthma and suffering doubly on the long trudge up the stairs. She also liked to tipple occasionally, when she became harmlessly drunk, her favorite drink being a lethal dry martini of which only the 300 knew the subtleties.
Ali Mallik didn’t connect his wife’s immodest behavior, smoking and drinking, or his own taste for whiskey as against Islam, considering all this as merely peripheral. He was a highly successful barrister, one of the richest in Calcutta, and Gandhiji had asked him to give up barristering to join the freedom struggle. But Ali had seen colleagues fritter away their lives in jail, and neither did he want to enter the uncertain arena of Hindu-Muslim politics. He knew that ever since Lord Curzon’s abortive partitioning of the old magnum Bengal in 1905, this politics had got murkier and murkier. But it was the big one, the riots and the final Partition itself, which had left an incipiently painful scar. He refused to consider moving back to his home town, Dacca, simply because he was a Muslim, just as he refused to accept the need for Partition. Secretly he longed for the Muslims to be the majority group in the new India, so he could take over the smug and snug feeling of his Hindu friends, and lay claim to India with the same arrogant proprietorship. It never occurred to him to long to be a Hindu because he was a Muslim through and through. He was sensitive to the fact that Hindus and Muslims were inextricably linked in a terrible and seductive symbiotic relationship on the Indian subcontinent which would have a long and unhappy history. But he was also convinced this must end in eventual synthesis and harmony. He felt he wouldn’t mind if one of his sons married a Hindu so this synthesis could be attempted right under his nose. But never did he voice this wish nor show any reaction other than mild acquiescence when one of his sons did just that. Nor, for the present, would he concede that the synthesis would never be complete. Like a primitive mixer for hot and cold water, which scalds one side of the hands and chills the other.
Junior, the Mallik firstborn, with the proper name of Riyaz, though an endearing child with feudal airs, turned out severe. The tendencies of his youth were exaggerated into a dogmatism exemplified by his unquiet watch over the Rajmahal, his refusal to install an elevator and his zeal over Pir Tasleem Ahmed’s tomb.
In his younger days, Junior had stumbled on the neglected tomb near the boundary wall and decided to restore it. He had it cleared and cleaned, patched up with plaster and painted.
“Why does Junior have to be so aggressive about it?” said Ali.
“Yes. And so sanctimonious,” agreed Saira.
They worried about the trouble-stirring potential of the tomb, and their fears were borne out almost immediately.
The tomb was partly camouflaged and partly straddled by the Rajmahal wall. When Junior had the wall breached and extended into the next compound to clear space for it he made no reference to the neighbor who grew hot under the collar and demanded an explanation. Junior was slow to respond and the neighboring landlord, a Hindu, erupted.
“These Muslim fellows are all the same! Are they still ruling the roost or what?”
Though he was out of the hearing of the house, the more conservative ghosts also made similar observations.
The neighbor gathered up his resources to stall this takeover of his property, just four square feet, and exhorted his supporters to knock down the extension. There was a confrontation and a skirmish, and Ali had to call in the police. The local magistrate persuaded the neighbor to allow the extension if a written request was made, eschewing legal ownership of that all-important four square feet and undertaking not to encroach further. Ali drafted the document himself, putting it on stamped paper, and swearing it as an affidavit in a court of law. The merchant could hardly reject his venerable neighbor’s circumspect gesture, and kept seethingly silent.
The tomb was identified with “Tasleem Ahmed,” the name decipherable in a faint inscription on the headstone. The “pir” was added as an inspired afterthought. “Pir” Tasleem Ahmed was endowed with a skeletal history after some stories were spread by locals, and Junior appointed the watchman of the Rajmahal as ex-officio tomb guardian. A brick godown, not far from the tomb, was put up on a corner of the drive for his dwelling.
The Mallik’s middle son, Mumtaz Antonia’s other victim, had come back to India permanently, and joined one of the big companies. His new girlfriend, Lalitha, appeared on the scene, her deep lilting voice and bubbling laughter sending happy waves through the Rajmahal. The ghosts on the other hand were dismayed at this rank outsider becoming a part of the new prime family.
“First a Muslim landlord . . . ” said a narrow-minded ghost.
“And what’s wrong with him?” interposed a more modern ghost.
“Nothing, nothing,” said the narrow-minded ghost hastily. “It’s just that Junior of course!”
“But Ali Mallik is not Junior, is he?”
There was a pause, as by now, all the ghosts had become admirers of Ali’s. “Then Russian, British, and Anglo-Indian , and now a black South Indian,” continued the narrow-minded ghost.
“I’m tired of discussing the same thing again and again. And if you object to Lalitha’s darkness, half Raja Shitanath’s family is . . . ”
The conversation came to an abrupt halt as the ghost of Raja Shitanath’s mother came in, her inquisitive nose quivering expectantly.
When Mumtaz decided to marry Lalitha, a Hindu, and that too from the South, there was also a general turmoil within the Mallik breasts. Ali Mallik wondered why Mumtaz hadn’t veered toward Surjeet Shona after his break with the satanic red-haired Antonia. What was wrong with this beauty from the other corner of India, this fair-skinned, straight-haired, long-nosed, Northern-Eastern version as against the dusky, curly-haired, large-eyed Southern one? Would he, Ali, have preferred that? But Surjeet Shona wasn’t Muslim either, was she? One wasn’t quite sure what she was! The contrast was highlighted when Lalitha became friendly with Surjeet Shona and they were often seen together. Why had Mumtaz switched from white Antonia to this other extreme when he could have fallen back, right here outside his front door, on the charms of someone more intermediate? He came to the same conclusion as Surjeet Shona about the inexplicable nature of attraction and desire.
Junior Mallik, the only one to express himself, had endless squabbles not only with his father, but bitterly with Mumtaz, the “misguided” bridegroom to be. He tended to act as if Lalitha didn’t exist. Can’t you at least greet ’Litha!?” said Mumtaz bluntly. “It’s uncivilized!”
The situation was made more poignant by the fact that this Lalitha was stunning, her sultry charms enhanced by the red bindi between her eyebrows and the flowers nestling in her mane of hair. She wore no makeup but her enormous black eyes and clear lips needed no artifice. Mumtaz burned with a feverish lust at the very thought of her. Religion, thanks to his parents’ vagueness, hardly impinged on his thoughts and actions, except remotely at Eid, when he joined the family celebrations.
“Tell me,” Mumtaz repeated. “Go on. Why can’t you greet Litha?”
“You know bloody well why not!” said Junior vehemently.
“No. I bloody well don’t!” said Mumtaz as vehemently.
“How can you marry a kafir, a Hindu and of all things, a South Indian?!”
“Kafir!” raged Mumtaz. “What the hell sort of word is that? Does one actually use such words?
“Well, can’t she, is she going to become a Muslim, change her name? Why doesn’t she do that, then there won’t be such a problem.”
“And what exactly is the problem? Besides, if she changes her religion or her name, she’ll still be a South Indian won’t she, Keralite to be exact!?”
“Bas, bas,” said Ali Mallik, looking up from the newspaper he hadn’t been reading. “There’s no need to argue. Listen Junior. Mumtaz has decided to marry Lalitha. It’s his choice just as Nadira was yours, and she is a perfectly civilized, decent girl, and I have no objection. So let’s leave it at that!”
“But the family proposed Nadira for me!” protested Junior. “I followed the custom by marrying her!”
“It was your choice,” insisted Ali Mallik. “You wanted to follow the custom, didn’t you? We didn’t force you . . . ”
“And have you forgotten how many Hindu friends we have, and Christian friends and Parsi friends, and Brahmo and Sikh . . . all “kafirs,” including SS, hello SS, who’s right here in the room with us!” burst out Mumtaz. Surjeet Shona had just walked in.
“Dad. Tell me,” said Junior heatedly, completely ignoring Surjeet Shona. “Has any Mallik ever married a Hindu?”
“No. But Khalid married a French woman. You know that.”
“That’s different,” said Junior.
“Oh really?” sneered Mumtaz. “That’s different is it? Why? Because she’s white? Because she isn’t a dark-skinned beauty from the south of your own country but an ugly pink Medusa from the sticks of outer Paris?”
Surjeet Shona was trying to greet everyone normally in this storm, when Saira Mallik came in the front door.
“Hello SS. What’s the fight about, darlings? Don’t you know everyone can hear you, right down to the ground floor?” she exaggerated.
“But she became a Muslim!” said Junior, ignoring his mother as well. “I wouldn’t have minded if you’d married Antonia . . . She had class!”
Everyone flinched.
“Unbelievable,” thought Ali catching Saira’s eye. “Junior is unbelievable!”
Surjeet Shona was intently examining a book and Ali kept quiet remembering his relief when Mumtaz had broken off with Antonia. Mumtaz, though as sensitive to the crass reference, was more inflamed by the transferred insult to Lalitha. “Class! Well let me tell you . . . ’Litha doesn’t have a pink face. But by god, she has class compared to anyone . . . And, and, if Antonia isn’t a, what did you call it, ‘kafir’, who the hell is?”
“She would have converted like a shot!” said Junior with a wild surmise.
Mumtaz glanced at Surjeet Shona aware that everyone in the room except Junior was feeling embarrassed.
“I’ll come again,” she murmured. “I have to . . . ”
“Don’t be silly, SS,” said Saira. “You’re supposed to have lunch with us. And I don’t know why Lalitha’s so late . . . ” She looked pointedly at Junior who had finally woken up to his faux pas. In his abrupt way he wheeled and left the room, just as Lalitha walked in perkily saying, “Hello everyone! Sorry I’m late!” Junior brushed by her muttering “Hello!” for a change.
Mumtaz smiled delightedly as he always did when Lalitha was there, and his attention unreservedly locked on his fiancée.
Saira was distressed. Deep inside her she was unhappy that Mumtaz had decided to marry a South Indian girl. The Hindu part was peripheral, almost to be expected. But she didn’t tell any of this to Ali. Saira was aware of the dichotomy and knew they would have to put a lid on it. Both were unfamiliar with Keralites, and had to force themselves to see Lalitha’s beauty through the screen of her dark skin. But both were also truly eclectic, and their minds made them surmount the vestigial conditioning. To get out of the rut of marrying cousins gave the whole thing an air of novelty, they consoled themselves. Ali converted his distaste at having to face his harder line relatives into a challenging confrontation.
Saira adored all three of her sons. “You’ll live in the Rajmahal, won’t you?” she said hopefully to Mumtaz.
Mumtaz was silent. He didn’t fancy living so close to his parents with the foul Junior breathing down his neck and criticizing Lalitha for every misperceived difference. Industry was subsiding in West Bengal and his company had transferred its head offices to Delhi. Most conservatives saw this as the deterioration, the beginning of the end of Calcutta.
Mumtaz married his Keralite Lalitha at a simple civil ceremony thinly attended by members of both families, and the pair went away to Madras. From Madras Mumtaz was transfer
red to Bombay and later Delhi, but never to Calcutta. There were no tangible problems to the immediate family from this marriage. Ali Mallik found Lalitha’s parents courteous and he was grateful they were distant. Junior managed to keep the minimum decorum in their presence though he was never able to look Lalitha in the eye, and rumblings from the rest of the clan were ignored.
Politically, there was a series of coalition experiments in other states, a lean majority for the Congress at the Center, and a shifting and settling movement in the body politic of the country which would take place with greater frequency as colonial rule receded behind two decades of semi-euphoric socialism and the passing of two idealistic prime ministers. This would affect not only the country as a whole, but many individuals, families and societies, not least, the Malliks. Their Muslim and Indian identities would come under scrutiny and they would continue to be affected by the relationship of Muslims and Hindus. And they would see painful bloodshed as if some inexplicably vengeful satyr was sitting on their shoulders saying, “So! You thought you could ignore all this, did you?”
The satyr was at work when Ali Mallik looked out of his chamber window one ordinary day and saw, as in a dream, a man running down the center of the deserted street with a knife in his back. Ali shivered as he watched the man being picked up by a passing police van. But for the life of him, he couldn’t remember whether the man wore lungi and a skull cap and was bearded, or whether he wore dhuti-punjabi, or whether he wore the neutral shirt and trousers. All he could see in his mind was that knife handle jutting brutally out of the screaming man’s back and not a drop of blood. Where had the blood gone? Had it spread down the skin of the man’s back, slowly staining his clothes from within, or was he hemorrhaging internally? Did he die in the end? Did the police help him or harass him? Each time Ali remembered, he cursed his friend Jinnah, for he very simply believed he was the sole cause for the breakup of the country and the deeper rift within India between the two communities. Almost till the end of his life, Ali Mallik convinced himself there would be a reconciliation. Though Pakistan may never rejoin India, there would surely be a stop to the hostilities between Hindus and Muslims, Pakistan and India. An atrocity against oneself or one’s family, surely, should not in the end, affect rationality for all eternity. He hadn’t deduced, from the breakup of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh, that there was scant hope when even the so-called natural unity of subcontinental Muslims was so misperceived. But nor had he ever contemplated going over to Pakistan, though Jinnah had offered him high office. The two broke off their connection for the short remnant of Jinnah’s life. And Ali had his law practice which rarely brought him face to face with these other, could they be called larger, issues? That almost forgotten routine of a Hindu-Muslim disturbance, a blip, confused and saddened Ali Mallik. Such things had diminished in West Bengal, seeming to justify the claim of some that the divisive hype was manipulated rather than showing a true hatred of man for man. Whether this claim was correct or not would be forever without answer, leaving poor well-meaning Ali Mallik forever confused. The leftist predominance in West Bengal politics ushered in more a period of conflict between left, extreme left, idealism, capitalism, intellectualism, and revolt than between traditionally clashing communities. But the blip happened and became a tattoo beating in Ali Mallik’s head like a tinnitus of the ear. Man-with-knife-in-back, no blood, picked up by police van, whisked off to unknown terrors, tortures, or revival and freedom, who knew? Why was Ali so sure instinctively, that it was a Hindu-Muslim matter? He would never find out, no one he talked to knew anything of it. Ali’s paper, The Statesman, a respected paper in impeccable English, said nothing. If Ali had thought to ask his clerks, he might have been shown a small paragraph on page four of a Bengali paper, thus clarifying for himself it had been a reality, and the result of a Hindu-Muslim fracas, that the man with the knife in his back had been a Muslim, that the police had taken him to hospital, where he had soon died. What the paper neither reported later, and what Ali Mallik never would have learned, was that there was propaganda about the incident across the border in East Pakistan which whipped up little twisters of violence. A retaliatory Hindu killing in Jessore, counter-retaliation in Agartala, and if tracked further more and more retaliations till the original little incident was obliterated, the immediate cause changed each time, and the twisters, if they had been combined would have formed a whiplashing tornado of untold destructive capacity. Greedily, such particles are swallowed for nourishment as the twisters grow, crisscrossing swiftly, furtively and fragmented about the land, an unpredictable concourse of whiplashes. Till one day, they combine to cause one of the cataclysms that milestone history.