“There was a Hindi play, Who Am I?” Petrov had said to Martin Strachey once. He was trying to explain the days before Partition, when the theater world was carrying out its job of mirroring the times. “A man is attacked and wounded in the riots and cannot remember thereafter whether he is a Hindu or a Muslim . . . . The protagonist is taken in by a Hindu family and his wounds are tended. When he gets well, he remembers who, or rather, what, he is, but he will not tell.”
“What about Ali Mallik’s story?” said Jack Strachey. “He saw a man with a knife in his back once, running down the street. He can’t remember if the man was a Hindu or a Muslim . . . ”
“But his dress would have shown . . . ”
“Yes, but Ali cannot remember!”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to remember . . . ”
“The name Mallik is as ambiguous. It could be either Hindu or Muslim!”
Ali’s man with the knife would always trouble him. Visions hemorrhaged inside him, spreading poisons. “Be exorcised!” he commanded, desperately. But the man would taunt him forever, sartorially indeterminate, sometimes even naked, white and veinless, with the knife handle sticking out neatly between his shoulder blades and not a drop of blood. It wasn’t that Ali’s imagination couldn’t stand the notion of blood. During early days, he had practiced as a criminal lawyer, and seen enough when he was involved with clients at the sordid end of life. But this bloodlessness was closely associated with the latent poison of prejudice, hemorrhaging, finally to kill, sprout a knife out of the back.
Fayyaz, the youngest Mallik son, was disinclined to take up a normal career. From his college days spent in India rather than abroad like his brothers, he had been drawn to the Communist movement with which the city was identified. This had been partly inspired by Petrov, who lived one floor down. Petrov’s stories had lain dormant in Fayyaz till he had reached his teens and gone to university, where he had again been thrilled to hear and read of the Revolution. Convinced it was the most glorious happening known to mankind he idealized and eulogized everything about it like his comrade-students and joined the Communist Union. By the time the party had come into its own, he had become a cadre member. As a result of his dedication he didn’t marry, though there were some fiery young girls in the movement with him. He had liaisons, self-conscious attempts at revolutionary behavior. But in the end, he righted himself to an extent and lived with a plain girl from a lower-class background. Poor Saira had to recognize that her youngest was way out of reach, though she kept on hoping. She eagerly offered him one of the apartments when it was vacated. But Fayyaz preferred to head for the mecca of communists, Moscow, and when that love story ended, to a tenement in the old Black Town. Saira and Ali were blessed with wealth and status strengthened by Ali’s eminence as a barrister and an ideally happy marriage.
“It must be the rough justice of fate that they should suffer through their children,” thought the Rajmahal.
4
Surjeet Shona Goes on a Journey
THE RAJ MAHAL WAS TO WITNESS ANOTHER MARRIAGE SOON. NEEL Banerjea, who had caused Surjeet Shona so much confusion at their first meeting, was to became a regular visitor at the Rajmahal. And she would go shining-eyed, and paradoxically, blindly, into her next love affair, putting aside all her fears. She would spend a blissful period during which she would pledge her life to Neel, and she would marry him unhesitatingly within a year in spite of her little son’s truculent behavior.
“Hate Neel Uncle!” Gurdeep, not yet four, spat out once, surprisingly forceful for his size. Surjeet Shona put her hand over his mouth to shush him. Neel was at the door and could have heard.
The wedding was quiet, soon after and similar to Mumtaz Mallik’s, but Surjeet Shona felt she was the luckiest and happiest of women. Such a man to make her life whole! She was echoed in this by some of the Bengali ghosts who were relieved to at last have the approved Bengali caste represented in their midst. But others, including the mansion, refrained from hoping for too much.
The first current between the two newly marrieds had transformed itself into an electrical eroticism. At night, the contrast in color between them was sharpened, when dark bodies became darker and light skins caught whatever little sparkles remained in the air. So Neel’s muscled body, with a fusion of hair nestling in his chest, became mysteriously black and Surjeet Shona’s glowed like a moonbeam. After the magic of their incoherent lovemaking, she would lie with her body aligned to his and adore this play of shadow and light. Then she would gaze at Neel’s profile in the dimness of the night, at the lashes lying on his cheeks, his lips, his sharp nose, as it moved slightly with his sleeping breath.
The indulgence was mutual and whenever Neel looked at Surjeet Shona his heart would almost stop. In the morning he would hungrily take in her unconscious form, sprawled, abandoned on the bed, the proportions perfect whatever the angle, the hair and face ravishing whatever the state. He would lightly trace his fingers along the body and wait for Surjeet Shona’s slow awakening, the response in her eyes.
Completely absorbed in her husband, Surjeet Shona gave up her job at Sharp’s to devote herself to Neel’s work with adivasis. Neel fooled himself he could “make up” for the loss in her income. But Surjeet Shona was financially independent, the job was irrelevant, and Neel’s habit of pushing himself away from organized employment, carrying on with intermittent patronage from the government and others, kept him forever short of funds. Surjeet Shona who could easily afford any extravagance, quickly learned to be circumspect, though she was the one who paid the bills. She was sensitive to Neel’s feeling of inadequacy as The Man, but the contradiction of his intelligence and this attitude baffled her. To her, their beautifully interwoven lives made nonsense of formality and she rejected Neel’s bad-natured outbursts.
“Everything of mine is yours,” she said, with such utter and innocent conviction, that Neel was disarmed. The situation galled him though, and he would never try to rationalize his reactions.
In the meantime, Surjeet Shona accompanied Neel on his field trips eagerly, putting up with the discomfort of living in minimal camps and dak bungalows, too awed by the elemental beauty and pathos of the setting and its denizens, and the early attentions of her intensely romantic lover-husband.
But the tally of contradictions increased. At the very start, Surjeet Shona strongly resisted moving to Neel’s small apartment near the Lakes.
“You’ve always complained about your apartment. It makes no sense to stay on! There’s so much space here. And I’ve had shelves made for your books.”
“But I like living near the lakes. All my friends are there!”
“You can make friends here too. There are the Mojumdars and Malliks. And how can you forget the Petrovs!”
“Petrov is a white man!”
“A white man! He’s hardly a white man in that sense.”
“Maybe! But the others are! White or brown they are all sahibs!”
Surjeet Shona refused to be hurt and burst into peals of laughter. “I’ll make you into one yet,” she joked. “Wait and see.”
Neel muttered to himself. “Don’t grumble!” murmured Surjeet Shona, fondling her husband in her sweet besotted way. “Do you know, you’re the most sophisticated person in the Rajmahal!” Her reactions were similar each time the subject came up. How could Neel counter such persuasion?
He moved into the Rajmahal, embarrassed by his shabby suitcases and possessions, reluctantly transferring his precious books to the new bookshelves. And Surjeet Shona went into a frenzy, arranging his study and lovingly unpacking his few clothes into one of the big empty cupboards.
But at bottom, both knew Neel was more at home with his own, his professors and his adivasis, though he mingled peripherally and reluctantly with the cocktail crowd. In time, the fading culture of the Rajmahal and all that went with it, the wealth, the style became slights to his innermost self. And Surjeet Shona was well aware of the constriction he must feel after his earlier free and close-to-
wild life. When the “husband” swamped the “lover,” she wondered if this would have happened with Guru, if his death hadn’t spared them. Other terrifying possibilities stemmed from Neel’s open admiration for the adivasis, primarily the women, with their sensuous freedoms. She sensed this had everything to do with his work fixation.
A turning point was a trip into the neighboring state of Bihar, to Neterhat, a small hill station in Chota Nagpur. Neel had a decrepit jeep which Surjeet Shona distrusted though by now she knew better than to say anything.
The Grand Trunk Road was a high point of the tour, and Surjeet Shona was lost for a time observing the life along the celebrated route. At the crossing over the Barakar river, which marked the Bengal-Bihar border, a cluster of elegant temple spires flashed by, rising from the dry river bed
“Neel, look! Let’s stop. Please Neel!”
“Not now. We’ll stop on the way back. Let’s get on now!”
“They must have been excavated from the river!” exclaimed Surjeet Shona, craning her neck to look back at the temples. But Neel didn’t reply and, hurt at the snub, she stopped chattering.
Transferring her attention back to the window, she saw that the people looked different from the Bengalis they had left behind, the style of clothing, the language, it was almost like another country. The geography had changed too, from brilliant green fields arabesqued with white paddy birds, to low tabletop hills and Sal forest. The common factor on both sides of the border was the blot of untidy industrialization, with collieries and factories grinding out smoke and other effluents. Neel had planned a stop for the night at Topchanchi, a lake and forest not far from the Grand Trunk Road. When they passed Parasnath Hill with its white Jain temple shining on the summit, Neel put off another eager request from Surjeet Shona, promising they would climb up on the way back. At Topchanchi they drove into a romantic dak bungalow surrounded by hilly terrain, so close and yet so unconnected to the industrial wasteland. Thin scrub led into dense forest-covered hills, and the silence was pierced by the plaintive call of peacocks and distant roars. Surjeet Shona’s senses tingled. This was tiger country! Driving around the lake in the late evening, she was imbued with a feeling of desolation sparked by a magical beatitude. But she didn’t question the mysterious contradiction or its link to the remote quality of the place. Dusk followed by dark came too soon for them to sight a tiger, though they eagerly scanned the glowing green and yellow eyes shining in their headlights, sometimes halfway up a tree, sometimes deep inside the forest. The night buzzed with the sawing of crickets and they slept cradled together, in the light of glowworms adorning a shrub outside their window. At dawn they went out to the lake again. The deer grazed peacefully, ignoring the low grumble of the jeep as it passed by, a group of wild boar rushed aslant into the trees, and a sambar stared at them before belling loudly and turning away.
“A tiger, a tiger, Neel,” whispered Surjeet Shona. “That’s what I want to see. All this is so tame by comparison.”
“You’ll see one today, Shona, I feel it in my bones,” Neel had barely whispered back when Surjeet Shona’s heart lurched. In a pool of sunlight barely twenty yards in front of them, lay a huge tigress with two cubs tumbling around her.
Neel braked abruptly and the jeep stopped short with a squeak. The tigress blinked indifferently at them and once Surjeet Shona’s breathing normalized, she cautiously raised her camera and kept clicking. They stayed half an hour while the cubs tumbled, licked occasionally by the powerful tongue of their mother. Then the great beast yawned releasing a fearful sound, stretched, and shepherded her awkwardly new cubs to the water’s edge, and as suddenly as a dream, they had melted into the wall of the forest. Surjeet Shona, stiff and baked in the heat and filled with bliss, hugged Neel exuberantly.
They left Topchanchi early on the long journey to Neterhat, through dry scrubland, the burnt grass covering giving it a charcoal tinge and scrunching underfoot when they walked out to ease themselves. The pristine silence of the countryside was only disturbed by the liquid ringing of wooden cow bells, a sound that became irresistible to Surjeet Shona. Craving to access it at will, she called to a boy ambling along with a herd, “Come here! I want one of those bells!” She could feel Neel stiffening next to her, but her bliss gave her a sense of power. The herd flowed around them in a honeyed river of sound punctuated by bucolic mooing.
“A bell?” said the astonished boy. “But this is for the cow. Why do you want it?”
Surjeet Shona’s laughter mingled pleasantly with the bell river. “Oh but I have a cow too,” she said. “And she has no bell. Come now. Give me one! I will pay you for it!”
The boy, in loincloth and torn vest, a ragged cloth around his head, with a bamboo flute tucked into it, obeyed Surjeet Shona. He took the money from her, his eyes popping at the ten rupee notes and after tying them carefully into the top of his loin cloth, sleepwalked to a cow, untied its bell and handed it to Surjeet Shona. “Take this for your cow,” he said. “It is my best bell, from my best cow. Now I will have to make another one for her.” He fondled the white soft skin of his bell-less cow while Surjeet Shona looked at her trophy, a handsome prehistoricallooking wooden bell, painted with a crude design of blue flowers. She shook it jauntily and waved to the boy who was scratching his head with his flute.
Neel’s expression was an instant dash of cold water. She felt her joy draining out. No word was spoken, but the contempt of that expression filled her with a mixture of fear, contrition, and sadness. She knew she had overstepped some invisible boundary taking her leagues further from her husband. “I have seven-league boots on these days,” she thought. “And they have a life of their own.” Before Neel revved up the engine she could hear the other characteristically liquid sound of these country tracts. The boy was propped up under a tree, languidly playing his flute.
Surjeet Shona dozed off, lulled by the intermittent sound of the bell bumping up and down on her lap. When she awoke the disjunctive feeling had left her and she impulsively touched Neel on the shoulder.
“Don’t you like it?” she shook the bell gently. “The sound is almost . . . noble.”
With an effort, Neel smiled, turned to Surjeet Shona and patted her cheek. “Enjoy it, Shona. But what will you do now? Buy a cow for it?”
They reached the unmetalled red earth ghat road to Neterhat in the late evening, when the sun was low on the horizon.
“It won’t take long,” said Neel. “Not more than an hour.”
As he spoke, the sky darkened and heavy drops of rain spattered the windscreen. Soon there was a downpour and the road had turned into a river of red slush. The poor light was no help with the jeep skidding at every turn. “We must keep going,” said Neel, and as Surjeet Shona prayed, there was a sudden whump and they came to a standstill. The engine roared and whined and the wheels spun, but the jeep stayed obstinately stuck. Neel got out of the jeep. “Put the gear into second,” he ordered. “The first’s slipping. And start the engine when I tell you!”
Rajmahal Page 24