Rajmahal

by Kamalini Sengupta

  “Come on, Junior. Do you want the watchman to get away with this? Is that what you really want?”

  Reluctantly, recognizing the common ground against Rawat, and conquering his natural perverseness, Junior agreed to send for the cantankerous watchman.

  Rawat appeared through the garden gate, a burly figure in khaki, his head shaved with a knotted tuft springing up from the crown.

  “I didn’t notice his tuft before!” whispered Surjeet Shona to Junior. “He can’t be a Brahman, can he?”

  “How do I know?” shrugged Junior edgily.

  Sudden loud singing from the prayer room forced Junior to shout. “What is this I hear Rawat? Who gave you permission to place a lock on the toilet? You must open it! At once!”

  “But that is impossible, Sahib!”

  Junior would never get used to Rawat’s oily familiarity. He gripped his chair arms. “Oh I see! So the toilet belongs to you does it?!”

  Rawat sighed. “For us Brahmans, Sahib, all this is very difficult. First of all, you must understand that I have still need of old toilet while on duty in grounds. Necessary cleaning is done of dirty place by sweeper. Next water is thrown to purify of defilement of sweeper’s presence. All the time it is seen that he touches nothing. Even lock, I alone can open . . . Only I can use, or, of course, some other fortunate Brahman.”

  Unnoticed by them, the music had stopped and the bhaiji stood bristling outside the prayer room.

  “Lies! He is lying, Surjeet-ji! He is no Brahman!”

  “Bhaiji!” said Surjeet Shona sternly. “Kindly go in.”

  “How was he using same toilet as us before?”

  “Bhaiji, I will talk to you later. Please go. Go!” repeated Surjeet Shona as the bhaiji resisted.

  Looking back furiously at Rawat, the bhaiji ducked into the prayer room, though it was obvious his ear quivered behind the curtain.

  “I am being paid to act over religious shrine and there is no other course for me but to accede to noble caste. My thread ceremony has been performed, and my head arranged accordingly,” Rawat said proudly, pulling the thread out of his shirt and twirling his tuft about.

  “Rawat . . . ”

  “‘Pandey ’!” exclaimed the watchman promptly. “As befits Brahman status, I have taken superior name of Pandey, Pandit Pandey! This has been done after due consecration at temple.”

  “But you are a Rajput!” said Surjeet Shona. “That itself is a noble caste, the caste of the maharajas. There is no provision for changing caste! And why do you want to become a cowardly Brahman when you are already a warrior!”

  “It is my fate,” said Rawat-Pandey complacently.

  “The rites you are performing are for a Muslim saint, and Muslims are not caste-ridden kafirs,” sniped Junior.

  “But I,” declaimed the watchman. “I am Hindu!”

  “All right, all right,” put in Surjeet Shona again. “What about Bhaiji? He too does the work of god, so then, he too must be a Brahman . . . ”

  “But he is Sikh, how he can be Brahman?”

  “The mullahs also do the work of god . . . ”

  “Memsahib!” chided Rawat, thoroughly exasperated. “They are Muslims, what are you saying?”

  “This grave is that of a Muslim too . . . ” tried Surjeet Shona again.

  “Oof Memsahib! How many times must I repeat . . . ” Surjeet Shona burst into giggles, “that I am Brahman, enjoined to do priestly work!!!” roared Rawat.

  “Out! Get out! Leave! At once!” exploded Junior, not appreciating at all that Rawat-Pandey’s chanakyan moves conclusively proved that the qualities of the Brahman need no sanction of birth. Looking unnaturally pleased, the neo-Brahman strolled out.

  Junior turned his ire on Surjeet Shona. “Stop your bloody giggling SS! I’ll get that fucking Rawat. Brahman my ass!” And he stomped away.

  Surjeet Shona’s giggles died down, but they had failed to acknowledge the dangers lying just under the surface in her country. The Rajmahal tried invoking the Pir to help with wise counsel. But the laconic ghost refused to enter the controversy. “It is enough that my resting place has been honored. I do not ask for more, and certainly not for trouble . . . ” Poor Ali had spawned a Frankenstein and the wily watchman was soon to get carried away by his holy role into uncharted terrain.

  Junior continued in a stream of rage. He ordered his guards, including Jainab, to break the lock on the toilet. But Rawat-Pandey was no pushover, and the unsuspecting bhaiji found, the very next evening, that there was a heavy new padlock on the toilet which he had been uneasily using. He crept hastily back to Jainab to whisper, “Did I not tell you? It is locked finally!”

  “We must break it again,” said Jainab intrepidly. “That is Junior master’s order!”

  The bhaiji was hopping up and down with the unstoppable demands of nature. “I must go upstairs. Urinating just now is essential!” He disappeared with a cross-legged gait.

  But Rawat-Pandey had organized a gang to stand guard over the toilet, and when Junior’s locksmiths arrived with their implements there was an ambush. The eruption of noise brought out some of the mansion’s inhabitants, including Surjeet Shona and Junior. They bumped into the aged bhaiji who had just reappeared, relieved in one sense. Surjeet Shona wondered at the ease with which the small dispute had entered into this arena of violent conflict.

  “Why,” she shouted to Junior over the noise, “Why all this? Can’t you settle it some other way?”

  “Please use the roof as before, Bhaiji!” she called imperiously. “What is the need for this fuss after all these years?”

  The bhaiji mumbled incoherently, but Junior wasn’t ready to withdraw. There was still the major obstacle of the godown and Rawat-Pandey ’s ouster, which would bring such relief, not only freeing the godown for destruction and releasing the toilet, but allowing his replacement by a proper Muslim watchman. The business of the toilet had brought that into perspective. “Why did I let things slide for so long?” thought Junior. “You don’t expect me to let that fool bully me, do you?” he sneered to Surjeet Shona. “That watchman has to go!”

  “See if it’s so easy,” shouted back Surjeet Shona, though she thought to herself, “Not that I would mind!”

  They both knew Ali Mallik was also in the way, with his self-congratulatory appointment of a Hindu watchman and his light tread on Hindu-Muslim ground.

  The belligerents were separated and sorted out with the help of the police. There were bloody gashes and bruises. No serious physical damage was done, but the question of harmony being restored was remote.

  And yes, Jainab had lost his glass eye.

  “My area record will be spoiled,” pointed out the police subinspector crossly. “First Hindu-Muslim encounter I have witnessed after so many years.”

  “You’ve got it wrong,” protested Junior. “This is not a Hindu-Muslim encounter. After all, the Hindu watchman has been looking after a Muslim shrine, also for I do not know how many years. His quarrel is with a Sikh!”

  The Rajmahal was weakening with age, and knew its attempts to sort out the situation would be hopeless.

  “Enough is enough,” said Surjeet Shona. And at last she allotted one of her precious bathrooms to the bhaiji. “He’s been here so long,” people said. “He’s grown up here. Come on, SS. Let the poor man have some peace!”

  Surjeet Shona felt chastened. “It should cool Junior down,” she consoled herself.

  That evening, heavily band-aided, Rawat, the neo-Brahman joined his wife at the evening puja in his garage-top room. Getting ready to prostrate before the household altar of Hindu gods and a terra-cotta replica of the pir’s tomb he said, “We must propitiate the pir to remember his servant. I have special need at this time.” His need was urgent, because he had heard that Junior Sahib, still on a roll, was about to demolish his godown.

  It was Maudie Memsahib who saved him. She was to arrive the very next day in her wraith form, stunning everyone into inaction. Rawat-Pandey eagerly connive
d in her installation in the godown and Junior was preempted again. His frustration hit hysteria pitch.

  The physical confrontation between the Hindu band, of Rawat-Pandey and his cohorts, and Junior’s sidees created a base of unending rancor. Who could forget a blow, a fist jarring against a jaw, or a metallic implement impacting to split skin? And the resultant blood? How little it needed for the split skin and jarred jaw to release incipient messages implanted under that skin. So, one band was ever ready to spar with the other, ever ready to spill more blood, a society split like the skin. The subinspector should have realized the record of his jurisdiction was likely to break. It was a feature of the eternal division, based on the curious and confused miscalculations of bigotry. Junior’s resolve to get rid of watchman Rawat-Pandey had taken a leap into the darkness. It wasn’t difficult to get to the denizens of that darkness, and Junior was able to hire a minor gang, muscle men from an inner city gymnasium. The Rajmahal hoped someone or something would prove strong enough to stem the deterioration. Although it was intrinsically lonely, not only at the desertion of the ghosts, but at the non-manifestation of its favorite inhabitants after death, and it now felt sure the end was near.

  When Surjeet Shona took up cudgels on behalf of Maudie and offered her toilet facilities as well, Junior’s frustration ballooned and he was convinced of a sinister conspiracy. “That do-gooding bitch must have a toilet-sharing mania!” he cursed, forgetting his own perverse injunction to Surjeet Shona to offer the bhaiji relief. “First she encourages that fat fraud by giving her toilet to the doddering bhaiji, and now it’s that old cow Maudie Jessop!” His mind seethed and his language reached its nonage nadir.

  “Sala Hindu gatekeeper, sahib, up to no good,” said Jainab, feeding his susceptible master. “My cousin is waiting only to take same job into competent hands. Best reciter of Quran for Pir-ji’s sacred tomb, and he is strong, strong like ox. And true Mussalman, Sahib. Not like uncircumcized son of pig!”

  The bhaiji’s need for a convenient relieving place had long been forgotten. They were on to something other, as the house discerned, and who could claim to have the answer to that?

  7

  The Immanent Junior

  ALI MALLIK, RESPONDING TO THE SHIFTING BALANCES IN THE Rajmahal, wondered if the long run of luck with his marriage could hold out.

  “Saira,” he said. “Look at our Rajmahal, almost empty! How much longer do you think we have? What do you think of our lives?”

  “Sad,” said Saira immediately. “So sad, so unfinished . . . ”

  “Saira!” sharply rebuked Ali, raising his voice higher than ever before with her. “Think what you’re saying, old girl.”

  Saira stopped. “I’m sorry, darling. I don’t know what I was thinking. Forgive me.” She went across and sat by him. “What is it?”

  “I, I can’t believe my ears. Say you didn’t mean it. What did you mean? Haven’t you been happy with me? Don’t you still have your loving sons?”

  Ali stopped his frightened outpourings and tried to analyze Saira’s shocking words. She was sitting next to him, with her arm linked in his, and her nearness helped.

  “Fayyaz, unmarried, childless Fayyaz, living in sin, is lost to us, gone away to the unknown world of politics and ideologies, all of which we can only view from the outside,” Ali was thinking.

  “Mumtaz is happy, and Fayyaz is loving when he comes,” said Saira, reading Ali’s thoughts which she could always do. “You were right about our loving sons.”

  Ali continued his thoughts, but spoke them out aloud, a transfer which was usual with his wife, so much at one with her as he was. And he voiced the unsaid fear which had always plagued them.

  “What about Junior then?”

  “Junior?” asked Saira softly. “I know you don’t mean his obsession with the Rajmahal,” she added, circumventing the obvious word, just as the papers did. “ . . . rival groups clashed after a group from a certain community set fire to some dwellings . . . ”

  “What is it that went wrong, what is it?” said Ali.

  “It doesn’t matter, darling. There’s nothing we could do.”

  “There have been so many big ones, haven’t there? The Partition and Khulna and Kashmir and the everlasting riots and flash points, and the wars, and Bangladesh, and then, then, finally for our old lives, the destruction of the Babri mosque. And . . . ”

  “Darling . . . ”

  “And Bombay . . . ? And my home . . . ? Across the border? The other . . . ?”

  Ali Mallik referred to his home town, Dacca, capital of the East Pakistan he hadn’t returned to at Partition simply because he was of a “certain community.” And Dacca had erupted in fury at the destruction of the Babri mosque in India, and the deaths and retaliatory deaths and bomb blasts that had followed in other parts of India, especially Bombay.

  “And have you forgotten Calcutta and ’46? And Noakhali? Have they dissolved in an acid bath leaving no trace? Oh it will come again, it will come again . . . ”

  Saira had no answer.

  “Oh fuck.” said Ali bitterly. “I used to dream . . . ”

  “I know.”

  “My man-with-the-knife-in-the-back . . . ”

  “Shshshsh. You’ve known for a long time, just as I have. We won’t see its end. That’s not all . . .

  “It’s Junior of course. Junior, Junior, Junior . . . ”

  They sat in silence and sorrow, and Ali knew this was what Saira had meant when she had responded so spontaneously to his first question.

  “My wonderful Saira,” he was thinking. “My dearest? My most precious.”

  And they were interrupted by a flush of love and endearments.

  “That’s what matters in the end.” said the Rajmahal with conviction. “ We could do with much more of that.” But then it too was suffering more and more from insecurity. “Right?” it added, shakily.

  And Junior? Did he deserve all this agonizing? Or was he just an unthinking, and aggressive provocateur? A bad-natured loner deserted by his wife? Was it really so, again, unthinkingly important for him to get rid of that insipid structure on the drive, and therefore Maudie, or de-Brahmanize the watchman for the sake of a toilet? Or for him to cross his father and the late Proshanto Mojumdars’ elevator desires, thus depriving them of freedom of movement? When he knew he himself already had twinges in his deteriorating knees, and shortness of breath? Why did he allow such matters to become obsessions, leading to blind rages and feckless machinations?

  Even minor concerns such as his dislike of birds became phobias, as he took unsuccessful pot shots at the pigeons with his air gun, cracking holes in the skylights. In a frenzy one day he dragooned all hands, making them shout, wave brooms, shirts, sheets, and arms from the lobby floor and on the stairway. The pigeons, flapping noisily and hysterically, swooped up the well of the stairs and through the open skylights releasing into the air in a burst. At a signal, the skylights were banged shut and all that was left was a flurry of dismembered feathers. But a covey was found mysteriously resettled under the high ceiling the very next morning, to the approval of the Rajmahal, which empathized with the pigeons, though it had mixed feelings about the mess they caused. It was discovered that the servants who were superstitious about pigeons had secretly opened the skylights at night. “One day there will be stalagmites and stalactites of pigeon shit in the lobby,” swore Junior, when he saw the pigeon-wallah carrying out cartloads of droppings. “The fumes from it are going to poison us all. It’s raining pigeon shit.” The guards took to keeping umbrellas ready to protect the tenants and their guests, and the pigeon-wallah found his work increased with its additional load of little bald baby birds which kept perishing after endless plunges. Helpful Surjeet Shona offered to try out the droppings as a fertilizer for her garden. “If guano works why not this?” she said, and suiting action to word made her grumbling gardener use it in the flower beds with inconclusive results. When the vultures circled, Junior allowed their presence to possess him,
and in an unconscious imitation circled round and round the room with flailing arms while he tried to work out solutions. After their flight, Junior was the most relieved, though he still had nightmares about them. He tried to smoke out the last stubborn pair on top of the raintree, but vultures not being wasps, ignored all such attempts. Their droppings adorned the tree, and with the erosion of these droppings, the tree was losing its foliage.

  “It will surely die,” the gardener told Surjeet Shona. “Their excrement is spoiling the vegetation.”

  “I’d rather they left than the pigeons,” said the Rajmahal.

  It was typical of Junior to start fizzing when, for the very first time, he heard one of the Hindu groundsmen, Ramnath, addressing old Jainab as “Jai Ram,” turning the Muslim name into a salutation to the Hindu god.

  “Ei Ramnath.” called Junior in ire. “Why are you calling Jainab ‘Jai Ram’? You can’t say a simple Muslim name or what?”

  “Arrey na Sahib. Then ask him why he calls me ‘Ramjan’? Why he cannot say Ramnath?”

  “What?” said Junior. “Say that again. What did you say?”

  This suddenly became very important to Junior. It was to mark a breaker in his thinking and slow down his subsequent actions. It was to revolutionize our Saira and Ali Mallik’s Junior, the essence, the boiled down sour milk, of their agonized deliberations.

  “I am telling you, Saheb.” Ramnath’s high-pitched voice cracked. He cleared his throat lowering the pitch, which started climbing again word by word. “Why?” he said, in the declamatory tones a parliamentarian would be proud of. “Why he cannot call me ‘Ramnath’? Ha? Ha? He has some problem or what? He cannot say good easy Hindu name like Ramnath? He must make me some Muslim, some Ramjan Shamjan . . . ” He started choking.

  “Incredible!” Junior’s cussed bent of mind was stalled, intrigued by the nuances inherent in this slippage. “Yes, yes?” he said.