“Just like lying Hindu, mocking me that I am Hindu when I am true Mussalman, haj what is more.” burst out the indignant Jainab.
“Lying Hindu he says? Lying Hindu. Is it not known to all that Musalman always trying to make all others into Musalman. So he calls me “Ramjan.” Ask him. Ask him if he did not do it first of all. I am, bas, following only. And still I am to blame?”
Junior had received quite a battering in his life. Under Ali’s tutelage he had become a competent lawyer, but his embitterment had crystallized when he had been appointed for the Muslim plaintiff in a Hindu-Muslim conflict. Whether he would win the case or not was irrelevant, but he was forever branded as a “communalist,” a fanatic, and a closet Pakistani. The injustice of this branding turned Junior, already an introvert, supersensitive to the rest of the world. Everything became colored with the poison of prejudice, and in time, as a defense, he convinced himself Muslims were superior to Hindus in all aspects, with biased comparisons ranging from the absurd to the sublime. He compared the rich non-vegetarian fare of Muslims to the watery vegetarianism of Hindus. The generosity of Muslims to the penny-pinching of Hindus. The equality among Muslims to the caste system of Hindus. And at the lofty end, the monotheism of Muslims to the pantheistic idol worship of Hindus. Junior twisted himself into a self-righteous bigot. His general sourness afflicted his looks, including the elegance which characterized the Mallik men. When his wife left him his sourness was curdled further by bitterness.
Junior, though so hard in his dealings with others, was like putty with his wife, Nadira. She was quiet, traditional, and pretty, given to instant obedience with Saira and Ali, but transfigured when she was alone with Junior. Saira didn’t know this and often wished Nadira would laugh and joke, act bitchy, anything to show more spirit. But Nadira stayed adamantly docile. Saira had nightmares that Junior was beating and torturing his wife. She rushed out of bed in a frenzy one night and threw open their bedroom door. The two were fast asleep and Junior had his arm protectively around Nadira. It took Saira and Ali some time to realize that Junior worshipped his wife, and it was the cold and mysterious Nadira who was keeping them all guessing. When she walked out on Junior with her children to return to her parents in Dacca, Saira felt a sense of déjà vu. Nadira had made up her mind when Junior told her she must stop using makeup and keep her head covered in public. “Next it will be a burka!” she icily said. And when he came back from the courts in the evening, a shocked Ali and Saira were waiting to tell him the news of her departure with the children. Junior locked himself into his bedroom and stood holding onto a shelf with eyes screwed tight and teeth clenched so hard, that the tip of a weak tooth snapped off. He sleepwalked to the bathroom to rinse out his mouth and taking the sharp scrap of tooth in his hand pressed it between forefinger and thumb producing a pinprick of blood, as if this small pain would bring Nadira back. The Rajmahal lamented though it wasn’t surprised. An expert witness, it had overheard Nadira whispering complaints to its walls and into the phone to her mother, and saw her withdrawing into herself. For all his bluster and manly airs, Junior hadn’t managed to draw Nadira to him.
The blow turned him half crazy, and he tautened and hardened himself more against the rest of the world. Saira and Ali understood some of the torment he was going through and they didn’t try to stop him when he crossed the border to Dhaka in a desperate attempt to cajole Nadira back. Nothing would shake her, though she agreed to send the children to India at distant intervals. Neither Saira nor Ali could do anything about the unfortunate tendencies which Junior displayed in more and more marked fashion from now on.
After all this time, it was the decrepit innocent Maudie’s attack on him which had started the process of change in Junior. Surjeet Shona did him the injustice of believing his cruelty had driven Maudie back to drink and to turn her suicide gun on him. And Junior did himself the same injustice. “My harshness gave Maudie that push!” he insisted. But it was unlikely that looking at semul flowers and birds could have bewitched her permanently out of alcoholism. Or despair. The flowering season of semuls is so short. They didn’t stop to think that it was his sudden appearance which had deflected her gun from herself and saved her. But Junior was to put himself on trial, finally leading to his self-conviction and sentencing. The internal trial meant another period of suffering for him, and still no inkling of the conflict was allowed to show.
A further burden borne by the Malliks at the time was the decline of their other daughter-in-law, Lalitha. She was diagnosed with a brain tumor and Mumtaz, desperate for his family’s support, went willingly back to Calcutta.
“At least Mumtaz has come back to us,” sighed Saira.
“ Yes, now,” said the Rajmahal bitterly. “Now when Lalitha is nearing the end . . . ”
Lalitha’s terminal illness exposed other weaknesses. Junior was incapable of expression, but he could easily see that Lalitha’s “Hinduness,” or her being from Kerala, made no difference to the closeness in the family, or to the universal pain of loss.
Saira need not have wept over Junior. The change was both imminent and immanent. Junior was thrown back into his immanent self when the absurdity of old Jainab and Ramnath’s unflinching name-calling dawned on him after the paving of Maudie’s crisis, Lalitha’s impending death, and his own brush with it. Having convicted himself, he fretted over his sentence in that uncharacteristic gush of self-mortification. And it had to be of course, to withdraw the case against poor broken down Maudie who was laid up in hospital again.
The old Anglo-Indian lady was speechless with delight when Junior gave her the news. She took his hands in her gnarled grasp, “And just imagine, I used to think you were so wicked!”
Junior patted her brusquely, still unused to his new role. “I’m getting another apartment for you Maudie, because the Rajmahal has to be pulled down.”
“Oh but where’s the money?” wailed Maudie.
“Didn’t I tell you I’d do it? Just leave it to me!” He couldn’t help the aggressive tone, his kindness would fit him ill for some time. But inside, he felt is if a fresh breeze was blowing through him. He vowed not only to get her an apartment of her own but to add a topping to the money that was due to her. That and the other major self-sentencing, to give up the Rajmahal, the source of his power and the base of his defeats and frustrations. At last he would readily accede to the brokers of good sense and sell out, slake off all the stale, crusty, accretions of that old building. He would free his parents by moving them to a garden house, and himself from the posturing of all these years which he had worn like a suffocating hairshirt. To sell the Rajmahal was to him like betraying himself, because it might provide the tear in the hairshirt through which his febrile inner surfaces would become visible. But it would lead to his punishment and salvation. And the mansion’s doom.
The Rajmahal shuddered repeatedly, weakening with every shudder, squaring its age-sloped shoulders to face up to the inevitable. Demolitions were in the air, and it uneasily awaited the beginning of the end, the bringing down of the godown. But Junior’s past couldn’t allow him such a facile passage. The twister of violence had been whirling itself into a nice potency ever since the bhaiji, prompted by that very, if not “same,” Junior, had been forced to defy watchman Rawat-Pandey. And that defiance would prove costly.
8
Twice Married, Twice Bereaved
THE RUMBLINGS OF THE RAJMAHAL VOLCANO COULD NO LONGER be ignored. Feelings between sections of the mansion staff had heated up with the goading of Junior’s musclemen. The neighbor, who couldn’t forget the breaching of his wall to make room for the tomb, had passed on his ill-feeling to his son. And the son was kept fully informed of all the goings on. He had no hesitation creeping in through the new breach created by the city toughs, and the volcano was never allowed to go extinct. Though Junior had dismissed the toughs by then, their links with the staff were already well forged. And the two teams placed themselves knowingly on the summit of the volcano.
Surjeet Shona found herself inextricably linked to the situation. Not merely because it was her bhaiji who was involved in the initial problem. But for other, more vital reasons.
Surjeet Shona’s weavers’ organization and other projects were well set, run by dedicated younger workers, and her presence had become nominal. Between a few conferences and seminars, time hung heavy on her hands and her Rajmahal altruism became a compulsion.
The Rajmahal, a sentimentalist if anything, had enjoyed Surjeet Shona most when she had been immersed in Martin, the phase Surjeet Shona considered her berserk phase. It watched her reactions with interest when Martin Strachey came down for his parents’ funeral. He had climbed high in British academic circles, his eminence resting on original researches into Calcutta, the city he had abandoned and with it his parents. “His wife hasn’t come because she’s too ashamed,” thought Surjeet Shona, her heart full with the poignancy of the old couple’s end, and for her ex-lover’s feelings. But there had been too much in between and Martin was too crushed by the manner of his parents’ deaths to feel anything but penitence and grief. And though Surjeet Shona admired his fine graying, the roughening of his skin contradicted by the refining effect of the present pain, no vestige of that searing affair threw threads between them. The other Rajmahalians, inarticulate, their age an upsetting reminder, attended the funeral with ashen faces. Surjeet Shona could see the affected Martin struggling with his emotions, but there was no help for him. “He must feel everyone’s accusing eyes on him,” she thought. “What a burden he’ll have to carry.”
The Rajmahal looked on Surjeet Shona, this original daughter with pensive love. “Neel was wonderfully interesting, and a Calcuttan. But he was a bastard. And the doctor may have been more suited, but he took on too much for his age. It’s a good thing she didn’t marry him. But how can she be protected? She’s so messed up and independent and always trying to do good! I wish she would simply go back to her original self-centered self. Poor little thing.”
Surjeet Shona was neither poor, in another sense, nor little. And though the mansion may have been wise, its assumptions about the “real” Surjeet Shona took it into difficult terrain beyond its scope. Though to do it justice, it was remarkably flexible for such a rigid thing as a building.
Where the Rajmahal found Surjeet Shona’s altruism unnatural, the Gulianis were simply suspicious. Especially after Surjeet Shona agreed to help them redo their apartment.
“What she is getting out of this helping us?” sniffed Mrs. Guliani. “What does she think she is getting?”
And when her husband rebuked her too quickly she shot back, “You are paying for her work or what? How much you are paying?”
In another context, Guliani couldn’t help agreeing with his wife when they discovered Surjeet Shona’s close involvement in all the mansion’s goings-on.
“Always here, always there,” said Mrs. Guliani. “No one can live without her or what?”
“Who knows?” shrugged Guliani disparagingly. “As long as our work gets done.” Inside him he was as puzzled as his wife. “What has she to do with all these people, these Petrovs and Maudie Jessop and all the others? And why is she so ready to help us too?” He wondered if she was getting a cut from the interior decorating firm working for him. “No,” he thought. “She’s too stinking rich as it is.”
“It’s just loneliness,” temporized the Rajmahal. “Everyone gets lonely when there’s no one else in the house.”
While Surjeet Shona ministered to the Petrovs during their last days, she would go onto the veranda where the old Russian sat cross-legged on his divan, his loincloth hanging about his haunches almost indistinguishable from the folds of his skin. She would look at his skeletal form, the skull-head enlarged on the shrunken body, the brittle, feather-light and rigid rib cage rising and falling as the frail lungs pumped. Then the ghoul would rise up from the pit of Surjeet Shona’s stomach, scratching, hurting the sore spots in her intestines trying its best to raise them into ulcers, a process that had begun those many years ago. The tears had decreased and dried gradually, recurring only at decreed intervals. But it was during her son Gurdeep’s wedding that they appeared without cause, the ghoul coming to reside within her permanently and slumber, awakening unannounced.
She wondered if it was the lowered resistance of a weakening body, or the accumulation of sorrows which lay the base of weepiness in the elderly. She recalled her indifference to such manifestations in others, assuming the elderly must be mawkish and soft in the head. That she should weakly shed tears at her son’s wedding or Osheem Petrov ’s frailness or a leaf falling on green grass, was an indication of another her, another Surjeet Shona who had as a robust young woman wept only at her own concerns and sorrows. Wasn’t it beginning to feel perversely pleasurable? “What beauty there is in sorrow, in death” the philosophers said, yet under the sentiment lay knowledge, the knowledge that perfection and perpetual bliss must evade one till the end. So her tears were for everyone, embracing the world and fearfully yet pleasurably waiting for the ghoul to reach out for her.
The tears threatened to turn into a flood after Maudie Jessop’s crisis, and Surjeet Shona, who was apprehensively waiting for the hot flushes of menopause, theorized that the flushing of tears was a substitute. “You get caught anyhow in the end,” she lamented.
She had been battling the underlying fear, of the “down-scaling,” the one-way concertina of life, the folding in with deceptive coos, squeezing and compressing one for the final plucking out by the ghoul. The Rajmahal would be disappointed to know that she felt her sense of urgency had led to impotence in the end, that her activities were insignificant, a speck of a life, and that if she did simply nothing but sit and drink like Maudie, it would make little difference at the very end.
When Lalitha was brought back by Mumtaz for treatment, Surjeet Shona was glad to have him in the Rajmahal. The gravitation of their English lovers toward one another all those years ago, leaving them both rejected, formed an unexploited link. Lalitha sat up with them, and they could see her straining to join the conversation. But the deterioration was pitilessly swift. Often, she would slump over, in the grip of a malignant slumber induced by the jealous proliferating cells. When she returned to the Rajmahal after radical surgery she had already left them in a sense, her mind slipping away and her body helpless. As the process drew on, a desperate Mumtaz sought his sanity in the ground floor Ohri apartment. It was during one such visit that he noticed Surjeet Shona’s tearfulness and put his arm around her. “Come on, SS. You’re the strong one. You can’t fold up on us like this. What’s the matter?”
What could Surjeet Shona say, when she herself couldn’t qualify the “matter.” But the little incident launched her on her dream phase. When she had the first of these dreams she woke up and rocked herself till she was calm. “What was it?” she wondered. “Was it sorrow? For what? Why am I so filled with this sorrow? Did I have a bad dream?”
She couldn’t remember. And these days she woke up often with that experience of deep sorrow. A moment later, it was replaced by a sense of anticipation and joy, and Mumtaz sprang to life in her thoughts. Mumtaz, strong, tall, with his normally twinkling eyes shadowed with the fear of death, another link between them. Were the tears for her past trials, all the deaths, her son, or the tragedy of Lalitha’s present? She quickly got up, eager to be with Mumtaz again.
The Rajmahal could see Surjeet Shona’s metamorphosis, and, like the ghosts, would have pinched itself if it could. It would have cheered too, but the time wasn’t propitious with all the deaths and Lalitha’s ebbing life. “Dear Surjeet Shona, she deserves another chance,” it said. And it keenly observed her awakening.
9
Heavenly Hetaerae
SURJEET SHONA LIES ON THE GRASS UNDER THE RAINTREE. IT IS A broiling summer day and the sun scorches everything that allows it access. She lies in the deepest, soothing yet dark, dark shadow, saved from this access by the raintree. She is naked, her body a
lmost white in the gloom and she looks up at the leaves and flowers of the raintree with its pink silken tufted panicles of flowers and lifted up leaves horizontally fusing to shut out the sun. She closes her eyes and sees the inhabitants of the mysterious black green of the tree, mythical pale beings draping languid limbs from the branches and resting their wings against the trunk, cloudy hetaerae of the sky gods. Underneath her deliciously freed body is the feel of the damp grass, and now and then when there is a movement of air, the leaves stir and the stored water showers her with icy drops. She sees the facade of the Rajmahal in negative imprint on her inner lids, black in the glare beyond the tree with white rectangles where the chiks lie lowered on each veranda. And framed within one of those rectangles is the shimmering figure of a man. Surjeet Shona’s desire grows for that man. She arises, stretches, caressing her flawless body with her hands and walks out from the shade into the sun, turning herself into a torch in the white light. She looks up at the man, shading her eyes with one hand and waving with the other. In a moment, he is with her under the dark of the tree, his body transformed to pale nakedness. Languidly they embrace, exchanging sweet kisses. Then one by one the man takes Surjeet Shona’s nipples, still burning from the sun, between his gentle teeth, while he mounts and enters her, and the hetaerae shake the branches to loosen the tufted flowers onto the lovers.
Surjeet Shona woke up in a fever of arousal aware that the shadowy man, that shadowy lover, was none of the previous inhabitants of her dream world. But Mumtaz. The veranda at which he stood was on the top floor, the Mallik floor, the matching apartment to hers at the lower end of the same mansion, the two balancing ends holding that crazy collection of inhabitants together. Did Lalitha not matter then, Lalitha who was such a close friend and confidant? Then why after all these years, when she was almost fifty, was she having the dreams of a virginal teenager with Lalitha’s husband as the desired other?
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