Rajmahal

by Kamalini Sengupta

  Surjeet Shona left her bed and, clothed, drifted onto the veranda, down the steps and into the garden and glare of her dream, toward the raintree, under which she had just lain in that dew of heavenly arousal.

  She had inherited some of the detritus of the Rajmahal. The abandoned wrought iron elevator, the birdcage, lay at one end of the veranda, modified, filled with plants, and the two marble ladies of the lobby stood hidden in the shrubbery outside. Junior, hyped by prudery, had provoked his sequestered father. “They must be removed!” he had exhorted. Ali was admittedly disgusted when his son had taken him onto the landing and pointed out the once-pristine, ever-young and elderly figures clothed in pigeon droppings. And the other desecration committed on them, their nipples and area between the legs, blackened, accentuated by the repeated and surreptitious finger-rubbing of drifters. Even the mansion had been feeling uncomfortable for some time.

  “ W hat will happen to the fountains?” Ali had protested.

  “The fountains can stay,” Junior had said. “We’ll convert them into normal fountains. We’ ll even allow them to play. But this disgraceful exhibitionism cannot be tolerated any more. How could you, as a Muslim, tolerate it in the first place!?”

  Surjeet Shona’s garden became the repository of the statues, though she promised to position them discreetly. She had them cleaned, nullifying the offending stains with bleach and detergent. When they reappeared after a few days in the sun, she hoped the dappling of the shrubs would camouflage them.

  She hesitated as she moved out toward the raintree. Since Petrov ’s disappearance it had frightened her to look at it, and though the vultures had mostly gone, a pair had stayed to build a giant nest on top of the tree. Her attention was first drawn to them when she saw them noisily copulating on that remote summit. Then they took up residence, huge even at that height, altering the profile of the raintree. She walked part of the way down the lawn without raising her eyes, and saw that the ground under the tree was caked with droppings.

  She was repelled. “To think I lay there in my dream! Why such a cruel dream, why?”

  She turned her back on the tree and looked up at the mansion, shading her eyes with her hands. The chiks were down as in her dream. But there was no figure on the Mallik floor. She went back to the veranda and lowered herself onto a reclining chair. The tree was within sight minus the pale hetaerae, only the vulture couple, making a majestic tableau on their high stage. She shut her eyes, but all she could see on her throbbing eyelids was an ugly face. Ever since Surjeet Shona’s affliction by her fear, it had manifested as a series of merging and changing aspects, mostly faces. In the early days, while she and Martin were locked in those terrible ecstasies, the faces would appear inside her eyelids when they closed. Later, when the conflagration in Punjab was at its height, and her break with her son at its most painful, the crimson viscousness of the pool of nectar was there in her eyelids, tiny bloody eyelid pools which carried the shadow of the giant ghoul in all its aspects. And it was always distorted, whether with a satyr twist of the lips or a sharp arrangement of the facial bones or the elongated cynicism of the God of Death. So this melting and changing image became almost like Surjeet Shona’s familiar, except that she was no witch and the image came unbidden and always with its wake of dread. So was it with Petrov’s vultures . . . It was natural to believe, once his body had vanished, that the vultures had carried him off and devoured him in some hidden charnel house. Surjeet Shona pictured this charnel house as the top of a tall tree, it had to be that same busy raintree, with a whole world being enacted on its spreading and complex summit, a pre-afterlife world. There the vultures pranced with spread wings in a hideous danse macabre shrieking harshly while they fought for poor broken Petrov’s meager remains. She lay on the chair with her eyes closed, allowing the faces to change and coalesce till they ceased. Her eyelids grew blessedly quiet and she became aware of the loud cawing of roosting crows. When she lifted her eyes to look up again, it was dark and the vultures had gone. And then she saw them in flight against the twilit sky, and her fear evaporated. Ordered by nature to associate with rotting carcasses and the raw, red insides of once living beings, they had been transformed into phenomenal creatures of the wind, full of grace and mystery.

  Whenever Lalitha improved slightly through the rough progress of her disease, Mumtaz would come alight with hope. Surjeet Shona would feel the joy of her dream lover working in herself and wonder, what did she want? Was it Mumtaz, was it not? It was too early to say, and she herself was the first to admit that dreams were hardly the thing to go on.

  Lalitha died, too young for death, her face still unlined, her hair still black. “Her cropped hair,” thought Surjeet Shona. “Her beautiful hair, tragically cropped for that ruthless carving up.”

  She and Mumtaz spent time on either side of Lalitha’s hospital bed, watching her die, her eyes only sometimes open with their light dulled. Surjeet Shona looked at Mumtaz growing gaunt, gray-faced, his shoulder bones jutting out. She couldn’t dissociate him from her dream-under-the-raintree Mumtaz, he was that Mumtaz. Was it love which gave her such pleasure to keep looking at his downcast face, the fuzz of gray hair withdrawing from the temples, yet forming a high thick crown which occasionally let out a strand, the long bumpy nose and wide lips, and sometimes catch his eye? Or was it just the dream remembrance which made her long to run her fingers over the vulnerable collar bone and neck and down that gaunt body, once so robust and strong? Many came, Lalitha’s children, Ali and Saira Mallik, Fayyaz. And Junior, who was given to standing grimly at the door. Once, when Lalitha had almost fallen off the bed in a fit, Mumtaz had burst out at the dark figure of his brother, “Get out! Get out Junior! Standing over her like a jinni! How can she ever get well?!” Junior had dropped the curtain which he was holding aside and vanished, never to come to Lalitha’s room again till the end. But it hadn’t helped. Nothing had helped. And Mumtaz had later apologized to an expressionless Junior.

  After shouting at his older brother, Mumtaz had buried his face in the comatose Lalitha’s side and wept, and all Surjeet Shona could do was swallow and put her hands on his shoulders, helpless and angry.

  “Come on you Monster!” she had called silently to the ghoul. “You’ve had your fun! Get on with it!”

  When Lalitha died, late one evening, everyone was in the room down to the servants. They stood there in spaced-out silence, their sharp shadows slanting in paralleled abstractions under the glare of the light. No one thought to stop them as they came in one by one, somber, awed at the thought of looking death in the face.

  “She is brain dead,” whispered the monitoring doctor.

  Surjeet Shona could see Lalitha breathing, watched the monitor screen of Lalitha’s heartbeat, the painful, jagged, jerky graph, pulling itself along its rocky path. Then the pik, pik sound stopped and became a long, even eeeee . . . not even a wail, because it had no changing cadences, just a dead, flat, inert eeeeee . . . The graph had stopped jigging and also drew itself straight, flat, inert, a path out of life into the black, illusory space of the inner machinery . . . “He was right, Uncle Osheem was right. It’s the little differences, the changing pressures shutting and opening the valves, forcing the graph to jump up and down, that give us life. When that restlessness goes, there is only nothingness.” The machine was switched off. In the silence, a daughter threw herself on her mother’s body and wept noisily. Mumtaz was sitting by the bed with his face hanging low, his hand clenched over Lalitha’s. And the others just waited. “While the ghoul grins!” thought Surjeet Shona. She closed her eyes too and tried to imagine herself dead, but all she saw were the ugly faces swimming in the two little red eyelid pools.

  “The day those images disappear for good, my brain will also die,” she thought.

  It was summer when Lalitha died, and even after she was brain dead, holding her heart-live hand, Mumtaz felt her sweat, or was it his own, dripping from his brow onto her.

  His voice broke, “How can it be
when she’s still sweating?” he asked the doctor. “Open your eyes,” he begged softly, desperately sealed into the closeness he had built up with Lalitha over many years. “Open your eyes. ’Litha. Look at me. ’Litha. Open your eyes.”

  Tears slowly dripped, like Mumtaz’s sweat, from the onlookers’ eyes as they saw his grief, and heard the scattered sniffling and Lalitha’s rasping breath which made the quiet, pik-pik-ing hospital room quieter. Spaced out with the others in that oblique design of parallel lines were Saira and Ali whose tears were for their son, Fayyaz and Juniors’ for their brother, and Surjeet Shona’s for her love, Mumtaz, and her friend ’Litha. But for most of the others it was like watching a film, which they imagined to be connected to their own lives because it was happening in the same room with them. They also knew in their heart of hearts, that their tears were not of grief but of the many catharses that take place in a life without affecting one personally. It was poignant, because it concerned someone not meant to die at that age, leaving behind such a heartbroken husband. And they acted their parts in that film feeling the necessity of their separate roles.

  After Lalitha’s death, whenever she could tear herself away from the Mallik apartment where Mumtaz was sunk in terrible grief, Surjeet Shona again found herself spending time in the Guru Granth Sahib room. She listened to the verses of the Gurus of the Sikh progression, and to the poetry of the Sufi and bhakti saints embodied in the sacred book.

  The wick is dry, the oil runs out,

  The drum is still, the dancer sleeps,

  The fire burned out, no smoke ensues . . .

  The string has snapped, the lute is mute . . .

  O Kabir, he who has conquered the five sins, . . .

  To reach the highest seat, he has not far to go.

  To Surjeet Shona the simpler yet inspired sentiments of the hymns, full of the joy of devotion, calling with unquestioning faith on the name of the Supreme Being, were detached from the reality of grief.

  Of his bounty one cannot write too much . . .

  God is master, God is truth

  His name spelleth love divine . . .

  Yet both were part of the same created world which Mumtaz wanted to escape and which the hymns together celebrated and transcended. She thought of the idea that rebirth was undesirable, that merging with the Supreme Being was the ultimate goal.

  Rebirth undesirable?

  “How can that be?” thought Surjeet Shona. “How can rebirth, or birth for that matter, be undesirable? Why has this beautiful world been created then? Do we run away because of a momentary unhappiness? If the “highest seat,” the ideal, is achieved, and all animate beings merge with the Supreme and there is no more rebirth, then why this world with all its fabulous beauty? To go back to Uncle Osheem’s idea of that little difference, that disharmonious conflict, does even “God” need it so badly that he has to create the world as we know it, the undesirable world from which we all must escape, working toward our non-return? If he is “God” can he not, much more easily, retain his wholeness, instead of sending all those parts of himself out into the world? Is it because it is a world of such intricacy and beauty that he too has forever been filled with desire for it? Seduced, by his own creation?

  She was going through such pain with Mumtaz steeped in the depths of sorrow, which she too had known in great measure, over and over again. Had she at any time, wanted to end this life of hers? Perhaps, intermittently, yes, perhaps. She watched Mumtaz calling out incoherently, pleading to join Lalitha. There was a scale, wasn’t there? Where things were weighed. In the balance. So then, could one say, the pain and sorrow outweighed the happiness? Was the pain, caused by her great fear of Death, enough to outweigh the happinesses of her life and thus push her into the arms of that very Death willingly? Could she ever countenance suicide, like Maudie, and the Stracheys, and Mumtaz in his frenzy? The scales must have tipped over during those intervals of berserk sorrow following the blows of her tragedies, but in the end, would she say the result was a permanently tilted scale?

  “No,” thought Surjeet Shona with conviction, “those scales, will never be still enough, never stabilize enough, to tip over forever. We’re kept guessing, and that is what makes life, the arrhythmic tilting and lifting. In any case Uncle Osheem,” she said, addressing Petrov in an imaginary monologue, “Please tell me why most creatures, from ants to elephants, and including us poor humans along the way, have such a strong life-instinct, fight death so automatically and implacably? Why does the orderly state have laws which punish murder but not self-defense? Doesn’t all this give Life the place of winner? The orderly state protecting life, the orderly state punishing the taker of life, the orderly state protecting the defender of life? So. Isn’t it better not to wonder any more, but to get on with the business of life. And living?”

  She felt a surge.

  She could see Mumtaz coming out of his despair, with his Mother’s nurturing and the bright potential of herself in the Rajmahal.

  And as if to ready herself, Surjeet Shona began significant preparations. She was almost as normal, courageous, sexy, sensual, frank and healthy as she had been when she had first come to settle in the Rajmahal, and she was no self-sacrificing martyr, “termartyr,” as her father taunted anyone that way inclined.

  Appraising herself in the mirror she approved of the stylish, shoulder length hair, with its beginnings of soft gray, and the allowed luxury of tinting to minimize the gray. Her Chinese hairdresser was especially attentive.

  “Her beauty will finish off if she dezzint hurry! Why you wasting time, eh? You can make some chappie happy still!” And after the cosseting at her weekly session she would say, “See, I make you so young. Lookit dat body. Come on, SS. When you going to bring de good news, eh?”

  The Rajmahal looked on morose and loving. “ Will the games never end?” it thought. But on the other hand it also realized that loneliness was unanswerable.

  10

  A Love Story

  TO MUMTAZ, THAT SEASON WAS BONDED TO THE LURKING unpleasantness of a certain summer in his childhood. A hot, humid, windless summer, when the children of the Rajmahal, normally so vividly active, were overcome with a torpor which they threw off only toward evening when the south breeze started up from the sea, and the humidity turned cool against their melting bodies. They changed playgrounds over the years. The maidan, where the activities were endless. Or the zoo, where their favorites were the magnificent white tigers of Rewa. Or the pontoon restaurant on the Strand, where after a boat ride suspended within the limpid orange and red skywater of the sunset they would eat ice-cream and cake. Or sometimes the Lake Club, with its sloping lawns, its shed housing those impossibly elegant racing boats, when they would go for dinghy rides around the mysterious islands of the Dhakuria lakes, and climb into the cement loudspeaker which broadcast ragged cement music at regatta time. Magical regatta time, when racing boats were taken out on the shoulders of muscular oarsmen who would row obediently and gracefully to the rhythmic “in-out, in-out” of the coxes, slumping over their oars and almost tumbling into the water with exhaustion at the end of a race. The star skull oarsman was Jimmy Sen, unbeatable hero worshipped by the children. Towering, hefty, unshaven, Jimmy Sen was their invincible Tarzan, Roy Rogers, Captain Marvel that summer. Standing on the upstairs terrace, the Rajmahal children’s screams would rise shrilly over the adult voices. “Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!”

  The Lake Club was the very same club contemplated by Proshanto Mojumdar while he swam in forbidden waters at the all-white club. This club was closed to white people, started as an alternative serious rowing club for Indians forbidden entry into the older Calcutta Rowing Club. Here was Martin Strachey, allowed into the Lake Club premises (for non-whites only), a child after all, but not his parents, who would wave in a friendly way from the Calcutta Rowing Club (for whites only), which jutted out at right angles to the Lake Club. The clubs were notionally separated by a cantilever bridge over a stretch of deep water, a well-proportioned and
elegant steel bridge which was out of bounds, cut off from both clubs by barbed wire fences. The bridge was open to the public, and thronged by crowds dressed up for their outings in colors never seen in either privileged club, munching peanuts, moorri and channa from paper packets, their children holding on to balloons and ice sticks. The attraction in that out-of-bounds stretch was the view of the large, fat, speckled fish which moved in shoals, in and out of the shadowy water in sudden rushes at the eatables thrown at them. The Rajmahal children managed to get those fish to come to their side too, and threw them genteel crumbs begged from the club cook. But they couldn’t see the fish clearly because of the interfering fence and sloping grassy bank. Those were the idyllic times.

  The bad time started that summer with Mumtaz fracturing his arm. He and half a dozen others were plunging uncontrollably up and down on a slanting tree branch on the maidan, swifter harder, shouting breathlessly, when it snapped. Mumtaz, who was perched on the highest point at the tip found himself pinioned on the ground with an excruciating pain tearing through his right arm which had fractured in three places. His young bones repaired rapidly, but he was never able to play more than a weak game of tennis afterwards, destroying the promise he had so far shown.

  Meera Petrov was the only insider Rajmahal girl child that summer, and she was hardly recognized as such because she was such a tomboy. So when she came forth in a two piece dress with her flat midriff bared a good four inches and her almost-as-flat chest hidden behind an entrancing top with wide frills, the surprised boys were taking in hissing breaths before they knew it. Meera, brown-haired, golden-skinned, was in the ultimate state of pre-puberty perfection, and that day, she had applied a light gleam of lipstick and a dash of pale blue eye shadow. In a sudden realization of the effect she was having, she preened, swaying her hips as she walked in a manner which was to become a habit but was that day, all new. The boys, smitten as if with one blow, were anxiously trying to please her. Mumtaz was filled with a desire to place his hands under the frilly top and on that flat chest, and felt an acute sense of frustration with his arm in plaster. That was the summer Ali and Saira decided to shepherd the children to the Lake Club and keep them under their watchful gazes because of Mumtaz’s accident. He couldn’t show off his nonexistent rowing skills in the fixed punt, he couldn’t clamber in and out of the loudspeaker. All he could do was to sit in the broad-bottomed dinghy to be taken out on the water by an obliging boatman, or hand over to bare-midriffed Meera his share of crumbs to feed the cuddly fish. Meera was enjoying herself, trying to make up her mind whom to favor, Martin or Mumtaz, setting the tradition for their future rivalry. The other possibility was Junior, but he was already forbiddingly distant. Meera’s younger brother Boris, whose friends were Fayyaz Mallik and the Norman boys, was disgusted and couldn’t believe what was happening to his sister. In the end neither aspirant succeeded. They were standing at the barbed wire fence, looking over at the all-white club, arguing about segregation, when Meera, fired by her new powers, said, “Well. It’s just as bad here, not allowing palefaces.” And to the shock of the boys she began climbing the fence. “See if they can stop me. I’m both. A paleface and an Indian.” She went cautiously, placing her feet and hands carefully between the barbs and steadying herself by holding onto a post. But her weight loosened the strands and in a moment she had slipped, landing astride the barbed wire and goring herself before she fell off. The frilly top caught and tore and that desirable not quite flat chest was exposed. But Mumtaz was too shocked to appreciate this, his fear exaggerated by the terrible commotion from the lake. Jimmy Sen, who had been practicing solo, going all-out in a powerful burst of speed, had had his spine rammed into by the pointed bow of another skull, novice-propelled and racing against the one-way rules. The dazed children had been hurried away by the Malliks before Jimmy Sen was brought in, but for a long time Mumtaz imagined the blood gushing from a hole which went right through his hero’s body. Jimmy Sen had taken years to regain partial normalcy and start rowing again. By that time Meera had gone away to boarding school, and Mumtaz was getting ready for Cambridge. The loss and memories associated with that summer surfaced at Lalitha’s death, from which he felt he would never recover.