Rajmahal

by Kamalini Sengupta

  When Mumtaz came running down armed with a curtain rod, Surjeet Shona tried to stop him.

  “Get out of the way, SS.” he called excitedly, pushing her away.

  And he rushed blindly and foolishly into the smelly, mysterious passage where all the evil of the world was that night concentrated and where all the rites of the dark phase of the moon had been performed from ancient times, long before the mansion’s existence, centered in a venom pit.

  Indescribable racking sounds, rushing feet, a scream, conjoined screaming, fearful din of violence. Surjeet Shona running toward it all. The godown an impossible barrier. Pushed out again by a narrow, seething mass. Wrenched out of the way by an arm. Feeling, more than hearing, a vibration deep inside. Mumtaz. Oh yes, Mumtaz . . . in unspeakable pain.

  Ali and Saira come running stiffly, half falling down the stairs. They see the police arrive and the bodies carried out. They see their middle and lately bereaved, just-found-happiness-again son, Mumtaz. And his new love Surjeet Shona. Shaking, standing by them with her hands tightly covering her eyes.

  “Don’t hide from it,” snaps Saira. “Go on. Open your eyes. Look girl. Look my darlings.” She coughs and weeps in spasms, spitting out phlegm and blood.

  “Look after her,” Ali to Surjeet Shona, whispering. He quells an old man’s tremor. “Bring her with you later. I must go.”

  Ali Mallik’s ptosis blinds his eye, an apology to old Jainab for his mockery. He hobbles quickly and painfully to the ambulance and gets in behind the stretchers on one of which lies Mumtaz, still alive. While Surjeet Shona thinks, “It’s me of course. Something always happens when I’m with a man.” Pinioned in the rigid hold of shock, she is powerless to follow her injured lover.

  When Mumtaz had floated by under the high light hanging over the Rajmahal drive, she had looked at his face through her fingers, in obedience to his mother’s injunction. “Look my darlings,” Saira had cried. Surjeet Shona could see his face very clearly, through the crystalline lenses of her faultless eyes. On that face was a fine, lacy tracery of blood, a tattered scarlet net. Junior finds old Jainab’s dentures in the morning, in the passage. The grisly dentures grin back, pleased never to go to work again, never to enhance the smile of the old magician again. Then Junior notices a little circular disc, winking in the sunlight. He approaches it, picks it up—a piece of glass, black, with bluish wisps cunningly worked into it, and it pricks his finger releasing a tiny speck of blood. On the ground is left behind a space, inside a circle of white powder. Such as could have been formed by the ferocious crushing-into-dust of an eggshell. Or a glass eye. Junior remembers ragged Jainab’s arrival at the Rajmahal and the first trick he performed for them a long, long time ago. He remembers how he shared that moment with his little brother, Mumtaz. And he prays, “Let my kid brother live. Oh Allah, please let him live!”

  The police arrest everyone in the lethal fracas, chauffeurs, guards, other staff, city musclemen, neighbors. All the people prised out from the passage are bundled into a black maria. Except for the absent chief protagonists, watchman Rawat-Pandey and Junior. Many have been injured, Old Jainab has been killed outright. But only Mumtaz, the outsider, the intruder, is critically injured. Who knows who is guilty, when lips are universally sealed? But at last and with finality, the watchman’s Rajmahal days are over.

  “Let me defrock him so that my Pir can have a proper guardian,” says Junior to his father.

  “You have carte blanche, my boy,” replies Ali at last. “Oh yes!”

  But the watchman hasn’t lost his Chanakyan skills, and this final joy is denied Junior. Even as they speak, he is heard trumpeting that his youngest son, the apple of his eye, has landed a prime government job. By reason of his status as an untouchable.

  “What the hell!” rages the impotent Junior. “What happened to his Brahmanhood?”

  The watchman has bribed a petty official, and his son is in possession of a stamped piece of paper which certifies him unquestionably as a shudra, the lowliest of the castes, at the head of which tower the lofty brahmans. His shudra status gives his son instant access to a reserved job, in government service.

  “Sir,” says the shameless fraudster, circumspectly divested of his top knot and sacred thread. “I, henceforward to be addressed merely as Valmiki, come humbly to take your leave. I am old now, just like this old building. And my Pir-ji has need of a younger and fitter servant. And in any case,” he sighs. “I can no longer hold such a sacred charge, belonging as I do, with my son, to the lowest of the low. If I have in any way committed wrongdoing, I crave your forgiveness.”

  The bhaiji’s voice rises joyously from the room of the Guru Granth Sahib:“ . . . the wondrous task is done

  Satisfied are all desires

  Filled is the world with joy

  All pain ended

  Complete, pure, eternal . . . ”

  Not long after, the Rajmahal is vacated by the remaining inhabitants and sold. It is destroyed, including that rooted carbuncle, Rawat-Pandey-Valmiki’s godown, eradicated in such a savage and surgical manner it hardly feels the pain. Surjeet Shona stops by one afternoon and steps into the space of clean new light between the two adjoining properties. She steps straight through the nonexistent wall with its nonexistent iron rails and barbed wire, from the pavement into the nonexistent garden. Opened out like this, the ground looks diminished, impossible to imagine the scale of the building once standing here. Surjeet Shona’s feet sink into the pink and beige rubble of brick and plaster, by shards of high quality glass with peacocks’ tail eyes which look up at a dark, cloudy sky. The raintree is back to full green strength, its leaves drooping in the sunlessness. A watchman appears by her side and notes the direction of her gaze.

  “There were once vultures on this tree, Memsahib. A pair of vultures. The police came and fired their guns at the tree top, through the gaps, not at the vultures themselves you understand, for that would be inauspicious. Again and again they fired. And that is when the great birds left.”

  There isn’t a pigeon in sight either. The mansion’s memory is seeping away through its heart, brain, its cornerstone, into Surjeet Shona’s hand, which has lifted up the stone, trying in vain to pass into her emotional body. The tremors of its expending power force it to slip from her grasp to fall soundlessly to the ground, yet shatter to a powder which will never be reconstituted. The new building, many floors high, will be filled with hard squares of brightly lit offices and hard bright machines and will remember nothing. Only the Pir’s grave will remain, Surjeet Shona can see it, protected by Junior’s wall bulge, behind a wilting dust-shrouded hedge maze. It will evolve again into a center of congregation, devotion and strife. And near it is that old pit, swirling with venom.

  12

  Memory

  SURJEET SHONA REMEMBERS ONE BY ONE AND OVER AND OVER HER marriages and the deaths of her men. “I won’t send for Gurdeep. I will not!”

  Will Mumtaz live or die? Will she lose her fear of that ghoul, transcend it? Hasn’t she talked to Mumtaz of the now because of that fear? Will Mumtaz live or die? Will he live or die?

  When she visits Mumtaz in hospital with the distraught Saira that night, she finds everyone from the Rajmahal present, thronging the corridors. Old Jainab’s body has been taken away, but his relatives are there, wailing and beating their breasts. They come crowding around Surjeet Shona. As if she can bring him back to life.

  She breaks away and finds herself in Mumtaz’s room. Saira, who has reached there before her, is standing with bowed head near her prone son. She looks up. She knows Surjeet Shona is the one who matters.

  “Go to him, darling,” and she retreats to cough and cough painfully, while Ali puts his arms around her and tries to help her with a glass of water. There is a flurry and Junior is there. He dashes forward, sees Surjeet Shona and holds back. He huddles with his parents and others of the family, and they dumbly watch Surjeet Shona sleepwalking toward Mumtaz. They register this is the first time they have seen
her looking ugly. And they remember how Mumtaz grew ugly before their eyes as Lalitha slowly died. Surjeet Shona’s hair is flattened in parts, standing up in others. Its white spreading dramatically. Her shalwar-kameez is askew, and she appears too thin, shapeless. It is almost impossible to look at her face, the loosened, trembling lips, the softening jawline, the deepening lines. The conspirators, Gravity and Time have been presented with another victory. Abruptly, as sometimes happens.

  Surjeet Shona is afraid to speak. Or look at Mumtaz. Her eyes gaze about the room. Avoiding the bed scrupulously. She looks at the ceiling, white, dead white, in one corner a small patch with loose plaster. Her eyes reach a ceiling fan hanging down in the middle of the room, on an extra long rod. This is an old building with high ceilings. She looks down the wall to the right of the room. “It must be a thick wall. These old buildings have such thick walls.” She moves forward slowly all the while. Then she stumbles. Her eyes fall on an edge of white. Where she can see a hand. “Mumtaz?” The hand is lying palm-down, and the top is covered with plaster. Out of the plaster moves a long tube culminating in a suspended bottle. Her eyes swivel out and away from the bottle. Then like a pendulum, toward the figure on the bed. They stop at the face. All that is visible of it apart from the hand. The body is under a sheet. The head swathed in bandages. The central portion of eyes, nose, and mouth uncovered. The eyes closed. The fine lacy tracery of blood, the tattered scarlet net has been cleared. Leaving a crazy pattern of cuts and contusions. Surjeet Shona’s hand touches the free fingers. And Mumtaz opens his eyes and looks straight at her.

  Her heart melts and lightens through a rainbow burst with the flash of his mischievous eyes. “SS.” Almost inaudible. “How good of you . . . Always . . . so good . . . My ’Litha’s friend . . . ’Litha . . . ” And, alarmingly to everyone who immediately rushes around him, his eyes fill with tears.

  Surjeet Shona feels a familiar twisting pain in her center. Her heart turns to cold dark stone. She is intimate with the nuances in Mumtaz’s eyes. And she knows. Instantly. Much ahead of the others. That Mumtaz has entered a time warp. Pitilessly drawn back by the allure of his long and deep marriage. To Lalitha. That a wedge of his life, the crucial wedge preceding the incident, has been neatly sliced out of his memory . . .

  “If he dies,” she thinks, “I will have to live with the memory of that last gesture he made to me. Of his pushing me away. ‘Get out of the way, SS!’ he said. ‘Get out of the way!’” Surjeet Shona leaves her lover’s limp unremembering fingers with a stunned expression.

  “Ali, Ali. Can it be . . . ?” Saira, whispering.

  “The boy will go through his suffering all over again . . . ”

  “I thought, wasn’t he, SS, weren’t they . . . ?” Fayyaz.

  “She hasn’t realized it yet. SS hasn’t realized he’s going to go through all that pain again. All she knows is she may lose him. That’s all she can think of.”

  “We lost little ’Litha. Little warm ’Litha, our dearest son’s dearest love. And he nearly lost his reason. Then SS came and saved him . . . ” Ali’s voice breaks.

  “He may lose his reason completely. Now . . . ”

  “Darling . . . ”

  “ Wait. Let the doctor . . . ”

  “ We must tell him! We must! We can’t let him forget . . . ”

  The doctor looks at Saira with a frown, and Ali shushes her again. Surjeet Shona stands against the farthest wall, her eyes wide open and dry, glittering, unfocused on the doctor’s intent form. Then the doctor calls and the family circles the bed. Surjeet Shona, statusless, falters and keeps her distance. Out of Mumtaz’s sight.

  The doctor whispers with the family. Surjeet Shona moves closer, turning her glittering eyes on Mumtaz. His eyes are closed again.

  Ali and Saira circle Surjeet Shona in with them. The doctor stands watching.

  Mumtaz opens his eyes and smiles at his loved ones. Then grimaces with pain. “Darling,” Saira again. At a loss for words. “How, does it, are you ... how do you feel? Tell us . . . do you remember?”

  Mumtaz’s eyes move desperately from figure to figure. Dilating. Rolling about. Demented.

  The doctor gestures at them to stop, move back. Whispering, “Later. It’s dangerous now. Later we will have to gently probe his mind to bring back the past. Now. He must rest. Please. Never try to force him.” Mumtaz is unconscious again. The doctor soothes them. “It’s all right. That’s the best way for him to rest . . . ”

  It comes to be known that the revisitation of that extreme loss may prove not only tragic, but hazardous in Mumtaz’s frail condition. “His memory may come back. Such things have been known to happen.” They know the doctor is being kind. Every attempt at reminding Mumtaz, even gently recounting small episodes from the past, is met with the demented rolling eyes and the swoon. And Mumtaz drifts incoherently in and out of consciousness in a time warp, bordering death.

  Memory, can do many harmful acrobatics, denying an inconvenient fact which simply ceases, never was . . . In this arena of memory and forgetting , truth and hallucination, people often cannot place themselves or identify their own roles . . . Surjeet Shona reads Petrov’s passage on memory again and again through the sick wrenching inside her. “Does Mumtaz not want me in his deepest self? Was our short span of love an inconvenient fact which has simply ceased? Oh Uncle Osheem, why did you not comment on this grotesque edge, this extreme of forgetfulness? Who do I look to now, what do I do to bring Mumtaz back?”

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” whispers Ali to Saira.

  “You know I am, darling. We’re all thinking the same thing.”

  The inconvenient fact imagined by Surjeet Shona is something other for them. All, every one of them, want Mumtaz to forget the other way around, to forget Lalitha. It is the remembrance of her that is inconvenient, not the living, not Surjeet Shona.

  “What a tragedy for Lalitha’s memory and our grandchildren, that we should wish this.”

  “And what a tragedy for SS and Mumtaz that we are forced to make such a wish!”

  “Only the return of his memory can save him. Only remembering he’s in love with SS.”

  “He can fall in love with her again, can’t he?”

  The family clings together, and Surjeet Shona is pushed to stay as close as possible to Mumtaz. She looks long at his eyes behind which his loss spreads like the waters of the ocean, into which she feels she can plunge dangerously any moment. The eyes return her look when they are open, but without recollection of that essential period. “Will I lose this last, this best love once and for ever?” Can anything, should anything, be “once and forever,” when the world so consistently denies permanence? Is it of any use to try and pass back into him the currents of their new love, willing him to forget one way and remember another? Or fall in love again? If he, and she with him, knowing its surreal wastefulness, can traverse that terrible terrain of anguish . . . again? Either way lies their salvation, and their tragedy. If Mumtaz’s memory comes back, the cruelty of that repeated grief in a time warp will haunt him. And if he falls in love with Surjeet Shona again, there will be that gap, that forgotten period . . . And they will both feel forever uneasy, both betrayed and guilty.

  Surjeet Shona can’t keep away from the hospital. But should she confuse Mumtaz, while he wonders, “Why, why is SS waving her face in front of me with such persistence? What is she to me . . . ?”

  Should she not free him, let him go back to his Lalitha? And his ugly, grief?

  Isn’t association with her, Surjeet Shona, preordained to end unhappily?!

  Does she have the right to engage him in this fierce tug-of-war?!

  But then, should she wish him back to Lalitha, back to the dead?!!

  Can she wish that on him and such a sacrifice on herself?!!

  Ask no more, Surjeet Shona, lest thy head fall off!!!!

  Trussed up with the cutting rope of this tug-of-war, she strains to break free. While the love that surrounds Mumtaz waits,
with its breath held.

  And then one day, Mumtaz opens his eyes and smiles.

  “SS. Is it you? You look so tired. What has happened?”

  His gaze drifts about the white hospital room.

  “Mother!” he exclaims. “Father!”

  Saira and Ali come tentatively up to him. Afraid. Will those eyes start their wild staring, their dangerous rolling again?

  The eyes are quiet, normal, and one by one they let go their breaths. Held for so long.

  “Darling,” says Saira, then stops as Ali darts her a warning look. The parents embrace their son gently and are surprised at the firmness of his return embrace.

  Junior bustles out of the room after directing meaningful looks at them. They wait. Mumtaz has closed his eyes again. Was it a temporary break? No one speaks.

  The doctor comes in with Junior and approaches Mumtaz.

  Ali holds Saira who is silently sobbing. She starts coughing and Ali ferries her to the back of the room, where Surjeet Shona stands alone, tears streaking her face. Ali pats her on the shoulder, he has two women to comfort.

  Then they hear Mumtaz talking in a normal voice. Surjeet Shona suddenly grows younger. She becomes the recognizable, the younger Surjeet Shona.

  “Doctor! What’s wrong with me?” the voice of the cheerful, normal Mumtaz.

  And then, wonder of wonders. “SS,” he says softly, “SS. Have I been giving you a rough time? What happened? Did anyone get hurt?”