Rajmahal (18 page)

Now, in a sense, Petrov had the “enemy within.” Reema Devi was fiercely protective of her autonomy and was as gregarious as most Bengalis. But in spite of the social surge, their bedroom stayed privileged and private. This sacred space was their enclosed world of carnality and any idea of subjugating strong-minded Reema was wildly exciting to Petrov. Another titillation was her powerful stage personality which seemed to vary her identity as often as her roles.

Reema Devi was a budding star when Petrov met her. “A budding star with budding breasts,” Petrov always reminisced. He would never forget his first view of her on the stage. She was sixteen, so slight of frame she had to pad out her figure to play the heroine, an impersonation of a female by a female. An imitation of an adolescent male actor, common in those days when few women appeared on the stage. By the time they were married, the padding was forgotten and Reema Devi was a young woman in full bloom. She was now the center of Petrov's life and a central figure in Calcutta's theater world.

Petrov's decision to produce
Neel Dorpon
, the
Blue Mirror
, was the result of his continuing obsession with famine, an examination of all the possible nuances of that terrible recurring phenomenon. Indigo was planted on precious rice paddy land at the behest of the planters, adding to the choiceless peasant's chronic hunger. Petrov imagined the peasants being forced to eat indigo in place of rice and turning blue before they died. No grotesquerie could beat the pictures imprinted in his gut.

The great Bengal famine occurred in 1943, soon after his move to the Rajmahal. Here he was, filled with the joy of his personal life, yet it was as if
the world had entered the intrinsic darkness lying in the pit of humanity's stomach. He saw writhing before him the spilled and stinking intestines from that stomach's pit, defiling the pavements of his adopted city. Nineteen forty-three plunged him into a well of cynicism, the deepest cynicism of which man is capable. It coincided with the other catastrophic cynicism across the oceans, Hitler's death and torture camps, which were shrouded in secrecy before hitting the world. Yet, and this to Petrov was the climactic point of that cynicism, the famine was out in the open, in full view in one of the largest cities of the world, but it would never be addressed by those who mattered at the critical time. It would never provoke the outrage and telling castigation that followed the end of the war in Germany. It would slink in slyly unheralded, and then like a whiplash, scourge, stun, and destroy its mass victims. And there would be no rebuke, no redress.

It slunk up on Petrov with the same slyness, in spite of his watchfulness. Blaming himself for his insensitive antennae, he was drawn out, further and further, to probe painfully. He knew of the famines of his own country, Russia, one of which had taken place when he was a near adult. Yet he had never been able to visualize the reality. Humans foraging in dustbins, their sores infested with maggots. Live skeletons eating from drains, anything they could find. Children sacrificed by mothers. Little girls bartered to whorehouses. Rice mixed with gravel, and a pitiless trade in gravel to augment that rice. At times he felt he was looking down the shithole of some epochal slum where the unspeakable remnants of hundreds of years festooned the squatting room, the walls, the floors and the clogged hole itself through which one could see below. He forced himself to examine it, look closely, face on, breathe in that stench, and it was so nauseating and tormenting, that his defenses did their best to obliterate it. He had to fight this tendency, and then he would find himself grappling with another depthless frustration, the frustration of his complete helplessness, though he wandered the streets like a mad man with his car full of provisions, handing out gruel, bread, fruit, milk, water. The first to accept his offerings, an emaciated man lying next to his dead wife and children, oozing a glutinous jelly from his eyes, swallowed once, gurgled, and died, as if Petrov had fed him poison. He imagined the man's intestines, dehydrated, collapsed, with the walls sticking together, refusing the passage of food. That fatal swallow had ruptured the brittle noodles of his intestines and stopped his weak breath. The creatures, that is what Petrov called them, so far removed were they from the human state, confused him with their
reactions. Sometimes watching him listlessly with the desirelessness presaging death, at others mobbing his car and blindly hitting out in the scramble to grab and cram their mouths. At a friend's free kitchen, he saw a mother rushing in before the gates were closed, after thrusting her children out of the way. He saw his friends fighting with the mother to get the children in and feed them. And yet, he had already seen mothers dying while feeding their children before themselves . . . People were trying to help, one and two, twenty and thirty, perhaps a hundred starving humans brought back from the brink. Kitchens were opened in well-to-do homes for one, two hours. “After all,” thought Petrov when he helped at these places, “who would allow one's own plump wife or child to want, even for a grain? Would it not be shameful then to let others beat on the gates with skeletal fists, and refuse to fill out the stark ribs which have just slid down those gates, even with a little gruel?” So some gates were opened and the gentlefolk gave to the fortunate minority who stumbled against them. The very black marketeers who had fanned the famine, and were given indifference-based immunity by the authorities, also helped in this small effort, but with different motives. They did it to divert the wrath of the gods. And to buy legitimacy.

Petrov almost lost all feeling, but he could see that Reema Devi was incapable of accepting this abdication of human dignity. And he saw her abhorrence burst out one day when they came on a group of press photographers busy at work.

She went at the photographers like a tigress, snatching the nearest camera and crashing it to the ground. “How dare you! Are they creatures in a zoo?” Petrov, struggling with the panting, resisting Reema Devi, waited for the photographers to strike back. But they were saying with awe, “Look! It's Reema Devi. It's Reema Devi herself!”

Ignoring their awe, filling her lungs to the full and throwing out her voice from its base, Reema Devi's words attained a thrilling resonance. “Pustules! Arrant swine! Is this the time for photography? Tell me! Have you no shame?” One of the photographers rashly raised his camera and clicked and Reema Devi furiously snatched it from his hold. Petrov was only just able to save it and hand it over before further damage was done. She breathed fire in Petrov's constricting grip and her voice rose to greater resonances, “Oh so now it's me you want, is it? What a drama for you! What a scoop! Animals! Degraded, filthy animals!” Trying to break from Petrov's hold, she kept crying, “Let go, Petro! Let me go!”

The causes of this drama lay prone, their shriveled, wrinkled skin shining on their skeletons, their eyes oozing that mysterious white jelly, creatures. But their continuous moaning had reached a crescendo and become a euphony from hell, “
Ma, duto phan, duto phan dao
.” “That's all they want after all,” thought Petrov, still grappling with Reema Devi. “It's so simple. Just a little gruel after all!” And that chorus throbbed inside Petrov, throbbed through the city and filled it with the heartthrob of despair. “
Ma, duto phan, duto phan dao
.” “Mother, give me gruel, just a little gruel . . . ” Reema Devi had stopped ranting but her harsh sobs added to this euphony, to the power of her scene, and the photographers looked on with awe. Petrov let go of her and they went through the motions like automatons, handing out gruel and packets of food, helped by the contrite photographers. When Reema Devi turned to leave, staggering with emotion and supported by Petrov, the photographers at last dared to lift up their endangered cameras, to click respectfully and guiltily when she was safely back in the car.

When Petrov picked up the next morning's papers, he saw the expected picture of Reema Devi on the front page, looking like Goddess Durga, and he thought, “They, and I, understand completely why she behaved as she did. Each of us is as helpless as the best or the worst of us . . . ” He knew there was no real will, no means, to combat the immensity of the famine.

The last time Petrov drove out with his supplies, he experienced the culmination of that surreal calamity. Young dying men were setting fire to the bodies of their wives, mothers, children, beating away the dogs and vultures. Then, as the flames grew fierce and engulfed the grotesque heaps, billowing out black smoke, he saw those very men gathering up their last strength to hang themselves from the drooping trees. He did nothing to stop them, just sat shuddering in his car, shuddering as much from despair as from the pervasive stench, with his arms on the steering wheel and his head on his arms.

 

Petrov's extreme slimness started from this time. Anorexia, an unrecognized condition for the age. He was able to eat only by acts of will power. Not eating was almost a compulsion which he had to fight with that will power. He watched in a state of detached depression as Reema Devi ate normally through her anguish, as if the availability of food to them had no connection to the famine. She, who was so passionately acting in plays about the famine and taking them on tours to other parts of the country.
He didn't blame her or any of the others or himself for being able to sustain themselves, even through a conscious application of the will, against the prickings of conscience, while the millions starved just outside their doorstep.

 

Petrov's Diary:
How do politicians and controllers allow a tragedy like famine? What about the silent majority who simply stand and watch, steeped in inertia? And the rest, are they active or passive? Do they change anything? Let us categorize.