Rajmahal (26 page)

But the paint was fresh and Maudie felt curiously sprightly at being on her own for the first time in her life. “Just think, I'm all on my little own at last!” she squealed. “Wait and see what I won't get up to!”

“No mischief now, Ma,” cautioned Amit in the twee tone he adopted with her. “I may not be able to rescue you this time!”

Maudie's sprightliness continued as she savored her complete independence, organized mahjong mornings, visited the club, and toyed with the idea of keeping a dog and a canary, following Doreen's long-ago remark. But she was sixty-five, the noisy and warm family of David Norman had disappeared leaving an eerie silence in a claustrophobic space. There was no one to spy on and suspect, no one to laugh and joke with, and no one to share meals with. She managed to hold two mahjong sessions, after which there was an evaporation of socializing, along with the sprightliness. The dog was forgotten, and though the canary was acquired and hung in a
fancy brass cage at the sitting room window, it soon came to grief. During Maudie's sprightly period it sang enchantingly, fluffing out its feathers and preening healthily, compelling the aspidistra on the sill below to throw out one gorgeous bloom. But the creeping depression in the air, the house's non-cooperation, the dim light in the passage by the window with its stingy glimpses of sky above, affected both bird and flower. The canary grew silent, uttering only little cries when Maudie forgot to put out its seeds and water, the aspidistra withered. The canary's color faded from the brilliant yellow it had been dyed by the bird shop man at New Market, to an unexciting pale lemon bordering on white. Maudie began to wonder if it was a canary at all, forgetting its earlier days of brilliant song. She woke up one morning, to a half dead aspidistra, and a canary cold and hard, feet up at the bottom of the cage.

Maudie's spirits plunged. Unused to independent social moves, she made no effort to befriend her new neighbors, the Gulianis, though out of habit she found herself listening at the entrance door for sounds of their comings and goings. When she put a wine glass to the flimsy plaster blocking the door between their rooms, she could make out voices. But the language wasn't English, it wasn't even Hindi or Bengali, and she could make no sense of it. The reason was simple, the Gulianis were Sindhi. Earlier, her social life had revolved around the Normans' circle, and the friends of her married days had disappeared. Now she was friendless. Where before, she had been classy, a cheapness crept in. She frittered away the lugubrious time with beauty sessions and stood for hours before her dressing table mirror. She made herself up, tried on dated too-loose clothes, dyed and re-dyed her hair, patchily, killing its glow. And she chatted away to herself with her lips hardly moving, a dying trickle of a chatter. “We'll try again tomorrow, my girl, oh yes, where's my drink, drinky, drinkies, why the hell waste time with this, no, no, tomorrow, yes, yes, tomorrow . . . ” She was preoccupied with her darkening skin, the comeuppance of her Indian blood. It was an incipient threat nursed from birth, which she combated with “snow,” bleaching sessions and whitening makeup. “Oh god! What the hell's wrong with my skin? What Mum told me to be so careful of, so I'm trying, no? Try my girl, try . . . ” But these attempts were intermittent, with long gaps caused by imagined ailments, when she would telephone her doctor and convince him she needed attention. His visits would be followed by a welter of pills, powders and potions, mostly harmless placebos. The Rajmahal watched, grim and sorrowful, and most of the
other tenants, never too close to Maudie, kept their distance. Mrs. Guliani was diffident in social matters, and felt no urge to access the friendship of the weird, over-painted pussycat of a
firangi
who scarcely greeted her. Mr. Guliani was involved in a prurient quest for sex in the exciting city and hardly noticed Maudie. His quota of concern was expended on a genuinely invalid mother, whom he and his wife looked after with a respectful care, which filled Maudie with envy. She convinced herself her brother had shamefully deserted her, she was sure the Gulianis disliked her for occupying a part of their apartment, and she knew Junior Mallik found her aberration of a one-roomer an insult to the beautiful structure over which he reigned. Maudie's paranoia mounted with pink gin after pink gin every evening, advancing gradually to the afternoon, then the morning, the whole day, breakfast, lunch, tea . . . All her waking hours were passed in the bitter, spicy miasma of gin angostura, her vision concentrated into that poisonously icy pink tumblerful, sip, slurp, swallow, pour, sip . . . Her soliloquy trickle crescendoed from a discreet murmur to a loud gush, her health plummeted, intensified by the febrifuge qualities of the angostura. Her servant's slackness, his insolence, and his persistent demands for loans, apart from his watering her gin bottle, caused her unending strain. Extracting work from him was hard. She developed a phobia against the smoke and curry smells of Indian cuisine, and restricted herself first to European meals, then to cold cuts and salads. Her family, prosperous general provision merchants, had supplied Calcutta's fastidious clientele with the finest selections of York cut hams, bacon in canvas, farm-made cheese loaf cheddar and English brewed pilsner beer . . . It took her time to realize those quality meats were no longer available. Such produce was made these days under dubious conditions, and her servant cheated her by using the cheapest outlets while charging her high-class rates. The family had in any case always been lovers of spicy food, indulging rarely in the merchandise they supplied to the Europeans. Maudie's spice loving genes and the poor quality of the cold meats led to the near death of her appetite. But when she had fits, writhing on the ground, and foaming at the mouth, she didn't realize her brain had been infiltrated by the worm hosted by badly cured pork. She would pick herself off the floor after these fits, murmuring to herself, “Like dear Anthony used to say, ‘one too many, my girl',” little able to diagnose the true cause. And as she weakened with worm-ridden head, alcohol, and poor nourishment, she exhorted herself bravely, “As long as you don't get the
d.t
.'s, my girl, there's no such thing as one too
many, that's what dear Anthony always said.” She avoided confessing to her doctor, afraid she might be well on the road to the dreaded delirium tremens.

 

While Amit was a regular visitor, Maudie welcomed him as her son's replacement, the solace for his loss. For Amit, the visits were an escape from his wife's prohibitions, simple cocktail stops. The frequency of these visits increased as Maudie's vulnerability began to excite him. “She's asking to be exploited,” he thought. “It gives her a reason to exist!”

Maudie, who had so easily succumbed to suggested suspicions of her brother and his family, had a separate compartment for Amit Dhar. He was especially hers,
her
visitor,
her
friend. She let him take charge of her affairs and was easily persuaded to give him power of attorney over her finances even before the Normans left. “But don't tell them,” Amit exhorted, adding to the haunting insecurity in Maudie. “You never know what they'll get up to . . . ” “You never know,” he repeated to himself. “Might come in handy one day.”

That day came soon after the Normans' departure. Amit found himself in difficulties, forced to resort to speculation with the funds most readily available, Maudie's funds. To do him justice, he had every intention of replacing the investment in full. After pocketing the profit. And without divulging the deviation. He was confident his brilliant maneuvers would end with him rich, and then richer still as her heir. But Amit was no financial wizard. Gambling called irresistibly, he was soon trapped by the stock market, and one day, he and his family were gone, leaving not a trace. And not a rupee.

When Amit's phone number elicited electronic howls, Maudie knew her luck was about to run all out. This didn't stop her addressing him endlessly in her soliloquies. “Come in, dear boy, come in. Have a drink. As my Anthony always said . . . ” Her drinking increased dramatically.

Junior Mallik came down to see her two months into her rental defaulting. He could smell the gin, see the apartment, suffer that one corner of the Rajmahal, however small, had been reduced to such a state.

“My, what a surprise!” said Maudie. She put a claw-like hand on his shoulder and drew him in. “Come in dear. Come in.” Behind the alcoholic haze Maudie knew Junior had come about the rent. Her welcome, therefore, was masochistic. It was a vast pleasure, in any case, to have a visitor, any visitor. She moved old magazines and papers off a chair, dusted
and smoothed the seat with bare hands, and invited Junior to sit down. Junior averted his eyes from her body, clothed in a translucent flowered dress which showed the outline of her nipples sloping over cascading breasts. There was a vestigial elegance in the uneven hem line which gave an impression of style, more because of her extreme skinniness than anything else. But her hair, cut in a ragged bob, her slipped face and eyes askew at the corners, the scarlet lipstick overflowing into the ribbing around her lips, denied this impression. Junior cleared his throat and sat down. He looked around him at the dust coagulated on surfaces, at a group of family portraits dominated by Maudie's handsome husband astride a horse.

“Would you like a drink?” Maudie asked in a slurred voice. It was past seven, the sun had set, and all right thinking people's thoughts veered in one direction, as dear Anthony always said. Junior declined stiffly while Maudie took habitually sure steps to her cocktail cabinet. The mirrors at the back reflected a number of empty decanters and a half bottle with a greenish liquid. She poured a generous amount into a glass cloudy with finger prints and edged with a frill of red lip marks, poured in water, and shook the little black angostura bottle at it. The angostura curled in magenta whirls then spread into that delicious pale pink bitterness.

Junior looked away, “Where's your servant, Maudie?”

“Don't know. Gone off somewhere. Haven't seen him for days. Three. Four days. Poor Charles.”

“Charles?”

“Canary. Charles was my canary. Left the day he died, the servant, Boy did. So yellow it used to be. ‘Nice yellow canary, memsa'ab!' That's what the bird man said. ‘Sings like an angel,' he said. Bright yellow it was at first. Though Boy, my servant you know, Boy said it was nothing but a cheap little munia, you know, one of those cheap little . . . ” Maudie trailed off nodding at her drink.

Junior shuddered. A canary! She had kept a canary in here. As if the pigeons weren't enough . . . He had always been against the incursion into the Rajmahal by the animal species. Proshanto Mojumdar had kept dogs, two of them, one after the other. Somehow this floor was accursed. He had been overjoyed when the last of the dogs had died. In the meantime, here he was, seeing death everywhere. The thought arose in Junior spreading a macabre pleasure. “And here I am wishing for more of it. For dogs and canaries! Old ladies too, why not?” Junior snickered and hurriedly sobered himself.

“Er. So he's on leave?” he asked.

“Who?” said Maudie tearfully. “
Who's
on leave?”

“Your servant,” said Junior. “How do you eat? Who cooks for you, Maudie?” he said in a louder voice. “Are you, I mean, what are you eating nowadays, I don't see any signs of your servant. How do you . . . ” he stopped with a sick feeling. The stench had suddenly been identified, as of a dead mouse, dead and rotting. He looked reluctantly at the bird cage, swinging lightly at the window in a newly sprung-up breeze. Something black and crumbling lay at the bottom. Junior got up and saw the dead canary. “I'll take this,” he said, controlling his nausea.

A rising hysteria gripped the house. With its own multifarious problems from its multifaceted tenants affecting it and its ghosts, time was taking its toll. It controlled a tremor starting down in its very foundations by a supreme effort of the will.

“Er, I'll be back,” said Junior. Tightly holding a shuddering breath, he plucked the cage off its hook and walked out. Releasing his breath he called to the guard down in the lobby, “Ei! Come here! At once!”

The guard came rushing up the stairs two at a time, puffing, face to face with his grim master.

“Take this!” commanded Junior. “Take this, clean it! Bring it back at once!”

Unburdened, he walked back into Maudie's room dreading the remnants of poor Charles' stench. But it had been wafted away by the merciful breeze.

“Maudie?” he said. She didn't answer, and Junior grew aware of a continuous drone. Maudie was talking to herself, launched on her river. Gazing moodily out of the gray oblong, its outline broken by the crazily wilted aspidistra.

A brain wave stopped Junior expressing the harsh ultimatums said to issue from landlords in such situations. The old people's home run by the British Trust, that was it! As he quietly left, Maudie was sobbing to herself, the tears streaming down her cheeks and the gin down her chin. The house heaved a sigh of relief when Junior tiptoed out of the door though it knew worse would surely follow. Junior stood a while on the balcony outside Maudie's room. He looked down into the lobby and, averting his gaze from the naked marble ladies, soothed himself with the sight of that harmonious space. The guard reappeared with the cleaned cage. “Take it inside!” he commanded. “Hang it near the window!” He frowned as a
pigeon drew his eyes to the head of one of the marble ladies, unsurprised but unhappy when it squirted her nose. Upstairs he broached the subject of Maudie's eviction to his father, carefully, because Ali Mallik was softly inclined toward his tenants and sensitive to his son's treatment of them.

Proshanto Mojumdar was Maudie's next caller on this unusually busy day. Sighting Junior leaving Maudie's apartment, he was stimulated into activating his elevator campaign.