Rajmahal (27 page)

“May I come in?” He walked in.

Maudie was sprawled in her chair, pulling at her drink and talking, talking obsessively and sobbing. Proshanto confusedly assumed he had stumbled onto something extraordinary, an emergency, a catastrophe.

“'ullo! And oo're you?” said Maudie, focusing with difficulty.

Proshanto was astonished. “Maudie!” he exclaimed. “What's the matter with you? Are you all right? Why are you weeping so?”

Maudie wiped her face with a browned lace handkerchief, and sat up straight. “Wha'shyourname?” she said plaintively. “Jush, jush walkin' in'ere no name nothing!”

Proshanto spoke in a gentle, polite voice. “I am Proshanto Mojumdar, Pro. Your neighbor, your old friend. Don't you remember us, Mini and Pro? Look!” He went to the door and pointed across to his veranda. Maudie got up, tottered, supported herself against the wall and came up behind him.

“Imagine!” she said. “Sho you're the chap 'oo liv'zh there. Pro! “Coursh! And wha'sh'ername, Minnie! Owdyoo shpeck' me to 'cegnizhe you? Looking all old and shcraggy! Never
ever
cumtosheeme! Werzh your dog? Love dogzh. Wanted a dog too. David shed nonono. Charles inshtead. Died, Charles did. Jush like that.”

“Quite,” said Proshanto, trying his best to be polite in spite of Maudie's rude remarks. “Charles” he assumed was a dog he had somehow never seen.

“Canary,” clarified Maudie. “Forgot 'is feed you shee.” Maudie looked at him dolefully out of her watery, bloodshot eyes.

“So sorry to hear that,” said the polite Proshanto Mojumdar. “Well, I think I shall be leaving. I shall come and see you again though.” The shock of Maudie's condition had dislodged his memory and he had forgotten why he was here in the first place. And then he remembered in a brilliant flash. “It is about the elevator!” he cried triumphantly. “Did I not tell you about the elevator? I think we ought to have an elevator here, Maudie.” His voice swelled. “Do you not find it difficult to toil up the steps on your own legs?”

Maudie clapped. “O what fun! A lif'! ‘Ow nyshe, 'ow nyshe! Drink 'ave a drink! Le'sh talk'bout it!”

Proshanto Mojumdar walked in purposefully, though he felt distressed when he caught the alcoholic whiffs. He couldn't remember how often he and Mohini had discussed Maudie, but something nagged him. He sat on the chair vacated by Junior Mallik and politely declined Maudie's offer of a drink.

“That boy, Junior Mallik . . . ” he said. He paused, forcing his thoughts into order. “Did he mention our endeavors regarding the elevator?”

“Sh'rude,” said Maudie. “Came 'bout d'rent. Jush imagine!” She sniffed. “Shtill. I'm diff'rent. Well brought up, good, hiccup, mannerzh you shee. Offered'im a drink. ' Nonono, 'e shed. You know,” she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Ee'zh a M'ommedan, and M'ommedans you shee, M'ommedans don' drink!” She nodded significantly.

“Well,” said Proshanto Mojumdar. “I may not be a Mohammedan, but I too have stopped drinking. At this age it is not good for one. My doctor has forbidden it!”

No response. Maudie had lapsed again into a catatonic silence. Proshanto soldiered on. “And this is a building with four stories! Of course, you are a young lady compared to us old fogies! Perhaps you find toiling up the steps easy! Ha, ha, ha. I know a modern elevator may not look nice in our lobby, but, unfortunately, it is most necessary. Ali Mallik is on our side, but it is that boy, Junior! He will not cooperate. What do you say, Maudie?”

Maudie's response was to fling her glass down, spilling her gin onto an already stained carpet. And as Proshanto gaped, she fell untidily and folded up on the floor. Her eyes rolled up under her eyelids, her limbs twitched, and a froth appeared at her working jaws.

“By Jove!” was all the poor octogenarian could say as he backed away toward the door.

His trembling legs carried him outside and after some commotion, Maudie was taken to hospital.

Delighted his plan had thus involuntarily been put into action, Junior took on the responsibility of overseeing her treatment. His concern aroused the admiration of other Rajmahalians and he wasted no time getting in touch with the Society for the Aged. While Maudie was in hospital, the patron and Junior visited her and persuaded her to look over the Senior Citizens' Retreat. She was told about its big verandas, the freedom to come
and go, to eat either the food provided or one's own in the kitchen attached to each room.

When Surjeet Shona heard she got into a tussle with Junior.

“Come on Junior! Have a heart! Let her come back!”

“Mind your own business, Miss Busybody,” said Junior. “It's the best place for her anyway. At least she'll get a couple of square meals a day . . . ”

“I can send her up food Junior, it won't be a problem . . . It's cruel to push her out . . . ”

But Junior was Junior.

Maudie recovered after prolonged treatment and moved into the Retreat. She had no lawyer this time around, but Junior found it expedient to be fair. He paid her hospital bill, and granted her the expected
salami
for her apartment. This he invested for her, using the income to meet her expenses. The exit of Maudie was thus smoothened, and it was a welcome change to find Rajmahalians impressed by Junior's philanthropy. Maudie, sober and docile, with no other choice, accepted. She had been depleted of everything. Of her money by the rascally Amit Dhar, and, as was discovered, of her valuables by the absconding servant, Boy.

The flimsy plaster in the wall of the flatlet was broken down, the wooden partitions removed, with all traces of the kitchen, the room cleaned, repaired, repainted, repolished, and returned to its original state as an intrinsic part of the larger apartment, for which the Gulianis agreed to an increase in rent. The Rajmahal was back to the way Junior wanted it.

While everyone was almost happily resettled, the Rajmahal had different feelings. For one, the Gulianis had long been causing it tremors by their strange ways, and the havoc caused by Maudie had shaken it to its innards. It could feel its strength being drained, a structural weakening every time it thought about Maudie. So its tendency was to forget about her, just as the other tenants did.

No one could put their finger on the moment of Maudie's return. Perhaps it was the lobby guard who first spotted her, wraith-like, drifting in and out of the sunbeams as she floated up the stairs and who ran up to stop her. He stammeringly addressed the collapsed, dead white face of Maudie Memsahib,
salaming
her respectfully by habit, and then asking her where she thought she was going.

“I live here,” replied Maudie in her genteel fashion, “and I am here on my own business. Please be so kind as to make way.”

She spoke in English, and the lobby guard was left scratching his head. Till he woke up and taking the stairs two at a time, overtook her and rushed up to his master. Maudie stopped at the first floor and rang the Guliani doorbell. Her pancake makeup glowed in the gloom, “just like a ghost,” shuddered the guard who was peering down from above. The door was opened, according to him, by a servant who behaved in a disoriented manner at the sight of the apparition. Maudie disappeared into the apartment, but not before Junior caught a glimpse of her. “Maudie!” he whispered. He stood at the top of the stairs disbelievingly and before his astonished eyes Maudie re-emerged onto the landing. Guliani's mother was with her, smiling in spite of her bent spine, holding her maid's hand to keep from toppling over. Gravely, Maudie nodded to the old lady, turned, and climbed the stairs, watched by the guard and Junior.

Maudie strained and panted her way up to them, her feet resounding loudly as she stepped from marble to wood. She entered the Mallik apartment and sat down breathing hard. After a period of vacancy she said in her old sweet voice, “I have taken up residence downstairs. I wonder if you noticed.” It turned out Maudie had “taken up residence,” not inside the Rajmahal, nor with the Gulianis, as Junior had for a sick moment thought, but in the Rajmahal watchman's godown on a corner of the drive. The watchman, Rawat, had fortuitously shifted to new quarters a few days earlier. He had welcomed his old friend Maudie as occupier of the godown. The problem was the lack of a toilet. The servants' toilet, earlier used by Rawat and his family, was some distance from the room, and certainly not suitable for a memsahib. So Maudie simply went up to her old room, taken over by the Gulianis, for the facilities.

The watchman, Rawat, faced Junior with equanimity.

“I naturally assumed it was with the sanction of your good self alone.” he defended himself unctuously to the foaming Junior.

“A likely story! Couldn't you at least check with me?”

“Who am I to question a one-time honorable tenant . . . ” He politely waited for Junior to calm himself before continuing. “And it would in any case show a lack of charity and militate against the spirit of
Pir
Tasleem Ahmed and his sacred tomb . . . ” He referred to the tomb of a Muslim saint which lay just behind the godown.

Junior controlled himself, reserving judgment on Rawat's windy
excuses. He knew the wily watchman was less than innocent. The Gulianis reacted with incredulity and anger when they heard their apartment had been invaded by Maudie behind their backs, and Junior had a tangled situation on his hands.

 

If Junior had access to the Rajmahal's ghosts, he would have known they had mixed feelings about the Gulianis, for a time so much approved by him.

“Who are these Sindhis?” they objected.

“Shopkeepers! How did such people get in here?”

And other ghosts replied, “It's that Junior! He is so befuddled by show!”

Great arguments followed as some of the ghosts defended Sindhis, who had such a long association with the city, providing not only wonderful shops full of rich merchandise in the New Market, but the best book shops in central Calcutta.

“After all, if they can give the city books they can't be all that bad!” they said.

“But those are the Calcutta Sindhis!” shouted the
swadeshi
ghost. “These are upstarts! I wish the Normans would come back, even if they are Christians! Look at the Gulianis' apartment!”

“Oh I love it!” breathed another elderly ghost. “It's so gay. Do you remember our village fair? Once there was a fat lady with yellow hair. From America. And she was dressed just like the plaster-of-paris-lady-with-the-lamp at the Gulianis'. We had to pay two pice to see her. Inside a hut.”

“What about Mrs. Guliani? Have you seen the way she dresses?”

“At least she looks after her mother-in-law.”

“And what a mother-in-law! Only sixty-nine and all bent up!” said the ghost of an old dowager. “I lived till eighty and I was straight as a rod!”

“But she's kind to our Maudie,” butted in another. “And what about Bhanushree! All bent up when she was a mere child!”

“She was born like that!”

“Don't quibble!” And they were distracted by the wails of the insulted ghost of Bhanushree.

The house intervened at this stage, as the shouting
swadeshi
ghost was setting up an awful clamor, giving rise to an atmosphere of whirling agitation which affected mortals if they were too near. It spirited them out of the way to the isolated center of the roof. But it sympathized, because it had been in agony over the Gulianis for a long time.

Guliani had acquired most of the Norman's furniture when he took over the apartment, though for the present, he had stored it away, unquestioningly accepting his wife's taste for fancier fare. When Maudie was sent to the Senior Citizens' Retreat taking only some of her furniture, he snapped up the rest including the piano. Junior deeply regretted the move when the Guliani daughters were heard crashing on the keys, sending the Rajmahal tenants half mad and bringing down a mass of complaints on his head.

“Wait, wait,” he said. “I hear they are getting a piano teacher. It's possible they'll improve.”

But the tone-deaf Guliani daughters showed no promise. When they continued the painful playing after the piano went out of tune, Junior decided to pay a call. He had never been inside the Gulianis' apartment and his visit dismayed him. The sofas were in the shape of white swans, the upholstery was garish and Junior shuddered as he looked around him at other evidence of the unspeakable. Was this the home of the same soft-spoken Guliani, the Guliani who had spent five years studying engineering in Germany, his current favorite? He reluctantly reminded himself of the couple's initial lapse, when they had hung out mounds of washing from their verandas, and the Rajmahal taboo had to be conveyed to them before they stopped. But with the harmony generated by Guliani's demeanor and no regression into public clothes drying, Junior had obliterated this memory. Nor had he ever set eyes on their belongings.