Rajmahal (3 page)

“What about all the times he forgot to honor and worship me when he was tangled with his bawds?” thought Inderjeet Kaur. But her heart weighed like a lodestone in her breast.

The Sardar Bahadur breathed his last breath that very day, while the evening hymns filtered to his brain via his impaired hearing, and his soon-to-be widow wept and fanned him with a hand
pankha
, though an electric fan revolved adequately above them. The evening hymns rose above his death rattle, and as they reached a crescendo, the rituals began. The room was prepared for the procession of mourners who began to file past as soon as the signal was given. Before it was laid in state, the body, including the scanty but long hair, was washed in curds by the men of the family. Inderjeet Kaur begged to be allowed to help, but her emotions and age overwhelmed her and the job was finished in no time without her. Not before she could view her husband's bare form, the distended flesh, rolling about as it was washed, the hirsute chest and arms with the sagging breasts, the wobbling dome of the belly. Then her eyes were drawn to the folds of flesh hiding the almost invisible worm of the penis and the wildly swinging scrotum distended by late life hydrocele. She had never looked on all this, because till the end, her husband had bathed himself, and they had always had sex in the dark on her insistence. She wished she had seen him in the clear light of the days of their youth, when her enclosing arms could feel his
muscular, fat-free body and his penis was more like a snake than a worm as it bit its way into her womb. Then he was washed clean of the curds and made decent again in pure white clothing, with a colorful turban gracing his head. Tubs of ice were brought in and placed next to the body, while fans were set up. Earthen lamps were lit and a pitcher full of water with a coconut at its mouth was placed near his head. He lay there all night, covered in white, while a senior temple priest chanted prayers, placing a fragment of gold in his mouth, touching him with the little golden ladder. The family were silent, stoical, neither sad nor happy, including Inderjeet Kaur who had become quiet. When mourners came in beating their breasts and wailing loudly, they were chided by the sons. The Sardar Bahadur had reached a ripe old age with glory and left a long line of successors, and this wasn't the time for lament. Soon after dawn, in the room which was thick and unpleasant with incense smoke and sweat, when the sun was already broadcasting its unwelcome heat, the bier was put on a carriage pulled by one of the family Rolls Royces. The Sardar Bahadur's white shroud, which would turn orange with sprinklings of saffron water on its way to the burning ground, was carefully decorated with flower garlands and gilded coconuts. The bier left the house in a shower of silver coins and golden petals eagerly secured by the waiting crowd. Watching the procession trickle out of sight through the broader routes of the old city from a terrace, Inderjeet Kaur could feel the cold grip of death on her heart as her life's companion tugged hard at it. She vowed to stay on in Amritsar, to give up the mansion in Calcutta where she had reigned over her family with the fast vanishing figure on the bier.

Whenever any of the Sardar Bahadur's progeny returned and entered the Rajmahal lobby, they found it sad and strange that this once sparkling area with the playing fountains, statues, and palms should be so sadly divested of its crystalline aspect. The reason was it was now open to the public. Refinements such as running fountains and flowerpots offered themselves readily to the indescribable muck trailing postmen, tradesmen, servants, and other casual visitors. The new landlord tried his best by keeping up a minimum standard with annual whitewashing, daily floor sweeping
and swabbing, and removing pigeon droppings. Inside the apartments, however, the sparkle was kept up by its particular and rich tenants.

The original privacy of the upper floors was violated when the central stairway became public and the building was turned inside out as a block of apartments occupied by unconnected tenants. But by now, most of these tenants knew each other's idiosyncrasies by rote, and with their aging faculties didn't feel any more comment was needed. This aging also made their bones creak and lungs whistle as they trudged up the stairs. A querulous rumble could be heard about the need for an elevator. The landlord ignored this, knowing well the aged ones had no choice. In a city where such accommodation was precious, his tenants' yokes to these apartments would loosen only with death. The result was some of the tenants were forced into seclusion and gave up the idea of ever stepping out.

The Rajmahal was concerned, first and foremost with Sardar Bahadur Ohri's family, to whom it had transferred its loyalty from Raja Sheetanath, and secondly with the new landlords. As to the ghosts, these it welcomed and encouraged. But the Rajmahal strictly curtailed their haunting activities, and the ghosts amused themselves by appearing sometimes to the guards in the lobby and frightening the pigeons.

The Rajmahal observed the negotiations with the new landlord warily. A Muslim in that privileged position was a distressing departure from sanity, was its initial reaction. But what choice did it have? The ghosts were getting hysterical as it was. Both the Sikh and Hindu ghosts, earlier busy with their viciousness toward each other, now showed how virulently anti-Muslim they were, an attitude based more on in-built prejudice than any thought of encountering those alien beings. The Rajmahal had to strain itself to the utmost to contain their agitation . And soon, when the second, could it be called defilement, was in progress as major alterations went under way, its confused efforts at resisting got it nowhere. Though it tried in the best way it could, releasing a loose brick here, pushing a pillar out of alignment there, springing a leak in this bathroom and bulging out the plaster in that . . . but with all the building frenzy no one noticed, and the work went on relentlessly, till soon there was a plethora of new families, atmospheres, sights, and sounds, leaving the Rajmahal dazed for a good half year, and silencing the ghosts.

Six families now inhabited the Rajmahal, the remaining Ohris in their ground floor apartment, and the Malliks, the new landlords, at the top.
The four families who rented the split middle floors were a mixed lot, British, Bengali, Anglo-Indian, and lastly Russo-Bengali. At the start of this story, the British couple, the Stracheys were still there, as were Proshanto and Mohini Mojumdar, the Normans with their widowed sister, and the Petrovs. And the abrasive eldest son of the landlord, Junior Mallik, was to take over the running of the Rajmahal in place of his retired father.

After its recovery, the Rajmahal continued its sharp observance of ghosts and goings-on. It had shuddered at its first loss of innocence, when Raja Sheetanath had deserted it to a Sikh family. But it had recovered in that incarnation in spite of the shattering nature of its earlier decrepitude and destruction. And here it was in yet another guise, as a block of apartments with a Muslim master. Fortunately for this third incarnation, the Rajmahal would learn to appreciate the Malliks before long, but it couldn't avoid the inevitable disappearance of its inhabitants one by one, and violence, before its day was done.

THE STRACHEYS LIVED IN NUMBER 4 RAJMAHAL, A HANDSOMELY SIZED apartment though it occupied only one half of the second floor. The most remarkable set of rooms was the main bedroom, dressing room and bathroom, the Sardar Bahadur's marital suite. The bedroom was largely occupied by Raja Sheetanath's double bed, made of carved oak with caryatid pillars and winged cherubs frolicking innocently. The ceiling above held a silken canopy with mosquito netting which could be pulled up and down by a cord. At the center of the canopy was a ceiling fan, which sometimes caught and tore the netting to shreds and this was one aspect of its original fittings which the Rajmahal wished could be replaced. But the Stracheys appreciated the antique value of the fan and had the wooden blades shortened rather than replace it with a modern version. Their bathroom held another beauty from the original Rajmahal, a marble shower shaped like an open oyster shell in which the bather was sprayed deliciously from neck to foot through rungs of perforated pipes. In those days, Calcutta had centrally supplied gas from the Oriental Gas Co. and gleaming copper water heaters were installed for the supply of hot water during the chilly winter.

Jack Strachey worked for Sharp and Co., a managing agency with offices on Clive Street. Sharp's imposing block stood close to the grandiloquently pillared Royal Exchange, which housed the Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry, an offshoot of the old Calcutta Chamber started by the traders of the East India Company. Sharp-owned jute mills stretched along the Hooghly, and Jack spent his early years in the Sharp's mill at Nagarpara. Most of the mills were run by Scottish engineers from Dundee. And “Little Dundees,” with nostalgically named pubs, like “Honey Bee,” were set up inside their well-insulated compounds, essential for the game of pretend.
At the right time of year, haggis and other Scottish delicacies appeared, and Highland flings were danced by unhealthily ruddy women and their sometimes-kilted husbands. So India was warded off, allowed to impinge only from a remove, riverine images framed by veranda pillars. Semi-naked coolies chanted and spat and loaded bales on to barges which swarmed to the jetties at the factories' sides, scenes which the memsahib, or mems, could snootily ignore, as they idled along the river banks of their secure compounds with their ayahs and strollers. But in another world were the hot and humid spindle and loom-filled factories, sweat amidst hanks of the golden fiber, flying particles settling like threshings of locust wings on every surface. Here Jack and the rest of the white management were forced out of their chastity belts into sweaty intimacy with the country's private parts. But locks hastily clicked shut against one last nightmare, the living quarters of the workers and their families, the “lines,” which existed across the road and away from the river.

Myrna Strachey, like the other mems, made rare forays out of the magnificent residential compound of Nagarpara Jute Mill. She was careful not to look beyond the back of her chauffeur's neck while the black walls and slimy drains of the mills and “lines” passed by. And she held her breath when they passed the stinking raw jute which lay drying by the roadside ditches in the retting season. These forays could be to neighboring white residences or to Calcutta to British friends' houses or to clubs with all white memberships. When the Stracheys moved to Calcutta, they were the ones visited by these doughty Scottish families at their Rajmahal apartment. Here they would gather around the piano while corseted matrons sang Scottish ditties and pressed tins of shortbread into their hands.

Myrna Strachey was a long-limbed, dark-haired English beauty. She liked to spend endless moments in the nude before a full-length mirror, examining her figure for flaws and curvetting to maintain the perfection. The children of the Rajmahal felt a rising excitement every time the Strachey's son, Martin, came back from boarding school for his holidays. They would find excuses to make Martin speak to her and crowd around him when he knocked on her bedroom door. This stratagem was used after the one time luck had favored them. Myrna was holding her door slightly ajar hiding behind it to speak to her son, and Martin was jostled out of the way by the others craning their necks and yearning for forbidden ephemera. This yielded nothing more than an impression of perfumed and shadowed pinkness in a distant mirror. It created a bond between
them and they would often remember this, their first glimpse of a naked adult woman, and then each other, and a softness would enter them for old associations in the security of the Rajmahal. The gang would hang around in the Strachey apartment, waiting to see Myrna emerging from her room in a mist of scent, her face flushed with makeup. She would hug her little boy, and sometimes one or other of his fortunate friends, and run down the stairs on confident high heels.

Jack Strachey adored his wife. He was a large, square, blonde Scotsman with an accent countered by English and Indian influences, an effect cultivated by him to put him on par with the superior English up at the head office. “They're ridiculous!” he would say defensively offensive against both Scots and Indians striving to get the right accent. “I had to interpret between Chatterjee and Mackintosh again, and they were both speaking English!” Myrna, English by birth, kept judiciously silent.

When Jack Strachey moved on to the head office in Calcutta to become one of the youngest directors, it was commonly expected he would end as chairman and managing director of Sharp and Co. This would lead to the presidentship of the Bengal Chamber and a knighthood. But Jack had to face the ultimate dishonor of being superseded by an Indian. Peculiarly, he used this failure to justify his staying on in India after retirement. In reality, he had never intended to return to the stifling suburbia of his background. His father, a carpenter, though a superior one with his own furniture business in the end, was originally “Skiddaw,” not the regal sounding “Strachey.” Jack had no hesitation in changing his surname when he was of age. Myrna, with her upper-class background, tilted the balance in his favor among the Calcutta British, who were mainly English. But trends in post-independence India added to the convolutions and Jack was right for the job at the wrong time.