Rajmahal (32 page)

Surjeet Shona couldn't distance herself from Martin, and after an initial struggle found herself tightly clasping and unclasping hands with him under the table. She snatched her hand away when Antonia pulled a chair up close on the other side of Martin and placed her sandaled foot against his leg. Feeling hot and cold at the same time, Surjeet Shona was jolted when she caught Mumtaz Mallik's eyes looking directly into hers. She wondered if the song had lifted him from his misery.

The launch had cut its engines and by their sides drifted the evening tide of the brown river, dealing watery slaps to the hull, shades of sand and mud eddying and making whorly patterns just below the surface. On the far bank tiny-looking palm trees and buildings were sharply etched, black on the paling twilight sky. A country boat, with its big hooded thatch, showed barely visible in the gloom, its boatman effortlessly swaying and swinging his oar in the silted-up shallowing river. His melodic tenor voice floated to them across the river, as sharp and clear as the etched palm trees, rising above and below and around Mohini and Proshanto Mojumdar's song and weaving itself in like a master craftsman's
jamdani
sari. Both melodies were in the same
rag
and the boatman's song was of the river too. It was a blessed passage.

SURJEET SHONA TOOK THE BREAK WITH MARTIN STAUNCHLY. IT PASSED her by and left her calm. She felt the demented but therapeutic interim after Gurdeep's death must have been provided by God, in whom she simply believed. And she carried on with her interrupted mourning in the room of the
Guru Granth Sahib
. There she sat, with the
bhaiji
softly reciting, the tears bathing her cheeks and her little son on her lap, crooning him to sleep, often falling asleep herself on the cushioned ground. Absorbed in consolidating herself and her child, she stayed away from others. With time Surjeet Shona normalized, taking to riding again. Later, she accepted a job offered by Jack Strachey. The work was undemanding and involved administering a small section at Sharp's, but it filled up Surjeet Shona's time.

And then Martin brought his bride, Gwendolyn, to the Rajmahal. Surjeet Shona caught a glimpse of her in the lobby. “She's not at all as I expected,” was her first thought. She wondered at Martin's choice of this scholarly looking woman, with the blonde plait haloing her head, the Madonna likeness spoiled by a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. Gwendolyn's petite rounded figure was such a contrast to herself, big-boned, tall, large-breasted and to the disrupter of her brief bliss, Antonia, a medium-sized redhead, that it seemed much in this world was inexplicable. When she recalled the passion of her affair with Martin she was pleased at feeling little emotion. But the small hairs at the back of her neck stood on end at the very thought of Martin's particular persona of shaving cream and sweat, and she felt vulnerable and reluctant to meet him. Arnie Aratoon, the other instigator of her dread, had packed up and left, to bemuse the populace of his new home in rural England with his dated Rolls, his shooting stick, and his stable of horses.

When Martin and Gwendolyn neared the end of their long visit, Surjeet Shona forced herself into a joint outing. “I must do this,” she thought. “I can't keep hiding.” As Petrov's acolyte she often went visiting with him and this time it was to introduce Martin to Professor Shanto Bose, Petrov's Bengali “brother.” Surjeet Shona found herself in a state of uneasy anticipation at the challenge of meeting the young Stracheys, but Martin came alone. “After
Neel Dorpon
all Gwen wants is to get away from this country and everyone in it . . . ” Martin apologized. “I've tried clubs, parties, plays, palaces . . . But nothing moves her. So, no more Calcutta for her.”

“Back to the known . . . ” said Petrov.

Face to face at last with Martin, Surjeet Shona hid her uneasiness. “It's almost as if he's forgotten,” she thought noting his lack of embarrassment. “Oh it's definitely over . . . ”

She was right. Promiscuous as he had been so far, Martin's current lover took up his complete attention, surgically cauterizing the past. To him it was perfectly legitimate a sexual encounter should lay the base for a platonic and warm future friendship. His disinterest in Surjeet Shona didn't occupy him for an instant.

“What a careless boy he is,” thought Petrov, as always keenly observant.

Martin's object was to penetrate this Calcutta, a Calcutta nonexistent to his parents. It would help him gain insight for his specialized researches into colonial Bengal. “He would become like my Russian guru if he stayed on,” thought Surjeet Shona.

 

The Bose drawing room, comfortably familiar to Surjeet Shona, had a musty-sweet aroma from the books lining its walls and mounting to the ceiling. Martin's sensitive nose quivered in response to the pests and molds infesting them and he exploded in a sneeze.

“Sorry,” he apologized. “I must be allergic to something!”

“Like your wife is to us,” thought Surjeet Shona.

Another sneeze set him rocking on his seat and Petrov and the professor burst into childish laughter. Martin discovered his seat was an unstable stack of king-sized books disguised with a coverlet.

“Good god,” he said worriedly looking around at the mottled books. “Why did you let me sit on these? And what
are
they? I've missed so much!” He changed his seat.

“Oh, you shouldn't worry,” said Petrov. “There's
too
much. And these books are mostly in Bengali. Do you know Bengali?”

“Er,
ektu ektu,
” said Martin in such a heavy accent that his claim was instantly thrown into doubt. Surjeet Shona giggled.

“Your Bengali isn't too good either,” said Martin, and sneezed again.

“And the relevant books may not suit your conclusions,” added the professor dryly.

“Come come,” said Martin. “You a professor and making assumptions about my ‘conclusions'!”

“I apologize,” beamed the professor. “You must enlighten me of course.”

“I'd rather listen to you!”

“Sergie-da is the expert.”

“I know, I know. I've wasted my time here. Too much dancing at Prince's.”

Surjeet Shona saw Petrov flinching and glancing at the professor.

“Intellectual snobbery,” she thought. She understood very well that such haunts were irrelevant to the professor. He belonged away from and
above
that world.

“How is old Prince's, eh?” said the professor suddenly. He looked blandly at Petrov. And Petrov stared hard back at him. Surjeet Shona suppressed another giggle.

“Oh super!” exclaimed Martin, noticing nothing of these exchanges. “That's the only part my wife likes in Calcutta.”

“So you will come back, but without your wife?”

“My parents are here, my interests . . . ” and in a burst of empathy, “Gwen simply can't take any of it. The city, the people,
and
my parents. My mother
can
be a bit trying you know.”

“They quarrel, your wife and mother?” Petrov persisted.

“They don't quarrel, but there's this awful chilliness when they're together. Gwen can't stand Mother's rudeness to the servants. She hates it when they don't answer her back.”

“But they
mind
,” Surjeet Shona couldn't help saying.

“You were brutal in your time, you British,” said Petrov. “Beating up employees, showering vile abuse, flogging them and kicking them . . . ”

“Are we any better?” the professor interrupted. “Our servants dress poorly and sleep in any corner of the house, on a piece of cloth, cardboard, anything, and they work from dawn to midnight, or as long as we require them. And the housewife, a truly thrifty Indian housewife, will give them the minimum food to keep body and soul together. So. Perhaps there is not much difference?”

The diplomacy of the professor's interjection hadn't escaped the others.

A servant, a mere boy in shabby shorts and vest came in to clear away the glasses. “Oh, oh,” thought Surjeet Shona.

Martin, as diplomatic as the professor, quickly turned away from the boy. Surjeet Shona noticed and reprimanded herself, “There I go! Still sensitive to Martin!”

 

And then, Surjeet Shona completely lost her bearings. She could never remember exactly what happened next, except that her eyes were snared by the penetrating gaze of a complete stranger, who had just walked in. “Neel Banerjea,” she heard over the roaring in her ears. And then, “Come, come, sit down. Neel is an anthropologist,” the words filtered through to her, “single-minded about exposing the exploitation and erosion of
adivasi
culture! We are lucky to catch a glimpse of him. Otherwise, he is always wandering away to the interior. Which tribe is it now Neel? Oraons or Bheels?”

“You are poking fun at me as always, Shanto-da.” Neel spoke with the long vowels of the refined Bengali in a quiet husky voice.

“Nice voice,” thought Surjeet Shona. She had caught his incredulous look when he had first sighted her before her reactions overwhelmed her. Neel Banerjea was fiercely good-looking, with a rangy figure, dark, his receding hair emphasizing his arresting eyes and small eagle nose. Surjeet Shona recognized the same mischief that reigned in Martin's eyes, and warning bells rang. She felt an overwhelming desire to run away.

“I just remembered I have to . . . ”

“Am I driving you away?” the voice was interrupting her.

“Where are you going, dear? We've just come . . . Sit down!” ordered Petrov.

Surjeet Shona obeyed, almost afraid to raise her eyes. All her efforts were directed to breathing normally, and she didn't realize her hands were tightly gripped together. That quiet husky voice speaking articulately and at length completely absorbed her, though the words made no headway to her brain. She would remember nothing of the details of the evening after this point.

WHEN ALI MALLIK BOUGHT THE MAJOR PART OF THE RAJMAHAL IN 1942, he had chosen the top floor apartment for himself because he didn't want tenants trampling all over him and preferred this distancing from up on high. The Malliks furnished their apartment luxuriously. Apart from the fixtures on the walls and the plumbing, most of the original furniture had gone out with the Ohris. So the apartment had no pretensions to regal splendor. But it had the approval of the Malliks' many Europeanized friends.

Ali Mallik favored sharkskin for dress occasions, and cut a dash in his tailored evening suits usually sharpened by a bow tie and scarlet cummerbund. His tailors were Barkat Ali's, hard to surpass anywhere in the world. Ali was slim and handsome in a skeletal way and his circle often teased him of starving to look like Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a family friend. Ali denied this, citing his pencil-thin mustache as evidence, a contrast to the clean-shaven Jinnah. Mrs. Mallik, Saira, was tall and statuesque with shoulder length blondish hair, a nose stone, and claimed her ancestors were royalty, Moghuls from Samarkand. Where exactly this was and whether Samarkandis were blonde or not, no one was quite sure, but the mystery made her doubly glamorous. By middle-age she had reddened her hair with henna and tended to have unhealthy-looking pouches under her eyes. But she was still handsome and her height added to the patrician effect. She wore chiffon saris and chain smoked cigarettes in a long jet holder, aggravating her chronic asthma and suffering doubly on the long trudge up the stairs. She also liked to tipple occasionally, when she became harmlessly drunk, her favorite drink being a lethal dry martini of which only the 300 knew the subtleties.

Ali Mallik didn't connect his wife's immodest behavior, smoking and drinking, or his own taste for whiskey as against Islam, considering all this as merely peripheral. He was a highly successful barrister, one of the richest in Calcutta, and Gandhiji had asked him to give up barristering to join the freedom struggle. But Ali had seen colleagues fritter away their lives in jail, and neither did he want to enter the uncertain arena of Hindu-Muslim politics. He knew that ever since Lord Curzon's abortive partitioning of the old magnum Bengal in 1905, this politics had got murkier and murkier. But it was the big one, the riots and the final Partition itself, which had left an incipiently painful scar. He refused to consider moving back to his home town, Dacca, simply because he was a Muslim, just as he refused to accept the need for Partition. Secretly he longed for the Muslims to be the majority group in the new India, so he could take over the smug and snug feeling of his Hindu friends, and lay claim to India with the same arrogant proprietorship. It never occurred to him to long to be a Hindu because he was a Muslim through and through. He was sensitive to the fact that Hindus and Muslims were inextricably linked in a terrible and seductive symbiotic relationship on the Indian subcontinent which would have a long and unhappy history. But he was also convinced this must end in eventual synthesis and harmony. He felt he wouldn't mind if one of his sons married a Hindu so this synthesis could be attempted right under his nose. But never did he voice this wish nor show any reaction other than mild acquiescence when one of his sons did just that. Nor, for the present, would he concede that the synthesis would never be complete. Like a primitive mixer for hot and cold water, which scalds one side of the hands and chills the other.