Rajmahal (40 page)

The old Anglo-Indian lady was speechless with delight when Junior gave her the news. She took his hands in her gnarled grasp, “And just imagine, I used to think you were so wicked!”

Junior patted her brusquely, still unused to his new role. “I'm getting another apartment for you Maudie, because the Rajmahal has to be pulled down.”

“Oh but where's the money?” wailed Maudie.

“Didn't I tell you I'd do it? Just leave it to me!” He couldn't help the aggressive tone, his kindness would fit him ill for some time. But inside, he felt is if a fresh breeze was blowing through him. He vowed not only to get her an apartment of her own but to add a topping to the money that was due to her. That and the other major self-sentencing, to give up the Rajmahal, the source of his power and the base of his defeats and frustrations. At last he would readily accede to the brokers of good sense and sell out, slake off all the stale, crusty, accretions of that old building. He would free his parents by moving them to a garden house, and himself from the posturing of all these years which he had worn like a suffocating hairshirt. To sell the Rajmahal was to him like betraying himself, because it might provide the tear in the hairshirt through which his febrile inner surfaces would become visible. But it would lead to his punishment and salvation. And the mansion's doom.

The Rajmahal shuddered repeatedly, weakening with every shudder, squaring its age-sloped shoulders to face up to the inevitable. Demolitions were in the air, and it uneasily awaited the beginning of the end, the bringing down of the godown. But Junior's past couldn't allow him such a facile passage. The twister of violence had been whirling itself into a nice potency ever since the
bhaiji
, prompted by that very, if not “same,” Junior, had been forced to defy watchman Rawat-Pandey. And that defiance would prove costly.

THE RUMBLINGS OF THE RAJMAHAL VOLCANO COULD NO LONGER be ignored. Feelings between sections of the mansion staff had heated up with the goading of Junior's musclemen. The neighbor, who couldn't forget the breaching of his wall to make room for the tomb, had passed on his ill-feeling to his son. And the son was kept fully informed of all the goings on. He had no hesitation creeping in through the new breach created by the city toughs, and the volcano was never allowed to go extinct. Though Junior had dismissed the toughs by then, their links with the staff were already well forged. And the two teams placed themselves knowingly on the summit of the volcano.

Surjeet Shona found herself inextricably linked to the situation. Not merely because it was her
bhaiji
who was involved in the initial problem. But for other, more vital reasons.

 

Surjeet Shona's weavers' organization and other projects were well set, run by dedicated younger workers, and her presence had become nominal. Between a few conferences and seminars, time hung heavy on her hands and her Rajmahal altruism became a compulsion.

The Rajmahal, a sentimentalist if anything, had enjoyed Surjeet Shona most when she had been immersed in Martin, the phase Surjeet Shona considered her berserk phase. It watched her reactions with interest when Martin Strachey came down for his parents' funeral. He had climbed high in British academic circles, his eminence resting on original researches into Calcutta, the city he had abandoned and with it his parents. “His wife hasn't come because she's too ashamed,” thought Surjeet Shona, her heart full with the poignancy of the old couple's end, and for her ex-lover's feelings. But there had been too much in between and Martin was too crushed by
the manner of his parents' deaths to feel anything but penitence and grief. And though Surjeet Shona admired his fine graying, the roughening of his skin contradicted by the refining effect of the present pain, no vestige of that searing affair threw threads between them. The other Rajmahalians, inarticulate, their age an upsetting reminder, attended the funeral with ashen faces. Surjeet Shona could see the affected Martin struggling with his emotions, but there was no help for him. “He must feel everyone's accusing eyes on him,” she thought. “What a burden he'll have to carry.”

 

The Rajmahal looked on Surjeet Shona, this original daughter with pensive love. “Neel was wonderfully interesting, and a Calcuttan. But he was a bastard. And the doctor may have been more suited, but he took on too much for his age. It's a good thing she didn't marry him. But how can she be protected? She's so messed up and independent and always trying to do good! I wish she would simply go back to her original self-centered self. Poor little thing.”

Surjeet Shona was neither poor, in another sense, nor little. And though the mansion may have been wise, its assumptions about the “real” Surjeet Shona took it into difficult terrain beyond its scope. Though to do it justice, it was remarkably flexible for such a rigid thing as a building.

Where the Rajmahal found Surjeet Shona's altruism unnatural, the Gulianis were simply suspicious. Especially after Surjeet Shona agreed to help them redo their apartment.

“What she is getting out of this helping us?” sniffed Mrs. Guliani. “What does she think she is getting?”

And when her husband rebuked her too quickly she shot back, “You are paying for her work or what? How much you are paying?”

In another context, Guliani couldn't help agreeing with his wife when they discovered Surjeet Shona's close involvement in all the mansion's goings-on.

“Always here, always there,” said Mrs. Guliani. “No one can live without her or what?”

“Who knows?” shrugged Guliani disparagingly. “As long as
our
work gets done.” Inside him he was as puzzled as his wife. “What has she to do with all these people, these Petrovs and Maudie Jessop and all the others? And why is she so ready to help us too?” He wondered if she was getting a cut from the interior decorating firm working for him. “No,” he thought. “She's too stinking rich as it is.”

“It's just loneliness,” temporized the Rajmahal. “Everyone gets lonely when there's no one else in the house.”

 

While Surjeet Shona ministered to the Petrovs during their last days, she would go onto the veranda where the old Russian sat cross-legged on his divan, his loincloth hanging about his haunches almost indistinguishable from the folds of his skin. She would look at his skeletal form, the skull-head enlarged on the shrunken body, the brittle, feather-light and rigid rib cage rising and falling as the frail lungs pumped. Then the ghoul would rise up from the pit of Surjeet Shona's stomach, scratching, hurting the sore spots in her intestines trying its best to raise them into ulcers, a process that had begun those many years ago. The tears had decreased and dried gradually, recurring only at decreed intervals. But it was during her son Gurdeep's wedding that they appeared without cause, the ghoul coming to reside within her permanently and slumber, awakening unannounced.

She wondered if it was the lowered resistance of a weakening body, or the accumulation of sorrows which lay the base of weepiness in the elderly. She recalled her indifference to such manifestations in others, assuming the elderly must be mawkish and soft in the head. That she should weakly shed tears at her son's wedding or Osheem Petrov 's frailness or a leaf falling on green grass, was an indication of another her, another Surjeet Shona who had as a robust young woman wept only at her own concerns and sorrows. Wasn't it beginning to feel perversely pleasurable? “What beauty there is in sorrow, in death” the philosophers said, yet under the sentiment lay knowledge, the knowledge that perfection and perpetual bliss must evade one till the end. So her tears were for everyone, embracing the world and fearfully yet pleasurably waiting for the ghoul to reach out for her.

The tears threatened to turn into a flood after Maudie Jessop's crisis, and Surjeet Shona, who was apprehensively waiting for the hot flushes of menopause, theorized that the flushing of tears was a substitute. “You get caught anyhow in the end,” she lamented.

She had been battling the underlying fear, of the “down-scaling,” the one-way concertina of life, the folding in with deceptive coos, squeezing and compressing one for the final plucking out by the ghoul. The Rajmahal would be disappointed to know that she felt her sense of urgency had led to impotence in the end, that her activities were insignificant, a speck of a life, and that if she did simply nothing but sit and drink like Maudie, it would make little difference at the very end.

When Lalitha was brought back by Mumtaz for treatment, Surjeet Shona was glad to have him in the Rajmahal. The gravitation of their English lovers toward one another all those years ago, leaving them both rejected, formed an unexploited link. Lalitha sat up with them, and they could see her straining to join the conversation. But the deterioration was pitilessly swift. Often, she would slump over, in the grip of a malignant slumber induced by the jealous proliferating cells. When she returned to the Rajmahal after radical surgery she had already left them in a sense, her mind slipping away and her body helpless. As the process drew on, a desperate Mumtaz sought his sanity in the ground floor Ohri apartment. It was during one such visit that he noticed Surjeet Shona's tearfulness and put his arm around her. “Come on, SS. You're the strong one. You can't fold up on us like this. What's the matter?”

What could Surjeet Shona say, when she herself couldn't qualify the “matter.” But the little incident launched her on her dream phase. When she had the first of these dreams she woke up and rocked herself till she was calm. “What was it?” she wondered. “Was it sorrow? For what? Why am I so filled with this sorrow? Did I have a bad dream?”

She couldn't remember. And these days she woke up often with that experience of deep sorrow. A moment later, it was replaced by a sense of anticipation and joy, and Mumtaz sprang to life in her thoughts. Mumtaz, strong, tall, with his normally twinkling eyes shadowed with the fear of death, another link between them. Were the tears for her past trials, all the deaths, her son, or the tragedy of Lalitha's present? She quickly got up, eager to be with Mumtaz again.

The Rajmahal could see Surjeet Shona's metamorphosis, and, like the ghosts, would have pinched itself if it could. It would have cheered too, but the time wasn't propitious with all the deaths and Lalitha's ebbing life. “Dear Surjeet Shona, she deserves another chance,” it said. And it keenly observed her awakening.

SURJEET SHONA LIES ON THE GRASS UNDER THE RAINTREE. IT IS A broiling summer day and the sun scorches everything that allows it access. She lies in the deepest, soothing yet dark, dark shadow, saved from this access by the raintree. She is naked, her body almost white in the gloom and she looks up at the leaves and flowers of the raintree with its pink silken tufted panicles of flowers and lifted up leaves horizontally fusing to shut out the sun. She closes her eyes and sees the inhabitants of the mysterious black green of the tree, mythical pale beings draping languid limbs from the branches and resting their wings against the trunk, cloudy hetaerae of the sky gods. Underneath her deliciously freed body is the feel of the damp grass, and now and then when there is a movement of air, the leaves stir and the stored water showers her with icy drops. She sees the facade of the Rajmahal in negative imprint on her inner lids, black in the glare beyond the tree with white rectangles where the
chiks
lie lowered on each veranda. And framed within one of those rectangles is the shimmering figure of a man. Surjeet Shona's desire grows for that man. She arises, stretches, caressing her flawless body with her hands and walks out from the shade into the sun, turning herself into a torch in the white light. She looks up at the man, shading her eyes with one hand and waving with the other. In a moment, he is with her under the dark of the tree, his body transformed to pale nakedness. Languidly they embrace, exchanging sweet kisses. Then one by one the man takes Surjeet Shona's nipples, still burning from the sun, between his gentle teeth, while he mounts and enters her, and the hetaerae shake the branches to loosen the tufted flowers onto the lovers.