Rajmahal (43 page)

“They are cowards, Shona baby. How can they?”

“So then,” said Surjeet Shona, “We come to the inevitable conclusion: That Uncle Osheem died, and they, the waiting vultures, carried him away . . . ”

“Do vultures carry away carcasses . . . ?”

“I do not know,” moaned Robi.

“It's all right, Robi,” said Mumtaz kindly. “There is no shame in that. You must know the Parsees give their dead to the birds in places called Towers of Silence.”

“The Tibetans leave their dead on hilltops for the birds too,” said Surjeet Shona, trying to make herself feel better. “It is an air burial, and that too is natural and noble. God made those birds for this task, Robi, to transform death through their bodies back into life. You have to remember it is natural.”

Surjeet Shona, glancing sideways at Mumtaz thought, “It won't be so easy to forget. Not in the Rajmahal with death all around us in such frightening disguises.” And this was the first time she felt like leaving. “ We must get away,” was her clear thought. “We must transfer ourselves to the living world, and before, not after our deaths.” The Rajmahal winced. This was also the time when she would make the traitorous remarks. “We have to get out of this houseful of near-skeletons, look at the Rajmahal, falling apart like a dehydrated skeleton itself.” The time when she could see with x-ray eyes into the spaced out network of rusted girders and worn walls enclosing worn inhabitants. The time when she would stroke the pillar against which she stood, and place her cheek on it to say, “Sorry.”

Mumtaz, responded at last to the forces of time and the gentle pressure of the Rajmahal's most intrepid woman, his mother. He began to drop in often at the Ohri apartment without devious persuasion. This was the time too, that Surjeet Shona found it propitious to make preparations and
take special care over herself. “There's no escape,” she half lamented half rejoiced when the almost forgotten flooding with joy and desire alternated with panic. “It's happened again.” She remembered a comment in Petrovs' diary, about a contradiction involving pain and pleasure:
A lover giving pleasure yet inflicting torture. Whose presence is intense delight and whose absence intense pain.
“I'm letting myself in for it again . . . ”

She was walking up and down on her veranda talking aloud to herself when she stopped short at the sight of Mumtaz in the doorway. Her heart thudded. “Intense delight,” she thought.

“Talking to ourselves, are we?” said Mumtaz. He sat back and stretched and said, “Heard the latest?” He had filled out to his original stature, lost the gauntness and the diminished look on his face. “They're wondering if Maudie's gun belonged to Shudo Mojumdar. Poor old Maudie. She keeps saying it was her husband's.”

“Really! But didn't Shudo notice?”

“Who knows? He's not here to be asked.”

Robi was squatting by Surjeet Shona as was his wont. He coughed delicately. “
Shaheb
. They have been saying . . . ”

“Who has been saying . . . ?”

“The servants, Mojumdar s
haheb
's servants have been saying, when the dog died there was too much blood. . . .”

Mumtaz sat up. “And, what else are they saying?”

“They found small pieces of brass, like . . . ”

“Bullets!?” exclaimed Surjeet Shona and Mumtaz together.

“You mean Shudo
shaheb
shot the dog!?”

“Who knows,
Shaheb
. It bit him once.”

“Ho, ho,” said Mumtaz. “What next?”

“But surely Proshanto
shaheb
must have been angry.”

“That they do not say . . . ”

“Pro said nothing, did nothing, and Shudo stayed on with him . . . ?”

“It could be that Pro simply forgot.” said Surjeet Shona.

“How can you forget such a thing? Would you forget if someone killed your dog?”

“He was senile Mumtaz. You didn't know. You didn't live here. Pro forgot everything toward the end. He lived in a dream world of his own. Things that happened in the present vanished as soon as they were over ...”

“But then, that man Shudo's dangerous!”

“He is bad man,” said Robi. “They are also saying . . . ” he stopped suddenly.

“Come on, Robi, Tell us! What are they saying?”

“They know he had one gun,
shaheb
. They are saying he tried to, na, na, na . . . ”

“Harm Proshanto
shaheb
, is that what they're saying?”

Robi was holding his head and moaning as was also his wont. “They are bad people too, those servants. Stealing from their
shaheb
, cheating . . . Na, na. It is nonsense . . . ”

Robi got up, disgusted with himself, and left.

 

Surjeet Shona was incredulous. “Mumtaz! Could Sudho have killed Pro?”

“There you go again! Next you'll say he pushed Petrov off the roof !”

“Shouldn't we find out . . . ?”

“SS, SS! Do you realize what you're saying? Pro died a normal death, there must be a doctor's certificate or the police would have been here. In any case, his body's gone, not even the ashes are left. You can't investigate a murder without a body, darling!”

Surjeet Shona flushed.

“I know what you're thinking,” teased Mumtaz. “Exhume the dog, that's what you're thinking!”

“Oh no,” said Surjeet Shona in a turmoil. “It's ridiculous, what a ridiculous idea!”

“Full of holes,” said Mumtaz mischievously. “Bullet holes . . . Dig up a long-buried dog's remains to find out if its owner was murdered by his brother who had no motive. It's Rudro who's inherited, SS, not poor old Shudo! And while we're about it, shouldn't we consult an ornithologist?”

“Now what?”

“Aren't you interested in the habits of the great Indian vulture?”

Mumtaz smiled and Surjeet Shona smiled back at him. Mumtaz put out his hand and gently tweaked Surjeet Shona's cheek. Then he took her hand and pulled her upright close against himself, and then, very slowly, very serious now, looking into her eyes, he brought his head down to hers till their lips touched. The kisses, so long awaited, were sweeter than Surjeet Shona's wildest dreams.

“My own SS,” murmured Mumtaz, holding her tight against him.

Surjeet Shona joyfully responded, savoring once more the hardness
of a man's body, this man's body. Mumtaz began to uncover her breasts, following the sequence of Surjeet Shona's dream.

“Not here,” she said, and she led him inside.

There followed such a passage of absorption and rejuvenation for the lovers, that they became blind to everything around them. It was difficult to say who was happier, the Rajmahal or Ali-Saira. Freely and guiltlessly happy, Surjeet Shona wondered, like Ali, why this hadn't happened many years ago, many, many years ago. “But then, there was Martin, wasn't there? And all the others. And 'Litha . . . . . . ” She and Mumtaz both knew such an ideal matching those many years ago was irrelevant when the now was so perfect.

“SS,” Mumtaz said to her one afternoon, when they were lying on her bed, sealed by their sweat, as if they would never be parted, “You are my wife. You always were . . . ”

Surjeet Shona murmured, flowering to the feel of his fingers moving on her hair in slowest, gentlest strokes. “Don't say anything.”

She had a blurred, warm feeling imbuing her whole body in a layer just under her skin that she and Lalitha were one person, and that Mumtaz felt this too. And in a layer under that layer, she knew and knew Mumtaz knew, this was the way to deal with his past love and her past friendship for Lalitha, and the happiness the little Keralite had created around her and with them during her life. She turned her face to Mumtaz's and ran her fingers along the shallow lines etched in crooked horizontal bars along his brow, then around the expression of pleasure in his eyes, along the ridge of his long, bumpy, nose, down the naso-labial lines and along the bow of his lips. And Mumtaz returned her touch for touch with his fingers, along the frown lines on her forehead, her long eyebrows, the wrinkles by her eyes, along her eyelashes, forcing her to close her eyes, along the ridge of her nose, the curve of her cheek bones, the edges of her lips. Then their erotic trembling fingers met at the tips, and joined, pulling them closer and closer till their lips were touching again.

“You are my wife, my beautiful wife, you always were . . . ” Surjeet Shona knew she could resurrect his wife for him, be that resurrection. Expressing sorrow,
exhibiting
it, to the one she loved and who loved her, his passionate solace, his kisses on her lips and the salt of her tears tasted through his tongue on hers . . . Happy, shared sorrow . . .

OLD JAINAB, UNEASY AFTER THE LOSS OF HIS GLASS EYE, WAS RESTLESS. The shakiness of age addressed him directly through the wrinkled, quivering, empty socket and all attempts to get him fitted up again failed against his logic.

“I am blind after the loss of the old,” he categorically stated. “Allah has divested me of my sight!”

Ali Mallik grumbled. “He's crackers. He thinks he can see with a
glass
eye. You'd think he was a hundred the way he carries on. Would you imagine the bally chap's much younger than I am?”

Ali had a blind spot to the visible signs of his own aging. It was true there was no tangible change in his skeletal appearance, apart from an increased hollowness of the cheek and a ptosis affecting the left eyelid. But age, like the Calcutta monsoon, doesn't allow for easy resolution, and, intangibly, Ali looked his age, and therefore older than Jainab.

 

Galled beyond reason by his eye's missing “sight,” the old magician went hunting. And the hunting ground had to be the scene of habitual assault, the dank smelly corridor between the godown and garages, the location of the Brahmanized toilet. The Rajmahal sighed. Delighted as it was by Surjeet Shona's new lover, its instincts clearly indicated big trouble ahead.

“Where is it, where is it?” intoned Jainab, clacking the false teeth he had pushed loose in his mouth.

It was dark and he searched among the weeds and cracks in the paving with a torch, his face close to the ground. Something white and shining near the wall caught his single eye, and he bent over for a closer look. And that was Old Jainab's last act in this life. With a sickening sound, his head was smacked against the wall, coinciding with his curdling scream for help.
The Rajmahal braced itself. No one could explain, or admit to knowing enough to explain, what really happened. Of the two chief protagonists, Junior and Rawat-Pandey, neither was on the premises at the time.

When Mumtaz came running down armed with a curtain rod, Surjeet Shona tried to stop him.

“Get out of the way, SS.” he called excitedly, pushing her away.

And he rushed blindly and foolishly into the smelly, mysterious passage where all the evil of the world was that night concentrated and where all the rites of the dark phase of the moon had been performed from ancient times, long before the mansion's existence, centered in a venom pit.

Indescribable racking sounds, rushing feet, a scream, conjoined screaming, fearful din of violence. Surjeet Shona running toward it all. The godown an impossible barrier. Pushed out again by a narrow, seething mass. Wrenched out of the way by an arm. Feeling, more than hearing, a vibration deep inside. Mumtaz. Oh yes, Mumtaz . . . in unspeakable pain.

Ali and Saira come running stiffly, half falling down the stairs. They see the police arrive and the bodies carried out. They see their middle and lately bereaved, just-found-happiness-again son, Mumtaz. And his new love Surjeet Shona. Shaking, standing by them with her hands tightly covering her eyes.

“Don't hide from it,” snaps Saira. “Go on. Open your eyes. Look girl. Look my darlings.” She coughs and weeps in spasms, spitting out phlegm and blood.

“Look after her,” Ali to Surjeet Shona, whispering. He quells an old man's tremor. “Bring her with you later. I must go.”

Ali Mallik's ptosis blinds his eye, an apology to old Jainab for his mockery. He hobbles quickly and painfully to the ambulance and gets in behind the stretchers on one of which lies Mumtaz, still alive. While Surjeet Shona thinks, “It's me of course. Something always happens when I'm with a man.” Pinioned in the rigid hold of shock, she is powerless to follow her injured lover.

When Mumtaz had floated by under the high light hanging over the Rajmahal drive, she had looked at his face through her fingers, in obedience to his mother's injunction. “Look my darlings,” Saira had cried. Surjeet Shona could see his face very clearly, through the crystalline lenses of her faultless eyes. On that face was a fine, lacy tracery of blood, a tattered scarlet net.
Junior finds old Jainab's dentures in the morning, in the passage. The grisly dentures grin back, pleased never to go to work again, never to enhance the smile of the old magician again. Then Junior notices a little circular disc, winking in the sunlight. He approaches it, picks it up—a piece of glass, black, with bluish wisps cunningly worked into it, and it pricks his finger releasing a tiny speck of blood. On the ground is left behind a space, inside a circle of white powder. Such as could have been formed by the ferocious crushing-into-dust of an eggshell. Or a glass eye. Junior remembers ragged Jainab's arrival at the Rajmahal and the first trick he performed for them a long, long time ago. He remembers how he shared that moment with his little brother, Mumtaz. And he prays, “Let my kid brother live. Oh Allah, please let him live!”