Rajmahal (44 page)

The police arrest everyone in the lethal fracas, chauffeurs, guards, other staff, city musclemen, neighbors. All the people prised out from the passage are bundled into a black maria. Except for the absent chief protagonists, watchman Rawat-Pandey and Junior. Many have been injured, Old Jainab has been killed outright. But only Mumtaz, the outsider, the intruder, is critically injured. Who knows who is guilty, when lips are universally sealed? But at last and with finality, the watchman's Rajmahal days are over.

“Let me defrock him so that my
Pir
can have a proper guardian,” says Junior to his father.

“You have carte blanche, my boy,” replies Ali at last. “Oh yes!”

But the watchman hasn't lost his Chanakyan skills, and this final joy is denied Junior. Even as they speak, he is heard trumpeting that his youngest son, the apple of his eye, has landed a prime government job. By reason of his status as an
untouchable
.

“What the hell!” rages the impotent Junior. “What happened to his Brahmanhood?”

The watchman has bribed a petty official, and his son is in possession of a stamped piece of paper which certifies him unquestionably as a
shudra
, the lowliest of the castes, at the head of which tower the lofty
brahmans
. His
shudra
status gives his son instant access to a reserved job, in government service.

“Sir,” says the shameless fraudster, circumspectly divested of his top knot and sacred thread. “I, henceforward to be addressed merely as Valmiki, come humbly to take your leave. I am old now, just like this old building. And my
Pir
-
ji
has need of a younger and fitter servant. And in any case,” he sighs. “I can no longer hold such a sacred charge, belonging as I do, with my son, to the lowest of the low. If I have in any way committed wrongdoing, I crave your forgiveness.”

The
bhaiji
's voice rises joyously from the room of the
Guru Granth Sahib
:

Not long after, the Rajmahal is vacated by the remaining inhabitants and sold. It is destroyed, including that rooted carbuncle, Rawat-Pandey-Valmiki's godown, eradicated in such a savage and surgical manner it hardly feels the pain. Surjeet Shona stops by one afternoon and steps into the space of clean new light between the two adjoining properties. She steps straight through the nonexistent wall with its nonexistent iron rails and barbed wire, from the pavement into the nonexistent garden. Opened out like this, the ground looks diminished, impossible to imagine the scale of the building once standing here. Surjeet Shona's feet sink into the pink and beige rubble of brick and plaster, by shards of high quality glass with peacocks' tail eyes which look up at a dark, cloudy sky. The raintree is back to full green strength, its leaves drooping in the sunlessness. A watchman appears by her side and notes the direction of her gaze.

“There were once vultures on this tree, Memsahib. A pair of vultures. The police came and fired their guns at the tree top, through the gaps, not at the vultures themselves you understand, for that would be inauspicious. Again and again they fired. And that is when the great birds left.”

There isn't a pigeon in sight either. The mansion's memory is seeping away through its heart, brain, its cornerstone, into Surjeet Shona's hand, which has lifted up the stone, trying in vain to pass into her emotional
body. The tremors of its expending power force it to slip from her grasp to fall soundlessly to the ground, yet shatter to a powder which will never be reconstituted. The new building, many floors high, will be filled with hard squares of brightly lit offices and hard bright machines and will remember nothing. Only the
Pir
's grave will remain, Surjeet Shona can see it, protected by Junior's wall bulge, behind a wilting dust-shrouded hedge maze. It will evolve again into a center of congregation, devotion and strife. And near it is that old pit, swirling with venom.

SURJEET SHONA REMEMBERS ONE BY ONE AND OVER AND OVER HER marriages and the deaths of her men. “I won't send for Gurdeep. I will not!”

Will Mumtaz live or die? Will she lose her fear of that ghoul, transcend it? Hasn't she talked to Mumtaz of the now because of that fear? Will Mumtaz live or die? Will he live or die?

When she visits Mumtaz in hospital with the distraught Saira that night, she finds everyone from the Rajmahal present, thronging the corridors. Old Jainab's body has been taken away, but his relatives are there, wailing and beating their breasts. They come crowding around Surjeet Shona. As if she can bring him back to life.

She breaks away and finds herself in Mumtaz's room. Saira, who has reached there before her, is standing with bowed head near her prone son. She looks up. She knows Surjeet Shona is the one who matters.

“Go to him, darling,” and she retreats to cough and cough painfully, while Ali puts his arms around her and tries to help her with a glass of water. There is a flurry and Junior is there. He dashes forward, sees Surjeet Shona and holds back. He huddles with his parents and others of the family, and they dumbly watch Surjeet Shona sleepwalking toward Mumtaz. They register this is the first time they have seen her looking ugly. And they remember how Mumtaz grew ugly before their eyes as Lalitha slowly died. Surjeet Shona's hair is flattened in parts, standing up in others. Its white spreading dramatically. Her
shalwar-kameez
is askew, and she appears too thin, shapeless. It is almost impossible to look at her face, the loosened, trembling lips, the softening jawline, the deepening lines. The conspirators, Gravity and Time have been presented with another victory. Abruptly, as sometimes happens.

Surjeet Shona is afraid to speak. Or look at Mumtaz. Her eyes gaze about the room. Avoiding the bed scrupulously. She looks at the ceiling, white, dead white, in one corner a small patch with loose plaster. Her eyes reach a ceiling fan hanging down in the middle of the room, on an extra long rod. This is an old building with high ceilings. She looks down the wall to the right of the room. “It must be a thick wall. These old buildings have such thick walls.” She moves forward slowly all the while. Then she stumbles. Her eyes fall on an edge of white. Where she can see a hand. “Mumtaz?” The hand is lying palm-down, and the top is covered with plaster. Out of the plaster moves a long tube culminating in a suspended bottle. Her eyes swivel out and away from the bottle. Then like a pendulum, toward the figure on the bed. They stop at the face. All that is visible of it apart from the hand. The body is under a sheet. The head swathed in bandages. The central portion of eyes, nose, and mouth uncovered. The eyes closed. The fine lacy tracery of blood, the tattered scarlet net has been cleared. Leaving a crazy pattern of cuts and contusions. Surjeet Shona's hand touches the free fingers. And Mumtaz opens his eyes and looks straight at her.

Her heart melts and lightens through a rainbow burst with the flash of his mischievous eyes. “SS.” Almost inaudible. “How good of you . . . Always . . . so good . . . My 'Litha's friend . . . 'Litha . . . ” And, alarmingly to everyone who immediately rushes around him, his eyes fill with tears.

Surjeet Shona feels a familiar twisting pain in her center. Her heart turns to cold dark stone. She is intimate with the nuances in Mumtaz's eyes. And she knows. Instantly. Much ahead of the others. That Mumtaz has entered a time warp. Pitilessly drawn back by the allure of his long and deep marriage. To Lalitha. That a wedge of his life, the crucial wedge preceding the incident, has been neatly sliced out of his memory . . .

“If he dies,” she thinks, “I will have to live with the memory of that last gesture he made to me. Of his pushing me away. ‘Get out of the way, SS!' he said. ‘Get out of the way!'” Surjeet Shona leaves her lover's limp unremembering fingers with a stunned expression.

“Ali, Ali. Can it be . . . ?” Saira, whispering.

“The boy will go through his suffering all over again . . . ”

“I thought, wasn't he, SS, weren't they . . . ?” Fayyaz.

“She hasn't realized it yet. SS hasn't realized he's going to go through all that pain again. All she knows is she may lose him. That's all she can think of.”

“We lost little 'Litha. Little warm 'Litha, our dearest son's dearest love. And he nearly lost his reason. Then SS came and saved him . . . ” Ali's voice breaks.

“He may lose his reason completely. Now . . . ”

“Darling . . . ”

“ Wait. Let the doctor . . . ”

“ We
must
tell him! We
must
! We
can't
let him forget . . . ”

The doctor looks at Saira with a frown, and Ali shushes her again. Surjeet Shona stands against the farthest wall, her eyes wide open and dry, glittering, unfocused on the doctor's intent form. Then the doctor calls and the family circles the bed. Surjeet Shona, statusless, falters and keeps her distance. Out of Mumtaz's sight.

The doctor whispers with the family. Surjeet Shona moves closer, turning her glittering eyes on Mumtaz. His eyes are closed again.

Ali and Saira circle Surjeet Shona in with them. The doctor stands watching.

Mumtaz opens his eyes and smiles at his loved ones. Then grimaces with pain. “Darling,” Saira again. At a loss for words. “How, does it, are you ... how do you feel? Tell us . . . do you remember?”

Mumtaz's eyes move desperately from figure to figure. Dilating. Rolling about. Demented.

The doctor gestures at them to stop, move back. Whispering, “Later. It's dangerous now. Later we will have to gently probe his mind to bring back the past. Now. He must rest. Please. Never try to force him.” Mumtaz is unconscious again. The doctor soothes them. “It's all right. That's the best way for him to rest . . . ”

 

It comes to be known that the revisitation of that extreme loss may prove not only tragic, but hazardous in Mumtaz's frail condition. “His memory may come back. Such things have been known to happen.” They know the doctor is being kind. Every attempt at reminding Mumtaz, even gently recounting small episodes from the past, is met with the demented rolling eyes and the swoon. And Mumtaz drifts incoherently in and out of consciousness in a time warp, bordering death.

 

Memory, can do many harmful acrobatics, denying an inconvenient fact which simply ceases, never was . . . In this arena of memory and forgetting , truth and hallucination, people often cannot place themselves or identify their own roles . . .
Surjeet Shona reads Petrov's passage on memory again and again through the sick wrenching inside her. “Does Mumtaz not want me in his deepest self? Was our short span of love an inconvenient fact which has simply ceased? Oh Uncle Osheem, why did you not comment on this grotesque edge, this extreme of forgetfulness? Who do I look to now, what do I do to bring Mumtaz back?”

“Are you thinking what I'm thinking?” whispers Ali to Saira.

“You know I am, darling. We're all thinking the same thing.”

The
inconvenient fact
imagined by Surjeet Shona is something other for them. All, every one of them, want Mumtaz to forget the other way around, to forget Lalitha. It is the remembrance of
her
that is inconvenient, not the living, not Surjeet Shona.

“What a tragedy for Lalitha's memory and our grandchildren, that we should wish this.”

“And what a tragedy for SS and Mumtaz that we are forced to make such a wish!”

“Only the return of his memory can save him. Only remembering he's in love with SS.”

“He can fall in love with her again, can't he?”