Rajmahal (28 page)

“This can't go on,” Junior complained, averting his eyes from the skirted plaster lady holding a lamp, so exciting to the elderly ghost.

“Certainly,” said Guliani readily. “Of course. I am very little at home and I didn't realize . . . Have a drink, Mr. Mallik. What can I offer you?”

“I don't drink,” said Junior curtly.

“Something soft?”

“No!” And abandoning tact Junior added, “I must tell you that we don't retain tenants in the Rajmahal who cannot observe the minimum, er . . .

His anger whipped up at the sighting of pencil squiggles on a wall. He was convinced the kitchen and bathrooms must swarm with cockroaches.

“I must press you to look for alternative accommodation!”

“Mr. Mallik, Mr. Mallik! Such a small thing . . . And as you know I am mostly out and my wife is, heh, heh, a little lenient with the girls . . . But I quite understand. The only solution is to sell the piano! There! My mind is made up!”

Guliani knew it wasn't simply the noise that had provoked Junior's reaction. He had guarded his seclusion precisely because he recognized his family's limitations. Not interfering with his wife's territory was the quid pro quo for his pursuit of pleasure in this thrilling city. At the same time, having the Rajmahal address on his card was a plus for him in Calcutta's snobbish commercial circuit, and even if he couldn't entertain at home there were enough clubs and restaurants for all that. But as Junior spoke it was clear Guliani had a problem on hand.

“What about Maudie Jessop!”

“Pardon?”

“It was you who encouraged her by offering her your facilities! She should never have been allowed back into the Rajmahal!”

“If you remember,” said Guliani softly, “She came here unasked. My mother may have been “guilty” of being hospitable, but she is an old lady who was brought up traditionally. It is impossible for her to refuse a friend.”

“Friend! Your mother never set eyes on the old cow before!”

Guliani's sensibilities quivered at this onslaught and the almost visible thread connecting his sacred mother to cows. He little realized that Junior's use of the rude phrase was linked to his subterranean contempt of Hindu cow veneration and all that went with it.

He took a deep breath, “So you think we enjoy having her visit us five times a day for this, this indelicate purpose?” he said, standing up to hide his agitation.

Junior took this as a signal. “Good-bye,” he said abruptly, and marched out.

“A piano!” thought Guliani with disgust. “A piano has to lose me my apartment!”

With the determination that had brought him this far from his modest background, he planned his maneuvers. He unhesitatingly sold the piano and arranged to bring in the Normans' furniture. “I will ask that friendly Surjeet Shona for advice. She has generations of good taste behind her ... Let it be done in a finger snap, so that next time that Muslim fellow will think he was having a bad dream.” It was essential to avoid further humiliation.

“Listen to him!” exclaimed the ghosts, when Guliani approached Surjeet Shona. “He's trying to change!”

“It's no good,” riposted the skeptics. “A tiger can't change its stripes.”

And others said, “How can you compare a Sindhi shopkeeper to that noblest of animals, the Royal Bengal Tiger!”

But it was too late to avert the desertion of the mansion by some of the older ghosts.

“It's time,” they muttered. “This is just the thin end of the wedge!”

Not long after, when all the ghosts were to vanish after Petrov's death, the Rajmahal would both rejoice to be rid of them, and lament at the clear signal given by this desertion.

 

While these events, and ghostly non-events, precipitated by her piano, were going on, Maudie was settling into her godown on the driveway, the repository of sacred accessories for the saint's tomb. There was nothing much there. A small cupboard with a few boxes of incense, matches, and candles, along with a tin trunk with a variety of colorful grave cloths. Maudie had her remaining furniture brought back to the Rajmahal and installed in this room with the help of Rawat, her old alcohol-procurer. He cleaned up the room and surreptitiously shifted the tomb's accessories to his own quarters.

Maudie happily and hazily felt, at the end of the move, that this wasn't such a bad place. She lay down for her first night's sleep in her own bed, relieved at the ease with which she could order her drink through her old ally. And the location on the ground floor was of endless interest. The view along the row of magnificent palms progressing down the drive, the Chowringhee traffic as it trundled by the distant gate, the activity on the Rajmahal drive. Even her visits to the Gulianis'didn't wear her out, though she could only communicate in sign language with the bent up lady who greeted her so graciously, and who was so hospitable with her offers of tea. Maudie had no idea that her cup was kept in the separate kitchen meant for people of indeterminate or undesirable caste.

The respectful care given to Guliani's old mother was paralleled by the house's attitude to all its older inhabitants. The Stracheys death had caused it great upset, but it was also relieved they were out of their misery. Maudie created a sentimental stirring in its bricks with her return, and it felt remorseful at its earlier carelessness. It was pleased that she so longed to return to its embrace, even if it was to that aberration on the driveway. Her heavy boozing and the watchman's complicity were of some concern though, and it wondered how Hindu middle-class morality, the Islamic taboo, and Junior's zealous eye could be juggled with her weakness. “This
will be interesting,” thought the Rajmahal. “Which side should I take in a confrontation?”

 

The matron and doctor at the Retreat had come down heavily on Maudie's addiction, and this had forced her to take flight. When she left, they advised her against the move to blunt the indecent haste with which they actually helped arrange for her departure. Dipsomaniacs were a constant threat to their routine and sanity and this was an old folks' home, not a prison. After this they did their duty by informing Junior and the committee and then kept very quiet.

Maudie led pleasantly unrestricted days as she eased her way back into her twenty-four-hour alcoholic haze. When Junior asked her, in his rough way, if she wouldn't be better off at the home, her skin tautened over her cheek bones giving her the skeletal look, that overtook her in a crisis, as if she was about to snap apart into bony fragments. Junior gave up the direct approach. He would have to think of other stratagems.

“He can easily have me carried off,” confided Maudie tremblingly to Rawat. “What's to stop him?”

“Who can dare to do such a thing when I am here!” the watchman growled, puffing out his burly chest. He wanted Maudie here, pleased at the prospect of bleeding her of some of her precious riches. He would have lost his cheer if he had known Maudie's “riches” extended only to the small residue of money released to her by the Retreat's matron. After all, how much do a few bottles of gin cost? The watchman was the only one who truly wanted Maudie, and that too under mistaken assumptions.

The experienced Rawat recognized the familiar glazed look on Maudie's face. Preempting her he said, “Here, Memsahib. I have put everything out here, the gin-
sharab,
the water, the lemon. I go now? Okay?”

 

Maudie's diminishing world was exemplified by her ever-diminishing room space. From a grand apartment with her grand private bedroom to just that bedroom split into a multipurpose apartment to this godown. Here, Maudie's dressing table, cupboard, and bed left cramped space for just two chairs and a table.

She took to strolling about the narrow strip skirting the drive, between the row of palms and the peripheral wall, the area highlighted by
Pir
Tasleem Ahmed's tomb. Junior had especially planned this corridor, and with the care of the gardeners it had turned paradisial. A secret garden with
an illusory spaciousness, its green carpeting made mysterious with inlets and recesses. Negotiating a cunning maze of hedges the visitor would come suddenly on the open space holding the tomb. A small pavilion had been built over it, with columns holding up a curving Bengal style roof and it was kept pristine with whitewashing. Everyday, after supervising the cleaning, Rawat would spread a fresh grave cloth over the tombstone and light the lamps in the niche behind it. Maudie looked forward to the varying brightly-colored and glittering raiment, the fresh flower petals strewn on the tomb every morning, the flaming lamps. She spent time here, lost in daydreaming under the trees and surrounded by the green of hedges and creepers. A semul tree had burst into waxy red flowers brilliant against bare branches, attracting squirrels which nibbled at the huge buds held in their minute hands. She most loved watching the sun birds, shimmering blue-black and pale yellow-green, weightless enough to sit on the petals without bending them and dipping their needle-beaks into the cups of the flowers. So tiny and perfect were these birds, that they appeared like normal-sized birds diminished by great distance, yet another illusion of space. Hoopoes knocked at the row of perfectly matched palms marching down the drive, tok-tok, riddling them with holes and highlighting the vista. Crows, flocks of parrots, doves, pigeons, bulbuls, mynahs, sparrows, seven sisters whirled and skirled, scolding and singing around Maudie who had found a perch on a ledge. Here she would sit leaning against the wall, her face tilted up in the sun, sometimes to be distracted by the devotees who came by to salute the tomb or light a candle. They would greet the strange white apparition in a dress and have small chats with her, about the weather, her health, and the grace of God. Most of them were the servants of the Rajmahal but there were many outsiders who had attached their sentiments to
Pir
Tasleem Ahmed's sacred remains.

Surjeet Shona came on Maudie soon after her arrival, strolling about by the enchanted shrine with a drink in her hand, as if she were at a garden party.

“Aunty Maudie,” Surjeet Shona gently chided. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh I love all religions, SS. God is one, no?” she said with simple sincerity.

“But, Aunty Maudie. You know, you can't do this.”

“Do what?” the alarmed Maudie asked, fearful her independence was being questioned again.

Surjeet Shona hesitantly explained the obvious. Drinking alcohol would offend all at this location, not only the spirit of the
Pir
, but his devotees and the Rajmahal.

“You should cover your head here too, Aunty Maudie. The same as in a Catholic church. Do you understand?”

“Watchman never said anything before,” sniffed Maudie. “I don't remember covering my head.” And she added suspiciously, “You aren't a Mohammedan are you?”

“Of course not!” laughed Surjeet Shona. “You know that, Aunty Maudie! But I'd definitely advise you against drinking here.”

So Maudie's slide into her incoherence of alcohol-induced states of euphoria or despair was stopped short by this distraction. She circumspectly wore her little Catholic veil when she visited the tomb and cut down on her drink. The house was rigid with uncertain hope. Had Maudie's break from the known performed the miracle? “Is the
Pir
at work?” it wondered.

Left unsaid was the fear of Junior Mallik, the one person Maudie needed to propitiate. And Junior Mallik was observing the issue with keen anxiety.

“What's the old cow up to?” he fretted. “Come on, oh
Pir
,” he pleaded. “Surely you can't condone her getting away with such blasphemy. And what about my devotion to you all these decades? Does it count for nothing?”

But the
Pir
's ghost, though his vibrations emanated ceaselessly, was inactive. If Junior could read his thoughts he would have suffered a shock.

“I was old too,” the
Pir
's emanation vibrated. “Oh yes. I was old too. And though I was never called an “old cow,” I was called many other things for my great age! What sin is there, in being old, and helpless, and weak after all? Is that not what all humans encounter, or dread? Why does it invite ridicule? Is Allah befooling us? Did I have to wait for the uncovering of my tomb to regain my respect?” And here he sighed a great sigh, which drained the spirit of the tenants for a second. “And the little lady shows me respect with the covering of her head, does she not? And she refrains from drinking in my space. How then can you, in spite of all your service to my remains, please my emanation?” he said to a deaf Junior.

This same deaf Junior was obsessed with the ouster of Maudie Jessop. Once the obstacle of her squatting was removed he longed to leap at the obstructive godown with iron staves.

“Even if I can't get rid of that shifty Hindu watchman, there's the godown,” he thought. Junior had always been anti-Rawat. But his father's
self-conscious secularity was a block. Ali came on so strong at any hint of prejudice that Junior was always frustrated.

When Surjeet Shona offered Maudie alternate toilet facilities at her apartment, therefore, Junior's thoughts became unprintable. “That mindless do-gooding bitch doesn't realize what a disservice she's doing Maudie. And me.”

“Listen,” he said to her with extreme constraint. “That's a great
service
you're doing for Maudie. But don't you think it's demeaning for her to live among the servants? That place was the watchman's godown, for god's sake!”

“You listen to me, Junior,” said Surjeet Shona firmly. “I know you want Aunty Maudie out of here. But the godown's been here forever, and it was
empty
. Why can't you let her spend a few happy years?”