Rajmahal (4 page)

The Stracheys spent seven years in the jute mill out in Nagarpara before moving to Calcutta. During this time, Myrna was submitted to the exaggerated pampering of her ayahs. They massaged her with creams and kept her cool with delicious iced drinks and seasonal summer fruits, laying out fresh cotton dresses lovingly laundered, and sheltering her from the extreme heat. But this bored and sickened her in the end. The savage, squalid country, the digs at her as an alien in the predominantly Scottish compound, were at first less relevant than the growing ties between her and Jack. But being kept out of the big bad world outside, cramped, created a resistance in her to having children. It was only after five years into her
marriage that she gave in and had Martin. And then, the life instilled a stupor in her, till one day it seemed she was trapped in a shrinking glass bubble. She lay inertly on deck chairs, staring across the muddy Hooghly at scenes she had once observed with such fascination. The changing moods of the river, the magnificent sunsets, bloated half-burnt carcasses floating by after nominal cremations, tidal bores knocking the small craft about, capsizing a ferry once and drowning its passengers before her very eyes. When the war came, amphibian planes landed on the water and khaki amphibian tanks droned across the river and crawled miraculously ashore as if earth and water were one element. But she was simply a viewer, not a participant, and the scenes remained what they had always been, vignettes framed between the veranda pillars of her prison.

When a trio of British air force officers was billeted on them Myrna was astonished to hear herself say, “Eenie, meenie, mynee, mo, catch a man ... Which should it be?” she smiled wickedly to herself at the first of the many anticipated thrills before a liaison. Tom, Dick, or Harry?” Ironically, she alighted on the oldest, who had so far shown no signs of facetious flirtatiousness. The lover-elect was cynical, the affair was brief and almost unpleasant. But Myrna felt liberated, as if she had smashed her way out of the glass bubble. The move to Calcutta came like a rescue air raid, one of the miraculous planes screaming down under strafing fire cover, and sweeping her away from that terrible place.

Jack and Myrna examined many alternatives before settling for the Rajmahal. They ignored the advice against moving into a block tenanted by Indians. “In Alipore,” they were told, “you'll get a house to yourselves and a garden, and you'll be close to all of us.
Everyone
lives in Alipore, or Ballygunge, or Tollygunge . . . ” “Everyone who's anyone, as well as white,” they may have added. But the thought of continuing within semi-rural limitations filled Myrna with dread. She needed desperately to be in the thick of things, centered.

Jack didn't mind either way, and the Rajmahal was that much closer to his office. He may have regretted it later when he saw the latitude it gave Myrna for her liaisons. But he couldn't have foreseen and planned so clearly into the future.

As for the Rajmahal, it felt both tentative and excited about the Stracheys, never having dealt with British tenants before. And it had also to deal with the ghosts who were frantic at the very thought of sharing their spaces with white people.

“
Mlechchas
in our midst!” shouted a
swadeshi
ghost. “Our purity will be sullied!”

“What purity?” said a Sikh ghost tartly. “You know nothing about this city. It's a real hodgepodge! Wait till you see what comes next.”

“We never thought we would have anything but upper-caste Bengalis,” said the
swadeshi
ghost, recklessly calling to question the aristocracy of the venerable Sardar Bahadur.

“Keep shut! Bengalis . . . black, skinny creatures from the gutters . . . ” more unprintable words followed from a middle-aged Sikh ghost and the house had to intervene. The ghosts had begun to tussle with each other's disembodied forms and utter little screams, which would soon escalate into shrieks, and this always permeated the atmosphere and affected the inhabitants' nerves. But the Sikh ghost was right. The post-Ohri Rajmahal would truly see a “hodgepodge” of tenants within a very short period. And what with calming the ghosts at each new incursion, and grappling with its own confusion, the house had already entered its half year of frustration. It was only after things had settled down that it could follow its natural inclinations of concern and affection toward its inhabitants. “They
are
upper class, anyway,” it would try and soothe the ghosts. “And after all, variety is the spice of life.”

 

Jack Strachey had been full of zest during the early jute mill days. Life was good, work was hard, and the big, hot country was getting him in its grip. As long as he had no contact with those stinking “lines” across the road.

All employees at Sharp's, British employees, were sent on regular furlough to Britain to stop them from curdling, convulsing with colic and draining away. Too many succumbed to the enervating air with its cargo of mosquitoes, the muggy water with its infusion of microbes. The other objective of the furlough was to ensure British employees married British. A handful had gone native and acquired Indian wives, exotic creatures perfumed with oriental attars, their foreheads adorned with vermillion. A girl from home was so much more
befitting
. Jack had been seen with beautiful Bengali companions for a while, causing a ripple of anxiety at Sharp's. “See that young Strachey goes home. Needs a bit of a change . . . ” Obediently, Jack Strachey, in the end unaffected by the Bengali beauties, the malaria, and the microbes, picked Myrna. Sharp's congratulated itself when he returned from that furlough with his young bride leaning with him over the rails of a steamer.

The Stracheys had decided to stay on after Independence, a minority among the British. Why should the proponents of the colonial power subject themselves to their country's erstwhile subjects? Yet some, a few, did, unwilling to give up the ineffable qualities built up over the centuries. Like the Stracheys, they “stayed on,” as some well-known writers have expressed through their fiction. The best in that fiction is exhibited in the reality of old age, of British people who grew old in India after Independence. And of such were the tragic Stracheys . . . not understanding of the Indian ethos, sympathetic but with no understanding. However much Jack Strachey may admire charming Indian women, or Myrna have sensual Indian lovers, or both enjoy the rhythm of the seasons, they couldn't encompassingly talk with Indians.

“What rapport?” you may ask. “Isn't it a bit too much to expect of a couple who stayed on just because they felt like it? Why all this sermonizing about chatting?” Rebuke accepted. It is in the nature of things that such lack of understanding must be. And for that matter, most Indians, whether from one extreme of urban, upper-class, and westernized or the other of rural poor, have their binoculars turned in on themselves. Apart from knowing little about the larger country, they can rarely talk with anyone outside their own confined groupings. So let's not waste time on all this and go on to the dilemma or situation of Jack and Myrna Strachey as among the few British who stayed on till the end.

When it came to lovers Myrna could talk with white and colored, European and Indian without discrimination. She was the mistress of men in an outré sense, having, by the time she had reached fifty, slept with almost any man who took her fancy.

And once, a visiting and elderly Ohri, long before Surjeet Shona came back to settle in the Rajmahal, who stayed for a time in the ground floor apartment belonging to his family. “I wonder if all Sikhs carry the ‘five k's',” Myrna had always wanted to know. And when she saw the handsome Ohri downstairs she had smiled to herself. Apart from the
kesh
, the
kanga
, the
karrha
, the
kirpan
and the
kacchha
, the five k's, she also longed to know if true Sikhs were forbidden from “interfering” with Christian women, white Christian women, just as they were instructed against Muslim
women. Some of the older Sikh ghosts could have enlightened her, but they couldn't read Myrna's thoughts.

“Oh Myrna,” her long-suffering and adoring Jack had thought, “why do you need so badly to explore everything in the world to its very core, why are you so curious about life you big, beautiful, thoughtless woman? Where does he keep his dagger, Myrna? Did you find it pinning his under shorts together? Or tucked into his uncut pubic hair?” He reprimanded himself for this uncharacteristic outburst. He knew he was lucky to be exempt from jealousy. “And no,” he thought smiling to himself when by the end of the millennium everyone was racing to wash their dirty linen in public water tanks, “I'm not like Mountbatten.” He referred to the assumption that the last viceroy must be homosexual because he didn't have jealous tantrums at his lady wife's allegedly wild love life, including her affair, platonic or otherwise, with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Jack couldn't remember if the insinuations included Lord Mountbatten himself being in love with Nehru, in which case he ought at least to have been jealous of Edwina for having smitten the one he was smitten by . . . Yet he seemed to have expressed only true warmth and friendship for the ever-so-romantic Nehru, providing no hint of the sexual leanings suspected by the Freud-seekers.

Mountbatten came to a sticky end, an extremely sticky end, but that was caused by an outside agency unconnected, to date, to Freudian patterns. So, blessedly, Jack Strachey was absolved of the endless pain his wife should normally have caused him. In retrospect he would classify these rare mental outbursts as spiteful objectivity rather than anything baser. And never would he express these thoughts out loud. But he recognized he was lucky not to suffer from jealousy.

At fifty, Myrna still continued with her curvets. She still had a slender figure, though it was getting harder and harder to trim the thickening waist. Her last affair had bored her and for the first time she asked herself the question, “Why do I do it?” And then she corrected herself, “Why do I have to do it?” But she couldn't get beyond the simple question. She couldn't ask if it was an inherent urge to power or pure sensuality, and the corollary that no one and nothing should stand in the way of its impulses. The more she continued, the more compulsive those impulses, all the classic signs of an addiction. She would continue her aberrant behavior, a pure hedonist one moment, a loving wife the next, like a yo-yo in a typhoon, up down, whirling, out of control, but attached with that string to Jack's strong finger.

The first turning point was when the British Raj was taken over by the historical compulsions of an ancient and humiliated people. When the transformation had been heralded by an unprecedented year's carnage, abruptly ending on the eve of Independence, “a miracle” as Chief Minister Surahwardy had whispered to the fasting Gandhi. When death and deepest degradation had raged in and around Calcutta during the great famine four years earlier. When a flood of refugees had poured across the new partition line between the two halves of the country. As if the terrible reluctance of the colonial power in withdrawing had left as its reaction, a vacuum so fierce it had sucked in the world around it, whipping itself around and around into the spiral of a potent tornado. And yet, researchers would be dejected to find so little in the personal records of the Rajmahal tenants and their ilk to reflect those cataclysmic events. They would eagerly scan the pages of the dusty, browned diaries of the Stracheys flipping to August 15, 1947 and finding nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing to reflect the banner headlines screaming, “INDEPENDENCE! FREEDOM!” in the newspapers.

“But they weren't official chroniclers,” you may say, “or self-conscious celebrities hoping their private papers would one day be published.” For instance, Myrna Strachey's diary said “Coffee, 11:00 a.m. Lady Bannerjea” August 14, and it also said, “Dinner, Roys, 8:00 p.m.” Was that dinner party organized specially to usher in Independence? At midnight Pandit Nehru was to hoist the flag in salute to that long-awaited day. Did the Roys, who were the hosts that night, wait with the string of the furled new flag in their hands, radio on, for the signal to pull that string? And did the Indian guests go crazy, their tears dropping with the flower petals from the unfurling flag? But then, why wasn't it mentioned in their diaries? They would have to be content with the records of the great, such as Pandit Nehru, whose pocket diary said, “The appointed day!” Pandit Nehru must have known his destiny and diary would be eagerly scanned by future generations. But, whether noted or not in their diaries, the Stracheys must have recognized that the changes had to come. That the tortuously built-up bastions on which their empire had rested couldn't bolster the new India forever. The changes would take place gradually but necessarily, for now the incumbents of the Writer's Building had brown skins, wore
dhuties
, with the reverse sartorial snobbery, and spoke a language which had remained a mystery to their British predecessors. Allowing the healthful self-respect to flow back into the enervated Indian body politic. The changes would slowly
impinge on the Stracheys and alter the texture of their lives in ways they hadn't foreseen when they had made their choice. That day, August 15, 1947, most of the Rajmahal tenants must have gone out on the streets to taste the air rich with the resonance of crowds, jammed into trucks, waving from tricolor-draped balconies, chanting “
Jai Hind
!” The Stracheys hung no tricolor from their balcony. But they leaned out and waved and smiled at their friends and the crowds, jostling unknowingly with the merry ghosts, joining in with the
Jai Hind
s. And when the joyous temple bells rang and conch shells blew, the Stracheys even felt a thrill, perhaps mixed with their first inklings of discomfort.