Rajmahal (9 page)

Summer, winter, monsoon, the apartment was perfectly attuned after decades of organization. In summer, the
khas khas
tatties replaced the veranda
chiks
, with the breezes carrying in the zest of the wet reed. The dust scent settling under the first rains became a pleasant cliché for Jack, and if he had known, he would have bought the attars sold on street corners promising the bottled essences of
khas
and rain dust. The potted lilies prepared to bud and flower white against the dark of the
chik
s. Solutions were endlessly attempted against one of the few faults of the Rajmahal, the low plinth of the lobby floor that led to flooding. During early days, the Sardar Bahadur, always elegant, had shallow ducts carved to drain into the fountains. But rainwater during a Calcutta monsoon is jealous of elegant solutions and it had never worked. The Rajmahal tenants would be almost immobilized till the end of the rains. The house knew this disregard of old age underscored its decline as it shuddered and picked up its metaphorical hem. When the waters receded, a clayey lining was uncovered with little colonies of tadpoles and other slimy creatures of the wet. The Rajmahal suffered the clinging staleness of mildew and mold, straining to evict any organic remains after the post-monsoon cleansing.

But the monsoon was a season Jack loved, and the outer veranda had always given him just the exposure he needed. He would venture out and peer around the
chik
s to enjoy the thunder and spray of the heavenly Niagara. Then the rains would come to an end. “Perfect,” he would sigh as the weather turned dry and fine, and fans and air conditioners were stopped. The renovation season would come around, and the “little men” appear. The polishing wallah to sandpaper and re-polish the teak and rosewood furniture and floors, the pleasant smells of spirit polish and beeswax spreading their fragrances. The masons to scrape and repaint the damp patches on the walls, sometimes to redecorate a whole room. The tailor to stitch up new curtains. The upholstery wallah to re-cover the chairs, Myrna overseeing their rearrangement with renewed pictures,
lamps, and polished silver. The newness would inspire vases full of flowers, early roses and chrysanthemums.

But the movement of time came barging in, disrupting the harmony. The little men vanished, shifting away from traditional avocations. Water no longer flowed on demand from taps. Power breakdowns meant the installation of noisy generators. The
khas khas
tatties vanished. The tolerance to heat diminished with air conditioners. The floor waxing was short circuited after Myrna slipped and fractured her ankle, and the sparkle of seasonal adjustments all but disappeared. With them disappeared a civic feature unique to Calcutta, the washing down of roads with high pressure hoses by superhuman little men, deftly up and downing their water jets to avoid cars and passersby.

The human contents of the Rajmahal, Jack's companions over the decades, were fading like the building. Sightings of Mohini Mojumdar were rare as she took to her bed. Then there was Petrov across the landing, turning peculiar, and Proshanto Mojumdar, dozing off in the middle of his scatty chatter. The landlord hardly came down though he and his wife waved sometimes from their landing. And Jack would reproach himself when he was occasionally asked to help an aging co-tenant. “Of course,” he would say guiltily. “Certainly. It's the least I can do. I've been so . . . ” And he would add, his conscience heavy, “I didn't realize . . . ”

One of the all-year-round activities involved the war against malaria-bearing mosquitoes. This was romanticized by Jack through the mosquito net which swirled down every night from the ceiling. Jack retreated to his bed, pulled at the strings tied by his side, and shut his eyes as the soft netting encircled him and Myrna, holding them in its protective embrace. That cloudy world gave Jack a feeling of intimate safety, like the net spread below trapeze artists, cocooning them in their aerial spaces. His worst moments came when the fan, still the crazily impractical fan with the wooden blades, tore the mosquito curtains when the delicate balance was upset. Each time, he saw to it that the netting was immediately replaced. The very worst was the day of the Bad News, when Myrna had lunged at the netting, tearing it from its moorings. Jack had felt as if he, a trapeze artist, had fallen from the high swings through a hole in the safety net, ever dreading the fatal impact to follow.

He felt the same dread again, though the net was as secure as it had ever been.

Petrov, the Russian tenant, kept a diary in which he made philosophical observations, which he shared only with Surjeet Shona, his eager acolyte:
What are the Stracheys doing here in this crazy, filthy, smoggy, out-of-control city? Do they really need this apartment, this Rajmahal, these ancient toothless servants, just for the sake of a view of the crowded
maidan
, access to a few shabby clubs, an idea that their Raj is still here? How do they face the sly hints about the greed of the British during the Raj, their savage revenge after native uprisings? I have heard them being taunted about the famine. Have they forgotten how they went skipping across starving bodies on their way into Firpo's? What about all the writing on this British indifference, the writing which reviles it? What about Jack Strachey's own true background? (I know what this means, after all, though I was so young when I left Russia. Jack Strachey was a full adult when he left his country.) A “true” background means a wholeness which can never exist in another country, in spite of a long life's association. It means knowing people of your own family, your region, your background . . . It means recognizing who you are and what you are, your true level . . . Ah! There I may have hit on something. Perhaps Jack Strachey's level in England is the problem . . .

Small differences with the Indians on which Jack and Myrna had commented and laughed over the years were now like monster barriers.

“It's rude to tell the truth, but not to yawn, spit, and burp.”

“And fart too.”

“ W hat about nose picking?”

“Have more, na, please, but you must . . . ”

“No thank you . . . ”

“Are you sure . . . ?”

“Of course I am, I said so didn't I!”

Exasperating. Maddening. As if one doesn't know one's own mind.

“Look at him Jack, piling my plate, it's monstrous!”

“Shshsh. Just eat as much as you can . . . ”

“Myrna, give Mr. Ghosh another helping . . . ”

“I just asked him, he said ‘no'!”

“Myrna! Insist, go on! Or you'll offend him . . . ”

But Jack knew the Indian experience would deny him simple solutions, that, in the end he could not have re-adjusted his personality and status-consciousness in Britain. Here his level was intact and understood. It was himself now and till the end.

Myrna's familiar quack quacking penetrated.

“What dear?' he said mildly.

“How do I
look
?” Myrna said in that anxious tone close to hysteria. “How do I
look
, Jack? You're not
listening
!”

How did she look indeed? Jack realized he hadn't
looked
at her recently, because of her incessant natter, because of his incessant concern for her. “ You . . . ” automatically, knowing his best strategy. “Darling, you . . . look . . . just fine . . . ”

“Don't lie! I don't believe you meant a word of that!”

“What dear?”

“I used to be so sexy.” Myrna's voice took on a mewling tone.

“Don't I know it!” Jack dutifully lunged at a heavily corseted breast.

Myrna slapped him away. “Stop it!” She started crying, turning Jack's heart and lowering his resistance so painfully that he groaned out loud.

“Oh Jack, I don't know how I should do my hair, and what I should wear . . . It's so hard . . . ”

“Hush.” Jack's voice trembled. “Hush . . . ”

“I can't decide! Should I dye my hair? And look at these stays, they hardly make a difference. It's too awful of Martin to forget the new ones . . . And, and, should I dye my hair? It's
awful
.” Desperate. “You aren't
saying
anything. Should I
dye
my hair, Jack Strachey, should I
dye
it, so they'll look at me again... ”

“I love you.” Jack was saying under his breath, all this while, like a mantra. “I love you. Hush, hush.” He held Myrna in his arms. “I love you,” he said, repeatedly, while Myrna sobbed her soft, pretty little sobs.

Sitting apart again, Jack stroked his wife and held the usual evening panacea, a weak whiskey, out to her.

“They say it's good for the heart.”

“The same words she repeats every evening, every single evening without fail!” thought Jack.

“I do look forward to it, I really do. It's just the thing for my angina.”

“But you don't have angina, dear. The doctor just said . . . ” Jack realized too late he had set Myrna off yet again. He consoled himself that most things said, or not said, would set her off . . .

“You'll believe how bad it is when I'm gone.” Myrna swallowed the pretty little sobs. “The doctor
said
I had angina, he said it just last week. It's
serious
, angina, and it's
so
painful. I could go just like that, in a second . . . ”

Jack breathed hard to hide the deep distress he always felt when Myrna talked of death. He took his whiskey glass with him and walked over to
the balcony. He leaned over, not seeing the pale orange sunset, not seeing the smoke hovering in its evening pall. “Why does her death bother me so much?” he thought. And then, while listening to Myrna's complaints, his heart thudded loud and fast. He had remembered the pact suggested by him not so long ago. Jack shivered from the descending cool. Was he afraid of dying, of death, for himself? He remembered incidents of violence in this city, when he was the victim.

There was the “white monkey” street attack. Once, when he was visiting a Sharp's jute mill, the workers had kept him
gheraoed
for forty-eight hours. He had used his waste paper bin as a urinal, and somehow refrained from doing the other thing. No harm done in the end. When things had gone back to normal, and he was back at the Rajmahal, the workers had again become the anonymous nonentities they had always been. Strange. Neither of these incidents recurred much in Jack's memories during those sightless lookouts over the
maidan
. It was other remembrances, of the many times pedestrians had banged on his car hood angrily with umbrella, briefcase, or bare hands, to tell the man in the car to stop for him, the righteous pedestrian-citizen. For a while, Jack had thought this behavior was reserved for the whites. It was in a way justified they should feel, “Simply because you have a fine car and I cannot, oh foreign upstart, you do not have priority over me in my own country!” While in that helpless position, looking on meekly at the militant pedestrian, he would think, “If he attacks me, he'll be joined by all the others, and they will kill me, an intrusive white man milking them in their poverty.” It was with the deepest shock that he witnessed the same violence done to a car driven by an Indian.

“Look, look!” he exclaimed to his chauffeur. “They are attacking an Indian man's car?”

“Bangali
babu
,” the up-country chauffeur laughed, missing the point. “He doing it everyone. Sahib not remembering, he doing it us too many time?”

But that memory, of frustrated, aggressive faces and reverberating hoods stuck in Jack's mind. Its association with death, his own possible death. He felt no fear, felt none even the very first time. It was the
phenomenon
of Death, with a capital “D,” that was frightening, not his
own
death.

Jack had always been proud of his physical courage, his fearlessness in the face of danger. Death when deeply feared was of others: the death of Myrna, or Martin, or Gwen, his grandchildren. He brought his mind back
to the “pact” with an effort. Myrna was surely well into the dreaded state. Jack looked at his hand as he raised the glass to his lips and tried to stop it from shaking. He was afraid. He physically lacked the courage to carry out his own pact. He was
not
a brave man! Myrna was in her hell, yet
he
, Jack Strachey, was completely helpless. He was unable to put an end to it, in spite of his own pact. He remembered the evening of proposing his “pact” to her when she had suddenly seemed so clear and normal. Yes “normal.” Not her “usual” incoherent shrill self . . . Yet she had instantly regressed when he had made the proposal. “Evil!” she had shrilled. “Oh you evil man, you want to murder me!” She had tried to get up from her seat and her hair net had come off, releasing her soft, fluffy white hair.

 

Tears came to Jack's eyes and he turned to look at his Myrna, a Myrna without a hairnet, for she had never retrieved or replaced it. Difficult as it was to get from moment to moment, where was the time to think of hairnets and such . . . ? It was as if his suggestion had precipitated her decline.

Myrna was quacking on again about the Bad News, and Jack felt a sinking feeling mixed with the familiar confusion. He was over eighty. The area of confusion covered the period when he was still in his early fifties, and it was about an unethical action of his at Sharp's. When he had deliberately passed over a bright young Indian who was due for promotion to a position still well below the glass ceiling put up for Indians. In his place he had pushed in a younger Briton newly arrived in India, by exaggerating his qualifications and “misplacing” a file. The Indian had left in frustration without creating a fuss and gone on to greener pastures. Jack had always felt that this act had forced him to meekly accept the takeover by Kuldip Chopra, the brilliant Kuldip Chopra who had finally brought Sharp's to its knees. Carrying out, it was rumored, much that was unethical along the way, and thus keeping Jack's fall within the realm of the angels by comparison. Still, there was a clear guilt attached to his own lesser, though unethical act. In trying to forget, he allowed his priority anxiety to dominate, his anxiety for Myrna. And then, from the premise of guilt, he moved on to the guilty area in his relationship with Myrna. In which
his
guilt featured, not Myrna's. Myrna's guilt was a given. He sighed, his mind teetering on the threshold of his other guilt. Though the lesser emotions of jealousy and revenge had never troubled Jack consciously, his ego's bruising, crudely put, his male ego's bruising, had resulted in the need for violence. He had never recognized this deeper impetus, but he had felt the need
to be violent to Myrna during the sexual act. In what he was convinced was a purely sexual context. “Nothing,” he told himself, “no nothing to do with her other men, just a, a sexual thing.” But he had always controlled himself, only rarely allowing a snarl to escape his lips while making love in that strong and passionate way, yet smoldering and holding himself back from actually tearing into her, making her bleed, cutting her, and raping her. Myrna, never the most sensitive of persons, had loved this contained force in Jack, not for a moment suspecting the cruel battle he fought each time, the battle to hold in his bared fangs and talons.