Rajmahal (16 page)

His father's aspirations re-appeared in Petrov at a remove. Where his father succeeded only in refined bibliolatry, Petrov longed to study and
perhaps one day resolve a great metaphysical riddle—the existence side by side of civilization and human degradation. Complicating this desire was a feeling of frustration at the impotence or lack of will of the “civilized” state in fighting this degradation. He could identify some of this with the antiroyalist and Marxist fervor of his countrymen. But being elliptically inclined, he found himself veering toward the Indian situation and sympathizing with the Indian struggle against colonial rule. A fascination for philosophy gave the final push. India, he felt, would offer him the most dramatic theater in which to witness the great riddle in action. And its philosophy, arcing like a rainbow over the collective mind of its people, would provide the answer.

Petrov joined the Institute of Oriental Studies in St Petersburg to familiarize himself with Sanskrit as well as Bengali, the languages he would need before going to India, specifically Calcutta. Thus his father's attitude on life and society and its effect on Petrov were to lead him on a philosophical mad quest, impossible of achievement.

Petrov knew it was only a matter of time before his fellow students denounced him with his imperial connections. He had two older brothers who were gearing up to flee to Germany, and Petrov, always dreaming of India, was left almost penniless when they disappeared westward.

Ali Sher, a co-student from Tashkent, kept Petrov revving with stories of a Bengali, M. N. Roy, who had reached Tashkent with a train full of arms from Lenin. He heard of the sympathy for Indian nationalists, who sometimes used Tashkent as a nucleus. Of the prodigious scholars working from the last century turning out encyclopedic histories of Central Asia with detailed references to India, and of Indian language courses developed and taught in Tashkent.

“Maybe I can study there for a start,” thought the young Petrov. “It might be safer than St Petersburg!”

Ali Sher told him of the scholarship on the subject of British rule in India. Of Saeed Ali Khoja, who had traveled in India at the end of the nineteenth century, and written of the death of nineteen million people due to famine during just one decade. As compared to five million war-related deaths in the whole world in the hundred years enclosing that decade! He described the rulers' policies to retain and drain the fabled colony while the ruled lived degraded lives, bringing into focus once again the riddle that stirred Petrov's imagination. How could a power, great at the time, tolerate this burden of dehumanizing contrast, including famine, without
a tremor, and yet claim civilizational superiority? How could its elite enjoy the flaky delicacy of a prima ballerina and denounce the heavenly hetaerae of Indian dance? He couldn't have forecast that he would witness at first hand the flesh and blood horrors of the great Bengal famine two and a half decades later in Calcutta, getting deeply involved in its ramifications and those of the tortured and wonderful metropolis.

He would play with the figures given to him by his friend and write it down on any scrap of paper that came to hand.
Nineteen million dead people equals ten years,
he would write.
That is, 1.9 million per year
under the heading
Famine in India
. And next to it
Five million dead people equals 100 years. That is, 5,000 per year
under the heading
War in the World
. Another time he would write,
5,000 in war against 1.9 million due to famine of one-sixth of the world's population (India). Or 1 war death in the whole world against 380 deaths due to famine in India alone. Or 1 war death against the iniquity of 380 famine deaths multiplied by 6 equals 2,280 . . .
And again,
1 is to 380, 1 is to 380 X 6 .... Which is justified, which not? Why should that seeker put the two figures together? Is there greater consideration in and about war, consideration that only 1 person should be shot dead, the parts of his body strewn on a battlefield, when 380 (x 6 times the iniquity) are carelessly left to starve, strewn about the countryside in India? 5,205 dead people in ONE DAY in India of famine! Thirteen or 14 dead people in one day from war . . . Is the war machine less cruel than the manipulation or indifference which kills by starvation?

He would rack his brain for a philosophical equation, the perfect formula, hardly aware that a famine was taking place in his own country right then, torturing, maiming, and locking in its ratchet, the customary countless faceless numbers. In the end all he could do was divert himself by practicing the lotus posture. “That's the first step,” the eighteen year old would murmur. “I must meditate. And before I can meditate I must be able to sit, for
hours
, in the correct manner. The answer will surely come . . . ” He learned to bend his unaccustomed legs, make them supple with yoga, and sat for hours in the lotus pose. But the answer didn't come. It never would.

 

Petrov went to Tashkent, assuming the cover name of Rahimbaeff. There he sought out the legendary M. N. Roy with the vague idea of enlisting his aid. Roy was busy rehabilitating a band of Indian
khilafatis
on their way to Turkey with even vaguer ideas of rescuing the caliph. Instead, they had
got caught in the wilds of Central Asia, in need of a rescuer themselves. And Roy duly played this part. Failing to appreciate their desultory though romantic aim, Roy planned to transform them into rescuers of their own country, completing the reverse cycle of rescues. The plan was to smuggle them in from the mountains bordering India to mobilize and arm the local populace. Roy had organized a building, India House, and Petrov was allowed to stay there with the
khilafatis
. But a sinister development finally winkled him out. Comrade Peter, vice-president of the Red Terror, part of the
Cheka
or Secret Police, arrived in Tashkent. The dreaded
Cheka
claimed the inheritance of Ivan the Terrible, now dubbed Ivan the Great, his example a part justification for its purges. Petrov was pushed into another room by Roy on a sudden visit by “Bloody Peter” at India House, and caught a glimpse of the tall thin man with a face as ugly as his deeds. Bloody Peter had found out about Petrov, but Roy, with his great influence, was just able to save him. Ever the pragmatist, the wise man advised him to leave for Europe. Poor Petrov left Tashkent despondent at getting further and further from his goal. The adventure deepened his fascination for India. Roy's plan may have been almost as impractical as the
khilafatis
', but he loved big dreamers of such conviction. “If there are others of that kind in Calcutta, its attractions could be legion,” he thought.

And he didn't allow
his
dream to vaporize. He fetched up in Europe, and stayed with his brothers. He tried academia in the “Oriental” departments of European universities. But nothing could divert him from his attempts to access the original. Finally, when his brothers handed him his full share of the family wealth, the restless Petrov joyfully booked passage for Calcutta. The diversion had taken him almost a decade, during which he had had to battle the inertia of luxurious living in Europe, and pinch himself to believe his Tashkent adventure. So, in 1929, at the same age as the century, he finally reached Calcutta.

The British were suspicious of this exotic immigrant and watched him closely. In those days when spying was rampant all over the globe and particularly in Central Asia where British spies jostled with Russians, Turks, Afghans and Sindhis, this strange figure claiming to be from the Russian nobility but unfathomably hobnobbing with the natives, was automatically suspect. They were wary not only because of the age-old Anglo-Russian face-off in the region, the Great Game, but because of the complications of the Bolshevik Revolution, the activities of Indians looking for arms, and Lenin's sympathy for them. They became still more
wary when Petrov admitted knowing the wanted revolutionary M. N. Roy though his frankness was puzzling. He was prepared and trotted out his family credentials, hinting untruthfully that this underscored automatic royalist leanings and an antagonism toward anticolonial activities. He had to flee the Bolsheviks, being from a noble family, he told them truthfully, and so the false name in his passport. And then, as a Christian and a European with an imperial legacy, how could he possibly be interested either in the caliphate in distant Turkey or in the freedom of India? He told them his aims were purely academic, to study Indian language and philosophy. His British interlocutors couldn't get any more out of him but his friendship with local Bengalis continued to puzzle them. They confiscated his passport and kept him under surveillance. When M. N. Roy arrived in India in 1931, Petrov was taken in again for questioning. But no further connection could be found between the two, nor any active participation by Petrov in the communist or freedom movements in India. M. N. Roy, though he had broken from the Comintern, was still wanted by the British, and was arrested in Bombay and sentenced to a long imprisonment.

Petrov chewed over Roy's history in his quest to solve the riddle, the contradiction inherent in the “legitimacy” of British rule in India. The British prided themselves on their “rule of law,” that they didn't allow summary executions and imprisonment like some despotic Oriental potentate, assumed to have no inkling of such practices as fair trial and due process of law. Yet, within this pattern of their own prideful claiming, if trials were manipulated, or troublemakers confined without trial, what did that mean? And if the hardships all prisoners went through in jail often damaged their health irretrievably, as it did Roy's, what did that mean? There were the numbers executed, for instance, after the major uprising of 1857, for “treasonous” or “seditious” acts, which presupposed a “legitimate” ruler. The contradiction had already reached its full poignancy with the last Mughal emperor's exile to Burma and the assassination of his sons, their bodies displayed at the Khooni Darwaza, the bloody gateway, which still stands in the middle of a busy Delhi thoroughfare. Roy was allowed a say in court after his arrest, and his defense was trenchant. What crime was he guilty of in trying to unseat a government, illegitimate in the first place . . . ? How could an illegitimate government presume to question an Indian's wish for self-government and call it “illegal”?

In Calcutta, Petrov went straight to the university where he located a Sanskrit teacher. Soon, he found himself living with a Bengali family in an outlying section of Calcutta, among narrow lanes, straying animals, including the occasional hyena and jackal, swampland, unsanitary open spaces and rural enclaves. This was the “black” or “native” town of the time, many leagues apart from Anglo-India, and to this day, though the rural atmosphere has been displaced, few non-Bengalis, let alone foreigners, are seen here.

The reactions of the Calcuttans were complicated by the “Rahimbaeff ” patronymic, which Petrov re-adopted in a burst of foolish orientalism.

“Is he a Russian or a Muslim?” they asked, assuming the two things to be mutually exclusive.

“How can he be a Russian, ‘Rahim' is a Muslim name!”

“What about the rest of his name?”

“It
sounds
Russian.”

“And he has a white skin too.”

But the initial discomfort felt by the Bengalis at the presence of this foreigner, was taken over by warmth because Petrov lacked condescension. It confused them, in any case, to think of a white person as Muslim. The only other whites they knew weren't Muslim, and the only Muslims they knew weren't white.

“Have you ever seen him in a mosque?”

“Or prostrating five times a day?”

“He doesn't act like a white skin either.”

“Yet he
is
white!”

“Most mysterious,” they added.

Petrov's knowledge of Bengali, his donning of the
Punjabi-dhuti
and his hunger for learning more about his adopted city and its culture won them over. In spite of his frequent incomprehension and peppery outbursts, his new friends went all out to locate tutors for him and help him settle down. When some of his left leaning friends learned that Petrov was not only from the home of the new politics but had known Indian revolutionaries, they felt more drawn to him. In their eagerness for his company they thoughtlessly violated his privacy, and Petrov had to control his swelling impulses of inhospitality.

“Can't they knock before coming in?” he fumed.

He locked his bedroom door, and soon gave up when the persistent banging became intolerable. But there were compensations, including dream sequences of singing by the women of the family. And the food. He relished the distinct flavor of each dish: the bitter starter, the savory middle courses of vegetables, fish and mutton, the sour-sweet chutney-digestive and the sweets to follow. “Bitter, salt, sour, sweet,” he said. “The Bengalis have a genius for structuring their meals!” At first the bitter
shuktoni
was a nightmare, an artifice concocted to make anything else delectable by contrast. “What a subtle test of the palate,” he sneered, grimacing over another dish, of neem leaves and eggplant. “Are they trying to punish me?!” But by degrees he became an enthusiast then an aficionado, looking forward to the bitterness, followed by fish head and pungent mustard flavored hilsa fish, and managing to manipulate hair thin fish bones like a true Bengali.