Rajmahal (20 page)

“If there is a shoe, ‘Planter Rogue'will always draw it. But today it was thrown at him for
you
, and
you
were the star! You have made a legend today, a new legend! Today's ‘Planter Rogue' couldn't even pronounce his English correctly!”

“We should never have done it in English! I knew it was a mistake, an unforgivable mistake . . . !”

“Reema, Reema! Stop it!”

Petrov was still under the spell of the famous and enigmatic smile which had transformed the whole play for him, and all the other plays, and his life. “Fascinating,” he had heard someone murmur during the play. “Most fascinating,” Petrov said to himself. Turning to her he said, “Smile Reema. Smile at me dear.”

Reema Devi turned toward him, and Petrov found instead her cheeks shining with tears. He stopped the car and held her close. He could feel
her trembling and thought, “There are some people who should not be allowed to age. Reema should just pass away one evening, as she finishes the last words of the last scene of her last triumph!”

The youthful Petrov had been slim and medium-tall with dark hair brushed back in two wavy wings on either side of a middle parting. His face had a drawn look, with a long nose and shadowed gray eyes, though his figure was wiry and suggested a muscular elegance, as one would imagine the romantically sexy Nijinsky. This un-articulated quality had captivated Reema Devi the first time she saw him. He had been dressed in Bengali clothes, a white
dhuti-punjabi
, while he sat next to the window at his desk. The light had fallen on his dark brown hair, striking golden notes, shining in his eyes and turning his skin and clothing a radiant white. Reema Devi was fascinated by the white skins of Europeans. They appeared to her sometimes like marble, sometimes like creamy yogurt.

Now nearing ninety, Petrov's skin was more yellow than white, as if an infusion of saffron had blemished the yogurt. The shine in his eyes was more like a pop-eyed gleam, he was skeletal rather than slim and his hair, shockingly, as with Nijinsky, had gone. He was eccentric, but then, as he himself said self-indulgently, some things should be allowed him at this great age. His eccentricity could not, in any case, be compared to the eventual madness of Nijinsky.

Petrov walked along Chowringhee toward the Rajmahal. It was twilight, a time he favored. To his right, the
maidan
glowed, a mess of crowds, vendors and the Ochterloney Monument, a needle probing the sky. At the old Firpo's arcade, he paused in his peregrinations and leaning elegantly on his walking stick, gazed at the scenes around him. “I'll have to stay on the street and risk being run over,” he murmured. He half knew he talked to himself aloud, but if he noticed people sniggering he was unaffected. Those who frequented this stretch, including the beggars, usually the most inclined to amusement, were used to him, and he to them. If he returned to the pavement he would step on to a carpeting of large, gray insects, an unknown species swarming and comfortably at home, ignored by the crowds and later the vagrants who slept right there among them, like larger versions of those same insects with their rugged and vulnerably thin sheet coverings. “What insects are these?” wondered Petrov, shaking his head.
“Is it some new breed? They are so large and fearsome, and yet so easily eliminated.” He poked unsteadily with his stick at one of the fleshy creatures lying half-squashed and wriggling in its death throes, and put an end to its miseries. “I wonder,” he thought, “whether man has been created as an aberration, a ridiculously vulnerable aberration, unable totally to protect himself except by his wits. No mastodon-might or muscular tonnage, yet lasting on, somewhat like these easily crushed insects. Humans and insects,” he continued, walking homeward on the pavement again at what was once a brisk pace and was now more hurried-looking than brisk, “the two most vulnerable, and tenacious, of God's created species . . . ” He looked up at the Firpo's arcade, in its place a utilitarian store, and the habitual picture came before him of his neighbors, the Stracheys, skipping over the bodies of one of the deadliest famines of India, while inside Firpo's, the privileged pranced and gorged under prisms of white light. As always, he imagined the Stracheys doing the fandango feverishly to forget the dehumanized images that had just passed before them. And now? Was he, Petrov, any different? He brushed off a small, dirty girl with outstretched palm and dropped a coin into the bowl of his friend with the withered legs, an echo of the legless beggars he associated with Russia through an Eisenstein film. A cheeky looking young man came too close. “Girls, hashish, smack?” he sibilated and before Petrov could react, the young man was yanked up by the collar, slammed vigorously on both cheeks and dropped on to the pavement. “Ei! Think you can harass anyone, eh, eh?” Petrov's sturdy protector, a pen-seller, yanked the offender up again and repeated the treatment. The moment he let go, the whimpering pimp vanished.

Petrov was bewildered and touched by this unexpected protection. Others were picking up the pens which had scattered on the pavement, and Petrov's endless monologue continued in his head. “Why would he spring to my aid with such ferocity? He knows he will get nothing from me. I have never bought a pen from him in all these years, in spite of his daily wheedling. Is it from some deeply rooted servility implanted by colonial conditioning, that I, a white sahib, must at all costs be protected. Because I, the white sahib, am inherently the protector of all? Or is it just from a sense of kindliness . . . ?”

“
Dhonyobad
,” he said to the flushed and smiling young entrepreneur, and continued his walk.

As he progressed toward the Rajmahal, his eccentricity was to take final direction, inspired by a new beggar on the route.

Petrov was sitting on a cement protrusion, one of his usual resting places, waiting for the hoarding above him to light up. He was about to check his watch as it came on, when he noticed a figure lit up in a recessed doorway. It was a beggar, sitting in the iconic lotus posture, his hair lifted into a knot, askew on top of his head, with a bleached spike standing out like a thorn. Apart from a loincloth he was naked. His eyes were open, but the lids were heavy and drugged. The combination of the hallucinatory lighting and the hallucinogenic gleam of the beggar's eyes, provoked Petrov. He walked up to the illuminated figure. The red light of the hoarding intermittently exposed the bare body which was smeared with ash and adorned with a string of
rudraksha
beads. Petrov's eyes were focused on the beggar's ribs which stood out starkly, barring his body in a fluctuating cage of shadows. In Petrov's mind was the Gandhara image of the ascetic Buddha, and in this figure before him were all the weightlessness of space and all the weight of the universe.

His internal bioscope showed him images from the great famine, the touchstone of his mental world. And at the same time an intellectual facet of his mind brought back his earlier readings, the fasts and penances of the great sages. It dawned on him that he must undertake such a penance, that at this stage of his life, such an action was required. The riddle remained unsolved, and before conceding it would remain eternally unsolved, was unsolvable, he would make this last effort.

So he determined to enter the state of the forest-dweller. Locating this “forest” in the Rajmahal didn't seem contradictory, Petrov was too sophisticated. And deeply intuitive about Reema Devi, he was certain of her reactions.

“A statement of my intention will be understood by her in no time, in spite of her nervous condition . . . ”

He took a coin out of his wallet with a shaking hand and threw it into the gourd rocking it on its round base.

“Take!” he said.

The mendicant yogi came to life, picked up a pair of ringed iron tongs and clashed them forcefully and rhythmically, augmenting the beat with a hoarse tenor chant. A crowd collected.

Petrov turned too quickly and lost his balance. He was helped to steady himself by a passerby, braced himself, and with the old man's forward slant, hurried home to the Rajmahal. He wanted feverishly to set out on his new course.

“Once I have solved the riddle the harmonious waves will calm all in my ambit,” he concluded. “And, while I am at it, I shall become a vegetarian and undertake ever more frequent fasts in an orderly progression. Reema will accept that we are at the end of our quest. And Robi will be my comrade-in-arms . . . ”

Robi, who had been rescued from the streets during the famine, was the Petrovs' major-domo. He knew little of formal philosophy, but he was an expert in hatha yoga, learned while he worked in an ashram. Early in 1943, he had returned to his native village and had been trapped by the famine. His family, landless laborers existing on the margins of the economy, soon used up his salary and his widowed mother who usually husked grain in times of need, couldn't find work. That year, in an atmosphere of war-related ordinances, inflation, uncertainty and indifferent governance, prices shot up and stocks dwindled. Buying grain became impossible with the unrecognizable new prices. Merchants turned overnight into hoarders scaling an escalating spiral of greed. The phenomenon wasn't unfamiliar to the elders among the villagers. Robi thought of taking his mother back to the ashram which was in a far away state. But hunger forced them to trudge to Calcutta, the Mecca for millions of starving peasants. They arrived at the great metropolis in a fit state to join the corpses littering the streets. After two days of desperate foraging, they found themselves in a quiet upper class Bengali area where daily kitchens were opened in some houses. They were given hot, freshly cooked
khichri
with vegetables, and strong sweet tea in Player's Navy Cut cigarette tins. On the second day, the housewife called to Robi from the portico and after asking about him and looking at his ragged ashram papers, sent him and his mother to the servants' quarters to change into clean clothes, and then in a chauffeur-driven car to the Rajmahal. While Robi and his mother crouched in the car, they gazed about them at the gleaming shops and houses of this part of town, at the trams and buses and cars, and at each other, not daring to speak. Robi met with the Petrovs' approval and soon found himself employed at the Rajmahal, installed with his mother in a comfortable room on the roof. It took them time to acclimatize to their good fortune, that they had escaped death by starvation, and that Robi was now earning many times his old salary and working for patrons with a human face.

When he and his mother filled out again, sometimes a claustrophobic feeling would overcome Robi, a great sorrow engulf him. He would gaze out from the rooftop and see his village nestling in the clouds. When there
was a lull in the traffic roar, the sound of a stray flute would create a fusion between his old habitat and this city and he would be filled with bliss.

After his walk along Chowringhee and his customary slow climb up the stairs to his apartment, Petrov leaned back panting on his chair. Reema Devi looked at his white eyelashes and eyebrows, his yellow-white fringe of hair which could be taken for ash blonde, when he caught her gaze on him. A sudden gleam lit his eyes, and she felt her face grow hot, swelling as it did when she was excited, embarrassed, or aroused. She was almost eighty, could she be any of these things? When did her face last swell that she straight away recognized the symptoms? There was a difference though. She put her hand up to her smoothly puffed out cheek. It was hurting, that was the difference, and she thought with amusement that it was hurting because the wrinkles had unglued themselves from their position of inward collapse and stretched. She smiled and caught Petrov's pale eyes again, sexy under the prominent white eyebrows and lashes, and she remembered a long ago reunion after a misunderstanding. How they had sprung together like two magnets. And in that powerfully tight clinch, Petrov had said, “Did you think you could get away?” And she had disconnected herself from him, almost feeling a tearing of the flesh and heard him say, “Don't you try to get away again.” And she had been far enough from him before he pulled her back, to see that gleam in his eyes and realize that the misunderstanding still lay unresolved but didn't matter. She remembered how, at one time, she would have crushes on her leading men, especially with the heroic makeup and dissimulation under blinding arc lights. A period of fluttery, intoxicating runs as long as the plays ran. The stage nearness, suggestive touches, suppressed embraces taking on a deep significance. Then, with the rise to stardom, she would be impatient of too much respect. “Come on,” she would say. “We are on the stage. Act natural. Everyone is looking at us!” And sometimes she would tease, “Make the best of this chance!” But by then Petrov had come into her life, and they were married, the ultimate theater couple. She knew how captivated he was by her, and when she caught him gazing at her she would think, “Petro, my dearest, you are embarrassing me! Everyone is looking at us!” The attentions of her real-life husband would embarrass her in public, but not of her stage lovers.