Rajmahal (39 page)

“And have you forgotten Calcutta and '46? And Noakhali? Have they dissolved in an acid bath leaving no trace? Oh it will come again, it will come again . . . ”

Saira had no answer.

“Oh fuck.” said Ali bitterly. “I used to dream . . . ”

“I know.”

“My man-with-the-knife-in-the-back . . . ”

“Shshshsh. You've known for a long time, just as I have. We won't see its end. That's not all . . .

“It's Junior of course. Junior, Junior, Junior . . . ”

They sat in silence and sorrow, and Ali knew this was what Saira had meant when she had responded so spontaneously to his first question.

“My wonderful Saira,” he was thinking. “My dearest? My most precious.”

And they were interrupted by a flush of love and endearments.

“That's what matters in the end.” said the Rajmahal with conviction. “ We could do with much more of that.” But then it too was suffering more and more from insecurity. “Right?” it added, shakily.

And Junior? Did he deserve all this agonizing? Or was he just an unthinking, and aggressive provocateur? A bad-natured loner deserted by his wife? Was it really so, again, unthinkingly important for him to get rid of that insipid structure on the drive, and therefore Maudie, or de-Brahmanize the watchman for the sake of a toilet? Or for him to cross his father and the late Proshanto Mojumdars' elevator desires, thus depriving them of freedom of movement? When he knew he himself already had twinges in his deteriorating knees, and shortness of breath? Why did he allow such matters to become obsessions, leading to blind rages and feckless machinations?

Even minor concerns such as his dislike of birds became phobias, as he took unsuccessful pot shots at the pigeons with his air gun, cracking holes in the skylights. In a frenzy one day he dragooned all hands, making them shout, wave brooms, shirts, sheets, and arms from the lobby floor and on the stairway. The pigeons, flapping noisily and hysterically, swooped up the well of the stairs and through the open skylights releasing into the air in a burst. At a signal, the skylights were banged shut and all that was left was a flurry of dismembered feathers. But a covey was found mysteriously resettled under the high ceiling the very next morning, to the approval of the Rajmahal, which empathized with the pigeons, though it had mixed feelings about the mess they caused. It was discovered that the servants who were superstitious about pigeons had secretly opened the skylights at night. “One day there will be stalagmites and stalactites of pigeon shit in the lobby,” swore Junior, when he saw the pigeon-wallah carrying out cartloads of droppings. “The fumes from it are going to
poison
us all. It's
raining
pigeon shit.” The guards took to keeping umbrellas ready to protect the tenants and their guests, and the pigeon-wallah found his work increased with its additional load of little bald baby birds which kept perishing after endless plunges. Helpful Surjeet Shona offered to try out the droppings as a fertilizer for her garden. “If guano works why not this?” she said, and suiting action to word made her grumbling gardener use it in the flower beds with inconclusive results. When the vultures circled, Junior allowed their presence to possess him, and in an unconscious imitation circled round and round the room with flailing arms while he tried to work out solutions. After their flight, Junior was the most relieved, though he still had nightmares about them. He tried to smoke out the last stubborn pair on top of the raintree, but vultures not being wasps, ignored all such attempts. Their droppings adorned the tree, and with the erosion of these droppings, the tree was losing its foliage.

“It will surely die,” the gardener told Surjeet Shona. “Their excrement is spoiling the vegetation.”

“I'd rather they left than the pigeons,” said the Rajmahal.

It was typical of Junior to start fizzing when, for the very first time, he heard one of the Hindu groundsmen, Ramnath, addressing old Jainab as “Jai Ram,” turning the Muslim name into a salutation to the Hindu god.

“Ei Ramnath.” called Junior in ire. “Why are you calling Jainab ‘Jai Ram'? You can't say a simple Muslim name or what?”

“
Arrey na
Sahib. Then ask him why he calls me ‘
Ramjan
'? Why he cannot say Ramnath?”

“What?” said Junior. “Say that again. What did you say?”

This suddenly became very important to Junior. It was to mark a breaker in his thinking and slow down his subsequent actions. It was to revolutionize our Saira and Ali Mallik's Junior, the essence, the boiled down sour milk, of their agonized deliberations.

“I am telling you, Saheb.” Ramnath's high-pitched voice cracked. He cleared his throat lowering the pitch, which started climbing again word by word. “Why?” he said, in the declamatory tones a parliamentarian would be proud of. “Why he cannot call me ‘Ramnath'? Ha? Ha? He has some problem or what? He cannot say good easy Hindu name like Ramnath? He must make me some Muslim, some
Ramjan
Shamjan . . . ” He started choking.

“Incredible!” Junior's cussed bent of mind was stalled, intrigued by the nuances inherent in this slippage. “Yes, yes?” he said.

“Just like lying Hindu, mocking me that I am Hindu when I am true
Mussalman
, haj what is more.” burst out the indignant Jainab.

“
Lying
Hindu he says?
Lying
Hindu. Is it not known to all that
Musalman
always trying to make all others into
Musalman
. So he calls me “
Ramjan
.” Ask him. Ask him if he did not do it first of all. I am,
bas
, following only. And still I am to blame?”

 

Junior had received quite a battering in his life. Under Ali's tutelage he had become a competent lawyer, but his embitterment had crystallized when he had been appointed for the Muslim plaintiff in a Hindu-Muslim conflict. Whether he would win the case or not was irrelevant, but he was forever
branded as a “communalist,” a fanatic, and a closet Pakistani. The injustice of this branding turned Junior, already an introvert, supersensitive to the rest of the world. Everything became colored with the poison of prejudice, and in time, as a defense, he convinced himself Muslims were superior to Hindus in all aspects, with biased comparisons ranging from the absurd to the sublime. He compared the rich non-vegetarian fare of Muslims to the watery vegetarianism of Hindus. The generosity of Muslims to the penny-pinching of Hindus. The equality among Muslims to the caste system of Hindus. And at the lofty end, the monotheism of Muslims to the pantheistic idol worship of Hindus. Junior twisted himself into a self-righteous bigot. His general sourness afflicted his looks, including the elegance which characterized the Mallik men. When his wife left him his sourness was curdled further by bitterness.

Junior, though so hard in his dealings with others, was like putty with his wife, Nadira. She was quiet, traditional, and pretty, given to instant obedience with Saira and Ali, but transfigured when she was alone with Junior. Saira didn't know this and often wished Nadira would laugh and joke, act bitchy, anything to show more spirit. But Nadira stayed adamantly docile. Saira had nightmares that Junior was beating and torturing his wife. She rushed out of bed in a frenzy one night and threw open their bedroom door. The two were fast asleep and Junior had his arm protectively around Nadira. It took Saira and Ali some time to realize that Junior worshipped his wife, and it was the cold and mysterious Nadira who was keeping them all guessing. When she walked out on Junior with her children to return to her parents in Dacca, Saira felt a sense of déjà vu. Nadira had made up her mind when Junior told her she must stop using makeup and keep her head covered in public. “Next it will be a burka!” she icily said. And when he came back from the courts in the evening, a shocked Ali and Saira were waiting to tell him the news of her departure with the children. Junior locked himself into his bedroom and stood holding onto a shelf with eyes screwed tight and teeth clenched so hard, that the tip of a weak tooth snapped off. He sleepwalked to the bathroom to rinse out his mouth and taking the sharp scrap of tooth in his hand pressed it between forefinger and thumb producing a pinprick of blood, as if this small pain would bring Nadira back. The Rajmahal lamented though it wasn't surprised. An expert witness, it had overheard Nadira whispering complaints to its walls and into the phone to her mother, and saw her withdrawing into herself. For all his bluster and manly airs, Junior hadn't managed to draw Nadira to him.

The blow turned him half crazy, and he tautened and hardened himself more against the rest of the world. Saira and Ali understood some of the torment he was going through and they didn't try to stop him when he crossed the border to Dhaka in a desperate attempt to cajole Nadira back. Nothing would shake her, though she agreed to send the children to India at distant intervals. Neither Saira nor Ali could do anything about the unfortunate tendencies which Junior displayed in more and more marked fashion from now on.

After all this time, it was the decrepit innocent Maudie's attack on him which had started the process of change in Junior. Surjeet Shona did him the injustice of believing his cruelty had driven Maudie back to drink and to turn her suicide gun on him. And Junior did himself the same injustice. “My harshness gave Maudie that push!” he insisted. But it was unlikely that looking at
semul
flowers and birds could have bewitched her permanently out of alcoholism. Or despair. The flowering season of
semuls
is so short. They didn't stop to think that it was his sudden appearance which had deflected her gun from herself and saved her. But Junior was to put himself on trial, finally leading to his self-conviction and sentencing. The internal trial meant another period of suffering for him, and still no inkling of the conflict was allowed to show.

 

A further burden borne by the Malliks at the time was the decline of their other daughter-in-law, Lalitha. She was diagnosed with a brain tumor and Mumtaz, desperate for his family's support, went willingly back to Calcutta.

“At least Mumtaz has come back to us,” sighed Saira.

“ Yes, now,” said the Rajmahal bitterly. “Now when Lalitha is nearing the end . . . ”

Lalitha's terminal illness exposed other weaknesses. Junior was incapable of expression, but he could easily see that Lalitha's “Hinduness,” or her being from Kerala, made no difference to the closeness in the family, or to the universal pain of loss.

Saira need not have wept over Junior. The change was both imminent and immanent. Junior was thrown back into his immanent self when the absurdity of old Jainab and Ramnath's unflinching name-calling dawned
on him after the paving of Maudie's crisis, Lalitha's impending death, and his own brush with it. Having convicted himself, he fretted over his sentence in that uncharacteristic gush of self-mortification. And it had to be of course, to withdraw the case against poor broken down Maudie who was laid up in hospital again.