Rajmahal (42 page)

And as if to ready herself, Surjeet Shona began significant preparations. She was almost as normal, courageous, sexy, sensual, frank and healthy as she had been when she had first come to settle in the Rajmahal, and she was no self-sacrificing martyr, “termartyr,” as her father taunted anyone that way inclined.

Appraising herself in the mirror she approved of the stylish, shoulder length hair, with its beginnings of soft gray, and the allowed luxury of tinting to minimize the gray. Her Chinese hairdresser was especially attentive.

“Her beauty will finish off if she dezzint hurry! Why you wasting time, eh? You can make some chappie happy still!” And after the cosseting at her weekly session she would say, “See, I make you so young. Lookit dat body. Come on, SS. When you going to bring de good news, eh?”

The Rajmahal looked on morose and loving. “ Will the games never end?” it thought. But on the other hand it also realized that loneliness was unanswerable.

TO MUMTAZ, THAT SEASON WAS BONDED TO THE LURKING unpleasantness of a certain summer in his childhood. A hot, humid, windless summer, when the children of the Rajmahal, normally so vividly active, were overcome with a torpor which they threw off only toward evening when the south breeze started up from the sea, and the humidity turned cool against their melting bodies. They changed playgrounds over the years. The
maidan
, where the activities were endless. Or the zoo, where their favorites were the magnificent white tigers of Rewa. Or the pontoon restaurant on the Strand, where after a boat ride suspended within the limpid orange and red skywater of the sunset they would eat ice-cream and cake. Or sometimes the Lake Club, with its sloping lawns, its shed housing those impossibly elegant racing boats, when they would go for dinghy rides around the mysterious islands of the Dhakuria lakes, and climb into the cement loudspeaker which broadcast ragged cement music at regatta time. Magical regatta time, when racing boats were taken out on the shoulders of muscular oarsmen who would row obediently and gracefully to the rhythmic “in-out, in-out” of the coxes, slumping over their oars and almost tumbling into the water with exhaustion at the end of a race. The star skull oarsman was Jimmy Sen, unbeatable hero worshipped by the children. Towering, hefty, unshaven, Jimmy Sen was their invincible Tarzan, Roy Rogers, Captain Marvel that summer. Standing on the upstairs terrace, the Rajmahal children's screams would rise shrilly over the adult voices. “Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!”

The Lake Club was the very same club contemplated by Proshanto Mojumdar while he swam in forbidden waters at the all-white club. This club was closed to white people, started as an alternative serious rowing club for Indians forbidden entry into the older Calcutta Rowing Club. Here
was Martin Strachey, allowed into the Lake Club premises (for non-whites only), a child after all, but not his parents, who would wave in a friendly way from the Calcutta Rowing Club (for whites only), which jutted out at right angles to the Lake Club. The clubs were notionally separated by a cantilever bridge over a stretch of deep water, a well-proportioned and elegant steel bridge which was out of bounds, cut off from both clubs by barbed wire fences. The bridge was open to the public, and thronged by crowds dressed up for their outings in colors never seen in either privileged club, munching peanuts,
moorri
and
channa
from paper packets, their children holding on to balloons and ice sticks. The attraction in that out-of-bounds stretch was the view of the large, fat, speckled fish which moved in shoals, in and out of the shadowy water in sudden rushes at the eatables thrown at them. The Rajmahal children managed to get those fish to come to their side too, and threw them genteel crumbs begged from the club cook. But they couldn't see the fish clearly because of the interfering fence and sloping grassy bank. Those were the idyllic times.

The bad time started that summer with Mumtaz fracturing his arm. He and half a dozen others were plunging uncontrollably up and down on a slanting tree branch on the
maidan
, swifter harder, shouting breathlessly, when it snapped. Mumtaz, who was perched on the highest point at the tip found himself pinioned on the ground with an excruciating pain tearing through his right arm which had fractured in three places. His young bones repaired rapidly, but he was never able to play more than a weak game of tennis afterwards, destroying the promise he had so far shown.

Meera Petrov was the only insider Rajmahal girl child that summer, and she was hardly recognized as such because she was such a tomboy. So when she came forth in a two piece dress with her flat midriff bared a good four inches and her almost-as-flat chest hidden behind an entrancing top with wide frills, the surprised boys were taking in hissing breaths before they knew it. Meera, brown-haired, golden-skinned, was in the ultimate state of pre-puberty perfection, and that day, she had applied a light gleam of lipstick and a dash of pale blue eye shadow. In a sudden realization of the effect she was having, she preened, swaying her hips as she walked in a manner which was to become a habit but was that day, all new. The boys, smitten as if with one blow, were anxiously trying to please her. Mumtaz was filled with a desire to place his hands under the frilly top and on that flat chest, and felt an acute sense of frustration with his arm in plaster. That was the summer Ali and Saira decided to shepherd the children to the Lake Club and keep
them under their watchful gazes because of Mumtaz's accident. He couldn't show off his nonexistent rowing skills in the fixed punt, he couldn't clamber in and out of the loudspeaker. All he could do was to sit in the broad-bottomed dinghy to be taken out on the water by an obliging boatman, or hand over to bare-midriffed Meera his share of crumbs to feed the cuddly fish. Meera was enjoying herself, trying to make up her mind whom to favor, Martin or Mumtaz, setting the tradition for their future rivalry. The other possibility was Junior, but he was already forbiddingly distant. Meera's younger brother Boris, whose friends were Fayyaz Mallik and the Norman boys, was disgusted and couldn't believe what was happening to his sister. In the end neither aspirant succeeded. They were standing at the barbed wire fence, looking over at the all-white club, arguing about segregation, when Meera, fired by her new powers, said, “Well. It's just as bad here, not allowing palefaces.” And to the shock of the boys she began climbing the fence. “See if they can stop me. I'm both. A paleface and an Indian.” She went cautiously, placing her feet and hands carefully between the barbs and steadying herself by holding onto a post. But her weight loosened the strands and in a moment she had slipped, landing astride the barbed wire and goring herself before she fell off. The frilly top caught and tore and that desirable not quite flat chest was exposed. But Mumtaz was too shocked to appreciate this, his fear exaggerated by the terrible commotion from the lake. Jimmy Sen, who had been practicing solo, going all-out in a powerful burst of speed, had had his spine rammed into by the pointed bow of another skull, novice-propelled and racing against the one-way rules. The dazed children had been hurried away by the Malliks before Jimmy Sen was brought in, but for a long time Mumtaz imagined the blood gushing from a hole which went right through his hero's body. Jimmy Sen had taken years to regain partial normalcy and start rowing again. By that time Meera had gone away to boarding school, and Mumtaz was getting ready for Cambridge. The loss and memories associated with that summer surfaced at Lalitha's death, from which he felt he would never recover.

 

His mind crawled along morbid, enervating grooves, embellished by the image of his dying wife's black silver-sequinned hair flaring on her still pillow and her dusky, emaciated, precious face

“What's the use?” he said to Surjeet Shona. “It's better to go sooner than later, without suffering. Look at Mother. Smoking obstinately and coughing her guts out.”

Surjeet Shona put her hand on his arm and said, She'll be okay, Mumtaz.” And again she said, “She' ll be okay,” her heart pulling, and she put her arm around him and her head on his shoulder. He was so diminished with loss that he had become cadaverous and ugly. His nose was enlarged between the gaunt cheekbones, his forehead dwindled though the hairline had gone so far back it had actually expanded. And the remaining hair, still thick, had whitened.

He could see the top of Surjeet Shona's head, an upper view of her nose and the slanting curve of her parallel eyebrows and eyelids, eyelashes. “Forgive me,” he said haltingly and lightly pressed her hand.

“Darling, what are we to
do
?” Saira wailed, wringing her hands and pleading with Ali. “No one deserves to suffer like that boy.”

“SS,” she said. “You must come more often to see the boy. You're his only hope.”

“What do you mean?” said Surjeet Shona, speaking too fast. “Why don't you summon his other friends? All of us can do something by being with him.”

“It's only you who can save him, darling,” said the distraught mother. And she prayed to the nameless God with whom she chatted sometimes in her head. “Please let me see him normal before I go.” These consecrated chats were never smooth, interrupted by Saira's racking cough. As if to invite disaster, she would immediately light a cigarette, while taking up her interrupted chat with God. “Sorry. I can't help it. Haven't I reached a respectable enough age?” This would be uttered in a mental wail, similar to the wail with which she pleaded with Surjeet Shona. “Save my boy, SS. You're the only one who can.”

Ali and Saira discussed Surjeet Shona. “She's in love with him,” Saira said. And when Ali asked her what they should do, she said, “I'm trying my best, Ali. We'll just have to wait and see.”

 

Surjeet Shona was feeling her way slowly, awkwardly, urged on by the Rajmahal. Saira brought Mumtaz down to her apartment and left them alone whenever she could. But Mumtaz was unresponsive.

Robi was squatting by Surjeet Shona's side during one of those visits,
when she lighted on the subject of Petrov's disappearance, still a burning issue at the Rajmahal. In her desperation to arouse Mumtaz she said the first thing that came to mind.

“Do you think Uncle Osheem was pushed over the roof, Mumtaz?”

“Don't be absurd, SS! Your imagination's running wild.”

“Nothing like an absurdity to bring some life back into him,” thought Surjeet Shona.

“Anyone could have done it, one of the servants, an old enemy . . . ”

“And this person decides Osheem's a menace at this time, when he's reached a hundred . . . ”

“He wasn't a hundred . . . ”

“Ninety-nine then,” said Mumtaz rudely. “At least! And how exactly would this mysterious killer have done it?” Surjeet Shona signaled to Robi, who had opened his mouth, to keep quiet. “Trundles all the way down by the rusty stairs, undetected,” continued Mumtaz, answering his own question. “And then
vaporizes
Osheem. And, incidentally, have you asked yourself why someone should want Osheem dead?”

Robi was holding his head, and he burst out irrepressibly. “It is I who left
Shaheb
,” he said, tears streaming down his cheeks. “I left him alone. After all these years, I only allowed those vultures to get hold of him.”

Surjeet Shona and Mumtaz knew his reference was to real vultures, not the human kind.

“You left Uncle Osheem alone that night, Robi?”

“I left him, I left him, oh, I left him! I did not want to say. But, yes. I, I, Robi, whom he saved from the clutches of Death, I left him to the mercy of Death's knaves!”

“It's all right,” comforted Surjeet Shona, “we understand. Don't worry about all that. Of course we understand. Uncle Osheem himself talked of Jom and his netting and noosing and hooking us all with his weapons.” She looked at Mumtaz. Would all this talk of death be too much?

“When did you leave him?” asked Mumtaz keenly. “Was it night or day? Was it dark?”

“How can I forget,” moaned Robi. “It was
omaboshyo
night. Such a night, such darkness.”

“Do vultures work by night?” wondered Surjeet Shona aloud.

“But when I came back, from, from that bathroom, it was dawn Shona baby. And the vultures had done their work. They had been waiting. Did we not all see them long beforehand, waiting, waiting?”

“Just a minute.” said Mumtaz loudly. “Have you ever heard of a vulture attacking living creatures? Even if they are old and helpless?”

“There must be a difference between scavengers and birds of prey,” said Surjeet Shona, suddenly as frantic as Robi to save Petrov 's dignity. “Robi,” she asked, “did you ever see vultures taking away live creatures, even weak and old creatures?”