Rajmahal (5 page)

Long after Independence, when Jack was poised for the final push to become chairman and managing director, he was passed over for the post, as loyal friends put it, by a man who didn't deserve a clerk's job, a covertly apartheid remark. The culprit was a brilliant Indian, backed by the newly powerful Indian lobby with strong nudgings from the government. “I'll have to resign,” Jack declared impulsively. But he pulled up short when friends alerted him, “They'll think you object to working under an Indian.” Jack didn't admit this was another sticking point. That year, the presidentship of the Bengal Chamber was also given to Jack's rival. Independence had knocked down one of the British Raj's bastions as it was doing everywhere. The Chamber was to decline gradually and lose its preeminent position. Sharp and Co. dwindled after being dogged by scandal and with the government squeezing it through new laws. The British knew their time was up, and Jack Strachey's pipping was accepted with resignation by the beleaguered community. He toyed briefly with the idea of joining one of the big Indian business houses, but the thought to him was in the end nonsensical.

 

After all the lost chances Jack Strachey became introverted and his adoration for Myrna intensified, part of a new siege mentality. Myrna's remorse grew. “It's time,” she said. She didn't articulate to herself that the arrival of menopause was the pushing factor. “It's time I looked after Jack,” she said righteously. This was made easier by Jack's gentle nature and perennial good looks. While most of her other men friends had become
ugly and cantankerous, here was her Jack, as impressive as ever. “How could I have had the heart?” she wondered. “How could I?” The regret grew and then faded with time. Now that Myrna was in extreme old age her faculties were sharply reduced and such niceties nonexistent. She was instead wedged on top of a mountain of resentment which translated into a general vengefulness. She bragged endlessly about her beauty and her betrayals, as if there had been no choice. “How could I not?” she now said. She was convinced she had some legendary role to play in the sexuality which writhed like a hidden turbulence under Calcutta's surface. This is what she thought that day looking at Jack leaning on the rail of their veranda, presenting his rugged octogenarian profile to the muggy South breeze. “I know,” she thought. “But what could I do?” The ghosts were pensive. After all these years they had acquired the same feelings of concern and protectiveness toward the
mlechcha
s that they felt toward all the tenants, including by now the Muslim landlord and his family. And the Rajmahal kept as calm as it could, recognizing that it could do nothing while Myrna's aging reached an extreme of disharmony.

Kuldip Chopra was the high flyer who did Jack Strachey out of the chairmanship of Sharp's. This was the second turning point. Jack, though steady, just, and steely, was without brilliance, as everyone at Sharp's regretfully noted. Regretfully, because he was popular and respected. But with Independence, the bosses, though still British, had to show their bona fides to the independent Indian government, and discrimination had to be seen as ended. Getting their own to come out to India was a vanishing option, and Indianization was unavoidable. So when the brilliant, flamboyant Kuldip Chopra created ripples, there was already a buzzing in the wings that if anyone was to signify the new order, it had to be him. Kuldip had shocked his white colleagues when he had first strolled into their offices, coolly plucked cigars from their humidors, sat back, and hiked his well-shod feet on to their desks. Before Independence. But this didn't stop him from taking the company surging forward with inspired management. Until that stage, very few Indians had been accepted into the covenanted ranks, and Kuldip was one of those few. He had a genuine pukka accent after a long education at Harrow and Oxford, a fine dress sense, and a sophisticated wife and living style, easily equaling his most fastidious British associates. Jack was a grammar school boy and had trained at Dundee for the jute mill floor and factory management, risen “from the ranks.”

Myrna was gnawing her nails and pouring herself too many whiskeys waiting for news on the expected day when the phone rang. She snatched at it eagerly, thinking, “He's lost it, I'm sure he's lost it.” She could feel her energy draining away while she listened to Jack's laborious words. The ghosts were listening in too, eagerly, and they sighed collectively when they heard the news. “So it's him after all, Kuldip Chopra!” she exclaimed when he came home. Jack's mind lurched and he wondered for a nightmarish second if Kuldip had been one of her lovers. His eye met Myrna's at the same moment and realizing what was going through his mind, she shook her head slightly, the first such acknowledgement between them. This was when the bell finally tolled for her illicit affairs. Her heart went out to Jack, the predictable, unpretentious husband, her life's stable rock, so crushed by this blow. Indian policies and politics had to be transformed at this time of all times, just when it would hurt him most!

“At least he won't be knighted,” said Jack.

“He can't be,” said Myrna, her small triumph being that Kuldip was the loser somewhere for not being British.

What, one might wonder, made Jack Strachey stay on? Was the ignominy of losing to the outstanding Kuldip Chopra, of not being knighted, of seeing his wife's ex-lovers flitting around him till the end of his life, of living among subject people cocky with freedom, not enough to drive him away, join at least one of the later streams of returning Britons? And if the attractions of staying on, ineffable or otherwise, had been so overwhelming, why was it that most other Britons thought and decided otherwise? Demographers, sociologists, psychoanalysts, historians, and political scientists may have come to the conclusion that this was the inevitable pattern when colonialism was ending, when, usually, the approaching end of an alien rule braked the ruling expatriates' ideas of putting down roots, turned their eyes homeward.

It is difficult to say, except that going back depressed Jack unbearably. Not even the attraction of Martin's nearness could turn that depression around. Underlying this choice was the memory of the cold, gray Skiddaw world, the formal distance between people in that small space. Here, there were all the other advantages, the automatic assumptions of the ones who had ruled, and the infinite and tender arrangements for leisure. And his common sense told him that in spite of the grumblings of other expats, they were still well-off, and life would still remain “good.” As for the Indians being cocky, Jack knew his Indians. Kuldip Chopra would always behave
decently with him, and a subtle superiority still clung to the expats as long as they had money. He convinced himself Calcutta society inherently knew an injustice had been done to him. How could he face the idea of Kuldip Chopra being the better choice?

When the Stracheys' son, Martin, came back to Calcutta with his bride, the first floor tenant, Proshanto Mojumdar, snatched at the excuse to indulge in his favorite pastime, hosting an entertainment. “We shall go to the theater!” he enthused. “And then to the 300!”

Martin's bride, Gwendolyn, was a scholar of European music, a subject far removed from his own. He was an academic too, specialized in nineteenth century British colonial history with Calcutta as his focus. Martin, who was more than normally promiscuous, had been Surjeet Shona's lover for a while. But this affair had been too zippy and it had all but zipped out of his mind. Occasional visions of their intimacy sometimes came into his memory, but divested of feeling. Gwendolyn had knocked Surjeet Shona and everyone else off his mind, and he was too lost in the blinding meeting of bodies to worry about minds. She was just the intellectual yet passionate bluestocking he had always wanted to marry. However, a shortcoming Martin hadn't anticipated was her antagonism to India. The signs were visible on the drive in from the airport. Gwendolyn was a petite blonde, her long hair plaited and wound around her head, a delicate renaissance painting, but churlish. As they headed for the city, her lips clamped together tighter and tighter, till they became a thin sealed line. Martin did his best to distract her with hurried chatter. But he couldn't block her view of a naked boy selling newspapers on the roadside. He groaned when Gwen unstuck her lips and hysterically stopped the car. Before he could think, he found himself helping her buy a cheap set of clothes at a nearby stall. She raced back flushed with her deed and presented the clothes to the astonished boy. A crowd immediately collected. Gwen, reeling with shock when she saw a pair of young men blithely holding hands, plunged back into the car. The young men peered through the car windows and planted their fingerprints on the panes, scattering when the chauffeur shooed them away. When one of them scratched his private parts, Gwen shivered, already sick with mental malaria. Martin's lips were tightly clamped now,
but to dam up the laughter. He said nothing when the shirt was hauled off the little boy to the amusement of the victim. Just as he didn't point out that being naked, even because of poverty, was more pleasant in the heat than being burdened with sticky clothes. Or that the young hand-holding men weren't homosexuals. Or that in India, when you itched you scratched. What was the use, he groaned, of trying to remind her of their jointly mocking at white missionaries for clothing, civilizing, and Christianizing “naked savages.” “They
are
savages!” hissed Gwendolyn, startling him.

 

Proshanto Mojumdar asked Martin to make a choice of entertainment, a regrettable move, he felt, because Martin lighted on
Neel Dorpon
, a historic and controversial play, unflattering to the British. He suggested safer alternatives. “Your wife is new to this country,” he pleaded, “she may find it embarrassing.”

“Why? It's history . . . ”

“But nevertheless, do you not think we should try something lighter,
The Pirates of Penzanc
e at the New Empire, for instance?”

“
The Pirates of Penz
. . . !” Martin was outraged. “
The Pirates of Penzance
! Come on, Pro. This is India!”

“No, but seriously . . . ”

“But I
am
being serious. Don't you understand?
Neel Dorpon
's from my area of specialization, nineteenth century colonial Bengal. I never dreamed I'd get a chance to see it. And Reema Devi's acting at the Petrovs' own theater! It's too exciting.” He spoke of their neighboring tenant, the Russian, Anatoly Sergeivich Petrov, who was married to the celebrated actress of the Bengali stage, Reema Devi.

 

The ghosts were excited. “I wish I could see it too,” enthused a grandmother ghost from the Sheetanath family. “I remember what an uproar it caused when it was launched! In the early days of our wonderful theater . . . ”

 

“These Bengalis are always showing off about literature and drama and art!” said the tart Sikh. “As if they are the only ones who are cultured! What do they know of a good robust
Heer
, or a manly bhangra. Hunh!”

Finally, Proshanto Mojumdar gave in. “Very well,” he said glumly. “The evening is in honor of your bride, and it is, after all, your choice.”

Martin was being partly dishonest.
Neel Dorpon
per se wasn't as exciting to him as testing his bride's reactions, and even more exciting, indulging in
the erotic prospect of teasing her. His mischievous intellect at work. “It must provoke her, one way or the other,” he thought.

Neel Dorpon
, in its English version, was brilliantly done and the audience watched Reema Devi's rendition with hushed awe. Reema Devi Petrov was in her fifties, yet as the young victim of rape her bulky body was transformed in effortless illusion. Her small, mysterious smile, hardly visible to the audience, seemed enlarged by a nonexistent projector onto a nonexistent screen, and each member of the mesmerized audience felt its quality. When the dastardly English planter, played with a combination of bombast and lasciviousness, threatened to rape her, the labored breathing of the audience turned the hall steamy.