The Impressionist (13 page)

Fatehpur’s only major centre of population is Fatehpur town itself. Although some distance from the trade artery of the Grand Trunk Road, which passes to the south of the principality on its way to Peshawar from distant Calcutta, Fatehpur still feels some benefit. Its weavers once made a particular type of chequered cotton cloth, popular across north India. Competition from machine-woven Manchester fabrics has damaged this, but the town is still bustling. Otherwise the Nawab’s subjects, a mixture of Muslims, Sikhs and Hindu Jats, are scattered among numerous small villages. Their wealth is considerable, at least in comparison to the peasants in less fortunate places, such as famine-ridden Bihar or flood-struck East Bengal. Thus the Nawabs have always been able to exact stiff taxes and still retain the grudging affection of their people.

Although the ruling family can draw their family tree back to the foundation, this event took place a mere two hundred years ago. In a land where numerous Rajput monarchs can trace their lineage back to the sun and have held exactly the same territory for a thousand or more years, this makes them laughable upstarts.

The kingdom’s early years are murky, though it is known that 1,122 years after the migration of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina, and some two years after the death of the World Conqueror, Emperor Alamgir, a minor Mughal general by the name of Ala-u-din Khan found himself adrift in the Punjab hills with a company of horse. Having fallen foul of Delhi court intrigue, he had been sent to the Punjab on a mission to pacify the Sikhs, who, despite a catalogue of inducements including the torture and beheading of their ninth guru, had unaccountably refused to convert to Islam and recognize Mughal power.

Riding through the hills, General Ala-u-din found he had lost his taste for warfare. A diplomat by nature, he had never really relished fighting, and had always tried to do as little of it as possible. This was rendered relatively easy by the breakdown of Mughal government after the Old Man’s death. Orders failed to arrive. Reinforcements were a thing of the past. Delhi was rumoured to be in the grip of a vicious power struggle and the Punjab Army had long since ceased to be a single entity. Separated from the other commanders Ala-u-din restricted himself to the occasional skirmish, a caravan raid or two. For some months he and his men had been content to roam the fertile countryside relieving peasants of their grain supplies and livestock.

It was a healthy outdoor life, and one can imagine the General, like so many generations of British soldiers after him, enjoying the crisp Punjabi mornings and the plentiful supplies of game. On this particular day, just as he realized that war was no longer for him, he came upon the hut of a pir. The saint blessed him, invited him in and suggested that if he did not want to make war, and did not want to return to take part in the orgy of betrayals and poisonings at Delhi, then he should found his own kingdom. This plan made sense, and so (with fingers crossed) Ala-u-din Khan had the pir’s hut razed, proclaimed the site Fateh-pur (‘city of victory’) and made himself its Nawab.

Fatehpur’s first century was a troubled one. The land was unpromisingly located on the traditional invasion route from Afghanistan, and only by paying hefty tribute to the Persian Nadir Shah, and later generations of marauding Afghans, Sikhs, Mughal rump forces and Marathas, were the nawabs able to scrape through it with their territory, if not their pride, intact. When Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, the eleventh Nawab attended the celebrations and eventually secured the recognition of his kingdom as an eleven-gun-salute state, ensuring that henceforward his descendants would occupy a position near the top of the great table of precedence which governs all official activities in British India, from the lowliest Sanitary Department tea party to the loftiest imperial durbar.

These days, on arrival in directly ruled British territory (a few miles up the road) or other princely states, the Nawab of Fatehpur sends a servant on ahead to ensure that eleven cannon are to be fired. If not, there will be no arrival. However great this honour, it is, as Nawab Murad does not forget, far less than the twenty-one guns accorded to the fabulously wealthy and important Nizam of Hyderabad, although gratifyingly more than the nine owed to the nearby Nawab of Loharu, another Punjabi Muslim principality with which the Nawab maintains a polite rivalry.

The construction of the New Palace, some distance away from what is now Fatehpur town, was the most ambitious project undertaken by the Khan dynasty. It was also responsible for an increased British presence in the state. The ‘vast and reckless’ expense involved (the words are those of Sir Percival Montcrieff, first Resident) led to the India Office gleefully concluding that there was every chance the Nawabs would soon prove themselves unfit to rule, so giving the British the opportunity to annex Fatehpur ‘for the good of the people’. Duly, the thirteenth Nawab was forced to accept constant administrative interference, which has continued unabated ever since. Although Nawab Murad is still ruler, he cannot tie his shoelaces without the agreement of the Crown’s representative, Major Privett-Clampe. The Major can veto visits to Europe, and halt the purchase of new cars, furniture, jewels, polo ponies or aircraft in favour of tedious administrative projects like the provision of a hospital or maintenance of fresh-water supply to the Fatehpur villages. If his opinion is not heeded, a word, a dispatch, would be enough to cause serious, even succession-changing trouble. The Major is a very powerful man indeed.

Luckily the asha dulls Pran’s senses. The experience is still painful, like having a fallen log hammered up one’s backside with a mallet, but at least it seems to be happening at one remove, the pain-messages arriving at his brain like holiday postcards; brief, belated and mercifully unenlightening about the sender’s real feelings. His head has been pushed down into the dusty black bedclothes, so he cannot see the purple face of the man toiling behind him. He is aware, however, that the pounding is punctuated by a rhythm of buttock-slaps and regular full-throated hunting cries. As the Major’s excitement mounts, ‘Tally-ho!’ gives way to ‘On! On! On!’, and the bed groans with the effort of maintaining its structural integrity.

Some may be tempted to view this as primarily a political situation. It is, after all, Pran’s first direct contact with the machinery of imperial government. Sadists, mothers of vulnerable servant girls or those with a straightforward taste for retribution may prefer to call it cosmic justice. Traditionally the consequences of our actions in this life are only felt in the next one, a quick inter-incarnational karmic tally moving us down the evolutionary scoreboard in the direction of sweeper, dog and fish, or up towards Brahminhood and eventual escape from the cycle of action and suffering. Pran’s accounting is happening with unusual speed.

Pissed, past it, weak of heart and chronically short of breath, the Major is no sexual athlete. Every so often he has to take a little breather, and it is during one of these breaks that Pran turns round and notices a hatch swing open in the featureless blackness of the Chinese room’s far wall. After a moment, the lens of a folding camera pokes through the opening, along with a hand holding a little metal trough of magnesium powder. On cue the Major decides to recommence operations, but, having worked up a muck-sweat, he takes a snap tactical decision and struggles out of his tunic, flinging it away with a stirring ‘View Hallooo!’ Just as the startled Picturewallah is poised to take his shot, his line of sight is obscured by the tunic and his foot slips off his stool, sending flash-powder all down the front of his achkan.

The sensation of cool air about his armpits is the stimulus the Major needs to finish the job, and he climaxes with a bloodcurdling yell. As his brain floods with sobering hormones, he starts to regard his situation with a critical eye. What on earth is he doing? Uncertainty swells to remorse, remorse to guilt and guilt to panic. He buttons himself up as quickly as possible and retires from the field. Being well brought up, when he is halfway out of the door he decides he ought to acknowledge the other fellow with some sort of gesture. Shaking hands hardly seems appropriate.

‘Well done, my boy!’ he calls gruffly. ‘Keep it up!’

As the door closes, a blinding flash of light illuminates the open hatch, like a trench under night-time shellfire. A momentary image of the Picturewallah desperately trying to put out his burning clothes is obscured by billowing smoke, which descends over Pran, enveloping him in a blanket of acrid-tasting grey.

As the asha wears off, Pran is overtaken by a creeping feeling of disgust. Dazed and sore, he lies on the bed, trying to grow a shell over what has just happened. After a while a pair of hijras appear through the haze and march him back to the zenana, where the Picturewallah, whose brocade achkan has a charred hole across the chest, is arguing with the Diwan.

‘You incompetent,’ the Diwan rages. ‘What are we supposed to do now?’

‘He saw nothing,’ snaps the Picturewallah, gingerly fingering his singed beard. ‘I’m sure of it. And he was pleased by the boy. We will simply tell Flowers to bring him back.’

The Khwaja-sara flaps around, hustling the courtiers out, begging them to keep their voices down. Pran is shown into a little alcove, where he lies down on a pallet and drifts into a troubled sleep. As he slides in and out of consciousness, he tries feebly to make out some pattern in what has happened to him, to work out how the proud son on the roof of his father’s mansion came to this. Like a little boy, he slips a comforting hand between his thighs. At least that is safe, for the moment. As for the rest, nothing is certain at all.

The next morning the hijras put him to work. He sweeps floors, the hem of the unfamiliar sari dragging on the floor, the choli riding up high over the ridge of his spine. He polishes brass and scours skillets and picks stones out of rice. The floor is the first he has ever swept. The pans are the first he has scrubbed. The feet he presses (hijra feet, with silver anklets and long curled nails) wiggle their toes to remind him that everything about his life is now inverted. He is filled with shame, but so shocked that he cannot find the words to complain. With every swish of the broom, Pran Nath Razdan is falling away. In his place, silent and compliant, emerges Rukhsana.

Day by day, Pran expects to be called back to the Chinese room. The summons does not come, and for several weeks his existence is bounded by the tiny, cramped spaces of the eunuchs’ quarters. Nor has he access to the mardana, the men’s wing, or to the zenana proper. Rukhsana, floating between worlds.

Through the pink portico lies a paradise of women and running water. There are perhaps a hundred living there, from old crones to babes in arms. Some are the Nawab’s wives or concubines. Others are maids or servants, descendants of women who came to Fatehpur as part of a dowry, and were born as the Nawab’s property. A few are married to palace men but choose to make their home here rather than outside the walls. Still others have arrived through some eddy in the universal flow of family obligation: widows, distant cousins, obscure aunts come to live out their last days in the rooms around the cool zenana courtyard. The maids scurry after their mistresses, and the hijras scurry after everybody. They are servants, bodyguards, spies, chastisers, cajolers and arbitrators of disputes, living in a warren of quarters just outside the zenana, ready at their mistresses’ beck and call. Their raucous voices cut through the space like scissor-blades through cloth.

Time passes. At night Pran lies awake in his little doorless alcove, close to the Khwaja-sara’s bedroom. He wants to make a plan of escape, but does not know where to begin. His situation appears hopeless. In the small hours he listens to the elderly eunuch’s reedy snores, a steady iamb of suck and rattle which thrums on his nerves as he tries to think. Where would he go if he did escape? He would have to travel miles across country, without money or friends. What guarantee does he have that somewhere else would be any better than here? Night after night, he turns this circle like a prayer-wheel, surrounded by the ponderous stillness of Fatehpur.

Something melancholy pulses through the palace. It is carried in the basic rhythm of zenana life, the heartbeat which underlies all other minor fibrillations: the visits of the Nawab. They are irregular and sudden, but the routine is always the same. The first sign is a racing messenger who skids into the hijras’ courtyard. At once someone rushes to the gong room, an upstairs chamber with a grilled window looking down over the entrance courtyard of the zenana proper. The huge gong is sounded and the little room which acts as its resonator disgorges a low syrupy burp of sound which spreads through the wing, vibrating its inhabitants into alertness and hasty toilettes. By the time the Nawab himself appears, accompanied by a few chobdars and bodyguards, an expectant hush has taken hold.

To Pran, secretly peeping through the gong-room grille, the thin man in the rich clothes does not look like a ruler. The silks, the jewelled Jodhpuri slippers, the strings of pearls and the egg-sized finger rings seem less true signs of power than elements of a particularly expensive fancy-dress costume. The bodyguards add to the sense of discrepancy. A gang of giant henna-bearded Pathans, they tower over the Nawab, making him look even slighter than he is. While their master is inside, the Pathans stand to attention by the gate, scratching themselves and making eyes at the hijras, who make eyes back.