Rajmahal (11 page)

She had once allowed imaginings of such a stud to manifest. The medical facts had just clarified, and then Proshanto had gone off over a nubile newcomer. “How dare he when he's the one with the shortcoming!” snorted Mohini. She knew Proshanto's sterility, or his presumed infidelity, were strong grounds for divorce. But it was still the early days, and revenge seemed sweeter. Her French class provided the chance, with the stud manifesting as a co-student from, of all places, Bulgaria.

“Wait till I produce a blue-eyed baby!” fumed Mohini. “What on earth made me think I had to depend on that dolt of a husband!”

The Bulgarian sat next to Mohini, then a voluptuous young woman with an enchanting smile and glossy black hair which flowed down her back. Her large eyes turned soulfully toward him often, and he found himself stutteringly addressing her at any excuse in his poor English and poorer French in order to have that pleasure. Mohini at first found him hilariously funny with his easy blushes, but when she saw the unmistakable invitation in his blue eyes she felt herself blushing back. The Bulgarian became more attractive in a flash when her thoughts of revenge clarified. She allowed their arms to brush and soon, the pleasure of this contact became a game with them. One thing led to another and, heaving with guilt and excitement, she found herself one day in those familiar arms in his lodgings. The Bulgarian,
no fledgling, plunged into the sexual rites he was used to, and before pulling her down on to the bed put a hand on her breast and brought his face close to hers with his tongue suggestively darting in and out. Mohini kept her lips tightly sealed and held her breath, fearful that the Bulgarian would have stinking breath with shreds of beef rotting between his teeth. And suddenly, his appearance became so abhorrent, the satyr grin on his face, the darting, snakelike tongue, that she panicked, picked up her things and fled. She was reminded of scenes of bacchanalia from the paintings of the European museums, and the Bulgarian was transformed into a hairy Pan whenever she thought of him. She never went back to the French class, terrified of encountering the poor puzzled Bulgarian again.

Dream mirages of the Sardar Bahadur's mistresses, whose bedroom the Mojumdars now occupied, evoked bawdy scenes from the
Arabian Nights
of Mohini's mind. Her psychic vision was especially activated when old Inderjeet Kaur's ghost arrived all the way from Amritsar and appeared in the ceiling mirror above her head. One night, when the mirror clouded and frothed with white clouds, partly the mosquito curtains of fact, partly the fumes of delusion, while pink and silver flashed in the dark, Mohini nudged Proshanto awake to share the vision with her. He opened his eyes briefly, blinked several times, and then scolded, “Put off the light!” It was the mirror above, staging the cameo scene of the
Sardarni
's night of spying. And it was this ghostly floodlit drama that Proshanto Mojumdar had mistaken for the bedroom light.

The vision, engineered by the house, did immense service to Mohini Mojumdar, setting her balance right and allowing her to regard objectively the comedy of her husband as exemplifying this life and its inexplicable yearnings.

She had, after that one little incomplete rebellion, resigned herself to childlessness. Not so for Proshanto, who started off on a search, lasting years, for a remedy. It was a pity test-tube babies, sperm banks, and surrogacy came too late for the Mojumdars. Proshanto went through all the available medical and pseudomedical practices, faith healing, allopathy, homeopathy, ayurveda,
unani,
and all the quackeries that came to his notice. But he wasn't destined to achieve an increase in his sperm count.

And then, in middle age, he was overtaken by feverish fears about his decelerating libido. “Male menopause,” he convinced himself. “That's what it is, male menopause.” In his anxiety to end the pause before it became a
full stop, he embarked on another long and weary search. Cures for “sex weakness, hormone imbalance, and secret diseases” in the sex clinics of Calcutta.

His desperation manifested on other tangents making a jagged manyrayed star around that insecure phase of his life. He put an announcement in the matrimonial columns of a leading Bengali newspaper, partly honest: “High-caste widower, 55, wealthy, vigorous, handsome, fair, six feet tall, seeks lively, unencumbered outgoing lady. Widowhood, caste, color, no bar . . . ” Somehow he balked at “marriage.”

He furtively collected the responses, a total of six, from an anonymous post box and kept photos of these hopefuls in his wallet. He would look at them and fantasize, hoping for a revival of his libido. “Any one of them could be mine if I wanted,” he assured himself. But instead of replying formally, he bought himself an expensive toupee and feeling uncomfortably tight about the head, traced an address to a back lane in a distant suburb. There he waited in vain for his fancy to emerge. Thus began his surreptitious loitering in obscure lanes observing the prospects, always disappointing. When the last of them turned out to be a transvestite, Proshanto was so depressed he threw the photos into the back of a drawer. Mohini came across them and managed to prize out the truth. She shrieked with laughter and embarrassed Proshanto by making the venture the prime story at any event. Proshanto was provoked to helpless anger by this disloyalty and had to make the best of it, stiffly smiling with the rollicking gathering. It was Mohini's revenge. “Just imagine, he killed me off in his ad, became a widower!” she would announce during her exposés. When the toupee needed a wash, Mohini soaked it in such strong detergent that it shriveled and shrank into a hairy spider. After listening tight-lipped to Proshanto Mojumdar's scolding, she contemptuously flicked the spider into a wastepaper basket. Proshanto rescued it but when he tried it on its suction end unstuck with a slow hiss and leapt off producing another burst of hilarity from Mohini. He compensated by demanding that Mohini should dye her hair. “You still have such a young face. It will be entirely suitable!” he said. His reason for saying this was complex. It wasn't simply to show a complementary approval of his own moves, but that a youthful-looking wife, by reflection, would shore up his image. Anyone looking at her should imagine a still active sex life with a still desirable partner. And in order to live up to these assumptions, his libido might revive! But Mohini
was having none of it and fed up with Proshanto's crazy behavior she became more stubbornly set in her gracious aging. Proshanto's loitering in obscure lanes ended with a last visit to a sex clinic. His choice, a doctor of “discrete and famous reputation,” turned out to be a huge Pathan type with bristling mustache and wig, the latter easily diagnosed by the experienced Proshanto. He clung to his dignity and submitted to the intimate probing and testing, receiving as a reward a packet of expensive magic made from crushed tiger bone, ginseng, and other uncertain ingredients. He also carried a package of physical aids, which he examined minutely in the privacy of his car and then flung into the nearest dustbin. “What would Mohini say if she ever found them?” he thought, shuddering with relief at his timely action.

When nothing worked, he became over active to make up for the tumult in such an important area of his life. He and Mohini spent long periods on his estate near the East Pakistan border, involving themselves in the land reforms of the newly elected government. They had a quaint mansion overlooking low hills and surrounded by Santhal villages. Sitting on their veranda next to a manual well shaded by papaya trees and biting into ripe guavas just plucked and dealing with the paddy crop, seasonal labor, and other farming matters which took up much of their time, was diverting. At first, the division of lands among the landless gave Proshanto Mojumdar a purpose in life. He had old friends among leftist politicians, and felt secure that the size of his own land holdings, which had dwindled after division between himself, his brother, and a few cousins, would protect him from any such takeover. When a band of party workers and peasants militantly armed and waving red flags oversaw the handing over of a portion of these lands to the landless he was outraged. But after spending fruitless days in Calcutta trying to reverse the situation, and sleepless nights agonizing over justice and injustice, feudalism and egalitarianism, he realized how hypocritical he was. “Why did you think you would be immune?” Mohini asked him. “Just because you knew some politicians?” She felt strongly, that the redressal of centuries of inequality by losing their lands was irrelevant when they were childless. This ideologically mixed thinking confused Proshanto, especially as his nephew Rudrangshu was to be his heir. “Rudro will have more than enough with whatever is left,” chided Mohini.

The land redistribution left Proshanto feeling aggrieved and ill-done-by on the one hand, and swelling with righteousness on the other, till one day,
his remaining lands slipped out of his grasp while he stood by helplessly like his body.

But Proshanto's libido was soon to be reawakened by a zealous minister friend's ideological activities. Busily erasing colonial memories by renaming streets and replacing monuments, the minister decided to end the white segregation still continuing in some clubs.

Proshanto Mojumdar, imbued with a deep sense of politeness, always squirmed at manifestations of racism (surely the very antithesis of politeness!). How could it be justified, even in the context of ruler and ruled, that “natives” should be barred from the exclusive haunts of the white man? Surely, once the ruler had left, the racism lay exposed and had to be excised. But things were changing fast. There were so many ironies, small and big. There was poor Jack Strachey's supersession at Sharp's by an Indian, to match Proshanto's by an Englishman, one after Independence and one before.

“Viewed within the context of our lives, it seems somewhat like a rough justice,” said Proshanto in his pedantic diction.

“‘Justice' because both of you have suffered for the color of your skins? They cancel each other out?” his wife retorted.

Proshanto didn't reply. He knew it had been the injustice of racism and ruler-ruled syndrome which had taken away the final promotions in his case, and a righting of these imbalances in Jack's.

“What you are saying is ‘it serves him right!'” continued Mohini.

“Not him exactly,” said Proshanto, “ but the British generally for what they did to us.” He should have added that he still felt sorry for his neighbor.

The minister chose the Swimming Club for his first assault, and called on his friend Proshanto Mojumdar, a good swimmer and versed in the ways of the West, to join in the direct action.

“They are in for a shock,” said Proshanto, excitedly.

“Why shock?” said Mohini. “Those places should have been taken over with Independence.”

Proshanto agreed with her for once.

 

He decided to wear a
dhuti
on the occasion, for the first time since his wedding, but had to take his upstairs neighbor, Petrov's help. The Russian had worn
dhuties
off and on for years. His Bengali academic and theater
world friends had never thought of abandoning their native dress, unlike Proshanto, who moved in different circles and had lost the habit. But he thought the occasion called for some such statement.

 

He remembered the Englishman of noble descent employed at one time at Sharp's. The Englishman was forced to resign when he began appearing in office swathed in a
dhuti-punjabi
. At the Strachey's one evening, it was ironical that the only two people in Bengali dress were two white people, both of noble descent, the maverick Sharp's ex-employee and Petrov. Was it their noble birth which allowed them to carry off their “fancy-dress” with such élan? The jokes which followed couldn't hide the earlier hegemony of the colonizers and their indelible imprint on sartorial mores.

 

The minister friend, a group of young swimmers, and Proshanto Mojumdar, his over-starched
dhuti
beaten into shape, set off in a cavalcade of cars. Inside the club, the minister's group brushed past the stunned members and marched into the changing rooms, whipped off their
dhuties
and clad in a medley of swimming trunks and loin cloths, reached the pool and plunged in. This was the time the minister, who was watching from the side, made his famous remark. “Are they afraid our color will roll off our skins and stain the water? What about sharing the pool with people who only use paper!
Chchi
!”

Proshanto, in the mean time, was filled with a euphoric triumph. At the same time, a feeling of unease lurked deep inside him, which he realized amounted to shame. Shame that his people had allowed themselves to be stripped of their dignity by the colonizer, and a deeper shame that they had allowed the British to continue in their assumptions of reverse-untouchability so long after Independence. He reminded himself, as he had always done at such moments, that even before Independence, at least one leading Bengali, Deshapriya Sengupta, had started a racing and rowing club, the Lake Club, where whites were excluded, right next to the existing whites-only Calcutta Rowing Club, and that too in spite of his having an English wife, Nellie. But Nellie was an honorary Bengali, who had taken readily to the sari, spoke fluent Bengali, and went to jail, like her husband, while fighting for freedom for her husband's people from her own. He felt better while stroking alongside the champion, pushing away the bitter truth under this thin salve, while he worried, “How am I to re-drape that complicated four yards of starched white cotton again without help?” He
came out of the pool still worrying, to find flashbulbs popping while the members and club officials stood by, bewildered. Proshanto Mojumdar marched heroically into the changing rooms again, and wound his still starchy
dhuti
around himself, somehow getting to his car intact where he couldn't stop it coming undone again. He arrived at the Rajmahal with the difficult garment bunched up in place by a string, and was greeted by Mohini's familiar screams of laughter. “We succeeded anyway,” said Proshanto Mojumdar proudly.