Rajmahal (19 page)

Read Rajmahal Online

Authors: Kamalini Sengupta

The group, government or society frames this checking activity. So, on the one hand, the group protects its members by creating checking activities for good. On the other hand it behaves in an evil (?) way, for the good of the group? Look closer: the checks are created for the good and then if the group's self interest is threatened, the checks are subverted, never mind who or what is harmed or damaged, while the lip-service continues . . .
Seeing all this, can one continue blindly, comfortably, passively acting for one's own interests? It seems, yes. Countries are always doing this. Such as “good” states like Britain today. The unit is embraced by the collective. So the state is more important than the individual. So the colonial power's activities for its own gain are legitimate though colonial rule is obviously illegitimate.
An individual's suffering, whether from hunger, starvation, injustice, deprivation or poverty is unimportant. There is so much individual suffering. A close friend, a spouse, a son, can miss it completely, or be indifferent to it. You, an individual, are suffering deeply, just like a vast number of individuals, from loss, frustration, jealousy, sickness, failure, pain, sorrow, disgrace, ridicule, ugliness, old age, disease . . . Or take the subject country rather than the ruling power. In the famine, individuals, a huge group of individuals, goes through a huge range of suffering. Hunger, deprivation, separation, helplessness, degradation, displacement, homelessness, shame . . . No means are left even to shed tears. And if tears are shed, a child might lick those tears to slake its thirst. As in
Steinbeck's
Grapes of Wrath
, where a woman suckles a strange man to save him from starvation!
 
Who is doing all this? Why is this being done? A tyrant, the colonial power, bad people? The Who (the perpetrator of suffering) may be easier to answer in part. Or take a metaphor for the partial Who, a common example as a metaphor. A lover giving pleasure yet inflicting torture. Whose presence is intense delight and whose absence intense pain. Can the “pain” be avoided?
The other part of the Who is unanswerable. For instance, who causes old age, senility? The Why too is unanswerable. It always was and always will be. It is without even a part of an answer. What if science can work out equations and formulas? The metaphysical why will always be without an answer. And all other human suffering? Nature? God? Or the Devil and God pulling from two ends in the danse macabre of vultures tearing at a carcass?
India in modern times has had a conscious many-faceted struggle for reform. The fronts are endless, and the country's whole form is being chiseled, hacked, hammered, remolded, sandpapered, to get it into shape. Re-formed. Formed again. Pick up any important Indian biography—it will tell you of a struggle for change, reformers, fighters, Raja Ram Mohan Roys, Keshav Chandra Sens, Vidyasagars . . . and after Independence all the new reform laws, against dowry, against untouchability, etc., etc. thesis, metamorphosis, synthesis—a struggle which will never end till the country reaches the end of a trail. At least that trail which synthesizes human dignity . . . Surely! Europe, the West, has reached the end of that trail. Its people have dignity accessible to them and have mostly taken it. Yet, they keep striving for more! In the never-ending spiraling circle they want more food, more thin people, more work, more leisure, more power, less aggression, fewer aged and longer lives. Reform is never complete. I have seen drunks and old decrepit men and women in Europe, today, foraging in dustbins! What hope then does this poor country, this India, have?
Bengal in India has had a particularly intense struggle. Its three quite recent great miseries, misery of violence and partition, misery of refugees, misery of famine, creating each time, a degraded mixed new identity. One generation has seen this and ages and dies without finding a synthesis solution. Its dreams are gone, shattered!
A myriad of freedom-fighters died before their dream came true. India became independent, but it showed tremendous cracks. India was a place to leave, escape. The thought of staying on filled many with frustration. So many
from this very building, my children Boris and Meera, and an ocean of others emigrating to Canada, Australia, Great Britain, the Gulf, Germany, joining their cousins in East Africa, Hong Kong , Singapore, as if they couldn't bear the independence of their country, as if Valhalla was elsewhere after it had come to India.
The changes brought about by those three penultimate and ultimate colonial period cataclysms, the depletion and degradation, affected the countryside deeply, shattering generations of the future. Naturally they could envisage nothing but continued deprivation if they stayed back.
Yet, that day, the biggest headlines were of Independence, and what did Independence mean? How much did it change everyday lives? It had the emotional power to instantly put an end to the riots in Calcutta at least, the killing. Bas! To cause Hindus and Muslims to embrace in public. And for all to call “Jai Hind,” “Victory to India!” with one voice, forgetting earlier quibbles.
But it had also caused the killings, because hand in hand with it went the cracking of the subcontinent into three. The mighty booming bang of the hammer of partition had become a necessity in the balance of negotiation, and the head of the hammer that had dealt that mighty booming bang was Independence! The model map of India cracked into three, and through those cracks came pouring out the flood of refugees, carrying violence, death, disease, destitution, hunger, adding to the state's deposit of misery. So, the headlines deserved their size. They contained all this and more. Following that violence and displacement. Justifying the replacement of subjection with Independence. Of course! And echoing in macrocosm the microcosm of millions of small, little battles, swirling like twisters across the surface of the land. Between ruler and ruled, between religions and castes and peoples, between illusion and reality. And forgetting all the way, the only end to it all, Old Age and Death.
Reema Devi was now both middle-aged and neurotic. The shoe-throwing incident at the English rendering of
Neel Dorpon
had upset her. Petrov was aware of this as they hurried out of the theater and headed for Proshanto Mojumdar's insistent entertainment at the 300.
“Imagine Petro!” said Reema Devi. “Planter Rogue was concussed! Concussed!” Petrov watched Reema Devi, the marvel on the stage, trembling and upset after this violence to her fellow actor. In his anxiety he
stepped in heavily. “Martin's a mischievous one. And that little prissy miss, Gwendolyn . . . Maybe we should have seen some other play . . . ?”
“You expect the Stracheys to sit through a
Bengali
play?”
Petrov laughed, diverted. Inhabiting different strata of society, he thought, was richer than sticking coyly to one's own. But was it truer? What did “truer” mean, after all, debated the chronic philosopher? Did it mean traditional groupings were sacred and the Other profane? Or did it mean that encouraging differentness was untrue because it disturbed the comfortable certainty of the known? Couldn't it be truer that the conventional simply couldn't face the wider world? Did it mean they didn't want to discover the crackle of excitement in newness? Would he change his life so far? Reverse drive in time and space to Russia, get married to a penurious closet-aristocrat or a coarse borsch-slurper . . . Ah no! he thought, quickly re-reversing from the unbearable and unthinkable, life without Reema Devi and the Eros. Never! Petrov was a multidimensional participant, but he was an outsider and could, therefore, see from the outside. He could see his wife, the genius actress deeply rooted in her profession and culture, yet moving in other dimensions with pride and ease. He could see the Stracheys in their painful displacement yet peculiarly true to that displaced culture, more lost than the Anglo-Indians. Anglo-Indians like the Normans and Maudie Jessop, the Rajmahal's inhabitants, who too stayed, not “behind,” but just stayed without knowing if they belonged, jumping on a bed of pins and pain, for no real fault of their own. He could see the Mojumdars bumbling along in their eclectic kindliness quite comfortable in the mixed arena of Calcutta yet displaced from the undiluted Bengal. The others. All located within the historicity of the Rajmahal. And could he, Petrov, who had fled from his homeland at a tender age, could he judge them?
They drove on without speaking, though Petrov looked frequently and anxiously at Reema Devi. He thought of her in her early days, eager for any part, confident and brilliant. Still young, she would take on the parts of old crones, gleefully disguising herself for those parts, secure in her youth. Now she desperately sought the youthful parts, refusing to allow faintest mention of anything near her true age. The theater world, most of all Petrov, knew where her nerves quivered and that the slightest stirring of air close to them could cause exquisite pain. Because they loved her and cherished the magnificent gift of herself to the stage, they would have
applied the thumbscrews for her. But, one day, it would happen, and she would have to accept the fateful turn of the screw herself.
Menopause, what trouble that had caused her. Yet it had freed her finally from a phenomenon she had come to detest. “I long for menopause, Petro,” she would moan. But the more she longed and moaned, the more the four-weekly metronome clicked away with painful regularity, till she was well past fifty. Reema Devi found the idea of menopause alluring not only because of the mess she found herself in during the dreaded days, but because of the effect on her acting. Menstruation weakened her to such an extent she could barely throw her voice, her most powerful attribute. “What's the purpose of it all, Petro?” she said once. “Creation, libidinous males, menstruating females? How can there be a God who creates such disorder? Left to nature we would be unacceptable, like animals. Can you call that order? I can assure you Petro, there is no God!”
Petrov listening keenly said, “Suppose you try and imagine a disorderly God, mind you, just a supposition!”
“Oh no! That simply cannot be!”
“Why not? Think of it as disorder, yet following natural laws, functioning inside an order.”
“The world was simply churned up from the ocean of milk. But you've got to leave out God!”
“Not the Gods eh? Without the Gods and the Demons fighting, the ocean would have stayed unchurned and there would have been no nectar, no world!”
“Don't forget the poison, Petro. It wasn't just nectar that came up, but poison . . . ”
“Which Shiva swallowed!”
Reema Devi was silenced for a while, and then said, “Can't you count him as one of the lesser Gods?”
“No!” said Petrov. “Not at all! That I would call blasphemy!” and he would float away into a long-winded discourse on poison and nectar, good and evil, lesser and greater gods, demons, order and disorder, while Reema Devi forgot the original worry.
Petrov remembered constantly one of her renowned roles. Constantly her face in that role danced before him, filling him with a deep pleasure. That role was like a flower, a deep-wombed, scented, pink-and-saffron-colored flower with a translucent tunnel, inside which the pistil of Reema Devi's magnificent gift, the gynaceum of the flower, seduced her audience.
Just as he had been filled with longing when he had entered the Rajmahal the first time and heard the complex rill of laughter from above. He liked to believe that laughter had come from the very center, the epicenter of his future home.
Reema Devi had turned the rearview mirror on to herself and was frenziedly redoing her face and hair. Petrov knew she was directing the upset of the evening from apocryphal triumph to failure. These negative impulses had gradually dominated her after their second child's death, a premature child too weak to withstand the world in infancy.
“You were wonderful, my Reema, utterly convincing in that overdone play!”
“Overdone! Naturally you would call it so with your, your Russian notions! ‘Bengali theater can't touch Chekhov,' that's what you're saying!”
“Don't talk such nonsense, Reema. You made the evening! I wish you could have seen yourself! And the audience. It was all your fault!”
“Oh yes! Blame me...!”
“Come, dear. You know what I am trying to say, in my clumsy way. Don't you? Don't you know the audience was at your feet, ready to kill for you?”
“They threw a shoe, a shoe! Can you imagine . . . ?”
“Yes, but they threw it at the rogue who was tormenting you, the utterly convincing victim of his lust! They were raging at him because of your perfect acting.”
“But you know the legend. It was the actor of the ‘Planter Rogue' part,
his
acting, which drew the shoe. Not the poor girl, poor me!”

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